The Pentagon used the 2005 Kashmir earthquake to send operatives from the Joint Special Operations Command, or JSOC — the secretive, über-elite military unit that killed Osama bin Laden – to Pakistan, First Post said in an article, citing a new book.
“The JSOC has proven to be the most lethal weapon in the president’s arsenal,” said DB Grady and Marc Ambinder in their just-published eBook, The Command: Deep Inside the President’s Secret Army, the report claimed.
It quoted authors as saying in the book that President Obama and the Pentagon leadership had increasingly made Navy Seals from the JSOC their military tool of choice.
“The JSOC’s counterterrorism units are credited with capturing or killing many of the most-wanted terrorists and insurgent leaders, including Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden,” the report added.
According to The New York Times, the JSOC has about 54,000 active-duty personnel from four branches of the armed services. The Navy Seals are one of the most celebrated units under its umbrella.
The book has been lunched at a time when Admiral William H McRaven, who leads the JSOC, is pushing for a larger role for his elite units who have traditionally operated in the dark corners of American foreign policy.
The book claims that JSOC had done more to degrade the capacity of terrorists to attack the United States than any other single entity.
The report said the authors boldly charged that the US used the 2005 Kashmir earthquake to send JSOC operatives into Pakistan and that US intelligence community “took advantage of the chaos to spread resources of its own” into Pakistan.
“Using valid US passports and posing as construction and aid workers, dozens of Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) operatives and contractors flooded in without the requisite background checks from Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI),” the authors said.
The authors have detailed the JSOC team’s goals in Pakistan. One was prosaic: team members were to develop rings of informants to gather targeting information about al-Qaeda terrorists. Other goals were extremely sensitive: JSOC needed better intelligence about how Pakistan transported its nuclear weapons and it wanted to penetrate the ISI and target Pakistani officers who were hand-in-glove with the terrorists.
“Under a secret program code-named Screen Hunter, JSOC, augmented by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and contract personnel, was authorized to shadow and identify members of the ISI suspected of being sympathetic to al-Qaeda. It is not clear whether JSOC units used lethal force against these ISI officers; one official said that the goal of the program was to track terrorists through the ISI by using disinformation and psychological warfare,” reveals the book. The Obama administration finally curtailed the Screen Hunter programme after Pakistan slammed the covert US presence inside the country.
With condolences, I predicted that killer quake from AGW. I find it doubtful that the Bush Administration would send anyone but those begging to help in lieu of being shipped of to being spread thin in Iraq or Afghanistan. This would be in addition to the big hurry they were showing on TV, the GOP stink about bringing home a Muslim bride/groom, and the other natural barrier of few Americans unable to speak english well, let alone a Pakistan language. However, the great AGW flooding in Pakistan, also predict by me, showed local control of the cooking pots and an eager audience for whatever.
They used a vaccination program as a front to collect DNA, they used the earthquake for all kinds of anti-Pakistan activities….I think its about time we kicked ALL Americans out of Pakistan and launch a program to identify their agents at all levels of society so we can punish them for treason
As an American, I find the above to be preposterous and hilarious paranoia.
Someone has outrageously over-estimated the capabilities of our government. You've never been here, to the USA, and tried to get a letter mailed across town by the US-Postal Service, have you?
Americanonymous
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