Balanced on this knife edge

Like a Phoenix from the ashes of its 1980 debacle at Desert One, JSOC has risen to possess America's licence [sic] to kill:

The SEALs are just part of the U.S. military’s Joint Special Operations Command, known by the acronym JSOC, which has grown from a rarely used hostage rescue team into America’s secret army. When members of this elite force killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan in May, JSOC leaders celebrated not just the success of the mission but also how few people knew their command ... even existed.

This kind of elite force is not easy to create. But, once one is created, the hardest task of a democracy is to keep it restrained to uses against our enemies. Once the impossible doesn't take long at all to do, it's easy for politicians to turn elite military units into instruments of personal power instead of their intended use as instruments of national defense.

Under President George W. Bush, JSOC’s operations were rarely briefed to Congress in advance — and usually not afterward, either — because government lawyers considered them to be “traditional military activities” not requiring such notification. President Obama has taken the same legal view, but he has insisted that JSOC’s sensitive missions be briefed to select congressional leaders.

No surprise that a Democrat is better than a Republican. Also no surprise that he's not that much better.

JSOC has made brilliant use of sigint to locate targets.

The Iraqi insurgency’s reliance on modern technology also gave tech-savvy JSOC and its partners, particularly the National Security Agency, an advantage. The NSA learned to locate all electronic signals in Iraq. “We just had a field day,” said a senior JSOC commander, speaking on the condition of anonymity to describe secret operations.

This is more than likely part of what Bob Woodward likened to the Manhattan Project three years ago.

Still, some of that technology has been in use in American cities for a decade or more. Our cell phones track our movements. Acoustic listening posts triangulate gunshots origins in high-crime areas. We seize and do forensics on alleged criminals' electronic devices (rightly so with a warrant).

It's only a matter of time before JSOC innovations get used domestically. How likely is it in the modern American surveillance state that there will be Constitutional controls? And I really don't have enough of a neo-Confederate sense of humor to laugh at one of JSOC's nicknames, "the Secret Army of Northern Virginia."

CIA/media follies

This Time report is what is technically known as wild-ass guessing. The program Darth Cheney reportedly protected was either assassination or it was domestic surveillance. Or it was unworkable and cancelled in 2008, I mean 2004, no biggie, move along, nothing to see.

Anyone can guess: How about enough resolution in satellite imagery to do facial recognition? (Why look straight down? Enemy of the State showed the problems with that.)

C'mon, give it a try! It's fun and easy, and there's no accountability for being wrong.

Enough bullshit! What we need from the media is not to print every goddamned unverified superficial rumor they hear. What we need is research, reporting, sourcing, and truth.

A bit of memory wouldn't hurt either. Could this "new" story relate to the unpursued Bob Woodward rhetorical bombshell of September 2008? Yes, at the time, I leaned to technology, too, since Woodward likened it to the Manhattan Project.

In any case, we still don't know.

Hit squads

Bob Woodward tells us that the escalation in Iraq (known in marketing-speak as the surge) didn't have as much effect as the Sunni changes (marketing: Anbar Awakening) nor a previously unreleased program of assassination (thin marketing: secret killing). He also likens the assassination campaign to the Manhattan Project.

First, let me say that war is about killing. Targeting that killing is in fact better than not targeting it, so I have no problem in principle with assassination as a tool of war. (As a tool of statecraft? Another matter entirely.)

Assassination is not new. Fiction has been written and filmed about it, and maybe a little non-fiction, too. We used it in Vietnam, though less successfully than the Viet Cong.

That means that even though Woodward is keeping mum (he's a journalist who requires elite access, after all) about what exactly is new. But the stunning "Manhattan Project" label is a clue.

I think that this campaign must have involved massive technology, though not quite to the level of "Déjà Vu". My guess: Tons of electronic surveillance of every phone call, email, movement, and purchase of the Iraqis and massive NSA keyword searching and machine translation (since so many of our military speakers of Arabic were too gay to be welcome to help), followed by human translation of data-mined messages and fact bases.

In short, I'd guess that the military massively replicated what the Clinton administration had deployed in prototype against Osama bin Laden and the Bushists scaled up under John Poindexter and his Carnivore-building ilk to watch Americans. If so, it's quite a technical achievement, though it does call into question why we haven't cared enough to find bin Laden himself.

Update (9/3/11): I was a little bit off here but not much. See this new item for follow-up.