Blowback, Second Edition: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire

In 1987, in fact, the government created a new Special Operations Command headquartered in Tampa, Florida, and placed it under an equally new assistant secretary of defense for special operations and lowintensity conflict. The command’s purpose was to consolidate and coordinate the activities of the forty-seven thousand “special forces” groups scattered across the military’s complex organizational charts, including the army’s Green Berets, Rangers, and covert Delta Force; the Navy’s SEALS and covert Team 6; and the special operations and commando units of the air force and the Marine Corps. One of the sponsors of this new structure was William Cohen, then a Republican senator from Maine, whose “keen interest in special operations” Washington Post reporter Dana Priest has noted “dates back decades.”⁷ Some military professionals and observers discount special operations because they do not rely on traditional military subdivisions and because they cost so little money compared with carrier task forces or B-2 bombers. Their political clout, however, vastly exceeds their budgetary needs and they were in no way “downsized” after the end of the Cold War. These covert units work closely with the Central Intelligence Agency and the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA). Programs like the CIA’s efforts at an army base in Colorado and in Okinawa until 1968 to train some four hundred Tibetan exiles to fight the Chinese or the CIA’s vast operations in supplying weapons to guerrillas harassing the Soviet forces in Afghanistan during the 1980s have now been turned over to the Special Operations Command.

In 1991, Congress inadvertently gave the military’s special forces a green light to penetrate virtually every country on earth. It passed a law (Section 2011, Title 10) authorizing something called the Joint Combined Exchange Training (JCET) program. This allowed the Department of Defense to send special operations forces on overseas exercises with military units of other countries so long as the primary purpose of the mission was stated to be the training of our soldiers, not theirs. The law did not indicate what JCET exercises should train these troops to do, but one purpose was certainly to train them in espionage. They return from such exercises loaded with information about and photographs of the country they have visited, and with new knowledge of its military units, terrain, and potential adversaries. As of 1998 the Special Operations Command had established JCET missions in 110 countries.

The various special forces have interpreted this law as an informal invitation to train foreign military forces in numerous lethal skills, as well as to establish relationships with their officer corps aimed at bringing them on board as possible assets for future political operations. Most of this has been done without any oversight by Congress, the State Department, or ambassadors in the countries where JCET exercises have been conducted. As a series of exposé articles in the Washington Post indicated in 1998, most members of the foreign policy apparatus had never even heard of JCET, and the assistant secretary of defense in charge of these special operations was noticeably vague in his answers to congressional questions about the programs.⁸

It has only slowly come to light, for instance, that in JCET exercises Americans offered crucial training to the Turkish mountain commandos, who in their ongoing operations against their country’s rebellious Kurdish population have killed at least twenty-two thousand people; that during 1998 multiple special forces operations were carried out in each of the nineteen countries of Latin America and in nine Caribbean nations; and that United States special forces units have given training in such skills as advanced sniper techniques, close-quarters combat, military operations in urban terrain, and psychological warfare operations to military units in Colombia, Rwanda, Surinam, Equatorial Guinea, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, and Papua New Guinea, among other nations. In each of these cases, they were acting in violation of U.S. human rights policies and sometimes of direct presidential or congressional prohibitions. (For example, special operations training continued in Colombia even after President Clinton had “decertified” that country for most military aid and assistance.)