Book review: ‘The Way of the Knife: The CIA, a Secret Army, and a War at the Ends of the Earth’ [View all]

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http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/book-review-the-way-of-the-knife-the-cia-a-secret-army-and-a-war-at-the-ends-of-the-earth-by-mark-mazzetti/2013/04/05/88e07306-9af8-11e2-9a79-eb5280c81c63_story.html?hpid=z3

Book review: ‘The Way of the Knife: The CIA, a Secret Army, and a War at the Ends of the Earth’ By Mark Mazzetti

The Penguin Press) - “The Way Of The Knife: The CIA, a Secret Army, and a War at the Ends of the Earth” by Mark Mazzetti

On May 1, 2011, CIA Director Leon Panetta was in command of the single most important U.S. military operation since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001: the Navy SEAL Team 6 assault on a mysterious compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, where Osama bin Laden was suspected to be hiding. The SEALs were sneaking into Pakistan without the permission of its government on a covert “deniable” mission in a country that was supposedly allied to the United States. Because U.S. law forbids the military to do this kind of work, the SEALs were turned over to the control of the CIA and were “sheep-dipped” to become, in effect, spies under Panetta’s nominal control.

Yet isn’t the CIA’s real job to steal other countries’ secrets, rather than to carry out targeted killings?

A few years before the bin Laden operation, Lt. Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, then the head of Joint Special Operations Command, had turned the Army’s Delta Force and Navy SEAL Team 6 into a fighting machine in Iraq and Afghanistan that increasingly mounted operations to gather intelligence — what McChrystal termed “a fight for knowledge.”

Yet aren’t Special Operations forces the “door kickers” whom you send in to kill or capture terrorists rather than the guys who collect intelligence?