U.S. Is Said to Order Further Clandestine Military Action

>>"As defined under the National Security Act, EO 12333, and various updates and amendments, covert actions require a presidential finding for authorization."
>>Even for DoD? I thought that was only CIA and other civilian agencies. (Not that I'm very well versed in any of that).

This is a gray area in the laws and a matter of dispute. The statutes explicitly state pertinence to the CIA, but the president can also designate "any other agency" to conduct covert actions. The statutes do not apply to "traditional" military operations and DOD claims it does not conduct covert actions. However, many post-9/11 military activities could be considered covert as currently defined. (As such, the Obama administration may not have issued a finding in this case, prompting the leak as a way of bringing the situation to the attention of Congress.)

The 9/11 Commission recommended that paramilitary operations, which can be covert, be placed under DOD auspices, but implementation was suspended indefinitely by mutual agreement between Tenet and Rumsfeld in 2005.

The Congressional Research Service has published several excellent reports outlining the issues involved.

<em>"As defined under the National Security Act, EO 12333, and various updates and amendments, covert actions require a presidential finding for authorization."</em>
Even for DoD? I thought that was only CIA and other civilian agencies. (Not that I'm very well versed in any of that).

<em>"Or it may have been intentionally leaked as part of a PSYOP/IO campaign plan intended to ratchet up the pressure on certain governments in the Middle East."</em>
That's something else that I was wondering about, though it seems like that wouldn't be very productive. As if Iran needs more evidence of conspiracies by the great satan.

@Schmedlap

As defined under the National Security Act, EO 12333, and various updates and amendments, covert actions require a presidential finding for authorization. CDR USCENTCOM does not have the inherent authority to order covert actions.

The question is, why was the document leaked? By law, Congress must be notified of a presidential covert action finding. If that had not occurred, the leak may have been done to tip Congress off to it. The key will be to see how the usual suspects respond.

It may have been done as another round in the turf battle between CIA and DOD, or CIA and DNI. The question of primary responsibility for authority over covert and paramilitary operations remains unresolved.

Or it may have been intentionally leaked as part of a PSYOP/IO campaign plan intended to ratchet up the pressure on certain governments in the Middle East.

That's what I thought. Odd that the story makes it sound like a Petraeus initiative.

spiritgivethlife,

If your post is a response to me, you're free to comment at my blog where ever I apparently stated whatever you think I stated. I also have a "contact" page there where you can email me (anonymously, if you choose). Otherwise, I have no clue what you're typing about.

End tangent.

At risk of getting this unfortunate thread back on topic - anyone know the answer to my question #1, in the first comment, regarding approval authority?

SWJ Editor,

You are such an obvious small guy in what you did. Little turds like you ran East Euro for a long time but look where they ended up-- take heed from the example as this is America and what goes around comes around, making YOU the last laugh when you least expect it. You abused my text to suit yourself. Remove it all or post it all, your call. But you're choping it up to. Is that allowed per your rules or are you one of those guys who thinks he's above them? That's dirty and dumb. Otherwise, frankly my dear, I don't give a damn!

DEAR MR. WHITE, while I could feel the spanking, I must say it has elements of intellectual gold in it that I fully appreciate for their wisdom.

I so thank you for your kind thoughtful post. Having on numerous occasions discussed his binarization of society, be it military vs. civilian, clash of civilizations etc, I came to feel that these dichotomies are fictions. It really is worse; things break down into thermodynamically disordered toxic globules releasing destructive energy and devastate the wholes far worse that when clashing at the edge. Col. Gentiles concerns are well founded from perspective of a society. Instead of either/or we would do well to tinker with integration of otherwise immiscible elements. You kindly engaging me in meaningful dialogue is an honor and a privileged that I will always thank you for. Perhaps the response to Mr. Chicken Little might entice you to yet another of your stimulating analyses. Thank you again.

Allow me to recommend h-history-and-theory for amazingly able military thinking on the abstract fundamantals of strategic issues here under consideration.

Oh God....you hurt me bad, Mr. Chicken Little! < snip>

<b>That's it; you have gone too far and are not contributing anything of value here. Your post has been deleted excepting the opening line which is quite the indicator of what your rant was all about. I'd recommend moving along now. Your posts are no longer welcomed here and will be deleted.</b>

<b>SWJ Editors</b>

I typed...
<blockquote><em>"You seem to be lumping SWJ in with the rest of the yelling and screaming on the net that passes for discussion."</em></blockquote>

You typed...
<blockquote><em>"The story's on B5, Jawa, everywhere.... if people are screaming at the NY Times for giving up info, which people on many US milblogs are... You honestly think someone in Iranian intelligence is saying 'well, those guys on Milblog X consider themselves patriots, and patriots know better. Cant be anything of value there. Off to read the Times!'"</em></blockquote>

I rest my case.

<blockquote><em>"But by your logic, this story plays our hand to the bad guys in Arabia, stirs up anti-US sentiment, etc. So if the more eyes that see it, the worse off we are, then tell me by your logic: milbloggers posting links to this story all over the place doesnt help the bad guys?"</em></blockquote>

I don't think that is why SWJ posted this story. You seem to be lumping SWJ in with the rest of the yelling and screaming on the net that passes for discussion.

<em>The secret directive, signed in September by Gen. David H. Petraeus, authorizes the sending of American Special Operations troops to both friendly and hostile nations in the Middle East...</em>

Couple questions here...
1. Wouldn't the approval authority for something like this be higher than the CENTCOM Commander?
2. Don't all orders for any Soldier sent to CENTCOM authorize their potential deployment to any country within CENTCOM?
3. Is it more likely that this leak was intentional, in order to send a message, or that the leak was the result of disagreements within the Pentagon?
4. If I were to publish classified information, could I avoid going to jail like the NY Times writers?

Good questions Schmedlap! A military that covers-up its bloopers--Oooooh so many, enough to prove mediocrity at best-- might as well "think outside the [legal] box," a la GW Bush, Rumsfeld and Cheney in order to take-over America. A bit smarter soldiers are the Israeli General Staff and they had found an old Commie trick for getting around their civilian masters consisting of a parallel hierarchy....parallel foreign ministry, defense, interior and information (most important, as there are a lot of blooming BS artists in the officer corps) too. Since they have the power of marking every square of toilet paper "TOP SECRET," no one can see what the mess they make consists of when cleaned up-- unless the stink "leaks" to the few honest media left. It is in power of generals and staff to cover up and pass themselves off as super heroes when they really are myopic dunces because for most Americans, "ain't my kid going to war." and so they love war movies where America always wins without getting its uniforms messed-up. But in the end history will not be fooled and personal ambition disguised as national security will reek and give them all away. By the way, did Petraeus in all his heavy lifting thinking ever consider what it would be like if all the nations into which we sent Special Ops Keystone Cops sent REAL Special Ops here in response to the Petraeus paroxysm of ego? Does anyone recall some group saying something about Petraeus that the Founding Fathers may be saying from their graves: PETRAEUS BETRAYED US!

Just to make sure nobody reads your opening sentence as an indication that you and I agree on anything, I would just like to clarify that I have absolutely no idea what any of your post is discussing, referring to, or trying to articulate.

You guys discussed this SpecialOps mania elsewhere when you discussed what is UNCONVENTINAL WARFARE. I had hoped that the quote you used to define it were insider chatter. Sending NATO and US/SFs into Soviet rear is quite different from sending NON-military personnel ready to accept exemption from the Geneva Convention protections. I am very familiar with that and the heroes ready to suffer the consequences to such getting of information or undermining Communism. All these failed miserably due to traitors at the top, remember? It resulted in American abandonment of people who supported US in full faith that it would keep its word as the world's leader of everything good. The Brits were deemed slimes by ALL anti-Communists for they readily sold out their allies and their agents for cover-up or for advantage, as did Israel did with the lists supplied by Pollard (whom they now want sent "home" to Israel).

But for A GENERAL to sign such a document so soon after his Commander and Chief gets the Nobel PEACE Prize and while he is seeking legal UN sanction of Iran is a bit weird, if not downright stupid, especially as it is released to the media. It can only make sense as political opportunism in a time when native police forces, rather than killer teams, appear as the best answer.

So laugh all you want SWJED, but at least cry this weekend for the young men and women who go on assignment not knowing that there are no laws on earth nor any conventions protecting them short of what their country is willing to do for them. Can a soldier refuse such an assignment?

We have sent so many soldiers into such impossible situation for so many years that I cannot deny that human lives sacrificed for political reasons-- as was South Vietnam by the Kennedy Bill-- should not surprise me. But before Petraeus signed that order, a soldier could refuse the assignment as in violation of Geneva Convention. As an aggressor on orders from the Pentagon he is no secret agent but a soldier that is violating the law. As I said, since every square of toilet paper at the Pentagon can be marked TOP SECRET to hide the creative peculiarity of its command officers-- like the infamous PowerPoint for presentation to the Bush White House in 2001: THINK OUTSIDE THE BOX, POISON AFGHANISTAN'S FOOD AND WATER-- this at least could have been kept secret. But nooooo, it had to be passed on to the NY Times, less than a month after its signing, including the Petreaus signing to indicate its non-command origin. Why? An American soldier in any Mideast country--even as a tourist-- is now vulnerable to arrest as a spy. Kuwait could do that to how many soldiers?

You may think all this funny and too hard to comprehend, but the Dreyfus quote in another post shows that you, not me, is alone in cognitive direction.

This is still OUR country, not the Pentagon's or CentCom's, or President Petraeus wanna-bes. The "news" should have come from the Commander and Chief, not from the wanna-be.

WHAT?!?

The ED'S and Schmedlap expressed my sentiment very well. (Where did these people come from....?)

Glad it wasn't deleted, nothing is more entertaining than outhouse attorneys peddling their wares. By the way "Spiritgivethlife", your use of the term "extremist" kind'a gives ya away....

That being said, Schemdlap, I am not as generous, yes a message is being sent. However that message is intended for domestic consumption. And I would add, this is specifically intended for DC beltway consumption. Not for some JV "extremist et al.

Why isn't Ambasssador Joe Wilson and his celebrity wife demanding that someone be frog-marched....? Secrets are secrets aren't they? I digress....

spiritgivethlife, what nation sends its troops in such ILLEGAL ops IN UNIFORM and then puts the order on mass media frontpage?

Dear Mr. WHITE, you were kind enough to read some of my past posts so you know what side Im on. Since I deeply respect your sagacious grasp of things I wonder if I might leave my concern to your judgment. I am a survivor of 9/11 at WTC and have spent time in Mideast observing the making of terrorism. alQaeda, I can say with some certainty, was a reaction to America-imposed situations and one of Khomeini's amazing accomplishments-- including the making of a religious revolution (of course, much like the Buddhist Revolution against Diem, helped by us, but only the few Iranians that seized the Tehran Embassy documents know that). His elan was used by him to build-up both the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood and the Shia Hezbollah. By contrast, contrary to his reputation, binLaden was not always the ascetic he is portrayed to be. I knew many Arab of his ilk in East Euro universities. I saw how Iranian students enforced Islam at the dorms of universities of Red regimes desperate for petro dollars bowed to the Iranian students. This turned the Arabs around in shame. Having known well at least three such eventual Arab shahids as fellow students I feel that there is a diagnosable madness in these youthful shahids that expresses as a persecution complex blowing up into a raging hate that-- and here is the key point-- is channeled into a self-discipline and fearless self-emulation that is astounding. In the 1970s and 1980s one could more easily link up with them and see them evolve. But these people proved very unstable, at any moment driven by their persecution complex to strike out with a cruelty marked by little regard for life, theirs or anyone else's. This characteristic: playboy-->to religious ascetic, becoming a disciplined fighter who trains obsessively in preparation for a glorious death, makes them quite dangerous for they will show incredible dedication, exposing latent abilities at kinetics that few can match. But then, if you're ready to die so long as you get to kill from among the people who are the root of your feeling of persecution, you're an awfully dangerous guy. The real danger EVOLVES in a Darwinian sense, for the best of them survived to the ultimate times as alQaeda circa 2000. Perhaps we should at this point remember that we have exhausted our national defense volunteers going after what really are not too many guys.

So long as GW Bush was president we fed that rage of persecution of some 1.5 billion people; and of these many fought, of which many died and many survived as expert killing machines through Darwinian survival of the fittest. As a result, here we are, making endless excuses for an utterly incompetent military command that repeatedly has had to resort to secrecy and mendacity to hide its incompetence as it repeatedly changes course to a new concept whlie trying to eradicate such special shahids. Yet avarice for acalades makes the military insistent on being the tip of the spear despite its record in and out of uniform doing deep penetration since no one figured out in Carters days that helicopter engines dont run well when full of sand.

We have gone through a decade of confidence breaking shame at how our military performs as a whole. And yet, our media applauds it to the sky while mom&dad soldiers needlessly die. Now "la piece de resistance:" a man whose command is marked by deception is broadcast all over the worlds media to take it upon himself to sign an order stating that international law and the rules of war mean nothing in that he authorizes their violation. A lot of proud SpecOps guys, of course, take glee at that added advertisement for how baaaaad they are. But the truth is that they are more often than not part of an intricate machine of focused massive firepower that is called in whenever they get into trouble. Just look what they look like in their spacesuit-like armor from head to toe compared to the armor naked shahids they face. The odds are incredibly lopsided should firepower focus and delivery be the standard. But should the ordnance delivery systems of the other services not be around, all hell breaks loose as our men are mauled for lack of an exit stategy as in Mogadishu. I'm in no way advocating that we deny our troops whatever assets we can muster. Indeed, I decry that we send them to battle intel blind, language deaf and culture dumb to live off of the "human terrain" when their presence on the geographic terrain is deemed sacrilegious by many Muslim tribes.

In Vietnam I enjoyed several advantages when disappearing from Saigon to interact with Vietnamese-- both sides. The trick was to bet my life on them having the idea that they had something to gain from keeping me alive so that I could return to Saigon. Seeing young GIs walk onto mines and booby-trap had an impact on me that made me quite unstable when reading the bravura of Pentagon swivel chair combatants. Senator Kerry's question rings in my head to this day: what do you tell the parents of the last guy to die in Vietnam? Worst still, having to literally "play God" in 1975 deciding which of the many Viets to whom I owed my life to help get out has left a sore from which I know I'll never recover.

But Viets are different than Muslims we face. Viets fight for a purpose, a logical purpose. The shahids, on the other hand, fight to die. And what drives them to become SUICIDE-KILLERS? That SENSE OF PERSECUTION that comes in reaction to the bravura of Americans backed up by all the firepower money can buy. Gen. Petraeus signing an order to sprinkle the Middle East with SpecOps teams as "INVADING CRUSADERS" arouses that sense of persecution that is madness, a madness that turns into self-discipline to do what few Americans would themselves be able to do. Major Hasan is a perfect example of what turns a man who enlists to serve his nation into an enraged psychotic ready to die taking as many Americans with him as he can just to make a statement. THE "CRUSADER" STATEMENT WHICH TRIGGERS THE HASAN STATEMENT IS LIKE STATEMENT MADE IN THAT NYTIMES ARTICLE, FAR MORE INFLAMING THAN ANY OF BUSHS ILL THOUGHT THROUGH BABBLE. Perhaps in the fullness of things it is just political posturing. But it is posturing that creates God knows how many shahids producing God knows how many dead American mom or dad soldiers who will face these shahids unprepared and helpless.

At the same time-- and anyone who studied diplomatic history knows what that means-- such profligate violation of national sovereignty and dignity means for sure that, long before Mideast Govs can get to them and stop them, Muslim shahids will, like Maj. Hasan, respond to that article by shedding innocent American blood in expectation of the innocent Muslim blood the SpecOps guys would shed. Indeed, the Special Forces is an entity in large part exaggerated, as many a general would attest. A lot of ceremony does not translate into competent actions that mean much in the overall scheme of things. Yet we forget that poking at the nest of killer bees is not a good idea; yet that's what the NYTIMES article does.

All through, the Chinese and Russians have been watching. In many ways one sits in utter amazement watching HOW OFTEN BLANK'S HYPERBOLES ARE TAKEN SERIOUSLY AT THE PENTAGON WITH POLCIES MADE BASED ON THE MUTUAL HATE BETWEEN CHINA AND RUSSIA THAT HE PROPOUNDS. Whatever their differences both know that America is STILL "the main enemy." But then why should they do anything but watch as the hubris of our second rate politics driven officers fires up the Muslim sense of persecution? At ONE TRILLION DOLLARS A YEAR for our "Crusade" we have become ever more the borrower owned by the Chinese bank. Russian military technology evolves and is passed on to update China's forces, both preparing for the day of the big challenge. We, meanwhile, are building mediocre military careers killing Muslims for Jesus. How many other moms and dads have we to replace those we wasted poking the Muslim killer bee hives invoking a boiling sense of persecution? Can't Petraeus campaign with ideas about stopping the BP gusher or something instead? Why can't he promote himself with anything but "surges" killing Muslims for Jesus?

Our defeat will not come when we finally give up and abandon our war on terror in exhaustion but rather when the Chinese and Russians decide that we've been baked soft and tender enough by our self inflicted neocon "World War IV" against Islam to take a bite out of us. And Petraeus stokes the fire in promoting himself as the Dauphin that puts killer teams anywhere killing Muslims for Jesus. I fear the cost of this "leaked" NYTIMES article will be the lives of the kids of many of my friends, kids driven to enlist years ago by patriotism rather than careerism and struggling to qualify for that special badge. No, SpecialOps guys DO NOT HAVE EYES IN THE BACK OF THEIR HEADS and are not made "special" through a Darwinian survival of the fittest like the shahids. The worst is yet to come for the last American patriots. Soooo, please, tell me, why are such stories "leaked" to the press as yet another poking of the stick into the nest of killer bees? Is Petraeus trying to scare the Iranians or is he trying to scare us into electing him by provoking the Iranians (the original Martyrs' Brigade)?