When Is Getting It Right 50% of the Time Considered Good?

I know you realize that any time the government’s secret agencies slip up and get caught in some outrageous program or another and the government claims that program has been ended, that it has only gone deeper under cover.

I also know you weren’t fooled by that business whereby the American government claimed it had closed down its secret global prisons, reined in the CIA, and ended torture.

But here’s for the people who did believe it….

CIA operatives have imprisoned and interrogated nearly 100 suspected terrorists in their former secret prisons around the world, but troops from [an]other secret organization have imprisoned and interrogated 10 times as many, holding them in jails that it alone controls in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Since 9/11, this secretive group of men (and a few women) has grown tenfold while sustaining a level of obscurity that not even the CIA has managed. “We’re the dark matter. We’re the force that orders the universe but can’t be seen,” a strapping Navy SEAL, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said in describing his unit.

The SEALs are just part of the U.S. military’s Joint Special Operations Command, known by the acronym JSOC, which has grown from a rarely used hostage rescue team into America’s secret army.

[...]

“The CIA doesn’t have the size or the authority to do some of the things we can do,” said one JSOC operator.

[...]

When Obama came into office, he cottoned to the organization immediately. [...] Soon Obama was using JSOC even more than his predecessor. In 2010, for example, he secretly directed JSOC troops to Yemen to kill the leaders of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

[...]

The president has given JSOC the rare authority to select individuals for its kill list — and then to kill, rather than capture, them.

[...]

Created in 1980 but reinvented in recent years, JSOC has grown from 1,800 troops prior to 9/11 to as many as 25,000, a number that fluctuates according to its mission. It has its own intelligence division, its own drones and reconnaissance planes, even its own dedicated satellites.

[...]

The unit takes its orders directly from the president or the secretary of defense and is managed and overseen by a military-only chain of command.

[...]

Two presidents and three secretaries of defense routinely have asked JSOC to mount intelligence-gathering missions and lethal raids, mostly in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also in countries with which the United States was not at war, including Yemen, Pakistan, Somalia, the Philippines, Nigeria and Syria.

[...]

[On] Sept. 16, 2003, [then Secretary of Defense Donald] Rumsfeld signed an executive order cementing JSOC as the center of the counterterrorism universe. It listed 15 countries and the activities permitted under various scenarios, and it gave the preapprovals required to carry them out.

[...]

JSOC’s success in targeting the right homes, businesses and individuals was only ever about 50 percent, according to two senior commanders. They considered this rate a good one.

  WaPo

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.