Wikileaks Report: US "Man-Hunters" in Afghanistan

[another saigon]

http://www.ipsnews.net/print.asp?idnews=52554

AFGHANISTAN
Task Force 373, the Secret Killers – Part 1

Pratap Chatterjee*

WASHINGTON, Aug 20 (IPS) - "Find, fix, finish, and follow-up" - also known as F4 - is the way the Pentagon describes the mission of secret military teams in Afghanistan which have been given a mandate to pursue alleged members of the Taliban or al Qaeda wherever they may be found. Some call these "manhunting" operations and the units assigned to them "capture/kill" teams.
Details of one of these secret "capture/kill" teams - named Task Force 373 - first became public as a result of more than 76,000 incident reports leaked to the public in July by Wikileaks, a whistleblower website.

The Wikileaks data suggests that as many as 2,058 people on a secret hit list called the "Joint Prioritised Effects List" (JPEL) were considered "capture/kill" targets in Afghanistan. A total of 757 prisoners - most likely from this list - were being held at the Bagram Theater Internment Facility (BTIF), a U.S.-run prison on Bagram Air Base, as of the end of December 2009.

The F4 concept was developed at the U.S. Special Forces Command in Tampa, Florida, under the leadership of General Bryan D. Brown, who took over the Special Forces Command in September 2003.

-snip-

Bush's departure from the White House did not dampen the enthusiasm for F4 - quite the contrary, even though F4 was altered recently, in typical military fashion, to "find, fix, finish, exploit, and analyze," or F3EA. By all accounts, President Obama has expanded military intelligence gathering and "capture/kill" programmes globally in tandem with drone-strike operations by the CIA.



Remember Operation Phoenix 40 years ago? I did not know that 'change' meant making the Afghan situation the same or worse than Vietnam.

[stray cat]

1. I never knew we were still trying to get Bin Laden and the "good doctor"

:sarcasm:

[another saigon]

4. and the Taliban?

apparently change occurred there as well.

[wildbilln864]

8. Let's not forget....

link :hi:

" After a week of debilitating strikes at targets across Afghanistan, the Taliban repeated an offer to hand over Osama bin Laden, only to be rejected by President Bush.

The offer yesterday from Haji Abdul Kabir, the Taliban's deputy prime minister, to surrender Mr bin Laden if America would halt its bombing and provide evidence against the Saudi-born dissident was not new but it suggested the Taliban are increasingly weary of the air strikes, which have crippled much of their military and communications assets."

[NNN0LHI]

2. Here is the kind of people we are getting the 'intelligence' from on who to target

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/01/01/eveningnews/main6045803.shtml

Jan. 1, 2010

New Clues about CIA Suicide Bomber

Taliban Sources Tell CBS News Haqqani Network behind Base Attack that Killed 7 Agents

By Kimberly Dozier

(CBS) Security may be tighter at the base Friday, but U.S. officials still don't know exactly how a suicide bomber managed to get in without being searched, killing even CIA agents including the base commander.

One former intelligence official tells CBS News initial reports indicate the bomber was being recruited as a CIA source.

And a Pakistani Taliban commander Friday praised what he called their "double agent." He said the bomber was avenging the killing of Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud in a U.S. drone strike last August.

[gateley]

3. It always stuns me that stuff like this (big!) happens, yet they're

focusing on scanning us at airports and thinking that's the way to combat terrorism.

[starroute]

5. It was Rumsfeld who pushed the manhunter teams originally

Back then, it was code-named "Grey Fox." The identification has changed,but not the concept.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2003/jun/22/iraq3

22 June 2003

Officially members of a unit named 'Intelligence Support Activity', Grey Fox was established by the Pentagon in 1981 to work as manhunters, assassins and deep penetration agents.

Since then, the unit that has been criticised by senior US officials for its 'lawlessness' and 'lack of control' has hunted Serbian war criminals in the Balkans, fought in Somalia, and in counter-terror operations across the globe: it is a key part of what the Pentagon calls its 'black world' of undercover operations.

But it was in the war in Afghanistan that the unit was expanded and given its free hand, part of US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's efforts to build a massively expanded covert military capability for the US war on terrorism.


http://www.counterpunch.org/stclair02072006.html

February 7, 2006

In April of 2003, Rumsfeld placed Cambone in charge of counter-terrorism teams operating under the code-name "Grey Fox". This covert operation is a kind of sabotage and assassination squad run out of the civil wing of the Pentagon. Rumsfeld had grown frustrated with the military's reluctance to assassinate suspected al-Qaeda and Iraqi resistance leaders, an understandable reluctance in light of US executive orders restricting the use of assassinations. So Rumsfeld seized control of the hit teams from the generals and assigned it to Cambone, a civilian appointee with no military experience. The Gray Fox project, so one Washington Post report concluded, is geared to perform "deep penetration" missions in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, Syria and North Korea, setting up listening posts, conducting acts of sabotage and assassination. When questioned about Gray Fox, Cambone snapped, "We won't talk about those things".

However, military officers did talk about Gray Fox. "The people in these units are available 24 hours a day, seven days a week, anywhere around the world. They are very highly trained, with specialized skills for dealing with close-quarters combat and unique situations posed by weapons of mass destruction", a military officer told Army Times. "If we find a high-value target somewhere, anywhere in the world, and if we have the forces to get there and get to them, we should get there and get to them", the official said. "Right now, there are 18 food chains, 20 levels of paperwork and 22 hoops we have to jump through before we can take action. Our enemy moves faster than that".

[another saigon]

7. yes, I remember

I also remember congress thinking this is great and no media coverage. Same as 1968.

[wildbilln864]

6. k&r! nt