Franklin's Focus 6/6/10



During the Vietnam War, we heard much about the Green Berets. A John
Wayne movie came out that glorified the Green Berets. In Vietnam this
glamorized body was commissioned to put and end to the countless
villages in Vietnam that were supplying the guerrillas with food and
water. Many, not most, of these villages were composed of old people,
women, and children. The men had joined or been conscripted by the
guerrilla forces

You may choose to believe or not the following comments. My sources
have been former Green Berets and sundry other persons. If you find
this hard to believe, I can't blame you.

The villages of Vietnam were known to supply water and food to their
sons, brothers, and husbands who belonged to the guerrilla forces.
Orders came down from the brass to put a stop to this by any means
whatsoever. In some case, villages were firebombed from above, thusly
reducing the villages and the villagers to mere ashes. On the ground,
squads of Green Berets entered the villages and rounded up the
populations, which were composed of only old people, women and
children. The huts were burned, and the inhabitants were executed.
(This action was also sometimes duplicated by regular American forces.)

My Lai came into prominence when a member of a regular squad became so
horrified over the killing of little children, women, babies, and so
forth that he ratted on his fellow soldiers. He said he had not
enlisted to bayonet babies. My Lais were common all over Vietnam, with
most of them being done by the Green Berets. As for actual combat with
the enemy, the Green Berets avoided such risky activities.

In an operation known as Operation ...., the Green Berets were
commissioned to slaughter a troop of American GIs who had been sent
into an adjoining country to perform a military attack for reasons
I've never been clear about. They were told they were going to rescue
American prisoners when they crossed into another country. I will
refer to this infamous op as Operation .....

There was much rising apprehension by the brass that word might get
out to the media that American troops had invaded and attacked another
country adjoining Vietnam. They apparently panicked and sent a Green
Berets unit to waylay and slaughter the whole unit on its return and
dispose of the bodies. This was actually done. GIs who have dared to
talk about this incident have mysteriously disappeared. I've gone
years without writing about it in any detail. This is the first time
I've even referred to Operation ..... with this amount of detail.

When I once mentioned this op to a former CIA employee, he turned pale
and walked away from me. I no longer mention it by name. I once heard
somebody call into a short wave radio program to ask about
Operation.... The guest, who was a Vietnam veteran, and possibly a
member of the Green Berets, just about choked on his words. He said he
could not and would not comment on 'that operation'. He would not even
refer to it by name. He obviously was deeply frightened by a mere
question from a caller about Operation....

I choose not mention that op by name. Nowadays automatic surveillance
equipment picks up certain words and reports their appearance
electronically to agents.

Be advised that the Green Berets stopped using that name a long time
ago. Nowadays they are only referred to as 'Special Forces'. These
forces are experts in assassinations, corrupting elections, bribery,
planting informants, stirring up rebellions by minorities, bombing
tourist hotels, and so forth. These forces are currently making
trouble in Iran, which does not endear the U.S. to the Iranian
government.

What I began smelling as I read the following Post report is a far
more radical, aggressive, and dangerous use of Special Forces. These
units are not easily controlled once they enter another country. A
gung ho officer might unleash his unit into doing who knows what.

Today's appended article is a piece on the American Special Forces
published in the Washington Post, which has a notorious history of
being connected to Operation Mockingbird, an op I've often referred
to. (Check out O.M. with Google if interested.) That the Post would be
doing an exposé on an American intelligence operation is mildly
surprising. I guess it's only Mockingbird that gets a free ride since
it and the Post have a long history of close cooperation. Then again,
perhaps the editor decided this story was simply too big and too
horrifying to sit on.

I will let the Post's investigative article speak for itself. I will
merely underscore the fact that the new and huge expansion of Special
Forces around the globe glaringly suggests the strong influence of the
Trilateral Commission on American foreign policy. It smells like early
ground laying for total world domination, a basic plank of the TC's
long term plans. It also goes along with the 1,000 U.S. military bases
now in operation, many with nuclear capabilities, not to mention many
other ominous signs.

This process has the odor of a developing pathway to what could end up
being the last world war. In WWII mere atomic bombs were dropped. The
next one will see the use of hydrogen bombs that will make those early
nukes seem like kid stuff.

Today's Quotation

'The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left
to decide for themselves.'

Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in a testimony before Congress in
connection with the murder of democratically elected President Allende
and the installation of a fascist government in Chile in 1973.

Please take special note of the title of the appended report. It
underscores the fact that Obama is actually expanding U.S. aggression
to a much vaster sphere.

I've said it before. Obama has to be impeached. If not, Amerika could
be in really deep shit. The man is extremely dangerous to this nation
and the rest of the world.

And yes, I know such words suggest I'm a conspiracy nut. Nonetheless,
this nut has presented the truth about why Obama is a threat ever
since he became a candidate for the presidency. He has steadily
fulfilled all my fears.

Warmest regards,
Richard

=========================================================

June 4, 2010 Washington Post

U.S. 'secret war' expands globally as Special Operations forces take
larger role

by Karen DeYoung and Greg Jaffe

Beneath its commitment to soft-spoken diplomacy and beyond the combat
zones of Afghanistan and Iraq, the Obama administration has
significantly expanded a largely secret U.S. war against al-Qaeda and
other radical groups, according to senior military and administration
officials.

Special Operations forces have grown both in number and budget, and
are deployed in 75 countries, compared with about 60 at the beginning
of last year. In addition to units that have spent years in the
Philippines and Colombia, teams are operating in Yemen and elsewhere
in the Middle East, Africa and Central Asia.

[Obama is making Bush look like a wimp.]

Commanders are developing plans for increasing the use of such forces
in Somalia, where a Special Operations raid last year killed the
alleged head of al-Qaeda in East Africa. Plans exist for preemptive or
retaliatory strikes in numerous places around the world, meant to be
put into action when a plot has been identified, or after an attack
linked to a specific group.

The surge in Special Operations deployments, along with intensified
CIA drone attacks in western Pakistan, is the other side of the
national security doctrine of global engagement and domestic values
President Obama released last week.

One advantage of using "secret" forces for such missions is that they
rarely discuss their operations in public. For a Democratic president
such as Obama, who is criticized from either side of the political
spectrum for too much or too little aggression, the unacknowledged CIA
drone attacks in Pakistan, along with unilateral U.S. raids in Somalia
and joint operations in Yemen, provide politically useful tools.

Obama, one senior military official said, has allowed "things that the
previous administration did not."

'More access'
Special Operations commanders have also become a far more regular
presence at the White House than they were under George W. Bush's
administration, when most briefings on potential future operations
were run through the Pentagon chain of command and were conducted by
the defense secretary or the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

"We have a lot more access," a second military official said. "They
are talking publicly much less but they are acting more. They are
willing to get aggressive much more quickly."

The White House, he said, is "asking for ideas and plans . . . calling
us in and saying, 'Tell me what you can do. Tell me how you do these
things.' "

The Special Operations capabilities requested by the White House go
beyond unilateral strikes and include the training of local
counterterrorism forces and joint operations with them. In Yemen, for
example, "we are doing all three," the official said. Officials who
spoke about the increased operations were not authorized to discuss
them on the record.

The clearest public description of the secret-war aspects of the
doctrine came from White House counterterrorism director John O.
Brennan. He said last week that the United States "will not merely
respond after the fact" of a terrorist attack but will "take the fight
to al-Qaeda and its extremist affiliates whether they plot and train
in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and beyond."

That rhetoric is not much different than Bush's pledge to "take the
battle to the enemy . . . and confront the worst threats before they
emerge." The elite Special Operations units, drawn from all four
branches of the armed forces, became a frontline counterterrorism
weapon for the United States after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

But Obama has made such forces a far more integrated part of his
global security strategy. He has asked for a 5.7 percent increase in
the Special Operations budget for fiscal 2011, for a total of $6.3
billion, plus an additional $3.5 billion in 2010 contingency funding.

Bush-era clashes between the Defense and State departments over
Special Operations deployments have all but ceased. Former defense
secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld saw them as an independent force,
approving in some countries Special Operations intelligence-gathering
missions that were so secret that the U.S. ambassador was not told
they were underway. But the close relationship between Defense
Secretary Robert M. Gates and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham
Clinton is said to have smoothed out the process.

"In some places, we are quite obvious in our presence," Adm. Eric T.
Olson, head of the Special Operations Command, said in a speech. "In
some places, in deference to host-country sensitivities, we are lower
in profile. In every place, Special Operations forces activities are
coordinated with the U.S. ambassador and are under the operational
control of the four-star regional commander."

Chains of command
Gen. David H. Petraeus at the Central Command and others were ordered
by the Joint Staff under Bush to develop plans to use Special
Operations forces for intelligence collection and other
counterterrorism efforts, and were given the authority to issue direct
orders to them. But those orders were formalized only last year,
including in a CENTCOM directive outlining operations throughout South
Asia, the Horn of Africa and the Middle East.

The order, whose existence was first reported by the New York Times,
includes intelligence collection in Iran, although it is unclear
whether Special Operations forces are active there.

The Tampa-based Special Operations Command is not entirely happy with
its subordination to regional commanders and, in Afghanistan and Iraq,
to theater commanders. Special Operations troops within Afghanistan
had their own chain of command until early this year, when they were
brought under the unified direction of the overall U.S. and NATO
commander there, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, and his operational
deputy, Lt. Gen. David M. Rodriguez.

"Everybody working in CENTCOM works for Dave Petraeus," a military
official said. "Our issue is that we believe our theater forces should
be under a Special Operations theater commander, instead of . . .
Rodriguez, who is a conventional [forces] guy who doesn't know how to
do what we do."

Special Operations troops train for years in foreign cultures and
language, and consider themselves a breed apart from what they call
"general purpose forces." Special Operations troops sometimes bridle
at ambassadorial authority to "control who comes in and out of their
country," the official said. Operations have also been hindered in
Pakistan -- where Special Operations trainers hope to nearly triple
their current deployment to 300 -- by that government's delay in
issuing the visas.

Although pleased with their expanded numbers and funding, Special
Operations commanders would like to devote more of their force to
global missions outside war zones. Of about 13,000 Special Operations
forces deployed overseas, about 9,000 are evenly divided between Iraq
and Afghanistan.

"Eighty percent of our investment is now in resolving current
conflicts, not in building capabilities with partners to avoid future
ones," one official said.

Questions remain
The force has also chafed at the cumbersome process under which the
president or his designee, usually Gates, must authorize its use of
lethal force outside war zones. Although the CIA has the authority to
designate targets and launch lethal missiles in Pakistan's western
tribal areas, attacks such as last year's in Somalia and Yemen require
civilian approval.

The United Nations, in a report this week, questioned the
administration's authority under international law to conduct such
raids, particularly when they kill innocent civilians. One possible
legal justification -- the permission of the country in question -- is
complicated in places such as Pakistan and Yemen, where the
governments privately agree but do not publicly acknowledge approving
the attacks.

Former Bush officials, still smarting from accusations that their
administration overextended the president's authority to conduct
lethal activities around the world at will, have asked similar
questions. "While they seem to be expanding their operations both in
terms of extraterritoriality and aggressiveness, they are contracting
the legal authority upon which those expanding actions are based,"
said John B. Bellinger III, a senior legal adviser in both of Bush's
administrations.

The Obama administration has rejected the constitutional executive
authority claimed by Bush and has based its lethal operations on the
authority Congress gave the president in 2001 to use "all necessary
and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or
persons" he determines "planned, authorized, committed, or aided" the
Sept. 11 attacks.

Many of those currently being targeted, Bellinger said, "particularly
in places outside Afghanistan," had nothing to do with the 2001 attacks.

[Hey, Mr. Bellinger, Obama knows perfectly well that Bush and Cheney
were behind 9/11.]

[The authors must be kidding. Obama was recently given the annual
Nobel Peace Award. He would never commission such vast and hostile
activities all over the globe. The Post must be making up this stuff.]

End