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This photo no longer appears on ISAFMedia’s Flickr stream!
In a post titled "More Shell Games: Command Structure for US Prisons and Special Operations in Afghanistan", I cited this article from AFP, which included this statement:
As the NATO commander, the only forces not under McChrystal’s control will be a special US task force that handles detainees, the small number of special operations forces and some support troops from other nations, the official said.
I also linked to this press release describing the return of a group from the Joint Enabling Capabilities Command (JECC) which had been in Afghanistan helping to set up Joint Task Force 435. JTF-435 has authority over US prisons in Afghanistan. I misinterpreted the press release to wrongly conclude that JTF-435, like the JECC, falls under the Joint Forces Command (JFCOM), when I stated:
As a part of JFCOM, then, JTF-435, and the prisoner operations under Harward, are well outside McChrystal’s official sphere of command within CENTCOM.
I received a response from a Media Officer in Central Command, Lieutenant Commander William Speaks, who has provided very useful information regarding the various command responsibilities involved. In the initial email, Speaks explained that the group from JFCOM was involved only in setting up JTF-435, as is common for JECC when it is involved in "helping to stand up new task forces before the permanent jobs are filled". He further explained that
Once they help get things set up and the permanent billets are established and filled, they turnover and leave. More importantly, while they’re there, they report to whomever has operational control over the entity they are helping to set up, not JFCOM. I thought this was made clear in the release White linked to, which was about the JECC team returning home.
I asked for further explanation regarding the media reports that I had seen where it appeared to be reported that McChrystal did not have authority over detainee operations, especially since even the first email from Speaks stated that " I can assure you that CENTCOM and ISAF do have authority over JTF-435, and JFCOM does not."
Here is Speaks’ full response to that question from me:
Jim:
The AFP story is not inaccurate, but it is imcomplete in its explanation of Gen. McChrystal’s authorities. The story says that "as the NATO commander," the detainee operations task force is not under his control. While that’s accurate, it does not explain Gen. McChrystal’s dual-hatted role as Commander, ISAF, and Commander of US Forces in Afghanistan (COMUSFOR-A). The latter includes forces serving under the Operation Enduring Freedom mission, which is separate from the NATO/ISAF mission.Gen. McChrystal does have authority over JTF-435 under his USFOR-A hat. You can certainly quote me on any of this information.
Regards,
LCDR Bill Speaks
It appears that I was looking under the wrong shell for the Afghanistan prisons command authority. While it is not under McChrystal’s ISAF hat, it is under his USFOR-A hat. Given McChrystal’s history of hiding Iraq prisons from ICRC inspections, that arrangement does not give me a warm, fuzzy feeling.
21 Comments
Interesting to see you got such a response. Good work!
Good you teased out this clarification on the record, Jim, and good they’re reading you.
Thanks, Jason and Barry. Although I have a very strong viewpoint on the issues of our presence in Afghanistan and our taking and treatment of prisoners everywhere, I want to be accurate in everything I write. That’s why I was very happy to work quickly with Speaks to get something on the record to correct my misinterpretation.
And yes, it is indeed interesting that they are reading me. We’ll see if I’m now living in “interesting times” as the saying goes.
Amazing the photo is gone now!
Great work citizen Jim White.
Thank you.
Well stated.
Which is precisely why I put it on my Flickr page and ran it again. *g*
He probably has a Google Alert set up for certain things. I would.
I use the Yahoo news widget for particular search terms.
And this?
Go, Jim!
OT Krugman gets out the kneepads for Obamacare, showing his Establishment credentials yet again.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/12/opinion/12krugman.html
It manages to be both superficial and condescending at the same time.
Was McChrystal’s obsfucation on black sites to the Red Cross part of his work at JSOC?
I’m interested to know what else his work there entailed, in light of Jeremy Scahill’s recent reporting on how JSOC and their Blackwater partners answered only to Rumsfeld and Cheney. Was McChrystal involved in assassinations, as well as the torture regime? Just as much as the subversion of the DoJ for political purposes, the promotion of a possible war criminal like McChrystal to lead the Afghan occupation has signaled Obama’s toleration of and complicity in the most inhumane, arbitrary elements of foreign detainee policy.
I get the impression that Mike Mullen is a very decent and upstanding officer, but the rest of the current high command seems to have very little use for the civilian chain of command.
Mullen is merely a figurehead, and was the logical choice to replace Pace after his off-the-cuff “teh-gays-are-immoral” remarks.
McRaven, Harward, Gourtney, Mattis, Schwartz, Rodriguez, Cartwright and Thompson — led by McChrystal (underboss) and Petraeus (the boss) — are the real movers and shakers.
Exit question: can you find the common link among all of those officers? If you can, you’ll understand why Mullen (the idea of a Chairman, period) is irrelevant.
Off the top of my head, I’d have to say that JSOC would be the common link, but I’m traveling right now and won’t have time to read your links this weekend.
Thanks for the links, very informative! I’d guess that the common link is that these officers work either with JSOC or with other joint/cross-branch operations. I’m not sure if this means that they report to the SecDef rather than the Chairman, though obviously that sort of variation on the chain-of-command seems to have allowed JSOC to operate with even less accountability than normal, under Cheney/Rumsfeld.
Mullen may indeed be a figurehead, but I was quite impressed to hear that he had brought an important skeleton out of the closet (though of course this may have been someone else’s idea)… No, not homosexuality in the ranks, but rather provocative false flag attacks!
When former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert seemed intent on starting hostilities with Iran before Bush and Cheney left office, Bush ordered Adm. Mullen to Israel to tell the Israelis, in no uncertain terms, don’t do it. Mullen gladly rose to the occasion; actually, he outdid himself.
We learned from the Israeli press that Mullen went so far as to warn the Israelis not to even think about another incident at sea like the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty on June 8, 1967, which left 34 American crew killed and more than 170 wounded. With Bush’s full support, Mullen told the Israelis to disabuse themselves of the notion that U.S. military support would be knee-jerk automatic if Israel somehow provoked open hostilities with Iran.
Never before had a senior U.S. official braced Israel so blatantly about the Liberty incident, which was covered up unconscionably by Lyndon B. Johnson’s administration, the Congress, and by the Navy itself.
The lesson the Israelis took away from the Liberty incident was that they could get away with murder, literally, and walk free because of political realities in the United States. Never again, said Mullen. He could not have raised a more neuralgic issue.
http://original.antiwar.com/mcgovern/2010/03/07/mullen-wary-of-israeli-attack-on-iran/
Yes, the politicization of the command structure in the military was just as insidious, and just as damaging as the politicization of DOJ. We still are dealing with the damage from that process, and Obama seems to be slipping into dependence on it all to readily.
Great reporting, Jim, and I’m of course a little chagrined at how you scooped CHNN. Disappearing photos and everything… I drink to you, and not just since I was going to anyway.
Thanks. I’ve got to have someone fix the link on the previous diary–I did manage to get a copy of the picture onto my Flickr page. :)
Jim, why don’t you come over here and see for yourself? The leadership here does blogger roundtables all the time. The media has already toured the new Detention Facility in Parwan that replaced the now empty Bagram Theater Internment Facility. btw, we have an excellent relationship w the ICRC because they recognize that our facilities are safe and secure. But then, don’t take my word. Come and see for yourself.
Yeah, I’ll just bet Dilawar’s family want to be the first ones in line to tour your shiny distraction from the other facilities…
Hmmm… It also seems that at least a few of the aforementioned officers are tasked to NATO, I don’t know if that is another commonality you had in mind crossword.
All of them owe their success (and in McRaven’s case, four promotions and tripling of his paycheck) to the Bush administration.
Schwartz is a dark horse for next Chairman of the Joint Chiefs (2016 – 2020), after Petraeus.
Schwartz is also an integral part of the JSOC mafia; he helped create Task Force 160 in the Carter Administration and flew Air Force missions under CIA control in the 1980′s, eventually becoming one of the founding members of SOCOM. If you look at his bio, you’ll see that he’s qualified to fly…just about everything, but certainly every rotary-wing aircraft the US has.
He’s rather young to be a four-star, since Mullen came in the 1960′s. You have to watch these officers, and their assignments, as it easy (or not, to the uninitiated) to see whom has been groomed, and who is left to fend for themselves. The officers I named are being or have already been groomed for critical future positions.