Abolish Secretive Special Ops Forces
For our own safety, we must disband these squads of killers.
By Sheldon Richman
June 12, 2015 "Information
Clearing House" -
It’s time to disband the Navy’s SEAL Team 6 and all other secretive,
unaccountable units of the U.S. imperial military. As is said about lawyers, if
we didn’t have these units, we wouldn’t need them.
The New York Times
reported recently:
While fighting grinding wars of attrition in Afghanistan
and Iraq, Team 6 performed missions elsewhere that blurred the traditional
lines between soldier and spy. The team’s sniper unit was remade to carry
out clandestine intelligence operations, and the SEALs joined Central
Intelligence Agency operatives in an initiative called the Omega Program,
which offered greater latitude in hunting adversaries.
Team 6 has successfully carried out thousands of dangerous
raids that military leaders credit with weakening militant networks, but its
activities have also spurred recurring concerns about excessive killing and
civilian deaths.
Afghan villagers and a British commander accused SEALs of
indiscriminately killing men in one hamlet; in 2009, team members joined
C.I.A. and Afghan paramilitary forces in a raid that left a group of youths
dead and inflamed tensions between Afghan and NATO officials. Even an
American hostage freed in a dramatic rescue has questioned why the SEALs
killed all his captors.
We are expected to trust the government that those operations
kill bad guys only. But why should we, when it has done so much to earn our
distrust? It has long downplayed the civilian deaths inflicted by drones,
bombers, and ground operations.
The Times writes:
When suspicions have been raised about misconduct, outside
oversight has been limited. Joint Special Operations Command, which oversees
SEAL Team 6 missions, conducted its own inquiries into more than a
half-dozen episodes, but seldom referred them to Navy investigators. "JSOC
investigates JSOC, and that’s part of the problem," said one former senior
military officer experienced in special operations, who like many others
interviewed for this article spoke on the condition of anonymity because
Team 6’s activities are classified.
Even the military’s civilian overseers do not regularly
examine the unit’s operations. "This is an area where Congress notoriously
doesn’t want to know too much," said Harold Koh, the State Department’s
former top legal adviser, who provided guidance to the Obama administration
on clandestine war.
Here we have a super-secretive unit of killers that is
protected from accountability by its own. William C. Banks, a Syracuse
University expert on national-security law, told the Times, "If you’re
unacknowledged on the battlefield, you’re not accountable."
Members of Congress pretend to keep an eye on the military to
prevent criminal behavior—but in fact they are integral to the corrupt system:
with eyes turned away, they keep it going with large sums of money. "Waves of
money have sluiced through SEAL Team 6 since 2001," the Times writes,
"allowing it to significantly expand its ranks—reaching roughly 300 assault
troops, called operators, and 1,500 support personnel—to meet new demands." And
this is just one unit—though it is the most glamorized, having conducted the
raid that reportedly killed Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan, in 2011.
The Times quotes James G. Stavridis, retired admiral
and former NATO Supreme Allied Commander, who said, "If you want these forces to
do things that occasionally bend the rules of international law, you certainly
don’t want that out in public." By "bend the rules," Stavridis means, in the
Times’ words, "going into undeclared war zones."
So politicians need secretive military units to fight
undeclared wars—which would seem to violate the Constitution.
The existence of secretive military units conducting private
lethal operations should bother anyone who aspires to live in a free society.
Their very nature offends common decency. Yet a propagandized population takes
for granted that secrecy is legitimate and necessary for our safety in a
terrorism-plagued world.
Beyond the obvious objections to secretive military units,
there is also this: U.S. intervention in the Muslim world makes people want to
kill Americans, as government officials
widely acknowledge. Secretive military units allow the national-security
elite to engage in actions that provoke violence against Americans confident
that Team 6 and the Army’s Delta Force will neutralize any retaliatory threat.
For our own safety, we must disband these squads of killers.
This piece
originally appeared at Richman's "Free Association" blog.