Skyfall, starring David Petraeus By Pepe Escobar

ROVING EYE

Skyfall, starring David Petraeus

By Pepe Escobar 

My name is Petraeus. David Petraeus. Move over, Bond, with your Skyfall; this is the real deal, a certified political/national security blockbuster to end them all. 

This is how Hollywood would market it; "He had the nation's highest security clearance. But above all he was an embedded lady killer." 

Now for the casting. Daniel Craig could easily play The General, although The General would rather teleguide a Hellfire than an 

  
Aston Martin, and wear a "fruit salad" (as in myriad decorations) instead of a killer Tom Ford suit. Demi Moore - sultry as ever - could play "Paula". Assorted Iraqis and Afghans would play "collateral damage". 

Meanwhile, murky does not even begin to describe alleged reality - as in the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, retired Gen David Petraeus, resigning over a bedroom farce only two days after President Barack Obama is re-elected, amid crossfire accusations raging for weeks regarding what the CIA was exactly doing in Libya, that godforsaken land liberated by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and now ruled by a bunch of militias. 

As whodunits go, this plot is going nowhere. Nobody knows why this blockbuster was leaked last Friday - by the way only one day after President Obama himself had learned about it (on the other hand attorney general Eric Holder of The Fast and the Furiousfame knew about it since "late summer", according to the proverbial anonymous, "US officials"). 

Nobody knows what the Federal Bureau of Investigation was planning to do before all hell broke loose - considering that its four-month investigation had unearthed that Petraeus and his lover, West Point graduate, fitness fanatic, adoring biographer Paula Broadwell, had not breached national security. 

Or maybe they had. For starters, The General - possessor of the nation's highest national security clearance - was using a mere G-mail account to talk dirty to Paula, using what The Washington Post gleefully described as "a tactic of terrorists who are rightly wary of espionage". And when it was leaked that the FBI found no "major security breaches", this means there WAS a security breach. 

My guy
The bedroom farce elements are enough to have Moliere rolling in his tombe. The whole thing started when Floridian Jill Kelley complained about receiving harassing emails from Paula, the adoring co-author (with Washington Post journalist Vernon Loeb) of the full-access biography All In: The Education of General David Petraeus, published in January. Paula and Petraeus had been getting down to the nitty-gritty since November 2011, two months after Obama appointed him as head of the CIA. Talk about an embedded biographer. 

So Paula must have thought she was in a sexy quadrangle, not triangle. She obviously didn't know much about Jill Kelley - the third woman in the farce - the other three sides being Paula and Petraeus' wife, the now "furious" Holly. The Tampa Bay Times described The General as a grandfather to Kelley's family. 

Kelley also happened to be a critical player; a "social liaison" to the Pentagon's supreme, shadowy, counterterrorism/killing machine, the Fort Bragg-based Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC). It's crucial to know that it was the JSOC that allegedly led the CIA and the Pentagon into what had happened during the attack against the US consulate in Benghazi in which ambassador Chris Stevens was killed. 

None of this obviously mattered to Paula; in the harassing emails that culminated in this bombshell, she bluntly ordered Kelley to "stay away from my guy". 

As for "my guy", he has multiple questions to answer. First of all; why did the CIA tell the White House that the Benghazi drama was provoked by that stupid "Prophet Muhammad" YouTube video - and not an attack coordinated by previously NATO-enabled Salafi-jihadis? 

And then, no less important; why did The General not decide to commit his public seppuku over two weeks ago, when FBI agents talked to him in person about the investigation? Was it his paramount reason the desire not to bomb the Obama administration and practically hand the election over to the Republican Party? Or maybe he was hoping the whole thing would simply be covered up, like a Pashtun wedding party obliterated by a Hellfire missile? 

According to The New York Times, the whole thing blew over in late October after an "unidentified" FBI employee - now identified as sending photos of his shirtless torso to Jill Kelley - spilled the beans to Congress Republicans all the way to House Majority Leader Eric Cantor. Nobody knows what was this FBI's informer agenda. 

In a nutshell, the FBI didn't manage to keep the investigation secret. Cantor, according to the Times, had a serious meeting with FBI director Robert Mueller III on Halloween; then nobody knows what happened till Election Day, November 6, when the FBI went by the book and told James Clapper Jr, the Director of National Intelligence, about the bedroom farce. To say that Mueller and Cantor also have a few questions to answer is the understatement of the year. 

With US corporate media now totally berserk, the master narrative remains that The Samurai General did the honorable thing by resigning. It all goes back to good ol' American Puritanism. You can be a killing machine, responsible for the death of untold numbers of civilians. But don't you dare betraying your devoted wife. 

The General may be thinking he chose the wrong profession. What an unforgiving environment; James Bond gets to wear fabulous suits, drinks countless martinis, drives an Aston Martin, shoots every bad guy in sight and beds every foxy lady in the universe. 

The failed warrior 
David Petraeus was more of a PR genius than a samurai to begin with. His cinematic model would be Captain Willard as played by Martin Sheen in Coppola's Apocalypse Now; the warrior intellectual. Petraeus, who for quite a while actively positioned himself as a possible presidential candidate in 2012, was clever enough to sell to US public opinion - and gullible mainstream media - the notion that he was a winner in both Iraq and Afghanistan. These are two monumental fallacies. 

The revolving door ethos in Washington - in this case between the Pentagon and the CIA - reached new heights of absurdity when Petraeus, who adapted his counterinsurgency tactics from Iraq to Afghanistan, as in take, clear, hold and build, was put in charge, as CIA director, of analyzing ... the counterinsurgency in Afghanistan. The Taliban must be laughing all across the Hind Kush about Petraeus's counterinsurgency "success" - which, by the way, he imposed, along with other Pentagon generals, on Obama in late 2009. 

Petraeus is a product of the Pentagon. He could never, by himself, get rid of the inbuilt logic of Endless War, established by Republican strategists of what French political scientist Alain Joxe has characterized as "war neoliberalism". 

Iraq and Afghanistan were pure manifestations of "war neoliberalism". Petraeus's "surge" in Iraq was a sham. When he arrived with his suitcases full of cash to convince Sunni guerrillas to fight al-Qaeda in Iraq, and not American soldiers, the real surge was already being accomplished; this was the surge led by the Iraqi Interior Ministry and Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army, which had practically succeeded in the ethnic cleansing of Baghdad and surrounding areas, reverting the population balance to the benefit of Shi'ites. As for the Sunni guerrillas, at least they could pocket American money while biding their time to continue their fight against a Shi'ite-dominated government in Baghdad. 

Obama's foreign policy team certainly thought that Petraeus counterinsurgency mumbo-jumbo would allow Iraq - and later Afghanistan - at least some sort of what could be dubbed inter-communitarian democracy, saving American face in terms of a troop exit that would not replicate the last helicopter leaving a Saigon roof in 1975. 

But the fact is Petraeus did not win any hearts and minds in either Iraq or Afghanistan; his take, clear, hold and build tactics ultimately led to nowhere in both cases - and we're not even talking about serious instances of torture, extrajudicial killings, illegal detentions and widespread shadow war. His "mini-surge" could only have had a shot at succeeding in Afghanistan (and that's quite a stretch) if it was not mini; if he had had access to hundreds of thousands of troops - something politically unacceptable in the US. 

Then there's Benghazi. What may have really happened is that the US consulate in Benghazi was a sort of CIA safe house/spy house - thus under Petraeus responsibility, not the State Dept. This neatly dovetails with "Paula" casually saying, at the University of Denver on October 26, that "prisoners" were being held at the consulate (the CIA vehemently denied it, so there must be a degree of truth to it). 

That the consulate was attacked by Salafi-jihadis is out of the question. The State Department may have been the fall guys - while Petraeus/CIA got away with their incompetence. Well, until the bedroom farce exploded. 

It remains to be seen whether anyone in Washington will dare asking the pertinent questions. It remains to be seen whether Petraeus's relentless, hyper-counterproductive (not to mention collateral damage-laden) drone wars will be reevaluated. It remains to be seen whether Obama 2.0 will decide to practice diplomacy - and not shadow war - in the intersection between Central and South Asia. 

The inestimable Ray McGovern, a former CIA analyst, suggests Obama should stop listening to " faux experts - the neocon specialists at Brookings, AEI and elsewhere" and instead go for "genuine experts like former national intelligence officer for the Near East Paul Pillar, former State Department chief of staff Lawrence Wilkerson, and military historian and practitioner Andrew Bacevich (Lt Col, USA, ret). These are straight-shooters; they have no interest in 'long wars'; they will tell you the truth; all you need to do is listen." 

Forget about straight shooters. The Acting CIA Director is now Michael Morell, a puppet of counter-terrorism czar John Brennan. As for The General, what a sorry exit; he gets no fancy car, no martinis, no Tom Ford killer suit, he doesn't save the world. And in the end he doesn't even get the girl. 

Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War (Nimble Books, 2007) and Red Zone Blues: a snapshot of Baghdad during the surge. His most recent book is Obama does Globalistan (Nimble Books, 2009). 

He may be reached at pepeasia@yahoo.com 

JSOC - The Joint Special Operations Command

31st January 2010, 03:32 pm by Stan

The Joint Special Operations Command, known by the acronym JSOC, pronounced jay-sock by members of the US armed forces, carries with it a mystique. The press, JSOC’s promoters and its critics, as well as the entertainment media, have all contributed to its mystique; and that mystique is promoted my the military because it functions as a kind of deterrent.

One of the advantages of offical secrecy is its contribution to this mystique - writ large for secretive units, but this mystique-maintenance is also useful throughout the military. Hollywood, pulp fiction, television drama, infotainment “news,” and military-veteran boosterism all contribute to the vast ignorance of military matters, by overdramatizing military life and military operations, and by idealizing it.

Film and popular literature are packed with protagonists whose past or present CV includes membership in some elite and highly secret combat unit, where individuals are seven-language linguists, flawless marksmen with every firearm ever manufactured, field surgeons, helicopter pilots, chess masters, and gymnasts.

The arms race among entertainment moguls to one-up each other’s fantasies has only accelerated this stupidity; and the thirst among (primarily male) consumers for this drivel has corresponding and escalating ratio of profit to humbug.

Hannah Arendt once noted:

The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together.

Obviously, I insert this quote with the subject of evil in mind, and in the context of a discussion of this mystique-laden military institution, JSOC. Because that is what they actually do, evil, and not some salvific secret missions that keep us unkowingly safe abed at night. Moreover, they are not the idealized archetypes, but simply a bunch of men who are conjoined primarily by their overarching commitment to US nationalism, their belief that ends justify means, and their personal pursuit of probative masculinity.

Few are multi-lingual, most are only marginally in better physical condition than the average civilian gym rat, many are stupid - moreso than you want to know - and all are committed, when under orders, to bully and kill helpless people.

They are far more banal than anyone would like to believe; and the culture is closer than anything else to a boys locker room. They like sports, pornography, gun culture, video games, alcohol, and misogynist humor.

A little background.

For the record, I was a member of a constituent organization for a few years in the 80’s while they were forming JSOC as a coordinating command in the wake of the 1979 hostage rescue debacle in Iran. Like all these coordinating elements that recieve truckloads of money, it grew into a kind of bureaucratic empire that was planted in some upscale digs on the boundary between Fort Bragg, NC, and the adjacent Pope Air Force Base. This is a process I call institutional dog-waggery… when the coordinaton and support apparatus becomes the tail that ends up wagging the dog.

Included in JSOC, then, were special counter-terrorism units from the Army and Navy, with special aircraft and air coordination asssets from the Army and Air Force. God only knows what tack-ons have happened since then, especially since Donald Rumsfeld privileged the role of so-called special operations as part of his doctrinal rewrite for the entire Department of Defense.

Money has flowed like water into special operations; and this is the institutional equivalent of pouring buckets of ox blood into the Atlantic Ocean at the mouth of the Chagres River. Along with the boys who want to kill to prove themselves have come opportunists and mountebanks of every stripe, not unlike the intellectual swindlers who sold Rumsfeld on his doctrine in the first place. Well, to be honest, Rumsfeld himself was one of the chief con artists, but that’s another story.

In time, the very precise and limited skill sets that had been developed by the early counter-terrorist units - mostly geared to hostage-barricade resolution - had diffused out of the CT units, via retirees and ex-members, as well as training agreements with other agencies, until anyone who wants to observe what used to be called close-quarter battle (CQB) can see it reenacted with a fair amount of verisimiltude on prime time tv… SWAT tactics to the layperson.

The original Delta Force commander, Charlie Beckwith, RIP, who wanted to ensure that these skills remained close-hold, used to tell subordinates that “the only way to keep a secret is don’t tell anybody.” He was prescient, as it turns out, and the CT units had - within a decade - worked themselves out of their dangerous and exclusive job.

This applied to JSOC, which also included infantry support units, i.e., Ranger Battalions, like the one Pat Tillman worked for when he was killed by his own comrades in Paktia Province Afghanistan in 2004. That was a JSOC operation; and it was not helpful in the maintenance of the enemy-deterring mystique. Three or so Taliban irregulars with an RPG and a couple of AKs, shooting ineffectively from half a mile away, created a public relations crisis that contributed to the disappearance of the Secretary of Defense, killing three people in the process.

The debacle in Somalia in 1993? JSOC.

Given the proven ability of special operations to fail, and given the diffusionary loss of its original focus, the only asset that remained for JSOC to do things that are “special” was its high level of secrecy. Many alumni are now performing special duties at six-figure salaries as mercenary contractors… still paid by the Department of Defense - that is, with your taxes - only without that pesky potential Congresdsdional overisght. I say potential, because Congress has no stomach to oversee anything military. The idealization of the military has ensured that.

Which brings me to the sycophancy of elected officials in the face of military commanders, and that includes Barack Obama.

Elected officials are forced to factor the mystique into anything and everything they say about anyone and everyone military. A sizeable fraction of the voting public believes that cops are like the interesting, intelligent people they see on endless Law and Order reruns, and they believe that military people are like the equally complex and ethical characters played by their favorite actors in idealized representations by the media. Or they are related to military members, an equally biasing condition.

Consequently, we have been forced to repress our gag reflex every time one of these Generals comes before a Congress that lines up to see who can fawn most effusively before the stars.

Barack Obama is terrified of the military-security nexus within his own government, because they are uniquely positioned, by this special status, to bring him down… his legal status as Commander-in-Chief notwithstanding. That is why he has dragged his feet on don’t-ask-don’t-tell - which he could suspend by fiat now until law is repealed; and that is why Obama didn’t sack Stanley McChrystal - a la Truman-McArthur - when McChrystal, now the military viceroy of Afghanistan, leaked a report last year to back McChrystal’s own play to increase troop strength in Afghanistan by 45,000.

Instead, Obama gave him 30,000 - enough less to save a little face, and enough more to dig the Obama administration deeper into the hole that the Afghanistan-Pakistan-Yemen war has become.

General Stanley McChrystal, by the way, is the fomrer commander of JSOC; and he was the JSOC commander who alerted then Commander-in-Chief George W. Bush to drop references to Pat Tillman in a speech, when it became apparent that the original cover-up of Pat Tillman’s death by fratricide was going to unravel around a fraudulent award that couldn’t be retrieved. McChrystal was in charge of the operation, in the loop on the cover-up, and helped Bush dodge the PR bullet on it.

In the military, we used to say, “No fuck-up shall go unrewarded,” and McChrystal is living proof. But that doesn’t tell us what else McChrystal and JSOC have been doing with themselves, aside from hiding. What other kinds of things does this secrecy permit?

Well, for one, McChrystal ran Task Force 6-26, which became temporarily famous after the killing of Abu Masab al-Zarqawi, a boogyman figure cultivated by the military-media complex. What made TF 6-26 infamous was their activity in Camp Nama, Iraq: torture. Massive, systematic, sustained torture, by JSOC operators, under the supervision of Stanley McChrystal, this deceptively soft-spoken officer.

The camp in Baghdad was used almost exclusively for the torture of detainees. The torture went on before, during, and after the scandal at Abu Ghraib. Detainees were killed by their torturers, members of the most elite units in the US armed forces. Almost in celebration of the activity of the camp, placards were hung that said, “No Blood, No Foul,” meaning if you don’t make them bleed, you can’t be charged with the crimes you are committing.

Impunity. That’s what secrecy buys. JSOC’s new “special” is impunity.

In an article in Harpers this month, Scott Horton, a fomer classmate of now-JSOC commander Admiral “Billy” McRaven, published a stunning expose of this impunity at Guantanamo Bay’s still-open prison camp. Apparently, within Guantanamo Bay, there is a “special” prison within a prison, quite likely run by JSOC, called “Camp No” by the soldiers now speaking out, meaning, no, it doesn’t exist. It was in this camp that three prisoners, held in Guantanamo for years now without any charges, allegedly commited suicide.

The suicide story was given to an uncritical press in June 2006, right after all three prisoners died, with the bizarre statement by Camp Commander Rear Admiral Harry Harris that the suicides were act of war against the US.

The U.S. Naval Criminal Investigative Service (yes, the NCIS of the popular tv program… “Characters Welcome”) conducted an investigation of the suicide story, declared the official story valid, then classified the investigative report and placed it off limits to the public… until a Freedom of Information Act request forced the Navy to cough up a highly redacted copy.

In Horton’s article, he explains:

According to the NCIS documents, each prisoner had fashioned a noose from torn sheets and T-shirts and tied it to the top of his cell’s eight-foot-high steel-mesh wall. Each prisoner was able somehow to bind his own hands, and, in at least one case, his own feet, then stuff more rags deep down into his own throat. We are then asked to believe that each prisoner, even as he was choking on those rags, climbed up on his washbasin, slipped his head through the noose, tightened it, and leapt from the washbasin to hang until he asphyxiated. The NCIS report also proposes that the three prisoners, who were held in non-adjoining cells, carried out each of these actions almost simultaneously.

Four soldiers from the 629th Military Intelligence Battalion who were at Guantanamo Bay (now named Camp America) have now come forward with a different story, a story about Camp No.

Salah Ahmed Al-Salami, Mani Shaman Al-Utaybi, and Yasser Talal Al-Zahrani did not simultaneously commit suicide in their separate cells as an act of asymmetric spite against the United States of America. They died at Camp No, in an extraordinary circumstance that the Harpers story outlines very well.

Given that these men appeared likely to have proven their innocence if granted a hearing in accordance with the most minimal standards of jurisprudence, the question arises, why were they killed?

I’ll make a suggestion, not an accusation, since I have no direct knowledge of this incident. Proving innocence can be very damaging, especially if release brings revelations of more torture, rape, and murder… all of which happened, involving special operations, at various times in the conduct of the now expanding war. These are felonies; and they can send people to prison.

Anyone who hoped the Obama administration would investigate these kinds of activities during the Bush era has been disappointed. On the contrary, Obama has expanded the war into new countries, expanded the participation of the CIA and JSOC, left Guantanamo intact, refused to initiate independent investigations of military actions, and promoted the former JSOC commander - tainted by cover-ups and torture - to the most powerful warlord in Afghanistan.

Now the Obama administration’s Justice Department is declining to investigate Guantanamo and the NCIS.

Meanwhile, JSOC flourishes, cloaked in secrecy with just the mystique peeking out. But there was no leaping over tall buildings in a single bound, no warrior-poets protecting us from the manifold dangers lurking outside our borders. There’s just garden variety machismo, men who beat, torture, and kill unarmed detainees… men who have learned to relish violence, because it raises their esteem in the eyes of other men - the terrrible escalations of probative masculinity that continue to underwrite war like no other phenomenon.

What Simone Weil said remains unfortunately true:

As soon as men know that they can kill without fear of punishment or blame, they kill; or at least they encourage killers with approving smiles.