Winners: JSOC, Obama's New National Security Team, Torture.
Today's National Journal has some great background on the elements of yesterday's successful attack on Osama bin Laden's hideaway.
It's worth reading the whole thing, but the kernel is pretty impressive: somehow, the Joint Special Operations Command -- a super-secret cross-branches collection of task forces and special operations units -- managed to eliminate the biggest obstacle to finding and dispatching high-value terrorist targets: bureaucratic infighting. From the National Journal:
Sunday’s operation provides strong evidence that the CIA and JSOC work well together. Sometimes intelligence needs to be developed rapidly, to get inside the enemy’s operational loop. And sometimes it needs to be cultivated, grown as if it were delicate bacteria in a petri dish.
In an interview at CIA headquarters two weeks ago, a senior intelligence official said the two proud groups of American secret warriors had been “deconflicted and basically integrated” -- finally -- 10 years after 9/11. Indeed, according to accounts given to journalists by five senior administration officials Sunday night, the CIA gathered the intelligence that led to bin Laden’s location. A memo from CIA Director Leon Panetta sent Sunday night provides some hints of how the information was collected and analyzed. In it, he thanked the National Security Agency and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency for their help. NSA figured out, somehow, that there was no telephone or Internet service in the compound. How it did this without Pakistan’s knowledge is a secret. The NGIA makes the military’s maps but also develops their pattern recognition software -- no doubt used to help establish, by February of this year, that the CIA could say with “high probability” that bin Laden and his family were living there.
That's a lot of cooperation from agencies that are usually at each other's throats. And it suggests that the recent personnel shifts in the Obama administration -- Panetta from the CIA to Defense; Petraeus from the field to the CIA -- are smart, and reflective of a closer-knit relationship between intelligence and the military.
Of course, there's this for our Code Pink/Move On friends:
JSOC costs the country more than $1 billion annually. The command has its critics, but it has escaped significant congressional scrutiny and has operated largely with impunity since 9/11. Some of its interrogators and operators were involved in torture and rendition, and the line between its intelligence-gathering activities and the CIA's has been blurred.
And this, from the Star Tribune:
Officials say CIA interrogators in secret overseas prisons developed the first strands of information that ultimately led to the killing of Osama bin Laden.
Current and former U.S. officials say that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, provided the nom de guerre of one of bin Laden's most trusted aides. The CIA got similar information from Mohammed's successor, Abu Faraj al-Libi. Both were subjected to harsh interrogation tactics inside CIA prisons in Poland and Romania.
They're too chicken to say it, but it's rendition they're talking about. And "harsh interrogation tactics" may not mean waterboarding, but I'll bet it means sleep deprivation, which the anti-Gitmo Gang likes to call torture. In other words: rendition and torture work. You can't celebrate the death of Osama bin Laden without celebrating how it came about.
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Comments :
Mar '11
Re: Winners: JSOC, Obama's New National Security Team, Torture.
Would make a good movie - they could call it "Rendition", or something.
Mr Obama's hypocrisy on this is as nauseating as ever, but at least there is good stuff going on behind the scenes.
Shame Gen. McChrystal was fired - he is a National hero.
Edited on May 2, 2011 at 9:41amDec '10
Re: Winners: JSOC, Obama's New National Security Team, Torture.
Big loser: Pakistan. I thought the Pakistanis had been pressured to give him up, but they were apparently desperate to hold onto that ace-in-the-hole until the bitter end. Time to tell Pakistan that they need to EARN the military and civilian aid they get from the US.
Jan '11
Re: Winners: JSOC, Obama's New National Security Team, Torture.
The Barking Dog
What perked their interest was the fact that this huge compound had no internet or telephone service.
Sherlock Holmes once solved a crime, not by pointing out a piece of evidence that was there, but by something that should have been there but wasn't (i.e., a barking dog).
It might be useful to see how many Libyan compounds just signed up for internet and telephone service ...
Apr '11
Re: Winners: JSOC, Obama's New National Security Team, Torture.
This is what I've said in other posts. The left is chest-thumping and already declaring victory in '12 for Obama. As more and more background on this whole operation becomes clearer in the upcoming days/weeks, some serious questions will be asked about how anyone can be for calling the strike that kills Osama, but be against the 99.99% of the stuff that made that last call possible. The left will be on the defensive on this issue very quickly and then watch it disappear from any mention in the MSM.