The Joint Special Operations Command, the U.S. military's premier counterterrorist strike force, is expanding its existing targeting nerve center in the region to make space for more American terror hunting personnel from three-letter agencies like the CIA, NSA, and FBI to foreign partners like Britain, France, Iraq and Jordan.
The Obama administration is enshrining the strike force's role of gathering multiple points of view on who to kill and capture, as it did in Iraq and Afghanistan into a permanent information sharing platform, two U.S. officials tell The Daily Beast, speaking anonymously because they were not authorized to discuss the secret task force publicly.
"This has been going on," said a senior U.S. official briefed on the expanded mission. "We're just putting it on steroids."
[...] The official explained that when JSOC does carry out a strike, it still answers to the regional military commander—for instance, Gen. Joseph Votel in the Central Command area—and still only carries out missions with the permission of the U.S. ambassador in the affected country.
"It's a streamlining of communications," not an expansion of JSOC authority, a second senior U.S. official said of the new center. "The normal chain of having to get approval still occurs. They are still having to seek the same permissions to do things."
"But they can look at things transregionally—and give advice...more efficiently and more effectively by eliminating some unnecessary steps so you can get at this problem quicker," the official said, shortening the amount of time to get approval an intelligence gathering operation or a drone strike.
Source: The Daily Beast
(Score: 3, Interesting) by jdavidb on Wednesday November 30 2016, @09:43PM
ⓋⒶ☮✝🕊 Secession is the right of all sentient beings
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 01 2016, @01:45PM
An Anarchist and a Christian? Christianity demands obedience to a higher power, Anarchy contends there is no higher power.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Thursday December 01 2016, @02:38PM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_anarchism [wikipedia.org]
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by jdavidb on Thursday December 01 2016, @02:57PM
ⓋⒶ☮✝🕊 Secession is the right of all sentient beings