Category Archives: Defense Department

Does the U.S. military want Afghanistan to get even nastier?

The Guardian reports: Even by Afghanistan‘s high standards, the massacre of Shia worshippers in Kabul on Tuesday 6 December was an act of stomach-churning brutality. A suicide bomber posing as a pilgrim on Ashura, one of the holiest days of the calendar of Shia Islam, had inveigled his way into the middle of a packed crowd of men, women and children. Witnesses watching from the rooftop of the nearby Abu Fazal shrine said body parts flew up into the air near the epicentre of the blast when the unknown bomber detonated himself.

The clearing smoke revealed a scene strewn with lifeless and often mangled bodies, lying in circles around the blackened area of tarmac where the bomber had stood. A young girl who had somehow miraculously survived was snapped by a photographer wailing into the air. Among the 55 killed there were no police officers or soldiers or anyone who might remotely be considered a “legitimate” target of the Taliban-led war against the Afghan government.

The Taliban itself was quick to condemn the attack in strong terms, while an extremist Pakistan-based movement called Lashkar- e-Jhangvi al Almiv has been fingered. If it really was a unilateral operation launched without the consent of the Taliban’s leadership it is another worrying sign of how the insurgency in Afghanistan is spinning out of control, becoming crueller and ever more willing to inflict horrendous damage on ordinary civilians.

But not everyone thinks such horrors are an entirely bad thing. Indeed, some within the US war machine have long argued the emergence of a nastier insurgency could be really quite useful for Nato‘s war aims. So useful, in fact, that foreign forces should try to encourage such behaviour.

One of them was Peter Lavoy, a former chairman of the US National Intelligence Council, the body that examines data from across the US government’s intelligence gathering machine and turns it into high-grade analysis that is rarely discussed publicly. At a closed-door meeting with ambassadors at Nato headquarters in Brussels in December 2008, Lavoy spelled out a strategy for winning the war in Afghanistan that has never been uttered publicly: “The international community should put intense pressure on the Taliban in 2009 in order to bring out their more violent and ideologically radical tendencies,” he said, according to a State Department note-taker in the room. “This will alienate the population and give us an opportunity to separate the Taliban from the population.”

His words, which we only know courtesy of WikiLeaks, are extraordinary because they have been proven at least partially right. They also differ fundamentally from the publicly stated strategy in Afghanistan. Known as population-centric counterinsurgency, or Coin, the fundamental principle is that foreign forces should try to keep ordinary Afghans safe from insurgents and thereby win their support.

The idea that Nato may actually be trying to make the population less secure appalls observers. “It just goes completely against the ethos of the American military not to take more risks in order to protect civilians,” says John Nagl, a retired lieutenant-colonel who co-wrote the US army’s field manual on countering guerrilla warfare. “I find it hard to believe elements of the US military would want to deliberately put more risk on to civilians.”

But behind the scenes, powerful voices continue to argue for a harder-edged strategy that makes the lives of ordinary Afghans more miserable, not less. Michael Semple, a regional expert on the Taliban, says it is an outlook he runs across in discussions with Nato officials: “I have heard serious, thinking officers articulate the idea that provoking Taliban fighters into acts of extreme violence against the population could be taken as a sign of Coin progress, prior to the final victory when the people turn against them.”

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Who are they kidding? When Americans struggle to close the plausibility gap with Iran

After Iranian television broadcast film of a captured CIA RQ-170 stealth drone that landed in Iran a few days ago, the BBC’s security correspondent, Frank Gardner, wrote:

If, as was originally thought, the Sentinel had been shot down then there would have been little to put on display but a pile of twisted wreckage.

Instead, what was on show on Iranian TV was an immaculate gleaming white drone that looked straight off the production line.

Which tends to back up the claim by Iran that its forces brought down the drone through electronic warfare, in other words that it electronically hijacked the plane and steered it to the ground.

On Thursday, the Commander of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) Aerospace Force Brig-Gen Amir Ali Hajizadeh said “through precise electronic monitoring it was known that this plane had the objective of penetrating the country’s skies for espionage purposes.

“After entering the country’s eastern space the plane was caught in an electronic ambush by the armed forces and it was brought down on the land with minimum damage.”

U.S. officials are now willing to concede what they must have known from day one: that the aircraft Iran captured is indeed an RQ-170.

But even after the release of close-up footage showing the drone in greater detail than it has ever been publicly viewed before, some U.S. officials remained skeptical.

ABC News’ Martha Raddatz reported:

Early Thursday, U.S. officials said, and ABC News reported, that the craft displayed did not appear to be the highly sensitive RQ-170 Sentinel and might be a model, in part because U.S. imagery indicated the Sentinel had not landed intact. Later, however, officials said it was possible that the Iranians had reconstructed the drone for display on television, but that the evidence was “inconclusive.”

An unnamed former senior Pentagon official “with extensive knowledge of unmanned aerial vehicles” also voiced skepticism to an AOL defense blogger:

Here’s what he said in an email after I sent a link to the Iranian footage. “Looks like a fake,” he wrote. “Does not look like the condition of an aircraft that lost control. Also wrong color, and they are not showing the landing gear or bottom of the aircraft… and the welds on the wing joints are hardly stealthy…” In order to avoid setting off radar, welds on stealthy aircraft must be very close to the surface of the structure and extremely smooth.

In both instances we get the same line of reasoning: those images of a captured RQ-170 can’t depict the real aircraft because we know the real one crashed and what we are being shown is intact.

That might sound plausible to a few people — especially those willing to believe anything a US government official says. But for the rest of us (and I’m inclined to think we’re in the majority), the reasoning is more likely to run like this: that thing doesn’t look like a model and it clearly didn’t crash, so any U.S. official who says that the lost RQ-170 crashed, either doesn’t know what he’s talking about, or he’s lying.

Most people will remain appropriately agnostic about the technical question of whether it would be feasible for an adversary to intercept and take control of such an aircraft.

As far as the issue of the weld joints on the wings go, it’s reasonable to make a couple of inferences.

Firstly, having recovered the aircraft, the first priority of the Iranians would have been to examine it thoroughly enough to make sure it wouldn’t self-destruct. The wings may well have been removed for that purpose and then later re-attached for public display.

Secondly, the Iranians clearly had an interest in giving U.S. officials and analysts plenty of time to make statements that could later be shown to be false. Given the difficulty that officials and experts have in uttering these simple words — I don’t know — it was predictable that the longer the Iranians kept quiet, the more often an American would say something stupid.

Loren Thompson at the Lexington Institute initially argued that the drone could be of no value to Iran because it was a “pile of wreckage.” He still insists, “whatever the insights that Iranians may glean from the RQ-170 Sentinel, the value of applying that knowledge in their ongoing war with America is likely to be modest.”

Others are less sanguine in their assessment.

Peter Singer of the Brookings Institution, author of “Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century,” said that while some of the mechanics of the aircraft are well known, some aspects — especially its sensors — would be important to countries like China.

“This is the jewel for them now,” Singer said. “It depends on what was on the plane on this mission, but one sensor it has carried in the past is an AESA radar. This is a very advanced radar that really is a difference maker for our next generation of planes, not just drones, but also manned ones like F-22s and F-35s.”

Maybe Iran won’t learn enough to clone drones for spying on America. But that’s irrelevant, firstly because the primary interest they have is in learning how to defend themselves from the U.S., and secondly, at a time when the U.S. is known to have been operating a fleet of RQ-170s over Iran for years and is suspected of involvement in a series of bombings, assassinations and acts of sabotage targeting Iran’s nuclear program, the evidence of an ongoing war is one being conducted by the United States (and Israel) against Iran — not the other way around.

What surprisingly few Americans still seem able to grasp is that countries like Iran, however malevolent their leadership might be, are much more preoccupied about defending themselves from the most heavily armed and aggressive nation on the planet, than they are in hatching plans to take over the world.

The more often Iran gets called the enemy of America, the more stupid we become.

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U.S. made covert plan to retrieve Iran drone

The Wall Street Journal reports: U.S. officials considered conducting a covert mission inside Iran to retrieve or destroy a stealth drone that crashed late last week, but ultimately concluded such a secret operation wasn’t worth the risk of provoking a more explosive clash with Tehran, a U.S. official said…

The officials considered various options for retrieving the wreckage of the RQ-170 drone.

Under one plan, a team would be sent to retrieve the aircraft. U.S. officials considered both sending in a team of American commandos based in Afghanistan as well as using allied agents inside Iran to hunt down the downed aircraft.

Another option would have had a team sneak in to blow up the remaining pieces of the drone. A third option would have been to destroy the wreckage with an airstrike.

However, the officials worried that any option for retrieving or destroying the drone would have risked discovery by Iran.

“No one warmed up to the option of recovering it or destroying it because of the potential it could become a larger incident,” the U.S. official said.

If an assault team entered the country to recover or destroy the drone, the official said, the U.S. “could be accused of an act of war” by the Iranian government.

The New York Times adds: The stealth C.I.A. drone that crashed deep inside Iranian territory last week was part of a stepped-up surveillance program that has frequently sent the United States’ most hard-to-detect drone into the country to map suspected nuclear sites, according to foreign officials and American experts who have been briefed on the effort.

Until this week, the high-altitude flights from bases in Afghanistan were among the most secret of many intelligence-collection efforts against Iran, and American officials refuse to discuss it. But the crash of the vehicle, which Iranian officials said occurred more than 140 miles from the border with Afghanistan, blew the program’s cover.

The overflights by the bat-winged RQ-170 Sentinel, built by Lockheed Martin and first glimpsed on an airfield in Kandahar, Afghanistan, in 2009, are part of an increasingly aggressive intelligence collection program aimed at Iran, current and former officials say.

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While Iran dismantles a prize stealth drone, Lockheed’s PR consultants cover up the damage

Lockheed Martin RQ-170 Sentinel spy drone

It’s always strange when the main thrust of a news story is the message that it really isn’t news. It’s as though the business of journalism is in part a form of mind control — identifying the things which we shouldn’t trouble ourselves to think about.

As soon as Iran proudly announced that they had captured a Lockheed RQ-170 Sentinel stealth drone that had flown from Afghanistan, a stream of reports followed about how this will be of little consequence. An unfortunate mishap. Once in a while the US loses a drone. What to do. Let’s just move on because there’s nothing worth paying attention to here.

“I don’t think this is a dagger pointed at the heart of democracy,” said Loren Thompson, defense policy analyst for the Lexington Institute in Arlington, Va. “A lot of information about this aircraft was already known by foreign military intelligence officials.”

Harper’s Ken Silverstein has called the Lexington Institute the “defense industry’s pay-to-play ad agency” so I guess Thompson’s statement to the Los Angeles Times is predictably reassuring — at least it might serve as little bit of damage control as Lockheed Martin and the Pentagon try to account for the RQ-170’s loss.

Apparently the drone should have had a fail-safe mechanism that would have enabled it to return home or self-destruct.

The most likely reason that the Sentinel didn’t self-destruct or safely return is that it was lost because of an onboard mechanical malfunction, said Thompson…

“That means what the Iranians have is a pile of wreckage — many small and damaged pieces from which they could glean little in the way of technological insights,” he said.

The question is: why is the Los Angeles Times even quoting Thompson when they have also spoken to a U.S. official with access to intelligence who says that Iran recovered the drone largely intact?

“It’s bad — they’ll have everything” in terms of the secret technology in the aircraft, the official said. “And the Chinese or the Russians will have it too.”

That sounds like the real story — or at least a major part of it.

So why fill the reporting with chaff pumped out by an expert like Thompson — who also just happens to work as a paid consultant for Lockheed Martin?

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Why Afghans have come to hate Americans

U.S. and Afghan government officials are struggling to reach a strategic long-term agreement — the sticking point is Afghan opposition to night raids which have surged under the Obama administration and now happen as often as 40 times a night.

NATO officials say they have modified how night raids are conducted in response to the Afghan government’s concerns.

“Ninety-five percent of all night operations at this stage are already partnered,” said Brig. Gen. Carsten Jacobson, the NATO spokesman in Afghanistan. “So basically the recommendation of the traditional loya jirga is already put into action.”

“It is in our combined interest that as soon as possible, Afghanization is accomplished,” he added, referring to an Afghan takeover of security responsibility.

Mr. Faizi was unimpressed by that argument. “According to reports from our officials in different provinces, the Afghan security forces are leaving with the American forces to go conduct night operations without being informed directly where they are going, which house they are searching and who is the target,” he said.

While General Jacobson said night raids averaged 10 a night now, a recent study of night raids by the Open Society Foundations, financed by George Soros, estimated that 19 a night were taking place during the first three months of 2011.

The American military is so enamored of the tactic that some generals have said that without night raids, the United States may as well go home.

General Jacobson said that 85 percent of night raids took place without a single shot fired, and that over all such operations accounted for less than one percent of all civilian casualties.

Statistics might calm the doubts of feeble-minded U.S. senators, but they will have little to no impact on the perceptions of Afghans whose homes are being violated. To live in a country where there is an ever-present risk of foreign soldiers breaking into your house in the middle of the night is to live in a state of oppression. This is the nature of occupation.

[Aimal Faizi, the spokesman for President Hamid Karzai,] said the raids were the biggest complaints that Mr. Karzai heard when visitors from the provinces met with him.

“If one of the messages of the United States is to win the hearts and minds of the Afghan people, then these night raids are totally against this,” he said. “People are becoming more and more against the international presence in Afghanistan.”

On the frontlines of southern Helmand Province, the governor of Sangin district, Mohammad Sharif, is a critic of the practice, even though his district has been the center of some of the toughest fighting of the war, with among the highest casualty rates for NATO forces. He said the Special Operations forces that carried out the raids often got the wrong people, including many pro-government people. “People are not happy, and they feel bad toward Americans,” he said.

A high-ranking official in Helmand Province saw the matter differently, although he did not want to be quoted by name endorsing night raids because of their unpopularity. “So many Taliban commanders have been killed or detained in night raids, and if it wasn’t for them, we would not have the peace we now have,” he said. “Taliban commanders are like snakes: it’s hard to catch them, and night raids are their charmers.”

He also noted that trying to arrest a Taliban commander during the day would inevitably mean a battle, which might well cause casualties among bystanders.

Mr. Faizi said the president was concerned that in many cases, Afghan families were forced to give food and shelter to insurgents, and then later were blamed for doing so and arrested. “We think that all these night raids, they bring the conflict directly to the homes of the Afghan people,” he said. “It has to be the opposite, the fight has to be fought somewhere else.”

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Will the U.S. get dragged into Israel’s next war?

Reuters reports: The top U.S. military officer told Reuters on Wednesday he did not know whether Israel would alert the United States ahead of time if it decided to take military action against Iran.

General Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, also acknowledged differences in perspective between the United States and Israel over the best way to handle Iran and its nuclear program.

He said the United States was convinced that sanctions and diplomatic pressure was the right path to take on Iran, along with “the stated intent not to take any options off the table” – language that leaves open the possibility of future military action.

“I’m not sure the Israelis share our assessment of that. And because they don’t and because to them this is an existential threat, I think probably that it’s fair to say that our expectations are different right now,” Dempsey said in an interview as he flew to Washington from London.

Asked whether he was talking about the differences between Israeli and U.S. expectations over sanctions, or differences in perspective about the future course of events, Dempsey said: “All of the above.” He did not elaborate.

He also did not disclose whether he believed Israel was prepared to strike Iran.

Meanwhile, Israel’s Defense Minister Ehud Barak told Israel Radio on Thursday: “Israel is a sovereign state and it is the government of Israel, the Israeli army and security forces who are responsible for Israel’s security, future and survival.”

Ali Gharib notes:

Barak reportedly rebuffed U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta last month when Panetta sought assurances that Israel would give the U.S. a heads up if it decided to attack Iran. Barak refused to “give any assurances that Israel would first seek Washington’s permission, or even inform the White House in advance” of an impending attack, according to an unnamed source in the U.K.’s Telegraph newspaper.

So here’s the question Panetta, Dempsey, President Obama, and all the GOP presidential candidates need to answer: In the event that without warning or contrary to U.S. advice, Israel preemptively attacks Iran, will the United States nevertheless be obliged to intervene on Israel’s behalf?

In other words, is the United States a pawn that Israel is free to move whenever it chooses?

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The intelligence on Afghanistan that Obama refuses to reveal

Steve Coll writes: In late 2008, the United States intelligence community produced a classified National Intelligence Estimate on the war in Afghanistan that has never been released to the public. The N.I.E. described a “grim situation” overall, according to an intelligence officer’s private briefing for NATO ambassadors.

In late 2010, there was another N.I.E. on the war. This one painted a “gloomy picture,” warning that “large swaths of Afghanistan are still at risk of falling to the Taliban,” the Los Angeles Times reported. This N.I.E., too, has never been published.

This autumn, intelligence analysts have again been poring over their secret district-by-district maps of Afghanistan, finding and assessing patterns. A new N.I.E. on Afghanistan is just about finished, people familiar with the latest draft told me this week. This one looks forward to 2014, when President Obama has said U.S. troops will be reduced to a minimal number, and Afghan security forces will take the lead in the war.

The new draft Afghanistan N.I.E. is a lengthy document, running about a hundred pages or more. As is typically the case, it is a synthesis, primarily written by civilian intelligence analysts—career civil servants, mainly—who work in sixteen different intelligence agencies. These days, an Estimate usually contains “Key Judgments” backed by analysis near the front of the document. There are six such judgments in the Afghanistan draft, I was told. I wasn’t able to learn what all of them were; according to the accounts I heard, however, the draft on the whole is gloomier than the typical public statements made by U.S. military commanders in Afghanistan.

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Inside the corporate plan to occupy the Pentagon

Adam Weinstein reports: With time fast running out for the so-called deficit supercommittee, the mammoth amount of government money spent on the military has become a prime target in Washington. But the main focus isn’t on big-ticket weapons projects or expensive wars—it’s on retirement benefits for the roughly 17 percent of soldiers, Marines, sailors, and airmen who have served 20 years or more in uniform. Currently the total cost of their benefits is about $50 billion a year.

Cuts to military pensions are “the kind of thing you have to consider,” Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said in September. When President Obama unveiled his $3 trillion debt reduction plan the same month, it called GIs’ benefits “out of line” with private employee retirement plans, saying the system was “designed for a different era of work.” When Congress held a hearing on military retirements in October, Rep. Austin Scott (R-Ga.) promoted a cheaper 401(k)-style plan that would slash existing benefits for many troops. “I see nothing wrong with them being able to choose a different retirement plan,” he said.

These ideas may sound like a bold new approach in an urgent moment—but in fact, the push for pension cuts and other corporate “reforms” at the Pentagon originates from an obscure advisory panel that has existed for a decade: the Defense Business Board. Its 21 members know little about military affairs, but they are rich in Wall Street experience, including with some of the biggest companies implicated in the 2008 financial meltdown. They are investment bank CEOs and CFOs, outsourcing experts, and layoff specialists who promote a corporate agenda of “behavior change” and “business solutions” [PDF] in the military bureaucracy. The board proposes not only to slash and privatize military pensions, but also to have the Pentagon invest in oil futures, boost pay for its executives and political appointees, and make it easier for them to fire rank-and-file employees while scaling back those workers’ collective-bargaining rights.

Indeed, “this sounds like what’s being done now around the country with the public unions,” affirms Charles Tiefer, a University of Baltimore law professor and defense contracting watchdog who’s testified to Congress about the board’s recommendations. The board was launched in 2001 by then Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who famously wanted to downsize the military and corporatize its management system. The essential reason it exists, Tiefer says, is so that “a pro-business attitude—especially on personnel issues—remains intact” inside the Pentagon.

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U.S. takes the lead on behalf of cluster bombs

Glenn Greenwald writes: Slightly more than two months after he was awarded the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize, President Obama secretly ordered a cruise missile attack on Yemen, using cluster bombs, which killed 44 innocent civilians, including 14 women and 21 children, as well as 14 people alleged to be “militants.” It goes without saying that — unless you want Rick Perry to win in 2012 — this act should in no way be seen as marring Obama’s presidency or his character: what’s a couple dozen children blown up as a part of a covert, undeclared air war? If anything, as numerous Democrats have ecstatically celebrated, such acts show how Tough and Strong the Democrats are: after all, ponder the massive amounts of nobility and courage it takes to sit in the Oval Office and order this type of aggression on defenseless tribal regions in Yemen. As R.W. Appel put it on the front page of The New York Times back in 1989 when glorifying George H.W. Bush’s equally courageous invasion of Panama: “most American leaders since World War II have felt a need to demonstrate their willingness to shed blood” and doing so has become “a Presidential initiation rite.”

But one aspect of the December, 2009, attack that perhaps did merit some more critical scrutiny was the use of cluster bombs, weapons which “scatter hundreds of bomblets over a large area but with limited accuracy and high failure rates.” The inevitability of “duds” — “unexploded ordnance” — poses a great risk to civilians, often well after the conflict has ended, since — like land mines — they often detonate when stumbled into by children and other innocents long after they disperse. According to the Cluster Munitions Coalition, cluster bombs “caused more civilian casualties in Iraq in 2003 and Kosovo in 1999 than any other weapon system.” As Wired pointed out, while the U.S. used these weapons in both Iraq and Afghanistan, “neither the Taliban nor Saddam used cluster bombs against U.S. troops.

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Remains of war dead dumped in landfill

The Washington Post reports: The Dover Air Force Base mortuary for years disposed of portions of troops’ remains by cremating them and dumping the ashes in a Virginia landfill, a practice that officials have since abandoned in favor of burial at sea.

The mortuary in Delaware, the main point of entry for the nation’s war dead and the target of federal investigations of alleged mishandling of remains, engaged in the practice from 2003 to 2008, according to Air Force officials. The manner of disposal was not disclosed to relatives of fallen service members.

Air Force officials acknowledged the practice Wednesday in response to inquiries from The Washington Post. They said the procedure was limited to fragments or portions of body parts that were unable to be identified at first or were later recovered from the battlefield, and which family members had said could be disposed of by the military.

Lt. Gen. Darrell G. Jones, the Air Force’s deputy chief for personnel, said the body parts were cremated, then incinerated, and then taken to a landfill by a military contractor. He likened the procedure to the disposal of medical waste.

Jones also could not estimate how many body parts were handled in this way. “That was the common practice at the time, and since then our practices have improved,” he said.

Gari-Lynn Smith, portions of whose husband’s remains were disposed of in the landfill after his 2006 death in Iraq, said she was “appalled and disgusted” by the way the Air Force had acted. She learned of the landfill disposal earlier this spring in a letter from a senior official at the Dover mortuary.

“My only peace of mind in losing my husband was that he was taken to Dover and that he was handled with dignity, love, respect and honor,” Smith said. “That was completely shattered for me when I was told that he was thrown in the trash.”

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Guantánamo: the most expensive prison in the world

The Miami Herald reports: Guards get combat pay, just like troops in Afghanistan, without the risk of being blown up. Some commanders get to bring their families to this war-on-terror deployment. And each captive gets $38.45 worth of food a day.

The Pentagon detention center that started out in January 2002 as a collection of crude open-air cells guarded by Marines in a muddy tent city is today arguably the most expensive prison on earth, costing taxpayers $800,000 annually for each of the 171 captives by Obama administration reckoning.

That’s more than 30 times the cost of keeping a captive on U.S. soil.

It’s still funded as an open-ended battlefield necessity, although the last prisoner arrived in March 2008. But it functions more like a gated community in an American suburb than a forward-operating base in one of Afghanistan’s violent provinces.

Congress, charged now with cutting $1.5 trillion from the budget by Christmas, provided $139 million to operate the center last year, and has made every effort to keep it open — even as a former deputy commander of the detention center calls it “expensive” and “inefficient.”

“It’s a slow-motion Berlin Airlift — that’s been going on for 10 years,” says retired Army Brig. Gen. Greg Zanetti, a West Point graduate who in 2008 was deputy commander at the detention center.

Both its location and temporary nature drive up costs, says Zanetti. While there, he wrote a secret study that compared the operation to Alcatraz, noting that Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy had closed it in 1963 because it was too expensive.

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U.S.-Israeli military ties ‘broader, deeper and more intense than ever before’

Haaretz reports: Israel and the U.S. will embark on the “largest” and “most significant” joint exercise in the allies’ history, said Andrew Shapiro, U.S. assistant secretary for political-military affairs, on Saturday.

Speaking to the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Shapiro said the exercise will involve more than 5,000 U.S. and Israeli forces, and will simulate Israel’s ballistic missile defense.

“Joint exercises allow us to learn from Israel’s experience in urban warfare and counterterrorism,” said Shapiro.

“Israeli technology is proving critical to improving our Homeland Security and protecting our troops,” he added, explaining that Israeli armor plating technology and the specially designed “Israeli bandage”, being used on American troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, are proven successes.

In addition, he said, Israel will soon gain access to an expedited Congressional Notification process, which will allow for faster trade of smaller, routine sales and purchases of arms between the allies. Countries already subject to expedited Congressional Notification processes are NATO members, Japan, South Korea, Australia and New Zealand.

Shapiro emphasized the Obama Administration’s support for Israel, despite comments by a senior U.S. official on Friday, who expressed concern that Israel would not warn the U.S. before taking military action against Iran’s nuclear facilities.

“Our security relationship with Israel is broader, deeper and more intense than ever before,” said Shapiro, adding that Israel’s military edge was a “top priority” for himself, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and U.S. President Barack Obama.

The U.S. has a $3 billion per year commitment to Israel, which Shapiro said the Obama Administration would continue to honor over the next ten years, “even in challenging budgetary times”.

Speaking of the economic impact of the U.S.-Israeli relationship, Shapira said it was important to note that U.S. security assistance to Israel helps support American jobs, since the “vast majority of security assistance” is spent on American-made goods and services. “We don’t provide assistance out of charity. We provide assistance because it benefits our security,” he said.

“We support Israel because it is in our national interests to do so,” said Shapiro, echoing the recent report by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, entitled, “Israel: A Strategic Asset for the United States”, which argues that Israel is a strategic asset to the U.S. “If Israel were weaker, its enemies would be bolder. This would make broader conflict more likely, which would be catastrophic to American interests in the region. It is the very strength of Israel’s military which deters potential aggressors and helps foster peace and stability.”

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U.S. turned a blind eye to torture in Afghan prisons

The Washington Post reports: Across the street from U.S. military headquarters in Kabul, shrouded from view by concrete walls, the Afghan intelligence agency runs a detention facility for up to 40 terrorism suspects that is known as Department 124. So much torture took place inside, one detainee told the United Nations, that it has earned another name: “People call it Hell.”

But long before the world body publicly revealed “systematic torture” in Afghan intelligence agency detention centers, top officials from the State Department, the CIA and the U.S. military received multiple warnings about abuses at Department 124 and other Afghan facilities, according to Afghan and Western officials with knowledge of the situation.

Despite the warnings, the United States continued to transfer detainees to Afghan intelligence service custody, the officials said. Even as other countries stopped handing over detainees to problematic facilities, the U.S. government did not.

U.S. Special Operations troops delivered detainees to Department 124. CIA officials regularly visited the facility, which was rebuilt last year with American money, to interrogate high-level Taliban and al-Qaeda suspects, according to Afghan and Western officials familiar with the site. Afghan intelligence officials said Americans never participated in the torture but should have known about it.

When the United Nations on Aug. 30 brought allegations of widespread detainee abuse to Gen. John Allen, the top U.S. military commander here, he took swift action ahead of the public release of the findings. Coalition troops stopped transferring detainees to Department 124 and 15 other police and intelligence agency prisons. They also hastily began a program to monitor those facilities and conduct human rights classes for interrogators.

But the prospect that U.S. officials failed to act on prior warnings raises questions about their compliance with a law, known as the Leahy Amendment, that prohibits the United States from funding units of foreign security forces when there is credible evidence that they have committed human rights abuses.

The State Department is investigating whether the law applies and what funding might be affected, according to U.S. officials.

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U.S. drone kills 28 in south Somalia

Another attack by a US assassination drone has claimed the lives of at least 28 civilians, while injuring dozens of others in southern Somalia, Press TV reports.

The incident took place in the town of Gilib, 350 kilometers south of Mogadishu, a Press TV correspondent reported on Sunday.

The Washington Post reported on Thursday: The Air Force has been secretly flying Reaper drones on counterterrorism missions from a remote civilian airport in southern Ethi­o­pia as part of a rapidly expanding U.S.-led proxy war against an al-Qaeda affiliate in East Africa, U.S. military officials said.

The Air Force has invested millions of dollars to upgrade an airfield in Arba Minch, Ethi­o­pia, where it has built a small annex to house a fleet of drones that can be equipped with Hellfire missiles and satellite-guided bombs. The Reapers began flying missions earlier this year over neighboring Somalia, where the United States and its allies in the region have been targeting al-Shabab, a militant Islamist group connected to al-Qaeda.

On Friday, the Pentagon said the drones are unarmed and have been used only for surveillance and collecting intelligence, though it would not rule out the possibility that they would be used to launch lethal strikes in the future.

Mindful of the 1993 “Black Hawk Down” debacle in which two U.S. military helicopters were shot down in the Somali capital of Mogadishu and 18 Americans killed, the Obama administration has sought to avoid deploying troops to the country.

As a result, the United States has relied on lethal drone attacks, a burgeoning CIA presence in Mogadishu and small-scale missions carried out by U.S. Special Forces. In addition, the United States has increased its funding for and training of African peacekeeping forces in Somalia that fight al-Shabab.

The Washington Post reported last month that the Obama administration is building a constellation of secret drone bases in the Arabian Peninsula and the Horn of Africa, including one site in Ethi­o­pia. The location of the Ethio­pian base and the fact that it became operational this year, however, have not been previously disclosed. Some bases in the region also have been used to carry out operations against the al-Qaeda affiliate in Yemen.

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