Dirty Wars

by Jeremy Scahill

  Years after the black sites had been established and scores of prisoners were shuttled through them, the International Committee of the Red Cross compiled testimonials of fourteen prisoners who had survived. Some were snatched in Thailand, others in Dubai or Djibouti. Most were taken in Pakistan. The ICRC report described what would happen once US forces took a prisoner:

  The detainee would be photographed, both clothed and naked prior to and again after transfer. A body cavity check (rectal examination) would be carried out and some detainees alleged that a suppository (the type and the effect of such suppositories was unknown by the detainees) was also administered at that moment.

  The detainee would be made to wear a diaper and dressed in a tracksuit. Earphones would be placed over his ears, through which music would sometimes be played. He would be blindfolded with at least a cloth tied around the head and black goggles. In addition, some detainees alleged that cotton wool was also taped over their eyes prior to the blindfold and goggles being applied....

  The detainee would be shackled by [the] hands and feet and transported to the airport by road and loaded onto a plane. He would usually be transported in a reclined sitting position with his hands shackled in front. The journey times...ranged from one hour to over twenty-four to thirty hours. The detainee was not allowed to go to the toilet and if necessary was obliged to urinate and defecate into the diaper.

  According to the ICRC, some of the prisoners were bounced around to different black sites for more than three years, where they were kept in “continuous solitary confinement and incommunicado detention. They had no knowledge of where they were being held, no contact with persons other than their interrogators or guards.” The US personnel guarding them wore masks. None of the prisoners was ever permitted a phone call or to write to inform their families they had been taken. They simply vanished.

  During the course of their imprisonment, some of the prisoners were confined in boxes and subjected to prolonged nudity—sometimes lasting for several months. Some of them were kept for days at a time, naked, in “stress standing positions,” with their “arms extended and chained above the head.” During this torture, they were not allowed to use a toilet and “had to defecate and urinate over themselves.” Beatings and kickings were common, as was a practice of placing a collar around a prisoner’s neck and using it to slam him against walls or yank him down hallways. Loud music was used for sleep deprivation, as was temperature manipulation. If prisoners were perceived to be cooperating, they were given clothes to wear. If they were deemed uncooperative, they’d be stripped naked. Dietary manipulation was used—at times the prisoners were put on liquid-only diets for weeks at a time. Three of the prisoners told the ICRC they had been waterboarded. Some of them were moved to as many as ten different sites during their imprisonment. “I was told during this period that I was one of the first to receive these interrogation techniques, so no rules applied,” one prisoner, taken early on in the war on terror, told the ICRC. “I felt like they were experimenting and trying out techniques to be used later on other people.”

  As the CIA began applying SERE tactics on more detainees at its black sites, Rumsfeld was not content with the Agency running interrogations. In late 2002, JSOC formed a task force to draw up plans for a potential role for its personnel in interrogating “designated unlawful combatants.” The CIA was reporting to the White House—specifically Cheney’s office—on its progress in using SERE tactics at its black sites, but JSOC could provide far greater flexibility and far less oversight. JSOC operators were tapped by the White House to participate in a parallel interrogation program known by its unclassified code name as Copper Green. Internally, the program was called Matchbox. Interrogation would be one of their key tactics, but Cheney and Rumsfeld had much broader plans for a new, unaccountable way of waging a global, secret war.

  WITHIN THE US LAWS governing military and intelligence operations, there are gray areas. Title 50 of the US code, or federal law, sets out the rules and structures for intelligence operations, while Title 10 covers military actions. The code under which a particular operation is performed has serious implications for oversight and accountability. The terms “covert” action and “clandestine” operations are often thrown around as though they mean the same thing. They do not. “Covert action” is a doctrinal and legal term that, broadly speaking, refers to an activity whose sponsorship is meant to be a secret. It is meant to provide the United States with “plausible deniability.” Such operations are extremely risky—not just in terms of the operational danger, but because they often involve secret US agents conducting operations inside the borders of a sovereign country without alerting its government. If the operation is exposed or disrupted, the potential for scandal is very real. The legal definition of covert action, according to Title 50, is “An activity or activities of the United States Government to influence political, economic, or military conditions abroad, where it is intended that the role of the United States Government will not be apparent or acknowledged publicly.” A covert action requires a presidential finding and for the White House to brief the House and Senate Intelligence Committees on its contents. This briefing must occur before the covert action unless there are “extraordinary circumstances.” The requirements for congressional involvement were established to prevent scandals such as the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba and Iran-Contra. Those operations were passionately supported by Cheney and Rumsfeld. Although they no doubt regretted the fact that Iran-Contra became public and stirred controversy, they did not regard the operation itself as a scandal but rather as a model for how the United States should conduct its dirty business.

  Military doctrine defines another class of activities, “clandestine operations,” in which the point of secrecy is to protect the integrity of the mission, not to conceal its sponsor, the US government. The military may conduct operations that are both covert and clandestine, but these are rare. Unlike covert actions, clandestine operations do not require a presidential finding if “future hostilities” are “anticipated” in the country where they are taking place. Nor is the administration required to report the operation to Congress. Such operations are defined as “Traditional Military Activities” and offer the intelligence committees no real-time oversight rights. Under US law, the military is not required to disclose the specific actions of an operation, but the US role in the “overall operation” should be “apparent” or eventually “acknowledged.”

  From where Rumsfeld and Cheney were sitting, the United States was at war, and the world was a battlefield. Therefore, hostilities were “anticipated” in every country on earth, necessitating dozens if not hundreds of potential “Traditional Military Activities” across the globe. Cheney and Rumsfeld realized that by using JSOC—a black-ops force whose activities arguably straddled both Title 10 and Title 50—they could operate in the crevice separating US military and intelligence law. Much of JSOC’s operations could be classified under military doctrine as “Preparing the Battlespace,” which is defined by the US Special Operations Command as “the umbrella term for all activities conducted prior to D-Day, H-Hour to plan and prepare for potential follow-on military operations...in likely or potential areas of employment, to train and prepare for follow-on military operations.” Such activities could be conducted as Advance Force Operations (AFOs), which are “military operations conducted by forces which precede the main elements into the area of operations to prepare for follow-on operations.” Unlike CIA operations, AFOs can be carried out with minimal external oversight—for a significant period of time—prior to an “overt” hostility, or for a “contingency” that may or may not occur.

  The congressional intelligence committees viewed this logic as a work-around to oversight and reporting laws, charging that the Defense Department wanted to liberally deploy its increasingly formidable intelligence capabilities abroad under the pretense of operational planning for future military hostilities, without granting the intelligence committees their du
e oversight.

  Adding another layer of bureaucratic complexity to this already murky area of US law was the fact that the armed services committees authorized the funding for operations, and the intelligence committees held the power to determine what constituted a covert action. Those committees often clashed on this very issue and fiercely guarded their turf, leaving a huge opening for potential abuses and the exploitation of gaps or gray areas.

  Although the CIA was supposed to be the main agency conducting covert actions, the National Command Authority—which consisted of the president and Rumsfeld—could choose to use Title 50 authorities for organizations other than the CIA, by delegating military assets to CIA operations. JSOC, for example, had been used for covert actions in order to operate in politically volatile areas without repercussions under international law or to supersede Congress’s authority to declare war. Title 10 operations conducted in “Preparing the Battlespace” had even fewer congressional reporting requirements, and with the congressional resolution authorizing a global war, the National Command Authority could use its power to direct military operations without having to classify them as covert actions. This had always been a gray area open for exploitation. And that was attractive to Cheney and Rumsfeld and their teams as they plotted their “Next Steps.”

  Rumsfeld had major plans for Special Ops—and they didn’t include any CIA control or meddling. Cofer Black’s departure opened a door for Rumsfeld to assert more control over the dark wars. But it wasn’t just the Agency or Congress that Rumsfeld wanted to cut out of the equation. It was also the conventional military bureaucracy and military brass, which he believed had grown soft and gun-shy. “The worst way to organize for a manhunt...is to have it planned in the Pentagon,” Rumsfeld wrote in an internal memo laying out a vision for SOF units to begin striking globally. “We must be willing to accept the risks associated with a smaller footprint.” On July 22, 2002, Rumsfeld sent a secret directive to General Charles Holland, the SOCOM commander, envisioning a decentralized “manhunt” that would circumvent the traditional military command structure and operate more like a private hit team. He instructed Holland to “develop a plan” to deal with al Qaeda and associated groups. Rumsfeld explained that going forward, they would need to find a way to “cut through” the Pentagon bureaucracy and process deployment orders “in minutes and hours, not days and weeks.” He added: “The objective is to capture terrorists for interrogation or, if necessary, to kill them, not simply to arrest them in a law-enforcement exercise.” But Holland “did not respond as swiftly and dramatically as people in Washington thought he should,” recalled Lawrence Wilkerson, a retired colonel who served thirty years in the army. “People in Washington, in this case, being Rumsfeld and Cheney.” The general came back with a five-year plan when Rumsfeld wanted immediate action.

  As Rumsfeld and Cheney pushed for Special Ops to start hitting globally, top military commanders expressed concern that those plans outpaced the military’s abilities to collect and exploit intelligence. Some JSOC teams in Afghanistan had found themselves in turf battles with other JSOC teams and, though they did kill a tremendous number of Afghans and foreign fighters, whom exactly it was they were killing was not always clear. A big problem was a lack of solid intelligence. While the CIA was taking the lead in hunting down High Value Targets (HVTs), Rumsfeld was simultaneously pushing JSOC’s men to yield results. But without good intel, they were chasing ghosts.

  When Rumsfeld proposed beefing up JSOC and taking it global, General Holland pushed back. He told Rumsfeld he was concerned about the lack of “actionable intelligence” in the emerging proposed target regions. One senior military commander said bluntly that “the intelligence wasn’t good enough to allow us to have a campaign like that.” Rumsfeld and his deputies reportedly ridiculed the commanders, particularly General Holland, for what they saw as excessive caution. A Pentagon adviser who worked closely with Rumsfeld at the time told the investigative journalist Seymour Hersh that Rumsfeld and his team were convinced that “there [were] few four-stars leaning forward in the Special Operations Command,” and that more “fighting generals” were needed, and further, the high-ranking military officers who came up during the Clinton years would need to be “reassessed.”

  More to Rumsfeld’s liking was General Wayne Downing, who had been called out of retirement after 9/11 to serve as deputy national security adviser and coordinate the US campaign targeting terrorist networks and “those who support them.” Although he technically reported to National Security Adviser Rice, he would be JSOC’s advocate within the White House. Downing pushed for JSOC to return to its roots as a “blacker/lower visibility force,” employing “a preemptive posture, with improved find and fix capabilities for sustained operations.” He began pushing for Special Operations Forces to prepare for “the future indirect and clandestine GWOT fight in countries with which we are not at war” and to conduct operations “in multiple, sensitive, non-permissive and denied areas.” He recommended that JSOC should report directly to the secretary of defense and not run its operations through the conventional chain of command.

  In reality JSOC was already being freed. While Downing went through official channels, Wilkerson said Rumsfeld and Cheney had already “bypassed Special Operations Command and went straight into Fort Bragg and began giving directions for Special Operating Force activities, direct action in most cases, directly from the Vice President’s office to the Joint Special Operations Command.” Within months, Holland would be relieved of his SOCOM post.

  It was the beginning of what would be a multiyear project by Rumsfeld and Cheney to separate this small, elite, surgical unit from the broader chain of command and transform it into a global killing machine. Before 9/11, they had big plans for JSOC, but the terrorist attacks gave them all the ammunition they would need to win their own war against oversight of these elite and highly lethal forces.

  “What I was seeing was the development of what I would later see in Iraq and Afghanistan, where Special Operations Forces would operate in both theaters without the conventional commander even knowing what they were doing,” said Wilkerson. “That’s dangerous, that’s very dangerous. You have all kinds of mess when you don’t tell the theater commander what you’re doing.” Wilkerson told me that when he worked in the Bush administration, “You had JSOC operating as an extension of the [administration] doing things the executive branch—read: Cheney and Rumsfeld—wanted it to do. This would be more or less carte blanche. ‘You need to do it, do it.’ It was very alarming for me as a conventional soldier.”

  There was no love lost between the CIA and Rumsfeld and Cheney over the emerging Iraq War intelligence game. And, as they planned other wars, they didn’t trust the CIA’s analysts to provide them with intelligence required to hit, early and often, globally. Rumsfeld believed that Special Operations needed its own intelligence operation specifically aimed at fueling the global kill/capture campaign. JSOC already worked closely with the famed signals intelligence operation, the Intelligence Support Activity, or simply the Activity. Also known as Gray Fox, the unit specialized in operational electronic surveillance and intercepts. But Rumsfeld also wanted an entity that mirrored the capabilities of the CIA—one that was built on human intelligence, known in the community as HUMINT. In the spring of 2002, a commission chaired by former National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft recommended that the NSA, the National Reconnaissance Office and the National Imagery and Mapping Agency be removed from Pentagon control and handed over to the CIA. Rumsfeld pushed back violently and moved US intelligence in the exact opposite direction.

  In April 2002, Project Icon was launched. The funding for the program came from “reprogrammed” Pentagon funds and was not briefed to congressional intelligence committees. The “new clandestine teams” made up of “case officers, linguists, interrogators and technical specialists” were deployed alongside Special Ops Forces with renewed focus on gathering human intelligence—from the field interrogations, s
urveillance and the running of local sources and assets. After initially operating under classified code names, the secret program would later become known as the Strategic Support Branch, or SSB. In July 2002, President Bush transferred Gray Fox to the Special Operations Command by executive order, giving Rumsfeld control over a huge portion of US intelligence assets and systems. This new shop, consisting of Gray Fox working together with SSB, would provide real-time intelligence to Special Ops Forces to target suspected militants, prevent future attacks and “prepare the battlefield” for potential military operations. In short, it would fuel a global manhunt. If Doug Feith’s intelligence shop was meant to threaten the supremacy of the CIA’s analysts, the SSB was meant to supersede the authorities of the Agency’s human intelligence structures.

  Any country, friend or foe of the United States, would be fair game for operations. The CIA, the US ambassadors and the home government would not be looped in. Early planning memos by Rumsfeld indicated that he wanted the SSB to focus intelligence-gathering operations on “emerging target countries such as Somalia, Yemen, Indonesia, Philippines and Georgia.” SSB was designed to “operate without detection and under the defense secretary’s direct control.” The Washington Post obtained internal Pentagon documents that called for a HUMINT branch that would be “directly responsive to tasking from SecDef.” These SSB units would operate under “nonofficial cover,” at times using false names and nationalities with the goal of covering the “full spectrum of humint operations.” It was a direct challenge to the CIA, whose Directorate of Operations was the traditional agency tasked with covert missions, particularly when conducted in “friendly” nations or countries where “conventional war is a distant or unlikely prospect.” There was pro forma language in the internal guidelines on the SSB defining “coordination” as giving the Agency seventy-two hours’ notice before launching an intelligence-gathering mission, but the SSB was intended to radically streamline the pace and scope of lethal covert military operations against terrorist suspects, regardless of where they resided.