America's secret military
- By Zhao Jinglun
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E-mail China.org.cn, January 24, 2014
Bush blatantly negated those Executive Orders.
And Barack Obama exponentially expanded the drone war. In May 2009, he told the CIA director that he needed to make the drone manhunt his "number one goal." Bush launched a total of 45 drone strikes as president, killing 477, whereas Obama conducted 316 drone strikes in 2013 alone, killing 2,363, including hundreds of civilian men, women and children. He targeted and killed American citizen Anwar Awlaki and his 16-year-old son. His drones wiped out a number of wedding parties in Afghanistan.
The drone war continues and keeps expanding. One might ask why the Norwegian Nobel Committee does not ask Obama for the peace prize back?
The Special Operations Forces are no less lethal. The Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) was established in 1980, and the United States Special Operations Command (USSOCOM or SOCOM) in April 1987. Their special operators include the Green Berets, Rangers, Navy SEALs and Delta Force commandos, specialized helicopter crews, boat teams and civil affairs personnel.
Writing in "Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield," Jeremy Scahill revealed that it was the then Vice President Dick Cheney, who drew up plans for ambitious global kidnapping and assassination operations, and that George W. Bush signed a directive on Feb. 7, 2002, claiming the Geneva Convention did not apply to al-Qaeda or Taliban prisoners held by the United States.
It was the Navy SEALs under the command of Admiral William H. McRaven who shot and killed Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan. Bin Laden was unarmed and not resisting. The killing of a defenseless person was blatantly against the rules of war.
Special ops forces took part in many operations and are deployed in 134 countries, nearly 70 percent of the world's nations.
In Afghanistan, they typically kick down doors, shoot and kill everyone inside, or take prisoners off the street to be interrogated by "enhanced" (read "torture") methods.
They snatch men from their homes in the Maghreb and hold shootouts with heavily armed militants in the Horn of Africa. They are pushing into cyberspace. They are everywhere as the Obama administration wages its secret war.
So these are America's secret military, whose operations are under tight wraps. But their killings are becoming increasingly known to the world.
And it is self-defeating, as Scahill points out, drone strikes and assassinations are creating more terrorists than they are neutralizing.
The author is a columnist with China.org.cn. For more information please visit:http://www.china.org.cn/opinion/zhaojinglun.htm
Opinion articles reflect the views of their authors, not necessarily those of China.org.cn.
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