A12 From Page One
secret from A1
cally useful tools.
Obama, one senior military offi- cial said, has allowed “things that the previous administration did not.”
‘More access’
Special Operations command-
ers have also become a far more regular presence at the White House than they were under the Bush administration, when most briefings on potential future op- erations were run through the Pentagon chain of command and were conducted by the defense secretary or the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “We have a lot more access,” a second military official said. “They are talking publicly much less but they are acting more. They are willing to get aggressive much more quickly.” The White House, he said, is “asking for ideas and plans . . . calling us in and saying, ‘Tell me what you can do. Tell me how you do these things.’ ” The Special Operations capabil- ities requested by the White House go beyond unilateral strikes and include the training of local counterterrorism forces and joint operations with them. In Yemen, for example, “we are doing all three,” the official said. Officials who spoke about the increased op-
S
KLMNO
FRIDAY, JUNE 4, 2010
Number of ‘secret wars’ worldwide increases in Obama administration
erations were not authorized to discuss them on the record. The clearest public description of the secret-war aspects of the doctrine came from White House counterterrorism director John O. Brennan. He said last week that the United States “will not merely respond after the fact” of a terror- ist attack but will “take the fight to al-Qaeda and its extremist affili- ates whether they plot and train in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, So- malia and beyond.” That rhetoric is not much dif- ferent than George W. Bush’s pledge to “take the battle to the enemy . . . and confront the worst threats before they emerge.” The elite Special Operations units, drawn from all four branches of the armed forces, became a front- line counterterrorism weapon for the United States after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
But Obama has made such forces a far more integrated part of his global security strategy. He has asked for a 5.7 percent in- crease in the Special Operations budget for fiscal 2011, for a total of $6.3 billion, plus an additional $3.5 billion in 2010 contingency funding. Bush-era clashes between the
Defense and State departments over Special Operations deploy- ments have all but ceased. Former defense secretary Donald M. Rumsfeld saw them as an inde-
pendent force, approving in some countries Special Operations in- telligence-gathering missions that were so secret that the U.S. ambas- sador was not told they were un- derway. But the close relationship between Defense Secretary Rob- ert M. Gates and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is said to have smoothed out the process. “In some places, we are quite obvious in our presence,” Adm. Er- ic T. Olson, head of the Special Op- erations Command, said in a speech. “In some places, in defer- ence to host-country sensitivities, we are lower in profile. In every place, Special Operations forces activities are coordinated with the U.S. ambassador and are under the operational control of the four-star regional commander.”
Chains of command
Gen. David H. Petraeus at the
Central Command and others were ordered by the Joint Staff un- der Bush to develop plans to use Special Operations forces for in- telligence collection and other counterterrorism efforts, and were given the authority to issue direct orders to them. But those orders were formalized only last year, including in a CENTCOM di- rective outlining operations throughout South Asia, the Horn of Africa and the Middle East. The order, whose existence was first reported by the New York
Times, includes intelligence col- lection in Iran, although it is un- clear whether Special Operations forces are active there. The Tampa-based Special Op-
erations Command is not entirely happy with its subordination to regional commanders and, in Af- ghanistan and Iraq, to theater commanders. Special Operations troops within Afghanistan had their own chain of command until early this year, when they were brought under the unified direc- tion of the overall U.S. and NATO commander there, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, and his operational deputy, Lt. Gen. David M. Rodri- guez. “Everybody working in CENT- COM works for Dave Petraeus,” a military official said. “Our issue is that we believe our theater forces should be under a Special Opera- tions theater commander, instead of . . . Rodriguez, who is a conven- tional [forces] guy who doesn’t know how to do what we do.” Special Operations troops train for years in foreign cultures and language, and consider them- selves a breed apart from what they call “general purpose forces.” Special Operations troops some- times bridle at ambassadorial au- thority to “control who comes in and out of their country,” the offi- cial said. Operations have also been hindered in Pakistan — where Special Operations trainers
THOMAS BOSWELL
In the Motor City, all parties show an ability to take the higher road
boswell from A1
their own a perfect game, a feat ac- complished just 20 times since 1858. And, everywhere, observers shook their heads that a thing that was so sad and screwed up late Wednesday night could, simply by good will and compassion, be turned into something sparklingly fresh, unexpectedly strong and best-of-baseball by Thursday af- ternoon. In fairy tales, human decency
transforms bad into good. Don’t bet too much on that formula working tomorrow. But it did for one day. In an age of stage-man- aged news-conference remorse and corporate shirking of respon- sibility, the Galarraga Imperfecto now shines with a fresh-scrubbed sense of honor. Sometimes, maybe we can tell the difference between what matters and what doesn’t. Handed a baseball disaster
Wednesday night, everyone showed the absolute best in them- selves. In a kind of cascade effect, one person saw unexpected virtue in another and decided, “Well, I guess I can suck it up and do the right thing, too, if he can.” As soon as Joyce saw the replay of his horrible “safe” call at first base, which was wrong by two feet, the respected 22-year big league ump took full responsibili- ty and even sought out Galarraga to apologize personally. “I just missed the damn call. . . .
This isn’t ‘a’ call. This is a history call. And I kicked the [expletive] out of it,” said Joyce, whose post- game stand-up accountability
PAUL SANCYA/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Tigers fans Alan Kideckel, left, of Berkley, Mich., and Matt DuMouchelle, of Windsor, Ontario, hold up signs in support of Armando Galarraga, who was denied the 21st perfect game in major league history.
could be taped and delivered to BP headquarters. “I take pride in this job, and I took a perfect game away from that kid over there who worked his [butt] off all night.” Joyce also sought out Galarraga to apologize.
“I give a lot of credit to that guy.
. . . You don’t see an umpire, after the game, say, ‘I’m sorry.’ Nobody’s perfect,” said Galarraga, who for one night actually was. A mass of Tigers gave Joyce a long face full of curses after his
blunder, but he stood through it, still believing he had been correct, but ejecting no one, letting Tigers Manager Jim Leyland, a genius of baseball blue, give him his best shots.
“If I had been Galarraga, I would have been the first one standing there [screaming]. I would have said something imme- diately,” Joyce said. “He didn’t say a word, not one word.” Just as Joyce was impressed with Galarraga, Leyland was sur-
prised at Joyce, an umpire he al- ready thought was usually one of the best. “The guy had every bit of integ-
rity. He faced the music. He stood there and took it,” Leyland said. “If he would have been defiant and said, ‘No, I got it right,’ then looked at it afterward and said, ‘Well, yeah, I missed it,’ that’s one thing. But this guy was a mess. I mean, a freaking mess. There was nothing phony about it. My heart goes out to him.”
Detroit knows people make
mistakes, have hard times and need a hand up. But even Leyland didn’t know what to expect when he cooked up the idea of Galarra- ga’s symbolic lineup card gesture of conciliation. “This is a day for Detroit to
shine . . . for Tiger fans to show what they are all about,” Leyland said. “I don’t know that they will, but I hope they do.” And, mostly, they did. Sometimes, common sense can win. Obviously, Galarraga pitched a perfect game in every sense that holds any sane meaning. With a night’s sleep, the whole sport seemed to realize that, whether his name is on a list or not, Galar- raga not only had retired the 27 consecutive hitters that constitute a perfect game; he got a 28th con- secutive out, too. So, thanks in a perverse way to Joyce, it will be Galarraga, along with Harvey Haddix, the man who pitched 12 perfect innings before losing in the 13th in 1959, who will rank be- hind only Don Larsen’s World Se- ries masterpiece when perfect games are discussed — even though neither Galarraga nor Haddix technically has a perfect game at all. Perhaps only one person in baseball was flummoxed and in- decisive: the commissioner. Im- promptu polls showed over- whelming public support that Bud Selig simply use his “best interests of baseball” powers to reverse Joyce’s call and make a one-time- only, unique-circumstance, no- precedent decision.
Instead, his office released a
statement that was so muddled — about studying the state of umpir- ing and future uses of instant re- play — that MLB “sources” had to leak what the release actually meant: Selig wouldn’t overturn the call. Fortunately, baseball had so
many stand-up guys jump for- ward so fast that no intercession from a supreme being was neces- sary. After Joyce realized the magni- tude of his mistake — “I missed it from here to the wall,” he said — he thought of Don Denkinger, whose blown call in the 1985 World Series, on a similar flip-to- the-pitcher-play may be the most notorious ever. “I worked with Don Denkinger.
I know what he went through,” Joyce said. “I don’t know what to say.”
But, apparently, almost every- one else did.
“I cannot believe the outpour- ing of support I’ve gotten,” Joyce said before Thursday’s game. “I can’t thank the people enough. I’m a big boy. I can handle this.” There’s a rumor going around
that everybody makes mistakes. But it’s what you do after you make them that matters most. Perhaps it is equally true that how we react to the mistakes of others, especially when they hurt us, reveals us like an open book. Or, as a different Jim Joyce, the writer James Joyce, put it: “A man’s errors are his portals of dis- covery.”
boswellt@washpost.com
hope to nearly triple their current deployment to 300 — by that gov- ernment’s delay in issuing the visas.
Although pleased with their ex- panded numbers and funding, Special Operations commanders would like to devote more of their force to global missions outside war zones. Of about 13,000 Special Operations forces deployed over- seas, about 9,000 are evenly divid- ed between Iraq and Afghanistan. “Eighty percent of our invest- ment is now in resolving current conflicts, not in building capabili- ties with partners to avoid future ones,” one official said.
Questions remain
The force has also chafed at the
cumbersome process under which the president or his designee, usu- ally Gates, must authorize its use of lethal force outside war zones. Although the CIA has authority to designate targets and launch le- thal missiles in Pakistan’s western tribal areas, attacks such as last year’s in Somalia and Yemen re- quire civilian approval. The United Nations, in a report this week, questioned the admin- istration’s authority under inter- national law to conduct such raids, particularly when they kill innocent civilians. One possible legal justification — the permis- sion of the country in question — is complicated in places such as
Pakistan and Yemen, where the governments privately agree but do not publicly acknowledge ap- proving the attacks. Former Bush officials, still
smarting from accusations that their administration overextend- ed the president’s authority to conduct lethal activities around the world at will, have asked simi- lar questions. “While they seem to be expanding their operations both in terms of extraterritoriality and aggressiveness, they are con- tracting the legal authority upon which those expanding actions are based,” said John B. Bellinger III, a senior legal adviser in both of Bush’s administrations. The Obama administration has
rejected the constitutional exec- utive authority claimed by Bush and has based its lethal operations on the authority Congress gave the president in 2001 to use “all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organiza- tions, or persons” he determines “planned, authorized, committed, or aided” the Sept. 11 attacks. Many of those currently being
targeted, Bellinger said, “partic- ularly in places outside Afghani- stan,” had nothing to do with the 2001 attacks.
deyoungk@washpost.com jaffeg@washpost.com
Staff writer Greg Miller contributed to this report.
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