Get News & Views Updates
Most Popular This Week
Popular content
Today's Top News
UPDATED: Were US Special Forces Involved in the Arrest of Faisal Shahzad?
A US Special Operations Force source told me that the planes were likely RC-12s equipped with a Guardrail Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) system that, as the plane flies overland "sucks up" digital and electronic communications. "Think of them as manned drones. They're drones, but they have men sitting in them piloting them and they can be networked together," said the source. "You have many of them--four, five, six of them--and they all act as a node and they scrape up everything, anything that's electronic and feed it back." The source added: "It sucks up everything. We've got these things in Jalalabad [Afghanistan]. We routinely fly these things over Khandahar. When I say everything, I mean BlueTooth would be effected, even the wave length that PlayStation controllers are on. They suck up everything. That's the point."
Guardrail has been used for years by the US military. In recent years, particularly in Iraq and Afghanistan, the military has also used the "Constant Hawk" and "Highlighter" aerial sensor platforms. All of these programs have recently undergone a series of upgrades.
So were US special forces involved with Shahzad's arrest?
"My conjecture at the moment is that immediately after this went down and they knew that he was on the loose, parts of the domestic counter-terrorism operations that they had set up during the Bush administration were reactivated," says the Special Forces source. "They're compartmentalized. So they kicked into high gear and were supporting law enforcement. In some cases, law enforcement may not have even known that some of the signals intelligence was coming from covert military units."
If true, that could mean that secretive programs such as "Power Geyser" or "Granite Shadow," remain in effect. These were the unclassified names for reportedly classified, compartmentalized programs under the Bush administration that allegedly gave US military special forces sweeping authority to operate on US soil in cases involving WMD incidents or terror attacks.
"They sidestep Posse Comitatus," said the source.
The Joint Special Operations Command, which was run by Gen. Stanley McChrystal from 2003-2008, is reportedly allowed to operate on US soil. That's a result of Presidential Decision Directive 25 (PDD-25), an executive order drafted by President Clinton on May 3, 1994. The complete text remains classified, however, "The full text of PDD-25 is reported to exempt the Joint Special Operations Command from the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 18USC Sec.1385, PL86-70, Sec. 17[d]. which makes it illegal for military and law enforcement to exercise jointly," according to GlobalSecurity.org.
Among the questions raised by the apparently central role of US special forces in the arrest of Faisal Shahzad is this: To what extent are US Special Forces permitted to operate on US soil under President Obama?
Also, Why did CBS scrub the initial mention of the involvement of Army Intelligence aircraft from its story?
UPDATE: The big story today is how the FBI team tracking Faisal Shahzad in Connecticut allegedly lost track of him. According to reports, Shahzad actually made it onto the Emirates aircraft scheduled to fly to Dubai. As The New York Times reported:
**
"Though Mr. Shahzad was stopped before he could fly away, there were at least two significant lapses in the security response of the government and the airline that allowed him to come close to making his escape, officials of the Department of Homeland Security, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other agencies said on Tuesday.
First, an F.B.I. surveillance team that had found Mr. Shahzad in Connecticut lost track of him — it is not clear for how long — before he drove to John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York, the officials said."
**
This is all entirely plausible. But what if that is not the entire story? At this point, this is just a thought, a possibility to ponder: It could be that the Feds lost track of Shahzad, but that other US forces, namely US military special operations forces (perhaps JSOC), were tracking him and waiting to see if he made any calls, met with any contacts, took any action while he was still a free man.
Consider the confidence of Attorney General Eric Holder, who said bluntly: "I was never in any fear that we were in danger of losing him." Those could be the words of a man trying to downplay what could have been a major FBI failure that, in part, would have played badly for Holder. Or they could be the honest words of a man who knew it was all being taken care of and how.
The official timeline of events released by the White House contains some interesting details that suggest US military special forces involvement. On Sunday at 3pm, according to the timeline, "Nicholas Rasmussen, Senior Director for Combating Terrorism Strategy, convenes an interagency meeting on this incident in the White House Situation Room." Rasmussen is a shadow figure. He cut his teeth in the Bush administration after 9/11 where he worked on the "dark side" as a director of the National Security Council's office of combating terrorism, putting him in regular proximity to Special Access Programs and other activites of which we dare not speak. To give context to Rasmussen's current job, one of his predecessors was Vice Admiral William McRaven, the current head of JSOC. "McRaven has managed to bridge both the civilian and military worlds," reported Newsweek. "While working at the National Security Council after 9/11, he was principal author of the White House strategy for combating terrorism."
If the hunt for Shahzad was being run through the National Security Council, which it was, the commander of the Joint Task Force would report to the NSC, which would in turn report to either John Brennan, the Deputy National Security Adviser for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism or National Security Advisor Jim Jones, and then they would report to the President. From the White House timeline, Brennan seemed to be serving that function. And remember, Brennan also comes from the dark side.
The point of all of this being that the story may not be as simple as the FBI losing Shahzad. One cog in the wheel may not have necessarily known what another was doing at any given time. It could be that there were forces at play in this operation whose involvement may not be a part of the story the White House wants divulged. Just a thought.
Comments
Note: Disqus 2012 is best viewed on an up to date browser. Click here for information. Instructions for how to sign up to comment can be viewed here. Our Comment Policy can be viewed here. Please follow the guidelines. Note to Readers: Spam Filter May Capture Legitimate Comments...
25 Comments so far
Show All"Why did CBS scrub the initial mention of the involvement of Army Intelligence aircraft from its story?"
So uncomfortable questions like trhe one below don't get asked.
"To what extent are US Special Forces permitted to operate on US soil under President Obama?"
I hate living under a Fascist government.
I attended the antinuke rally in Times Square the Sunday after the car bomb attempt. I never was at a more overpoliced rally (maybe, the small-scale protest at the Chilean embassy in DC right after the murder of Allende, but that wasn't a mass demonstration).
What angered me most was the police treatment of the participants at the antinuke rally--the majority of them middle aged and elderly, who were told to "get back in your pens." When I objected to a police official, I was told it was for safety.
Readers here must continually defend and exercise the hard-won rights of assembly and speech and constitutional safeguards against search and seizure.
Frances -
Thanks for your insight on the timeline and chronology of these two ostensibly unrelated events - the abortive SUV bombing and the big antinuke rally in Times Square.
I'm sure the timing is nothing but coincidence.
Bill from Saginaw
I don't think the New York Times even mentioned the rally and march last Sunday. Not huge, penned, but still a few thousand people.
Frances, thanks so much for your report from Times Square. I wasn't able to take part until the march began, and therefore, I wasn't at Times Square.
"Readers here must continually defend and exercise the hard-won rights of assembly and speech and constitutional safeguards against search and seizure." -- Frances
I agree with you!
Now you see it, now you don't.
It took diligent US counterterrorism officials just 53 hours to investigate the failed Times Square SUV bomb incident, find and catch the perp, plus get a confession (Wow! Fast Indeed!! See how the left hand is now coordinated with the right, keeping America safe!!!). CBS, in turn, was able to self-censor (straight into Orwellian memory hole oblivion) that fascinating, very newsworthy paragraph about a US military special forces hi tech electronic surveillance team circling over Manhattan, merrily sucking up everybody's domestic cell phone communications, in order to prevent (at the last possible moment) this swarthy evil doer Faisal Shahzad from escaping off to the Middle East - this offending news snippet deleted (for national security reasons no doubt) in less than an editorial hour and a half.
You have to hand it to our spooks and the Pentagon's psy ops spin merchants of death. Despite their sordid history of blood stained gaffes and blowback, sometimes these fellas can really spin forth a pretty well-orchestrated yarn for the local yokels to swallow. Stay tuned. More is sure to come during the next phase of this fast breaking news cycle.
In the meantime ask me no questions, I'll tell you no lies.
Bill from Saginaw
I've got this terrible premonition that Mr. Shazad and his family will be enjoying a new private life in our witness protection program. It strikes me as so very odd that such an "evildoer" would roll so easily especially if it's true that he said to his interceptors "I've been waiting for you" or something like that.
In regard to CBS and why they would scrub the story: let's ask Dan Rather and Mary Mapes.
I smell a rat. Let's stay on this story. And again thanks to Jeremy Scahill and all the others out there who I feel are literally risking their lives to get to the truth. YOU RULE!
I'm sure "Posse Comitatus" will be shown to be illusory, along with "Miranda" (who knew there was a national security excemption?), the right to not be tortured, the right to a fair trial, etc. Americans seem to have rights, up to the point at which, they don't. Strange rights.
The problem is: except for Jeremy Scahill and a few others, unless you are one of the very naive sheeple, you cannot believe anything our government or their whores in the corporate media tell you as they have lied so much that they have to be assumed guilty until proven otherwise. You need to fear your own government plutocracy and corportocracy; as that is the REAL BOGEYMEN!
When is the United States going to get it?
We deserved 9/11 and we will continue to deserve bombings and attacks until we change our foreign policy.
Why is no one asking why these folks are doing what they are doing?
It's not really that hard to stop these attacks: Quit supplying Israel with illegal weapons and any money at all; stop the support of facists regimes like that in Indonesia; and quit killing innocent civilians in revenge crazy crusades, as in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Yes, find the criminal who killed innocents, but surely that can be done by the largest military operator in the world without invading countries and slaughtering innocents.
Well, let's see. Christmas crotch bomber moves into action in time to justify drone bombing and attacks on Yemen and "targeted killing." Supposedly had ties to "Al Qaida in Yemen."
Now Shahzad springs into action just in time to shore up lagging support for drone bombings and countless other depredations in Pakistan, as well as justify Obama's continued use of warrantless wiretapping and suspension of Posse Comitatus and habeas corpus. Also note that he has an Iranian-sounding name.
Writes Scahill:
'Consider the confidence of Attorney General Eric Holder, who said bluntly: "I was never in any fear that we were in danger of losing him." Those could be the words of a man trying to downplay what could have been a major FBI failure that, in part, would have played badly for Holder. Or they could be the honest words of a man who knew it was all being taken care of and how.'
Absolutely right, Jeremy, but I would add one more thing. They could be the (less than) honest words of a man who was part of an upteenth sting operation with regard to terrorism, causing a crime to be committed (like most stings) and risking our lives to justify the folly of war and the tyrannization of society.
Don't forget one other thing, Clovis. Though it doesn't really have much to do with "timing", per se, this whole scenario is a wonderful opportunity to justify the disgusting number of security cameras on our streets watching us. It was the video from one such camera that allowed authorities to "identify" who they were looking for here.
See, Americans? Those cameras are protecting you!
Good point, Seventhson. Those cameras are a key component of the goons' control over our lives. And now we've got the Special Forces running operations on U.S. soil. You really have to wonder what's next.
Jeremy Scahill's UPDATE and jaxfl1 -
"It could be that the feds lost track of Shahzad, but that other US forces, namely US military special operations forces (perhaps JSOC) were tracking him and waiting to see if he made any calls, met with any contacts, took any action while he was still a free man...... One cog in the wheel may not have known what the other was doing at any given time. It could be there were forces at play in this operation whose involvement may not be a part of the story the White House wants divulged."
As my candidate for a key unidentified "force at play in this operation", I hereby nominate the Pakistani ISI, with the ISI's shadowy historical cooperative links to elements of the American military intelligence community.
This nationalized American citizen of Pakistani descent mysteriously rotates from Pennsylvania to Pakistan to Waziristan - where he is taught some things by somebody about how to do terrorist truck bombings - then returns to Connecticut, buys an SUV off of Craig's List, and sets it off in completely half-assed fashion in Times' Square, as skillfully as the Christmas eve underwear bomber. The swarthy evil doers who led this vulnerable chump astray with their Islamic radicalism it turns out are right there in the wild and wooly Af/Pak border region - right where Obama's war on terror Afghan escalation is focused now, right where Bush and Cheney and the CIA said the really bad guys were always being harbored.
Who benefits from this scenario? See, JSOC and all that hi tech surveillance wizardry can work very comfortably, hand in glove, smoothly coordinated with traditional gumshoe work by the FBI, right here on the good old soil of the USA.
Don't worry about that Posse Comitatus stuff, or the dangers of our patriotic American spooks running amok here in the homeland, like those rogue elements involved in COINTELPRO and/or Watergate once ran afoul. Times are different now. The whole world changed on 9/11, you see.
As this caper unfolds, don't be surprized if the narrative which ultimately emerges points back towards friendly foreign intelligence agency cooperation with Bob Gates' friends within the Pakistani ISI. Like jaxfl1, I've got a premonition. The Times Square truck bomb case is too neat, too politically expedient, too quickly solved unless there was a humint snitch or two on the inside steering the law and order players on the outside, so that the end result can prove that militarism does work to keep America safe.
Bill from Saginaw
Great post, Bill.
With the capitalistic economies in Europe and Amerikkka rapidly deteriorating, it will not be long before Barry declares martial law and his private army (Blackwater/Xe) begins to enforce it.
The incident regarding Shahzad that Scahill is discussing is merely a prelude to the new Amerikkkan fascism that is already in progress.
I am skeptical of Jeremy Scahill's theory. The fact that some news sources mentioned Special Forces and then dropped any mention is what often happens in the heat of reporting a highly emotional incident. All kinds of unreliable reports are circulated and then retracted. To play this up without further evidence is not responsible journalism. Both extremes of Left and Right attribute uncanny powers and omniscience a federal government.("Obama sabotaged the Deepwater Horizon" is the latest from the likes of Limbaugh and Heck-of-a-Job Brownie)
What I find more intriguing is a report on CNN that Shazad did not appear to have any anger against the US until very recently. The govt is making much of his car trip into Taliban country while he was visiting family in Pakistan. And it is conceivable that he was not in fact any kind of radical until he saw for himself the damage being caused by US drone attacks. This is certainly not to excuse his bungled attempt to kill people in Times Square but such a direct personal connection by Farzad between Obama's current Af-Pak policy and the failed attempt seems possible. A realistic understanding of people like him, and of the link between US foreign policy and terrorism, is the best defense.
do mean like, what happened to Tim McVeigh when he was serving in the U.S. Military for Operation Desert Storm?
Jeremy Scahill is an investigative journalist who has put his neck on the line to expose and document "the world's most powerful mercenary army" he's not an idle spectator. I'm not saying you are either but why such skeptism of him? Limbaugh and Brownie don't count.
Valatius -
Granted, the evacuation of Times Square in response to discovery of a simmering makeshift SUV truck bomb is a highly emotional (and news coverage worthy) incident, but who - what sort of insider, speaking-not-for-attribution sources - were credible enough for CBS to insert this paragraph about the Special Forces surveillance spooks bailing out the FBI into their first disseminated draft of history?
One or more sources with top security clearances. One or more off the record, usually reliable sources within the CIA/DIA/NSA alphabet soup of civilian/quasi-military/fully-military intelligence agencies that the top folks at CBS felt comfortable enough with to not only disseminate, but to initially run this scoop in their headline lede. That's who. So what do you think the political agenda is of CBS's sources for this particular "unreliable report" news analysis trial balloon that was first circulated and then so very promptly retracted?
As I see it, Jeremy Scahill's journalism is a lot more responsible than that of CBS. And remember, CBS was the same mainstream media entity (and its defrocked anchor Dan Rather) who got burned by a US intelligence community disinformation ploy once before.
On your latter point, I am deeply suspicious of any effort to compartmentalize out the motivation of a wannabe terrorist truck bomber, a wannabe underwear bomber, or a soldier who went homicidally postal at Fort Hood. In your opinion, Shahzad's anger against the United States appeared very recent. Therefore it was possible or even likely that his abortive Times Square bombing was tit-for-tat retaliation against Barack Obama's drone strikes in Pakistan. Period. Let's put that turd exclusively on Obama's plate. Period. George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, and the rest of the Bushies' black ops comrades-in-arms therefore implicitly get an automatic pass.
In my opinion, such cause-and-effect compartmentalization is artificial, transparently partisan, self-serving propaganda spin. I connect the big picture dots that way not because I see the federal government as possessing uncanny, omniscient powers to manipulate public opinion. I think the exact opposite is the case. And it is painstaking, quality investigative journalists like Jeremy Scahill who seem most capable of coherently separating the forest from the trees.
Bill from Saginaw
Hmmm, Scahill's journalism in question... I guess Amy Goodman was smokin' the same shit too right?
Jeebus, some people can't call a spade a spade when they see... a spade.
Is Posse Comitatus even in effect anymore? Or did the Patriot Act send it the way of the Passenger Pigeon? That would be a reason why CBS would change their title to the report.
This story is very ominous if you value the rule of law, our Constitution, and think having the military involved so directly in the apprehension of a U.S. citizen threatens our rights and freedoms.
This is Winston Smith - fight Big Brother before it's too late, please
More Food for Thought Department:
"Perhaps the most severe competition in our government today is between Special Forces in the DOD and the CIA over who runs clandestine operations."
-Historian, author, and former CIA analyst Chalmers Johnson, in published interview with journalist Harry Kreisler, posted in Counterpunch, 5/6/10
Bill from Saginaw
What nonsense. You don't need JSOC or special planes and equipment to track down a cell phone. All cell phones now have GPS locators embedded that any law enforcement agency can use to locate them. Cell phones without such tracking devices were outlawed some time ago.
William Rood, patriotic citizen of the world