Para-Military network under U.S. Defense Department tracks and kills Afghan-Pakistan insurgents

The United States Department of State in most of its assessment reports of mostly Third World nations in recent years has alleged that Third World nations are using para-military groups to assist their military to combat armed separatist/terrorist movements in their territories.

One of the countries that have been singled out in recent years in State Department reports was Sri Lanka which was battling a ruthless terrorist group Tamil Tigers (LTTE). The U.S. has accused Sri Lanka and its military forces using break-away LTTE dissident group Tamil Makkal Viduthalai Puligal (TMVP) of ‘Karuna’ and ‘Pilliayan’ to track and kill Tamil Tigers and the organizations main operatives.

State Department officials in their dealings with Sri Lankan officials while the government offensive against the Tamil Tigers was in progress have accused that Sri Lanka military of arming the dissident TMVP cadres to assist it to hunt and kill LTTE fighting cadre and collecting intelligence for the Sri Lanka government.

Sri Lanka military forces totally defeated the Tamil Tigers and eliminated its entire leadership in May 2009 winning a military battle against a ruthless terrorist group which endeavored to establish a separate independent state in the predominantly Tamil provinces in the north and east of the country after 26 years.

Now, another agency of the United States, Department of Defense, it has been revealed, has established its own para-military to gather information, hunt and kill insurgents in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The New York Times in a page one prominently carried investigative report on March 15 declared:

“Under the cover of a benign government information-gathering program, a Defense Department official set up a network of private contractors in Afghanistan and Pakistan to help track and kill suspected militants, according to military officials and businessmen in Afghanistan and the United States.

“The official, Michael D. Furlong, hired contractors from private security companies that employed former C.I.A. and Special Forces operatives. The contractors, in turn, gathered intelligence on the whereabouts of suspected militants and the location of insurgent camps, and the information was then sent to military units and intelligence officials for possible lethal action in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the officials said.”

The New York Times further states:

“It is generally considered illegal for the military to hire contractors to act as covert spies. Officials said Mr. Furlong’s secret network might have been improperly financed by diverting money from a program designed to merely gather information about the region.

“Moreover, in Pakistan, where Qaeda and Taliban leaders are believed to be hiding, the secret use of private contractors may be seen as an attempt to get around the Pakistani government’s prohibition of American military personnel’s operating in the country.”

The allegations that Mr. Furlong ran this network come as the American intelligence community confronts other instances in which private contractors may have been improperly used on delicate and questionable operations, including secret raids in Iraq and an assassinations program that was halted before it got off the ground.

The account of his activities is based on interviews with American military and intelligence officials and businessmen in the region by the newspaper.

Military officials said Mr. Furlong, a retired Army officer, is now a senior civilian employee in the military, a full-time Defense Department employee.

Mr. Furlong has extensive experience in “psychological operations” — the military term for the use of information in warfare — and he plied his trade in a number of places, including Iraq and the Balkans. It is unclear exactly when Mr. Furlong’s operations began. But officials said they seemed to accelerate in the summer of 2009, and by the time they ended, he and his colleagues had established a network of informants in Afghanistan and Pakistan whose job it was to help locate people believed to be insurgents.

In addition, at least one government contractor who worked with Mr. Furlong in Afghanistan last year maintains that he saw evidence that the information was used for attacking militants.
The contractor, Robert Young Pelton, an author who writes extensively about war zones, said that the government hired him to gather information about Afghanistan and that Mr. Furlong improperly used his work. “We were providing information so they could better understand the situation in Afghanistan, and it was being used to kill people,” Mr. Pelton said.

He said that he and Eason Jordan, a former television news executive, had been hired by the military to run a public Web site to help the government gain a better understanding of a region that bedeviled them. Recently, the top military intelligence official in Afghanistan publicly said that intelligence collection was skewed too heavily toward hunting terrorists, at the expense of gaining a deeper understanding of the country.

Instead, Mr. Pelton said, millions of dollars that were supposed to go to the Web site were redirected by Mr. Furlong toward intelligence gathering for the purpose of attacking militants.

In one example, Mr. Pelton said he had been told by Afghan colleagues that video images that he posted on the Web site had been used for an American strike in the South Waziristan region of Pakistan.

In mid-2008, the military put Mr. Furlong in charge of a program to use private companies to gather information about the political and tribal culture of Afghanistan. Some of the approximately $22 million in government money allotted to this effort went to International Media Ventures, with offices in St. Petersburg, Fla., San Antonio and elsewhere. On its Web site, the company describes itself as a public relations company, “an industry leader in creating potent messaging content and interactive communications.”

The Web site also shows that several of its senior executives are former members of the military’s Special Operations forces, including former commandos from Delta Force, which has been used extensively since the Sept. 11 attacks to track and kill suspected terrorists.

Until recently, one of the members of International Media’s board of directors was Gen. Dell L. Dailey, former head of Joint Special Operations Command, which oversees the military’s covert units.

- Asian Tribune -