Reply #48: There's more in last year's thread on a Seymour Hersh expose [View All]

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The thread from March 2009 on Hersh's "executive assassination wing" story has a lot about the Joint Special Operations Command, which McChrystal was part of before he got the Afghanistan position. http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x5259662

I quoted there from a 2006 Newsweek story, which was kind of sucking up to McChrystal but did drop some interesting tidbits:

http://www.newsweek.com/id/52445?tid=relatedcl

Jun 26, 2006

No one would have mentioned his name at all if President George W. Bush hadn't singled him out in public. Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, West Point '76, is not someone the Army likes to talk about. He isn't even listed in the directory at Fort Bragg, N.C., his home base. That's not because McChrystal has done anything wrong--quite the contrary, he's one of the Army's rising stars--but because he runs the most secretive force in the U.S. military. That is the Joint Special Operations Command, the snake-eating, slit-their-throats "black ops" guys who captured Saddam Hussein and targeted Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi.

JSOC is part of what Vice President Dick Cheney was referring to when he said America would have to "work the dark side" after 9/11. To many critics, the veep's remark back in 2001 fostered his rep as the Darth Vader of the war on terror and presaged bad things to come, like the interrogation abuses at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay. But America also has its share of Jedi Knights who are fighting in what Cheney calls "the shadows." And McChrystal, an affable but tough Army Ranger, and the Delta Force and other elite teams he commands are among them.

After the Zarqawi strike, multinational forces spokesman Gen. Bill Caldwell refused to comment on JSOC's role, saying, "We don't talk about when special operating forces are involved." But when Bush revealed to reporters that it was McChrystal's Special Ops teams that had found Zarqawi, Caldwell had to gulp and say (to laughter), "If the president of the United States said it was, then I'm sure it was."