SPECOPS IN IRAQ AND SYRIA. BOOTS ON THE GROUND. GLOBAL ASSYMETRIC WARFARE AND ITS INEVITABLE REGIONAL IMPACT.

Seal Team Six : the mythic spec-ops unit, that few American's know about and fewer still outside America. In doing research for this article I read several book's by now retired Team Six member's and members of other spec-ops unit's, numerous articles in the New York Times, Washington Post and The Daily Beast. Here I will cite some excerpt's from one of the New York Times' articles from June 6, 2015 by Mark Mazetti and a slew of other reporter's.

The New York Times article entitled , SEAL Team 6: A Secret History of Quiet Killings and Blurred Lines: "The unit best known for killing Osama bin Laden has been converted into a global manhunting machine with limited outside oversight".

My reason for posting this article is manifold, I couldn't resist posting it in the wake of the San Bernardino massacre and it's inevitable blowback. American populist politician's like Trump and Ted Cruz, if elected will inevitably shift the course of the planet dangerously close to global anarchy . The use of secretive special operations units like Seal Team Six, will dramatically increase. Since such units are "officially" nonexistent the extent of most of their activities will remain classified, with the dramatic rise in Caribbean nationals absconding to groups like ISIS, I foresee a time when units like Seal Team Six may become operative in the region. Regular reader's of this blog lionzman@blogspot.com and my other blog nazaritze@blogspot.com, would know that I stress heavily on an independent and integrated Caribbean as a buffer from outside influences, such as American "foreign policy", wreaking havoc in the region.

The dependence on tourism regionally, and the marketing of the Caribbean tourist product to specifically, America, Canada and Western Europe are all factor's that make the Caribbean the most ideal "soft target "ever. A terrorist attack regionally aimed at particularly nationals of western European countries , America  and Canada  by Islamic terrorists or any terrorist group for that matter, will forever alter the region. Such a development will only increase the already destabilizing presence of the CIA and will no doubt unleash spec-ops groups in our midst, who will have a disastrous effect on the internecine lived reality that is Caribbean living. In the following I aim to show, from the excerpt's from the New York Times article the dangers of clandestine units operating on our shores. Caribbean economic, educational and eventually political cooperation is the only way forward for the people's of the region depending on Europeans, Americans and now even the Chinese will only plunge the region even further into the abyss it has sunk into.
"They have plotted deadly missions from secret bases in the badlands of Somalia. In Afghanistan, they have engaged in combat so intimate that they have emerged soaked in blood that was not their own. On clandestine raids in the dead of the night, their weapons of choice have ranged from customized carbines to primeval tomahawks.

Around the world, they have run spying stations disguised as commercial boats, posed as civilian employees of front companies and operated undercover at embassies as male-female pairs, tracking those the United States wants to kill or capture.
Those operations are part of the hidden history of the Navy’s SEAL Team 6, one of the nation’s most mythologized, most secretive and least scrutinized military organizations. Once a small group reserved for specialized but rare missions, the unit best known for killing Osama bin Laden has been transformed by more than a decade of combat into a global manhunting machine".
Foreign Policy carried an article in their online magazine By Linda Robinson published December 7, 2015  entitled: " One-Half of a Good Strategy". The following is excerpted from that article:
"With Defense Secretary Ashton Carter’s announcement in early December that a special operations “expeditionary force” will be deployed to Iraq, a new phase of the effort to defeat the so-called Islamic State (ISIS) has begun. The special operators will be authorized to conduct raids in Iraq and Syria, and their activities will remedy one of the most critical gaps in the campaign to date—intelligence. By conducting raids, as special operators did in May when they killed Abu Sayyaf, an ISIS leader who had helped manage its oil and gas sales, they can gain troves of intelligence through interrogation of captured ISIS fighters and from their phones, computers, and other possessions. This type of “sensitive site exploitation,” as it is called, involves rapid processing by intelligence analysts, which, during the heyday of the surge in Iraq, enabled operators to conduct up to 17 raids a night".
The aforementioned article clearly highlights the fact that Spec Ops unit's will be authorized to conduct "kill missions" , in Iraq and Syria, stating that the units have official sanction to execute assassinations on behalf of the US government in Iraq and Syria. I will excerpt statements from US Spec Ops commanders, active and non-active SpecOps operators admitting, how sometimes those operation's can go awry. What follows is excerpted from the New York Times article mentioned previously.
June 6 2015 "SEAL Team 6: A Secret History of Quiet Killings and Blurred Lines".
"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".
"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".
“War is not this pretty thing that the United States has come to believe it to be,” said Britt Slabinski, a retired senior enlisted member of Team 6 and veteran of combat in Afghanistan and Iraq. “It’s emotional, one human being killing another human being for extended periods of time. It’s going to bring out the worst in you. It’s also going to bring out the best in you.”Team 6 and its Army counterpart, Delta Force, have delivered intrepid performances that have drawn the nation’s two most recent presidents to deploy them to an expanding list of far-off trouble spots. They include Syria and Iraq, now under threat from the Islamic State, and Afghanistan, Somalia and Yemen, mired in continuing chaos".

"Like the C.I.A.’s campaign of drone strikes, Special Operations missions offer policy makers an alternative to costly wars of occupation. But the bulwark of secrecy around Team 6 makes it impossible to fully assess its record and the consequences of its actions, including civilian casualties or the deep resentment inside the countries where its members operate. The missions have become embedded in American combat with little public discussion or debate".
"The Omega Program, allowed the SEALs to conduct “deniable operations” against the Taliban and other militants in Pakistan. Omega was modeled after the Vietnam-era Phoenix Program, when C.I.A. officers and Special Operations troops conducted interrogations and assassinations to try to dismantle the Vietcong’s guerrilla networks in South Vietnam. While Special Operations troops functioned under the same rules of engagement as other military personnel in Afghanistan, Team 6 members routinely performed their missions at night, making life-or-death decisions in dark rooms with few witnesses and beyond the view of a camera. Operators would use weapons with suppressors to quietly kill enemies as they slept, an act that they defend as no different from dropping a bomb on an enemy barracks".
“I snuck into people’s houses while they were sleeping,” Bissonnette says in his book “No Hero,” written under the pseudonym Mark Owen. “If I caught them with a gun, I killed them, just like all the guys in the command.”

The rules boiled down to this, the noncommissioned officer said: "If in your assessment you feel threatened, in a split second, then you’re going to kill somebody.” He described how one SEAL sniper killed three unarmed people, including a small girl, in separate episodes in Afghanistan and told his superiors that he felt they had posed a threat. Legally, that was sufficient. A half-dozen former officers and enlisted troops who were interviewed said they knew of civilian deaths caused by Team 6. Mr. Slabinski, a former senior enlisted member of SEAL Team 6, said he witnessed Team 6 members mistakenly kill civilians “probably four or five times” during his deployments.
Near the end of an Afghan deployment by Team 6’s Blue Squadron, which concluded in early 2008, elders complained to the British general whose forces controlled Helmand Province. He immediately called Capt. Scott Moore, commander of SEAL Team 6, saying that two elders had reported that the SEALs killed civilians in a village, according to a former Team 6 senior member.
Just after midnight on Dec. 27, 2009, dozens of American and Afghan troops landed in helicopters several miles from the small village of Ghazi Khan in Kunar Province, and hiked to the village in darkness. By the time they left, 10 residents had been killed.

What happened that night is still in dispute. The purpose of the mission was to capture or kill a senior Taliban operative, but it was quickly apparent that no Taliban leaders were present at the target. The mission had been based on faulty intelligence, a problem that bedeviled United States military operations even after years in Afghanistan. A former governor of the province investigated, and accused the Americans of killing unarmed schoolboys.
A rescue operation two years later succeeded in releasing an American physician, though at great cost. One night in December 2012, a group of Team 6 operators wearing night-vision goggles burst into a compound in Afghanistan where Taliban militants were holding Dr. Dilip Joseph, who had been working with an aid organization. The first operator to enter was felled by a shot to the head, and the other Americans responded with brutal efficiency, killing all five of the captors.  The physician said in an interview that a 19-year-old named Wallakah was the sole kidnapper to survive the initial assault. He had been subdued by the SEAL operators and sat on the ground, hands around his knees, his head down, the doctor remembered. Wallakah, he believed, was the one who had shot the Team 6 operator. Minutes later, while waiting to board a helicopter to freedom, Dr. Joseph said, one of his SEAL rescuers guided him back into the house, where he saw in the moonlight that Wallakah was lying in a pool of blood, dead. “I remember those things as clear as day” .

What follows is an article by Annie Jacobson that appeared in The Atlantic.com in their online magazine, the article gives readers rare insight, into cutting edge technology that is, "transforming humans for war". The increasing asymmetric nature of global terrorism has increased governments' demands for, trained professional killer's. Western governments and particularly the US government, have long sought the "super soldier" intrepid, intelligent with ten times the strength of a "normal" man who can go for days on end without sleep, one who is absolutely obedient to his handlers. The article even quote a well known retired four-star US Army general and Michael Goldblatt.  In 1999 the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), created the Defense Sciences Office (DSO) and made Michael Goldblatt its director. Goldblatt was a biologist and venture capitalist from the Midwest. The program’s first goal was to create “a wireless brain modem for a freely moving rat,” i.e. mind control DARPA’s Eric Eisenstadt stated at a technology conference in 2002, Goldblatt became a pioneer in military-based transhumanism—the notion that man can alter the human condition fundamentally by augmenting the body with machines and other means.  Obama announced recently concerning the top-secret Talos project (TALOS is strikingly close to the futuristic exoskeleton that Gorman first envisioned for DARPA 25 years ago, and aims to be “fully functional” by 2018. “I am here to announce that we are building Iron Man,” President Barack Obama said of the suit during a manufacturing innovation event in 2014. When the president said, “This has been a secret project we’ve been working on for a long time”. Read about all this and more, in light of the numerous revelations the article will unearth I think the depiction of Obama in the artwork at the head of this article, is not only fitting but unnerving indeed.

Engineering Humans for War
SEPTEMBER 28, 2015  BY ANNIE JACOBSEN HYPERLINK "http://www.defenseone.com/voices/annie-jacobsen/11612/" HYPERLINK "http://www.theatlantic.com/"HYPERLINK "http://www.defenseone.com/voices/annie-jacobsen/11612/"THE ATLANTIC
"Inside the Pentagon’s efforts to create a super-soldier — and change the future of the battlefield".
Retired four-star general Paul F. Gorman recalls first learning about the “weakling of the battlefield” from reading S.L.A.Marshall, the U.S. Army combat historian during World War II. After interviewing soldiers who participated in the Normandy beach landings, Marshall had learned that fatigue was responsible for an overwhelming number of casualties.


Annie Jacobsen is an investigative journalist and bestselling author who writes about war, weapons, U.S. national security and government secrecy. Full Bio
“I didn’t know my strength was gone until I hit the beach,” Sergeant Bruce Hensley told Marshall. “I was carrying part of a machine gun. Normally I could run with it … but I found I couldn’t even walk with it. … So I crawled across the sand dragging it with me. I felt ashamed of my own weakness, but looking around I saw the others crawling and dragging the weights they normally carried.” Another officer told of the effects of “fear and fatigue.”
“Soldiers get tired and soldiers get fearful,” Gorman told me last year. “Frequently, soldiers just don’t want to fight. Attention must always be paid to the soldier himself.”
For decades after its inception in 1958, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency—DARPA, the central research and development organization of the Department of Defense—focused on developing vast weapons systems. Starting in 1990, and owing to individuals like Gorman, a new focus was put on soldiers, airmen, and sailors—on transforming humans for war. The progress of those efforts, to the extent it can be assessed through public information, hints at war’s future, and raises questions about whether military technology can be stopped, or should.

Gorman sketched out an early version of the thinking in a paper he wrote for DARPA after his retirement from the Army in 1985, in which he described an “integrated-powered exoskeleton” that could transform the weakling of the battlefield into a veritable super-soldier. The “Super Troop” exoskeleton he proposed offered protection against chemical, biological, electromagnetic, and ballistic threats, including direct fire from a .50-caliber bullet. It “incorporated audio, visual, and haptic [touch] sensors,” Gorman explained, including thermal imaging for the eyes, sound suppression for the ears, and fiber optics from the head to the fingertips. Its interior would be climate-controlled, and each soldier would have his own physiological specifications embedded on a chip within his dog tags. “When a soldier donned his ST [Super Troop] battledress,” Gorman wrote, “he would insert one dog-tag into a slot under the chest armor, thereby loading his personal program into the battle suit’s computer,” giving the 21st-century soldier an extraordinary ability to hear, see, move, shoot, and communicate.
At the time Gorman wrote, the computing technology needed for such a device did not yet exist. By 2001, however, DARPA had unveiled two exoskeleton programs, and by 2013, in partnership with U.S. Special Operations Command, DARPA had started work on a super-soldier suit called TALOS (Tactical Assault Light Operator Suit) unlike anything in the history of warfare. Engineered with full-body ballistics protection; integrated heating and cooling systems; embedded sensors, antennas, and computers; 3D audio (to indicate where a fellow warfighter is by the sound of his voice); optics for vision in various light conditions; life-saving oxygen and hemorrhage controls; and more, TALOS is strikingly close to the futuristic exoskeleton that Gorman first envisioned for DARPA 25 years ago, and aims to be “fully functional” by 2018. “I am here to announce that we are building Iron Man,” President Barack Obama said of the suit during a manufacturing innovation event in 2014. When the president said, “This has been a secret project we’ve been working on for a long time”.

It was the collapse of the Soviet Union that accelerated many of DARPA’s most radical super-soldier science programs. The revelation that the Soviets had developed an extensive biological weapons program caused DARPA to bring biologists into its ranks, and with the life sciences at the fore, DARPA began to look inside the human body, toward a scientific capability that could transform soldiers from the inside out.

“Soldiers having no physical, physiological, or cognitive limitation will be key to survival and operational dominance in the future.”
In 1999 DARPA created the Defense Sciences Office (DSO) and made Michael Goldblatt its director. Goldblatt was a biologist and venture capitalist from the Midwest who, during the food-related national health scare that followed three children’s deaths from eating E. coli-contaminated hamburgers at Jack in the Box restaurants, became hyper-aware of pathogens. “A guy I was working with, Alvin Chow, and I came up with a technology for self-sterilizing packages … that sterilized products in the field,” he told me in a 2014 interview. Thinking the technology could be useful to the government, he called Larry Lynn, the director of DARPA. “I told Larry … how [the self-sterilizing packages] could be used in field hospitals or on the battlefield. Larry was blown away. He said, ‘We want you to come to DARPA.’ And I did.”
The turn of the century “was a radical time to be at DARPA,” Goldblatt said. He believed that defense sciences could demonstrate that “the next frontier was inside of our own selves,” and he became a pioneer in military-based transhumanism—the notion that man can alter the human condition fundamentally by augmenting the body with machines and other means. At the time, the threat from biological warfare was in his words “growing far faster than the solutions were coming in. … [President] Clinton gave lots of money to the countermeasures program for unconventional pathogens,” with the result that DARPA had plenty of funding for biology programs. Goldblatt saw the creation of the super-soldier as imperative to 21st-century warfare.

Goldblatt ran the DSO until 2004, and when he spoke to me last year, he could only describe unclassified programs. More than 10 years after his departure, the status of the “super-soldier” pursuits he helped launch is murky; DARPA’s highest-risk, highest-payoff programs remain secret until they are unveiled on the battlefield. Still, given the progress of the exoskeleton, these or similar programs could be closer to reality than anyone realizes.
One idea was to find a way to get a wounded soldier to go into a kind of suspended animation until help arrived. Bears hibernate. Why can’t man?
“Soldiers having no physical, physiological, or cognitive limitation will be key to survival and operational dominance in the future,” Goldblatt told his program managers a few weeks after his arrival. One program in the DSO, called Persistence in Combat, addressed three areas that slowed soldiers down on the battlefield: pain, wounds, and excessive bleeding.
Goldblatt hired a biotechnology firm to develop a pain vaccine. If a soldier got shot, Goldblatt explained, the vaccine would “reduce the pain triggered by inflammation and swelling,” the desired result being “10 to 30 seconds of agony then no pain for 30 days.” Such a vaccine would allow the warfighter to keep fighting so long as bleeding could be stopped. To develop new ways to try to stop bleeding, Goldblatt initiated another program that involved injecting millions of microscopic magnets into a person, which could later be brought together into a single area to stop bleeding with the wave of a wand.

Another idea was to find a way to get a wounded soldier to go into a kind of hibernation, or suspended animation, until help arrived. Achieving this goal would give a soldier precious hours, or even days, to survive blood loss and avoid going into shock while awaiting evacuation or triage. Bears hibernate. Why can’t man? Could a chemical compound produce such a state?
What if soldiers could have 10 times the muscle endurance of enemy soldiers? What if they could leap seven feet or do 300 pull-ups a day?
Sleep, too, was a focus of intense research at DSO. In the Continually Assisted Performance program, scientists worked on ways to create a “24/7 soldier,” one who required little or no sleep for up to seven days. If this could be achieved, an enemy’s need for sleep would put him at an extreme disadvantage. Goldblatt’s program managers hired marine biologists studying certain sea animals to look for clues. Whales and dolphins don’t sleep; as mammals, they would drown if they did. Unlike humans, they are somehow able to control the lobes of their left and right brains so that while one lobe sleeps, the opposite lobe stays awake, allowing the animal to swim. While some DARPA scientists ruminated over the question of how humans might one day control the lobes of their own brains, other scientists experimented with drugs like Modafinil, a powerful medication used to counter sleep apnea and narcolepsy, to keep warfighters awake.

Other programs explored other questions. What if soldiers could have 10 times the muscle endurance of enemy soldiers? What if they could leap seven feet or do 300 pull-ups a day? Under the DSO banner, in a program called the Brain-Machine Interface, DARPA scientists studied how brain implants could enhance cognitive ability. The program’s first goal was to create “a wireless brain modem for a freely moving rat,”DARPA’s Eric Eisenstadt stated at a technology conference in 2002. The scientists would implant a chip in the rat’s brain to see if they could remotely control the animal’s movements.
“The objective of this effort,” Eisenstadt explained, “is to use remote teleoperation via direct interconnections with the brain.” The bigger objective was to allow future “soldiers [to] communicate by thought alone. … Imagine a time when the human brain has its own wireless modem so that instead of acting on thoughts, warfighters have thoughts that act,” Eisenstadt suggested. But a 2008 report by defense scientists raised some warnings. “An adversary might use” brain technology “in military applications. … An extreme example would be remote guidance or control of a human being.” Other critics said that the quest to enhance human performance on the battlefield would lead scientists down a morally dangerous path.

Michael Goldblatt disagreed. “How is having a cochlear implant that helps the deaf hear any different than having a chip in your brain that could help control your thoughts?” he asked. When questioned about unintended consequences, like controlling humans for nefarious ends, Goldblatt insisted, “There are unintended consequences for everything.”
Armed with the information above how can any Caribbean leader, in good conscience continue to insist that, our interest's are in anyway best served, in a union with the US or any European power? The US and Europe are highly sophisticated, supra-technological militarized industrialized nations, with vast military, financial, geo-political interest's that are best served through the subservience of the rest of the world.
I have called for in the past and will continue to call for the total, and complete independence of all Caribbean nation states from America and western Europe as embodied by the EU. The goals and interest's of the major and minor western powers are diametrically opposed to our own. Any continued linkage to them will be totally disastrous, for the region in the light of global, terrorrism and it's asymmetrical nature. Any injection into the region of highly trained technologically advanced terrorist's will wreak havoc regionally. Conversely any injection of specops unit's regionally will have an even worse effect than the terrorist's they will purport to fight in the name of "humanitarianism".