Leon Paneta is the point man for making all US military actions secret.
It’s hard to ignore a mobilization of even smaller units if you live next to a military base. The military never does anything efficiently. Everyone has to be marshaled together in one place under strict controls, with all the necessary equipment on hand, and it all has to be moved at the same time to the place of embarkation. The reason all this is required is because a significant portion of troops are grouchy, whiny, and will always balk at doing anything out of the routine. Even the most elite units have to deal with this. You can’t do that stuff quietly.
Military leadership also make a big deal of OpSec (Operational Security) and not telling folks things they don’t have to know in order to do their jobs, and not telling anyone who isn’t directly involved, regardless how it affects them. Except, military people have families they care about, and don’t want to alarm them by simply disappearing without a word. They find out and tell their friends in the community, and so on. Since almost nothing the military does can’t happen without extra training for the troops involved, the training itself is always a big tip-off. There was a time when such things were most likely just an exercise to get the right punches on the right tickets and satisfy some command coming down through bureaucratic channels. With US troops stretched too thin over too many military adventures these days, there’s no such thing as “just an exercise.”
Just check what optional equipment Joe Snuffy had to pack, what sort of personal supplies, and you’ll know at least the current climate where he’s going. What is flying off the shelves at Wal-Mart? If his sergeant emphasizes insect repellent and sunscreen, it’s summer where he’s going. Sterno cans and hot chocolate? Someplace cold. Compare that with known foreign policy statements and it’s not hard to guess where he’s deploying. Eventually you’ll see in the news somewhere an announcement which confirms your guess. If any of this involves National Guard activation, there will be even less secrecy, as it’s big news in the small town newspaper.
That will change.
This week saw the US Senate approved Leon Paneta as Secretary of Defense. He’s currently Director of the CIA. He has said publicly he would like to see the CIA working with Defense to have more military troops carrying out CIA operations. In case it’s not obvious, more troop deployments on CIA missions puts more military adventures under Black Ops. It means Congress and the voters will be told a whole lot less, for reasons of national security. That means deployments will take on a wholly different character, and the CIA will oversee more details. Troops themselves will know a whole lot less, be jerked around a whole lot more, and everyone will simply have to adjust or face severe punishment for violations of national security.
Thus, the President alone gets to decide who knows what his troops are doing, if even he knows. Paneta has already asserted this is how it should be. John Galt over at Activist Post puts it this way:
This statement is telling, as it refers to Congress as a place where a president should seek advice, not approval. This assertion is the precise difference between a constitutional republic and an authoritarian dictatorship…. Each of the ongoing wars are run as though they are black ops missions: secret prisons, torture centers, citizen surveillance, the fomenting of coups, and CIA-directed drones peppering the military theater and beyond.
So as Paneta moves from the CIA to Defense, he carries a pre-determined plan to run Defense as a ready servant of the CIA and all the evil that entails. Where once the troops had to put up with CIA agents involved in their operations, they now will report to those CIA agents and take orders from them. If you think of the CIA as demons with pretty faces, you would have a fair picture of the ethics and morals under which they operate. As already noted here, the CIA does not serve national interests intentionally. Their agenda is entirely under some branch of the New World Order; the US simply pays for it.
This is not a good time to be an American.
