US military created private spy and murder squad in Afghanistan

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US military created private spy and murder squad in Afghanistan
By Patrick Martin
16 March 2010

A long-time US military official used Pentagon funding to establish a
private intelligence and assassination network in Afghanistan and
Pakistan, according to a report Monday in the New York Times. The
network was shut down after the CIA station chief in Kabul objected to
a competing military-backed intelligence operation, the newspaper said.

The article identified the official as Michael D. Furlong, a 25-year
veteran of the Air Force who is now a senior Pentagon civilian
employee, working at the US Strategic Command at Lackland Air Force
Base in San Antonio, Texas. He reportedly diverted money from a $22
million contract to gather cultural and political information about
Afghanistan and funneled it to at least two private firms which
employed former intelligence and military Special Operations personnel.

The Times report, written by Dexter Filkins and Mark Mazzetti, has the
character of a controlled release of information for the purpose of
containing the damage to US covert operations in the
Afghanistan-Pakistan theater. It is not only the US military and
intelligence agencies that are being protected, but the Times itself.
According to the article, the newspaper hired two of the covert
operatives who had worked for Furlong in its efforts to release Times
reporter David Rohde, who was captured by the Taliban in December 2008
and escaped seven months later.

Despite its prominent placement and sensational language, very few
actual facts are presented in the Times account, and the article begs
the obvious question: Did the private, off-the-books operation funded
and directed by Furlong contain an operational component? In other
words, did Furlong contract for the creation of a private American
death squad?

The Obama administration refused any substantive comment on the Times
report. Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman told the media Monday, “The
story makes some serious allegations and raises numerous unanswered
questions that warrant further review by the department,” but he
declined to answer any questions. The Pentagon has refused to make
Furlong available to the press.

Whatever the motivations of those who acted as sources for the Times
article, including top executives of the Times itself, Monday’s report
puts the spotlight on the murky netherworld of US covert operations in
Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq, where official military and
intelligence personnel rub shoulders with contractors and
sub-contractors, as well as journalists and researchers who are little
more than disguised intelligence operatives.

For example, two of the contractors hired by Furlong as part of the
public effort to gather cultural information about Afghanistan were
Robert Pelton Young, an author, and Eason Jordan, a former top news
executive at CNN. Jordan was forced to resign his post in February
2005, after 25 years with the network, after he made comments at a
conference in Switzerland to the effect that US military personnel
were deliberately targeting foreign reporters in Iraq, where
journalists have been killed in record numbers.

Despite the apparent bad blood between the former CNN executive and
the military brass, he became a Pentagon contractor, setting up web
sites to collect cultural and political information for the training
of military personnel, first in Iraq and then in Afghanistan. Young
and Jordan apparently became discontented with Furlong because he
failed to pay them on time, and, along with the CIA, helped expose the
fact that Furlong was diverting money to the secret
intelligence-gathering operation.

The Times account notably leaves out the most important facts about
the Furlong affair: the names of those on whom his network spied and
who were subsequently targeted for assassination, either by the CIA,
the military, or private mercenaries working as subcontractors.

Two companies named as recipients of funds via Furlong are
International Media Ventures, which is described as “a private
‘strategic communication’ firm run by several former Special
Operations officers,” and American International Security Corporation,
“a Boston-based company run by Mike Taylor, a former Green Beret.”

The Times reports that Taylor said in a phone interview that “at one
point he had employed Duane Clarridge, known as Dewey, a former top
CIA official who has been linked to a generation of CIA adventures,
including the Iran-Contra scandal.”

The article then reveals that the Times itself hired Taylor and
Clarridge in the effort to locate and rescue David Rohde—a fact which
confirms the connection of the former Iran-Contra figure to ongoing US
covert operations, 25 years later.

The Times account indicates that Taylor proposed an armed assault on a
Taliban compound where he believed Rohde was being held, clearly
suggesting that American International Security Corporation had
paramilitary operatives at its disposal, the same type of personnel
who would be deployed in an assassination.

The echoes of the 1980s Iran-Contra affair are significant. A Reagan
White House official, Lt. Col. Oliver North of the National Security
Council, established an off-the-books covert operation to aid the
Contra terrorists at war with the Sandinista-led government of
Nicaragua, in defiance of a congressional ban on military aid to the
Contras.

North used funds obtained through another illegal covert operation—the
secret sale of US weapons to Iran, during the Iran-Iraq war—to finance
the arms shipments to the Contras.

As the Workers League, forerunner of the Socialist Equality Party,
warned at the time, the Iran-Contra affair was not merely a scandal,
but laid bare the existence of a secret government in the United
States that threatened the democratic rights of the American people:

“The contra aid network gives a glimpse of the real face of American
imperialism which should dispel any illusions that democracy is a
permanent feature of American life. … Twelve years after the Watergate
affair and the subsequent revelations in Senate hearings of the CIA’s
counterrevolutionary operations, assassination plots and state terror,
there has emerged a far more massive and dangerous development of an
extra-constitutional apparatus of terror and repression.” (Statement
of the Central Committee of the Workers League, “Labor Must Act on
Iran-Contra Crisis,” December 23, 1986).

This threat to democratic rights has grown enormously since then, and
especially in the period after the 9/11 terrorist attacks—themselves
of murky origin and with unexplained connections to the US
intelligence apparatus. Today, the US government is running a
multitude of death squad operations in Afghanistan and Pakistan,
targeting those resisting the US occupation of Afghanistan and anyone
else alleged to have links to “terrorism.”

One significant fact referred to by the Times is that the operations
directed by Furlong “seemed to accelerate in the summer of 2009,” the
period when Gen. Stanley McChrystal arrived to take command of US and
NATO military operations in Afghanistan. McChrystal was previously the
head of all US military Special Operations, and ran the assassination
squads in Iraq which played an enormous role in the so-called “surge”
of 2007-2008, when hundreds of Iraqi nationalists and militants
opposed to the US occupation were hunted down by US Special Forces and
murdered.

The Times report provides a reminder of the scale of such operations,
and of their completely uncontrolled, illegal and unaccountable
character. There is no reason to believe that the scope of such
activities is limited to the mountains of the Hindu Kush.

The top Obama administration intelligence official, retired Admiral
Dennis Blair, the director of national intelligence, has declared that
the US government has the right to assassinate American citizens who
are determined by the executive branch to represent a threat to
national security—that is, the right of summary execution, without
benefit of trial, due process or any constitutional protection.

http://wsws.org/articles/2010/mar2010/hits-m16.shtml

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