President Obama, Candidate Obama, Blackwater and Black Ops

Dear Friends,

Who really reports the news today?  Who really breaks the stories long before the mainstream media picks them up if they ever do?  I suggest that Amy Goodman on Democracy Now and Rachel Maddow on The Rachel Maddow show are often one to two weeks ahead of the mainstream media.  This week, I would add Jon Stewart on The Daily Show to that list.

I cited many times from The Rachel Maddow Show which has been particularly effective at making clear the ineffectiveness of the clean up effort by BP.  Actually, I should note that Rachel did her own version of what President Obama should have said in his Oval Office address the other night.  It was very good but not any better than my own post on that subject.  Here is her speech that President Obama should have given.

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But I am not writing about that the devastating environmental catastrophe resulting from the oil spewing from BP's Deepwater Horizon well, this post is about the way that President Obama is making candidate Obama look like a liar and a con artist.  Candidate Obama was all about reversing the terrible things that President George W. Bush had done concerning black operations, rendition, secret prisons, Guantanamo Bay, etc.  Unfortunately for the United States and the world, President Obama is turning out to be worse than President George W. Bush.  Here are a couple of examples.

The first example is taken from Democracy Now today where Jeremy Scahill was interviewed about Blackwater CEO Erik Prince moving to the UAE (a country with no extradition treaty with the United States) to avoid prosecution and most likely to continue to provide contractors to the United States.  I should note that the story of Erik Prince's move to the UAE was covered by a variety of media outlets that would not be considered mainstream, but not by the mainstream media.  If you search on The New York Times website for the story, you will find links to the non-mainstream media coverage but not to any direct coverage by The New York Times.  But I digress.

Jeremy Scahill is reporting that President Obama has expanded the use of secret special forces operations abroad, not only in Iraq and Afghanistan but in places like Mexico.  Here is a link to the interview and here is a portion of that interview:

JEREMY SCAHILL: Right. Well, I mean, what you have to understand about this is that the premier counterterrorism strike force that the US has is the Joint Special Operations Command, which is sort of an all-star team of US special forces where they pull personnel from the Navy SEALs, DEVGRU, from the Army Rangers, from the Delta Force. They have their own aviation division, which is the 160th Aviation; the Night Stalkers is their nickname.

And under the Bush administration and after 9/11, they took this force that traditionally was supposed to be deployed in countries throughout Latin America, for instance, where the US wanted to either change the leadership in those countries, overthrow governments, or wanted to support a repressive regime. And they would send in special forces to upfit their military, in other words, to improve the capability of those countries’ special forces. And it was a way of the US waging proxy wars. What happened is that Bush, in the early stages after 9/11, shifted JSOC’s focus from a training mission to direct action missions, and they formed what are called special mission units, SMUs, that would go around the world and would essentially abduct or assassinate individuals that were believed to be al-Qaeda leaders or terrorists or opponents of the United States.

And so, what the Obama administration has done is taken the lead character who facilitated that transformation, General Stanley McChrystal, and appointed him the theater commander for the entire US front line war now in Afghanistan and Pakistan. That, combined with the fact that you have Petraeus also exerting his own influence in the special forces world and issuing execute orders to operate in countries that his forces previously had not—Yemen, Somalia, elsewhere. The air strikes, for instance, that you reported on recently on Democracy Now! in Yemen that killed, I think it was, fifteen civilians or more was likely not a JSOC mission, but rather Petraeus’s sort of parallel special forces mission.

The United States special forces are now in Mexico, for instance, and in Colombia, where they are attaching themselves to the Drug Enforcement Agency. That’s what they—they go in, and they can basically become what they want to become. If it’s attaching with the FBI, they’ll do that. If it’s passing themselves off in some kind of a diplomatic capacity, they’ll do that. In those countries—in Mexico and in Colombia—my understanding is that they’re working with Colombian special forces and with Mexican special forces to give them an expertise that they maybe don’t have or to advise them on certain operations. But the lines are blurred. And oftentimes when you have these highly trained US forces in these countries and they come under some kind of fire, are they not going to shoot back?

So I’ve been given specific examples, for instance, of US forces operating in the Republic of Georgia and where they are fighting against and targeting Chechen rebel leaders. And this is happening all around the world now.

And so, Obama has opened a direct line of communication with commanders of these task forces that are doing these hits. And I’ve heard from people that are involved with planning of these missions that there’s far greater access for these sort of dark forces with the Obama White House than there was under the Bush administration, which is really extraordinary, because Bush and Cheney would often pluck people from out of the chain of command and directly order them to do something, McChrystal chief among them.

On Tuesday night's The Daily Show, Jon Stewart put together a great segment contrasting what candidate Obama said about secret special operations, rendition, habeas corpus, etc. and what President Obama has actually done on those subjects.  Of course when Jon Stewart does it, it sounds funny but if you think about it, you should be scared and really upset that the candidate of hope and change is continuing if not extending many of the worst things that President George W. Bush did.  Unfortunately, I am not able to put the clip in the post but here is the link.  The applicable part starts at minute 1:45 and ends at minute 9:09.


Thanks for reading and please comment,
The Unabashed Liberal