Rumsfeld's P2OG vision for the expansion of JSOC and ISA was just the beginning. His successors Gates and Panetta, both of whom served under Obama, continued to expand JSOC. With its own "intelligence division, its own drones and reconnaissance planes, even its own dedicated satellites," in Arkin's words, JSOC has effectively tripled in size since 9/11.
As of 2013, its budget was $10.41 billion. According to one former senior JSOC commander, in 2009, "Obama gave JSOC unprecedented authority to track and kill terrorists, to 'mow the lawn.'"
The SEAL, Delta and CIA units involved in the bin Laden raid were operating under JSOC's ISA programme.
The role of the ISA (which is now known as Mission Support Activity) in Afghanistan"--"including sponsorship of networks linked to bin Laden during the Cold War, continuing through the tracking and assassination of the al-Qaeda founder"--"underscores the extent to which bin Laden-related operations were heavily compartmentalised from the wider intelligence community. Information on the operation was available only to a few senior officials with oversight in JSOC, and on a need-to-know basis.
Although then CIA chief Leon Panetta exercised overall command over the operation, JSOC Commander, Admiral William H. McRaven, had maintained actual command during the raid.
Yet contradictions in the official accounts of the bin Laden raid demonstrate that so far, there are few compelling reasons to believe the White House's narrative of the assassination.
Details of the operation's execution have been repeatedly chopped, changed, shifted, and altered, often by White House officials themselves. The threedifferent insider accounts put forward by Navy Seal members who participated in the raid are all inconsistent.
The fog of war might explain some of those discrepancies, but what can explain the contradiction between the claims of two CIA directors about the raid?
John Brennan, then National Security Advisor to Obama and now CIA Director, told journalists immediately after the raid:
"We were able to monitor in a real-time basis the progress of the operation from its commencement to its time on target to the extraction of the remains and to then the egress off of the target" We were able to monitor the situation in real time and were able to have regular updates and to ensure that we had real-time visibility into the progress of the operation. I'm not going to go into details about what type of visuals we had or what type of feeds that were there, but it was"--"it gave us the ability to actually track it on an ongoing basis."
Later, however, then CIA Director Pannetta, who had overall command over the operation with JSOC, contradicted Brennan in an interview on PBS:
"Once those teams went into the compound, I can tell you that there was a time period of almost 20--25 minutes where we really didn't know just exactly what was going on. We had some observation of the approach there, but we did not have direct flow of information as to the actual conduct of the operation itself as they were going through the compound. There were some very tense moments as we were waiting for information. But finally Adm. [William] McRaven came back and said he had picked up the word 'Geronimo,' which was the code word that represented they got bin Laden."
Whichever of these accounts is true"--"Brennan's or Pannetta's"--"one of them is a lie. Based on the ongoing failure to resolve the contradictory accounts of what actually happened inside the compound, this would suggest that Pannetta's account is correct: White House officials, including Pannetta himself"--"who was the CIA director at the time"--"did not have direct visuals of the conduct of the operation within the compound (including the actual assassination of bin Laden). They were basing their claims about the details of the operation on what they were told about it by those who executed it.
Yet, it seems, even those who conducted the operation did not seem to have a clear understanding of what it had involved, resulting in contradictory versions of the story, many of which went on to be publicised by Obama administration officials.
Rather than investigating these bizarre discrepancies about one of the most important covert operations in US history, White House officials decided to rush to announce the raid, and to pretend that Obama and other cabinet members had personally witnessed and verified the events of that day.
Yet according to Jack Murphy, a former US Army Senior Weapons Sergeant in a Military Free Fall team in 5th Special Forces Group who served in Afghanistan and Iraq:
"Various accounts of the raid itself have surfaced in recent years, some more accurate than others, none of them close to telling the full account. Contrary to official denials, helmet cam video of the raid does exist."
If the video feed of the raid itself does exist, why was it not broadcast to White House officials? Did JSOC keep White House officials in the dark about the real-time execution of the operation?
So resolute was JSOC Commander Adm. McRaven's determination to ensure that public scrutiny of the bin Laden raid, and events leading up it, will remain forever locked down, he ordered all government records relating to the raid to be transferred to the CIA, and deleted from Pentagon files. This guarantees that no information on the raid can ever be gained under Freedom of Information Act requests, and that the real details of the operation will indefinitely remain a closely-guarded intelligence secret.
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