Please welcome another illegal program to the party!

[lala_rawraw]

via our friend Michael Smith...


"Donald Rumsfeld has built a secret US force to ‘take out’ Al-Qaeda – but Britain’s best are doing the spadework, writes Michael Smith
Donald Rumsfeld was never a man for diplomatic language. On July 1, 2002 in the early months of the global war on terror, the American defence secretary sent a two-line memo to Doug Feith, his under-secretary for policy, asking: “How do we organise the department for manhunts? We are obviously not well organised at the present time.”

<snip>

Rumsfeld now gave his special operations teams new orders. They were “to capture terrorists for interrogation or, if necessary, to kill them, not arrest them”. He also persuaded President Bush to sign a presidential finding authorising the military “to find and finish” terrorist targets.

<snip>

Rumsfeld had created a killer elite that has been compared favourably by one its key US architects, Lieutenant-General Jerry Boykin, with America’s highly controversial Phoenix programme, which secretly eradicated about 20,000 people without judicial process during the Vietnam war.

<snip>
Orthodox military commanders did not like it. In fact, the death of 18 US forces in Somalia in 1993 — in the Black Hawk Down incident — so traumatised US military chiefs that a virtual block was put on special operations missions despite the emergence of Bin Laden as an implacable foe."


http://www.timesonline.co.uk/newspaper/0,,176-2035979,00.html