|
|
|
|
|
Keeping tabs on SOCOM Sam Urquhart / GNN | May 12 2006 Reports have detailed the growing role of Special Operations Command worldwide, but what are they doing? Special Operations Command (SOCOM) is the branch of the U.S. military concerned with aspects of modern warfare that occur away from the public eye, underneath the radar of other states and the mainstream media. It has, unsurprisingly, benefited massively from the War on Terror and Iraq. In January 2005, it emerged that underneath SOCOM, Rumsfeld had established an organization known as the “Strategic Support Group.” SSG, the Washington Post reported, was “intended to add missing capabilities—such as the skill to establish local spy networks and the technology for direct access to national intelligence databases—to the military’s much larger special operations squadrons” while some in the Pentagon had begun to refer to it as “secret army of Northern Virginia.” Since then, information on the SSB, SOCOM and its relationship to other government bodies has been sparse. What exactly is SOCOM up to? This year, we have heard a little about the expansion of military teams onto State Department territory. We sometimes hear about covert operations in ‘denied areas.’ For example, according to Seymour Hersh, SOCOM may well have had teams in Iran for over a year. Some commentators suggest that this represents a military incursion into State Department territory and that State is somehow likely to find this a problem. In the ranks, this may be so, but not for Condoleezza Rice, who in January of this year committed her department to working closely with the military including in “post-conflict situations” a strategy she calls “transformational diplomacy.” If people on the ground don’t like it, that is not a problem as “In the coming years hundreds will move across borders and into the front lines of diplomacy where they are needed most.” Presumably because a few will be moving out when the military toughs move in. Ann Scott Tyson reported in the Washington Post in late April that Donald Rumsfeld had hatched a plan to further expand the power of the military. “The details of the plan are still classified” she wrote, “but the documents envision “a significantly expanded role for the military — and in particular a growing force of elite Special Operations troops — in continuous operations to combat terrorism outside of war zones such as Iraq and Afghanistan.” The product of at least a three year germination period, she wrote, “they reflect a beefing up of the Pentagon’s involvement in domains traditionally handled by the CIA and State Department.” As Mike Whitney explained on 25 April, the aim is to create a parallel service to complement State Department representatives in strategic embassies overseas or, as Whitney put it, “to put the US military under private control and turn the world into one massive war zone.” This is consistent with the 2006 QDR, which I reported on earlier this year and which promised to gain US access to previously “denied areas” through surveillance capabilities and to operate across the world, using small rapid response teams under the cloak of secrecy. That was a Department of Defense, not a CIA document. Now, with the transition from Porter Goss to Michael Hayden seeming likely at Langley, it also seems plausible that the Defense establishment is seeking to consolidate its power over intelligence gathering overseas. Fortunately for us, the U.S. is a democracy in name and form, if not entirely in substance. Hence we can have some access to what plans are being laid, how much money is being raised to pay for them and the likely consequences of putting them into action. Hydrogen powered spy planes One SOCOM initiative which is taking off right now is a hydrogen powered surveillance plane known as Helios or Global Observer manufactured by AeroVironment Ltd. The DoD obviously trusts AeroVironment as they have entered into “a sole source contract with [them]....[as] the Government does not have the data rights to this system to enable competition.” The BBC reported on Helios back in 2003. “Liquid hydrogen stored on board and oxygen extracted from the air are combined in fuel cells. The electricity generated drives the propellers,” says the Beeb, “a full tank of hydrogen would keep the unmanned plane in the air for 24 hours.” A project justification document from February 2006, states that the Helios is explicitly required for “persistent surveillance in denied areas.” (Not for romantic solutions to climate change as the Beeb hoped in its earlier peek). By denied areas, they mean foreign countries, places where people might take offence if a spy plane lingered over their heads for twenty-four hours. In-Q-Tel SOCOM has also taken on a share of the venture capital firm In-Q-Tel, along with the CIA. In theory, In-Q-Tel is supposed to be a tool for investing in promising technologies to be used in “national security” matters. Redherring.com reports that its capital has grown over time to around $50m since “the CIA established In-Q-Tel in 1999 and so far it has worked with about 90 companies and helped bring more than 120 technologies to market.” A February 6 request for funds for a similar fund by NASA let slip that the CIA had been joined by SOCOM in funding these new technologies, but what exactly are they? The technologies being invested in by In-Q-tel include, the “state-of-the-art speech recognition and patent pending conversion technologies to listen to recorded conversations and create minable databases” being developed by a company named Callminer. Attensity are working on tools for the “structuring and analyzing the vast amounts of text found in written reports, communications, open source documents, and other data feeds,” by which they mean “structured and unstructured data sources, such as warranty claims, customer feedback, and field service records.” Then there is Initiate, whose “Identity Hub™ software..overcomes duplicate and fragmented records, multiple identifications, transpositions, misspellings, nicknames, aliases, address inconsistencies and identity misrepresentations to instantly find and accurately link all the records about a person, household, organization or other object across disparate systems and data sources.” In a similar vein, Intelliseek have a means “to find, categorize, rank, summarize, and filter data no matter what its source, location, format, or language” while Pixlogic are marketing a tool that “automatically see[s] the logical visual objects in an image, or any text that may appear in the image/video, indexing this content without manual intervention, and allowing users to search and retrieve the specific pictures/video segments they need with just a few clicks of the mouse.” Keyhole Inc., the company responsible for the software behind GoogleEarth are also on board, with their creations that are “enabling fast, fluid interaction with multi-terabyte network-resident databases of Earth imagery and geospatial information. Users can “fly” from space to street level seamlessly while interactively exploring layers of information including roads, schools, businesses, and demographics.” Skybuilt Power provide a “mobile power station” and Tendril “a distributed programming interface to instantiate, manipulate, and orchestrate previously non-computerized activities related to buildings, factories, cities, crops, homes, and other objects in the physical world.” To smooth the way, Agentlogic have developed a sort of robotic agent, via “software [which] assures that users are aware of important events across many systems on a near real-time basis, and allows users to pre-define actions to automatically take in response to events whenever possible.” This is not to mention the technology offered by A4 Vision, whose “products are designed for broad security applications such as surveillance and access control, [and] law enforcement…Through innovations in 3D data capturing and processing capabilities, these systems permit industry-leading accuracy in real-time facial recognition and tracking.” Onpoint is another venture capital arm of the defense establishment, being marshalled by the U.S. Army. Every single one of their companies deals with the development of alternative fuel sources, generally rechargeable batteries or fuel cells for use by the armed forces. As their own website states, the soldier of the future will have to “operate for days, or even weeks, without re-supply, so the power/energy requirements of the soldier’s equipment must be available for extended periods.” They will have to operate in “extreme environments” and independently. When put together these tools provide an insight into an oncoming web of international and maybe domestic surveillance and supervision. In intelligence operations such as the assasination of dissidents or the toppling of unfriendly governments, it is easy to see how facial recognition, data mining and 24 hour surveillance from the air could be useful. Without it being publicly understood, an army for the New American Century is slowly being built. The Project for the New American Century planned for a total reformation of the U.S. army to turn it into a flexible, futurized tool useful for projecting the power of Washington wherever necessary and to be able to operate underneath the radar of conventional detection. That plan is still proceeding apace. As the largely neocon thinktank explained in ‘Rebuilding America’s Defenses,’ published in September 2000. “Air warfare may no longer be fought by pilots manning tactical fighter aircraft sweeping the skies of opposing fighters, but a regime dominated by long-range, stealthy unmanned craft. On land, the clash of massive, combined-arms armored forces may be replaced by the dashes of much lighter, stealthier and information-intensive forces, augmented by fleets of robots, some small enough to fit in soldiers’ pockets.” Even though no-one is really talking about it, those promises they made before September 11 are gradually materializing through bureaucratic tools such as investment funds and procurement, precisely the areas of U.S. policy that receive little attention because they are either unglamorous or impenetrable. That is all the more reason to keep SOCOM above the media radar. ---------------------------------------------------
Prison Planet.tv: The Premier Multimedia Subscription Package: Download and Share the Truth! Please help our fight against the New World Order by giving a donation. As bandwidth costs increase, the only way we can stay online and expand is with your support. Please consider giving a monthly or one-off donation for whatever you can afford. You can pay securely by either credit card or Paypal. Click here to donate. |
