Meet Mark Bowden

Mark Bowden is an author, journalist, screenwriter, and teacher. His book Black Hawk Down: A Story of Modern War (1999)— an international bestseller that spent more than a year on the New York Times bestseller list — was a finalist for the National Book Award. Bowden also worked on the screenplay for Black Hawk Down, a film adaptation of the book, directed by Ridley Scott.








I read his book and I know he was the only one the Delta Operators opened up with. He also had unprecedented cooperation from the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (Nightstalkers), Mike Durant’s outfit - Sean Linnane






Bowden is also the author of the international bestseller Killing Pablo: The Hunt for the World's Greatest Outlaw (2001), which tells the story of the hunt for Colombian cocaine billionaire Pablo Escobar. Killing Pablo won the Overseas Press Club's Cornelius Ryan Award as the best book in 2001 and is currently being adapted for film, with Bowden again writing the screenplay. He is also the author of Doctor Dealer (1987), Bringing the Heat (1994), Our Finest Day (2002) and Finders Keepers (2002).












The Ploy published in the Atlantic, May 2007, is the inside story of how the interrogators of Task Force 145 cracked Abu Musab al-Zarqawi’s inner circle — without resorting to torture — and hunted down al-Qaeda’s man in Iraq.




It was a macabre moment of triumph. At a closed compound within Balad Air Base in Iraq, behind Jersey barriers 30 feet high, the men and women of the interrogation mill crowded around a stark display: two freshly dead men, bare and supine on the floor.

The audience members were expert interrogators, most of them young, some of them military, others civilian contract workers. They called themselves “gators,” and they were the intelligence arm of Task Force 145, the clandestine unit of Delta Force operators and Navy SEALs who hunt down America’s most-wanted terrorists. For years, their primary target had been Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian leader of the grandly named Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, the gloating, murderous author of assassinations, roadside bombings, and suicide attacks.

A U.S. PSYOP leaflet disseminated in Iraq shows al-Zarqawi caught in a rat trap. Text: "This is your future, Zarqawi".

Together, living and working inside this “Battlefield Interrogation Facility,” the gators had produced leads for the Task Force to chase. They had put in thousands of hours probing, threatening, flattering, browbeating, wheedling, conning, and questioning, doing what Major General William B. Caldwell IV, in his press conference the next day, would call “painstaking intelligence gathering from local sources and from within Zarqawi’s network.” It was, as Caldwell would put it, “the slow, deliberate exploitation of leads and opportunities, person to person,” all striving to answer just one critical question: Where is Zarqawi right now?

Al-Zarqawi's global terrorist network.

This day, June 7, 2006, had finally produced the answer.

And so here he was, stretched out on the floor, stiff, pale, gray, and swollen in death, his “spiritual adviser,” Sheikh al-Rahman, lying alongside him. The men had been killed, along with two women and two small children, when an American F-16 had steered first one and then another 500-pound bomb into the house they occupied in a palm grove in the village of Hibhib. Task Force operators had recovered the men’s bodies and carried them as trophies to Balad. Both now had swaths of white cloth draped across their midsections, but were otherwise naked. Zarqawi’s face—wide, round, and bearded, his big eyes closed, a smear of blood still lurid across his left cheek—was unmistakable from his frequent videotaped boasts and pronouncements. He had been more sought-after than Osama bin Laden, and in recent years was considered the greater threat.

No more. The mood was one of subdued celebration. President Bush would call that day to congratulate the Task Force’s boss, the Joint Special Operations Commander Lieutenant General Stanley McChrystal. For many, the satisfaction was tempered by photos of the dead children. They were hard to look at.

The unit’s female J2, or chief intelligence officer, embraced a young woman in a T-shirt and khaki cargo pants who was part of the two-person gator team that had produced what is known in the trade as “lethal information.”

“I am so glad I chose you for this,” she said.

McChrystal himself came by. A tall, slender, very soldierly-looking man, he was an Army briefer during the Persian Gulf War, but has been infrequently seen or photographed in recent years because of his clandestine post. He and his top commanders stared down at Zarqawi with evident satisfaction. Everyone leaned in to listen.






“Yep,” said one of the colonels, “that’s one dead son of a bitch.”






This is must-read stuff. If this link is down, comment below and I will post the entire article here - Sean Linnane

UPDATE AFGHANISTAN: GEN STANLEY McCHRYSTAL

STORMBRINGER already alerted on how General McChrystal’s politically correct instincts resulted in the Pat Tillman Silver star fiasco.

So what’s the deal with McChrystal’s initial command guidance to US and NATO forces in Afghanistan?

NEW US BATTLE RULE: NO FIGHTING NEAR AFGHAN HOMES

The top U.S. general in Afghanistan will soon formally order U.S. and NATO forces to break away from fights with militants hiding in Afghan houses so the battles do not kill civilians, a U.S. official said Monday . . .
. . . McChrystal will issue orders within days saying troops may attack insurgents hiding in Afghan houses if the U.S. or NATO forces are in imminent danger and must return fire, said U.S. military spokesman Rear Adm. Greg Smith.
"But if there is a compound they're taking fire from and they can remove themselves from the area safely, without any undue danger to the forces, then that's the option they should take," Smith said. "Because in these compounds we know there are often civilians kept captive by the Taliban."

General Stanley McChrystal has just broken a combination of Rules No 2 and No 3 of Sean Linnane’s 3 Rules of Leadership:

#1 Never Lie to the Troops

#2 Never tell a man to do anything you’re not willing to do yourself.

#3 Never Give an Order you know won’t be obeyed.

McChrystal's command guidance forces combat commanders and NCOs to modify their behavior, to seek loopholes – in military planning terms, this General Officer guidance is known as an artificial constraint.

General McChrystal's order basically outlines tactical guidance for the enemy: if you were the Taliban, where would you initiate all contact from now on?

This order will cause our forces to hesitate under fire, and in combat hesitation is fatal.

Essentially, we've just instituted the same self-imposed "no-fire" zones that assisted our Communist enemies in Vietnam.

Gen. Stanley McChrystal, who took command of international forces in Afghanistan this month, has said his measure of effectiveness will be the "number of Afghans shielded from violence," and not the number of militants killed.

I agree with one aspect of this sentence: in war, body count math is not a measure of victory.

CHANGE OF COMMAND IN AFGHANISTAN

On Lt Gen McChrystal replacing Gen McKiernan - The situation is comparable to Lincoln’s search of a replacement for McClellan; there are a lot of officers out there who know their stuff on paper but putting it together under field conditions - even in training - is another thing altogether. Leaders who are able to field and lead forces against an enemy willing to stand and fight calls for very unique leadership capabilities. This is something I know about. LTG McChrystal proved himself in this department: as commander of JSOC he got al-Zarqawi's scalp and nailed it to his lodge pole.

During spring of 2007 McChrystal led JSOC, attached forces and other government agencies in a series of highly effective covert operations in Iraq that coincided with the troop surge. McChrystal's forces employed a concept dubbed "collaborative warfare": a range of tools from signal intercepts to human intelligence to find, target, and kill insurgents. It has been suggested that it was this effort, not the well-publicized surge, that was responsible for the drop in violence in 2007–2008

McChrystal got egg on his face in the aftermath of the Pat Tillman Silver Star fiasco. Former professional football player Pat Tillman was killed by friendly fire in Afghanistan on April 22, 2004; McChrystal approved a posthumous Silver Star for Tillman. The day after sending the paperwork forward, however, McChrystal apparently sent an urgent memo warning senior government officials not to quote the phrase "in the line of devastating enemy fire," in the citation because it "might cause public embarrassment" if Tillman had in fact been killed by friendly fire, as McChrystal suspected.

McChrystal was recommended for discipline by a subsequent Pentagon investigation but the Army declined to take action against him. I personally have a hard time forgiving him for this. A friend of mine, Brigadier General Gary Jones, took the hit on this when Army Special Operations Command made him one of the scapegoats, after the fact. Jones was retired but they let McChrystal walk. To me the whole thing smacks of officer CYA after-the-fact; why did McChrystal sign the citation if he suspected friendly fire?

As long as I stood in formation and wore jump wings on my chest – 25 years – the Army always told me the worst thing you can do is screw up a military funeral. You can screw up anything else and we’ll cover for you, but a veteran's funeral must be pulled off without a hitch. McChrystal was a key player in the Tillman tragedy of errors - he must be pretty good; they kept him around and now they put him in charge of the main effort of the GWOT, or whatever it is we’re calling it these days.

To me, McChrystal is either a Ulysses S. Grant or he's a George Armstrong Custer. Grant climbed all the way to the top via a list of quantifiable achievements; Custer was a politician and a ticket puncher and we all know how that ended. Let's hope LTG McChrystal is the former not the latter.

SEAN LINNANE SENDS