Crusader Boykin's on the way out

[Rose Siding]

...A U.S. intelligence official, speaking on condition of anonymity owing to the sensitivity of the subject, said that Boykin currently was still on the job. But word around the Pentagon was that Gates would ask Boykin to go, this official said. Consultants who work with the intelligence and Special Operations community said it was all but certain that Boykin was following Cambone out the door. "If you're getting rid of Cambone, you almost certainly have to get rid of Boykin," says Philip Giraldi, a former CIA counterterrorism official who stays in touch with the community. "They're hand in glove. Gates feels it all went out of control, that they're doing too many things in too many places."

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16549316/site/newsweek/

Further overdue noises from Gates' Pentagon:

snip>
Critics of the covert program say that Gates and Cambone's replacement, Lt. Gen. James R. Clapper, are concerned that too much collateral damage may work against U.S. interests. Giraldi says the U.S. Special Ops teams operate too often without accountability.....Adds Arquilla, an advocate of dropping small teams into countries rather than launching air strikes: "There's a growing realization in the Pentagon that the more collateral damage is done, the worse is our position in the 'battle of the story'—in other words, every time we kill innocents our story is much less compelling and the clash of civilizations story is much more compelling."

[no_hypocrisy]

1. I dunno. I was hoping that Boykin would be reassigned to Iraq

with the noble military mission of evangelizing both the Sunnis and the Shi'ites.

[Hubert Flottz]

2. He's been in Iraq!

That's part of the trouble there!

EDIT...

MOVING TARGETS
Will the counter-insurgency plan in Iraq repeat the mistakes of Vietnam?
by SEYMOUR M. HERSH
Issue of 2003-12-15
Posted 2003-12-08


The Bush Administration has authorized a major escalation of the Special Forces covert war in Iraq. In interviews over the past month, American officials and former officials said that the main target was a hard-core group of Baathists who are believed to be behind much of the underground insurgency against the soldiers of the United States and its allies. A new Special Forces group, designated Task Force 121, has been assembled from Army Delta Force members, Navy seals, and C.I.A. paramilitary operatives, with many additional personnel ordered to report by January. Its highest priority is the neutralization of the Baathist insurgents, by capture or assassination.

The revitalized Special Forces mission is a policy victory for Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who has struggled for two years to get the military leadership to accept the strategy of what he calls “Manhunts”—a phrase that he has used both publicly and in internal Pentagon communications. Rumsfeld has had to change much of the Pentagon’s leadership to get his way. “Knocking off two regimes allows us to do extraordinary things,” a Pentagon adviser told me, referring to Afghanistan and Iraq.

One step the Pentagon took was to seek active and secret help in the war against the Iraqi insurgency from Israel, America’s closest ally in the Middle East. According to American and Israeli military and intelligence officials, Israeli commandos and intelligence units have been working closely with their American counterparts at the Special Forces training base at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, and in Israel to help them prepare for operations in Iraq. Israeli commandos are expected to serve as ad-hoc advisers—again, in secret—when full-field operations begin. (Neither the Pentagon nor Israeli diplomats would comment. “No one wants to talk about this,” an Israeli official told me. “It’s incendiary. Both governments have decided at the highest level that it is in their interests to keep a low profile on U.S.-Israeli coöperation” on Iraq.) The critical issue, American and Israeli officials agree, is intelligence. There is much debate about whether targeting a large number of individuals is a practical—or politically effective—way to bring about stability in Iraq, especially given the frequent failure of American forces to obtain consistent and reliable information there.

Americans in the field are trying to solve that problem by developing a new source of information: they plan to assemble teams drawn from the upper ranks of the old Iraqi intelligence services and train them to penetrate the insurgency. The idea is for the infiltrators to provide information about individual insurgents for the Americans to act on. A former C.I.A. station chief described the strategy in simple terms: “U.S. shooters and Iraqi intelligence.” He added, “There are Iraqis in the intelligence business who have a better idea, and we’re tapping into them. We have to resuscitate Iraqi intelligence, holding our nose, and have Delta and agency shooters break down doors and take them”—the insurgents—“out.” MORE...

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/031215fa_fact?031215fa_fact

[Javaman]

3. Clap on, clap off, clapon clapoff, the Clapper. nt

[Elidor]

4. Where's your god now?

:evilgrin: