Gordon Duff Reports

Gordon Duff is a Marine Vietnam veteran, a 100% disabled vet. He has been a featured commentator on TV and radio including Al Jazeera and his articles have been carried by news services around the world. He has been a UN Diplomat, defense contractor and is a widely published expert on military and defense issues. Duff is Senior Editor at Veterans Today and an outspoken advocate for veterans; his powerful words have brought about change.

Gordon is a lifelong PTSD sufferer from his war experiences, and he is empathetic to the plight of today's veterans also suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Gordon's timely and critical reports have been featured on Salem-News.com, a news organization staffed by a number of veterans, particularly former U.S. Marines. You can send Gordon Duff an email at this address: Gpduf@aol.com

On May 15, 2011, Duff wrote regarding the use of Navy SEALS in the exercise to capture or kill Osama:

One thing is clear. SEALS were chosen because of their history of secrecy. The entire “bin Laden/Abbottabad” operation is a fiction. The ploy was to use Navy SEALS to trade on their reputation and heroism in order to “sell” a cover story to serve a long series of agenda’s.
The real end result for members of America’s armed forces is to have them cast as bullies, liars and murderers. What we have is a replay of the Delta Force’s operation at Tora Bora, a theatrical construct with a wild story intended on providing a rationale for a decade of war, begun, sustained and ultimately lost based on a fairy tale.

The original “Tora Bora follies,” Osama bin Laden and his entourage leaving his massive luxurious underground complex in a fleet of white GMC Yukon XLs with the aid of local warlords while the Delta Force was “called back for consultation” is as believable as the mysterious funeral of the imaginary Osama bin Laden, an old man seen on video watching television whose biometric signature in no way remotely resembles the facial recognition patterns of the real Osama bin Laden. Bin Laden, the real bin Laden, worked for years with the CIA and was photographed many times.

Veterans Today contributor and senior defense analyst, Brigadier General Asif Haroon Raja made the following observations:

Hardly a week has lapsed since the shattering news of helicopter assault by US SEALs leading to Osama bin Laden’s death and already several branches have sprouted from the trunk of the original story.

Too many doubts are being expressed about the authenticity of the claims made by rejoicing US leaders. As the clouds of skepticism are getting thicker, euphoria of US leadership is correspondingly getting deflated.

Or it was a hoax to cash upon the ghost of Osama? Or was it to stir up uprising in Pakistan similar to the ones in Arab countries and then make it a pretext to take actions as in case of Libya?

Even if we blindly accept the one-sided US story, how come Osama being a trained fighter with no dearth of chivalry chose to live in a house which had no protection? Like the minefield being of no value unless covered with fire, high walls of the house are of no consequence without inner protective shield.

Since the house was devoid of arsenal and he had not put up token resistance even with his personal weapon, it means Osama had given up militancy and was leading a quiet and peaceful life with his family. Was it fair to kill an unarmed man?
Pretext of his burial at sea is unconvincing since the Afghans are not inclined to the idea of shrines. Osama was wanted since 2001 dead or alive. How come, when the golden trophy was seized, it was disposed off in indecent haste rather than displaying it in all the 50 states of USA? The US has yet to furnish proofs that Osama was killed. No photograph of his dead body within the Abbottabad house or before and during his burial at sea has been displayed.

More recently Duff acknowledged  that the bin Laden operation was a "theatrical farce," staged to cover the exit of Secretary Robert Gates and the move by former CIA Director Leon Panetta into the DOD as Secretary of Defense and abort the possibility of "heroic claims by new CIA Director Petraeus of killing the long dead Osama bin Laden, the long frozen CIA operative." He introduced his article on August 6 with the following prefatory comment:

Today 31 NATO troops, 20 of them Navy Seals from the Osama bin Laden operation died in what is reported as a helicopter crash in Afghanistan. The chances of this story being true is almost nil.  The chances of this being a staged coverup is over 80%.  We believe these people were murdered to silence them.  This is why.

Duff indicates that a faction in the military who supported George W. Bush, saw a:

...continuing need to vilify a long dead top CIA operative to provide residual cover for the Bush administration. The reason?  Bush and his cronies are all facing charges of war crimes, not just in minor jurisdictions but heading for the ICC, putting them on the dock with Gaddafi ( a far less harmful character). As for the timing of this incident?  This we will work on.  What we can easily surmise is that some of the dead have been dead since their bodies were taken away from the helicopter crash site in Abbotabad.

 Further, Duff stated in that article:

When VT saw why the government staged this, we saw we could accomplish two things:

1. We could simply report the truth for those willing to believe it, something we believe is the right thing to do.
2. We could also support the United States in a very real way, knowing Pakistan would weather this crisis, timed, in some ways, as a face saving move in response to the embarrassing Raymond Davis affair.  I believed if the truth came out, clear enough for insiders, intel and miliary for sure, to understand that we knew and other insiders knew, there would be no reason to “clean house” afterward, to stage a coverup and get rid of any involved.

 As a former insider, and a friend of those who watch what goes on inside on a daily basis, subject to an oath of secrecy, Duff analyzes events in a different manner than the pundits who broadcast the so-called news on TV 24 hours a day:

Someone had gotten to someone.  My best guess and this is a guess…an expose’ by the mainstream media, perhaps Murdoch, another guess, conjecture I admit, regarding the farce at Abbottabad, information possibly gotten through spying, bribery and blackmail, threatened to take down Obama.
With Murdoch’s good friend and “monkeyboy,” Netanyahu ‘on the ropes,” with crowds marching in Israel’s streets demanding his ouster, we have more timing to factor in.
The bin Laden killing, the third rate drama of capturing an unarmed frozen dead guy and throwing him into the ocean had probably become an albatross around certain high ranking necks.
Norway was no accident, it was a warning too.  It has been containerized, just as the Murdoch espionage issue is now “poor Rupert and the pie thrower.”
These Americans are casualties in a game, one like 9/11, sacrificial pawns, like Britain’s 7/7, all lies, all theatre, all evil.

Following this article is an attachment--a videoed interview of a neighbor of the house where bin Laden had allegedly lived and been killed. The interview transcript was translated below:

...

Bashir: We were awake, not asleep, a helicopter came, some men came down from that, into that house, then that helicopter went away
Reporter: How many men?
Bashir: 10-12, then that helicopter took rounds of those rear hills, then he came back and when he came back, two more helicopters arrived, one from the west and other from the north, there was a blast in the first helicopter and it was on fire, we immediately came out, when we reached there, the helicopter was burning, then after about 20 minutes the army and police arrived, they pushed us back, now we are asking that, if osama was here then who took him to america, because all those men that came in the helicopter died in the blast, now if Osama was in that helicopter he must have died and got burnt in that helicopter too, then how they took him? this is a question of serious concern. America claims they they killed him and picked him up. How they picked him up? This is what we are thinking
Reporter: Was there only one helicopter?
Bashir? Yes the other that came flew away to Mansehra, there was only one that landed the men and came back to pick them but as he was picking them up, it blew up and caught fire.
Reporter: The men were in it when it blew?
Bashir: Yes They were.
Reporter : How you know?
Bashir: We saw it with our own eyes
Reporter: You saw dead man?
Bashir: Yes, dead men,
Reporter: How many?
Bashir: I couldn't count them because then the compound was on fire. The gate was open, we went in, the army and police hadn't arrived then, there were some people but they weren't stopping them. The whole neighborhood has seen that but they are silent now....

 There is another video clip of a Gordon Duff interview of the Pakistan Station Chief that follows about the Raymond Davis matter.

Tension in Pakistan Intensified

Navy SEALs Team

Read about Seal Team Six.

by Jake Tapper, ABC News

"The Navy SEALs team that conducted this operation was the legendary Team Six, aka DevGru, or the “Naval Special Warfare Development Group,” flown into Pakistan by helicopter teams  from the 160th Special Operations Air Regiment, part of the Joint Special Operations Command....

"For years, from detainees at Gitmo, the CIA had the nom de guerre of the courier, but they didn’t have his true name until 2007. Intel spotted him in early 2009 – it took a while to follow him . Last August when intel found the compound the reaction was along the lines of “Oh my God who are they hiding here?” a [sic] official said, recalling definite recognition this was a significant find. Congressional leaders were briefed about the compound in December.

"One possible complication: While CIA contractor Ray Davis was in the Pakistani prison there were concerns about his safety were this mission to be conducted.

"Davis’s March 16 release cleared that possible obstacle to the operation -- a kill mission, with the clear objective to kill bin Laden."

According to this story, the CIA had the name of Osama's courier as early as 2007, had located him more than two years ago, and followed him to the walled mansion where Osama was allegedly hiding in August of 2010. If we look at a map of Pakistan, we find that the mansion was in Abbottabad, 75 miles northeast of the capital of Islamabad. Lahore, where Raymond Davis was captured and imprisoned, is about 235 miles by car southeast of the capital city.

According to an article in the Washington Post in January, "Davis arrived in Pakistan in September 2009 as a 'technical adviser' to the consulate in Lahore, according to sources who said his job was to assist in vetting visa applicants. His initial three-month diplomatic visa, listing his birth year as 1974 and a home address in Las Vegas, has been repeatedly extended at U.S. request since then." The same report revealed that an embassy statement said Davis "was assigned to the embassy in Islamabad and was working under a diplomatic passport with a visa that expires in June 2012."

In 2003, according to Josh Rogin of The Cable: Foreign Policy, Osama appointed Abu Faraj al-Libbi his official messenger between himself and al-Quaeda members in Pakistan, necessitating a move with his family to Abbottabad, where Osama had built the "compound," eight times larger than the next biggest house in the affluent area--a neighborhood inhabited by many retired Pakistani military officials--where he has been in hiding for the last six years. Not long after moving into the compound in 2005, al-Libbi was captured, but a trusted assistant of his, who was also a protégé of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, took over the courier role. After identifying this man, it took intelligence officials four years to be able to trace him to the compound where he and his brother were living in August of last year.

Since that time, the Navy Seal team who killed Osama have been engaged in very secret training exercises in Afghanistan, preparing for the raid, which had to be delayed because of the flap that recently occurred in Lahore, involving CIA asset Raymond Davis, who apparently had no connection with or knowledge of the courier tracked to Abbottabad. Richard Holbrooke's replacement, Marc Grossman, arrived in Pakistan two days prior to the raid on Osama in order to work out details of a "strategic dialogue scheduled to be held in Islamabad at the end of May, and to attend a trilateral meeting on Afghanistan with his Pakistani and Afghan counterparts" to sort out the tension that resulted after Davis' killing of two Pakistani citizens.


Daniel Markey, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, theorized to Rogin: "This really strikes at the myth of the strength of the Pakistani military and intelligence services. Either they are incompetent or they are actively complicit. Either way is no good so there is no win....Given how really angry they've been with us in recent months, the idea they would see this as an important opportunity to mend fences just isn't likely."

Task Force 373--America's own Death Squad

During World War II, the Nazis had mobile killing units called "Einsatzgruppen", German SS and police squads tasked to murder political enemies behind German combat lines. Today we have our own; we call it Task Force 373.

CIA Spy Captured Giving Nuclear Bomb To Terrorists

Posted by EU Times on Feb 11th, 2011

The Nato coalition in Afghanistan has been using an undisclosed "black" unit of special forces, Task Force 373, to hunt down targets for death or detention without trial. Details of more than 2,000 senior figures from the Taliban and al-Qaida are held on a "kill or capture" list, known as Jpel, the joint prioritised effects list. In many cases, the unit has set out to seize a target for internment, but in others it has simply killed them without attempting to capture. The logs reveal that TF 373 has also killed civilian men, women and children and even Afghan police officers who have strayed into its path.

The United Nations' special rapporteur for human rights, Professor Philip Alston, went to Afghanistan in May 2008 to investigate rumours of extrajudicial killings. He warned that international forces were neither transparent nor accountable and that Afghans who attempted to find out who had killed their loved ones "often come away empty-handed, frustrated and bitter".

Now, for the first time, the leaked war logs reveal

Afghanistan war logs: the glossary

What do all those military initials mean? This is our guide 

Datablog: Guardian selection of key events data

details of deadly missions by TF 373 and other units hunting down Jpel targets that were previously hidden behind a screen of misinformation. They raise fundamental questions about the legality of the killings and of the long-term imprisonment without trial, and also pragmatically about the impact of a tactic which is inherently likely to kill, injure and alienate the innocent bystanders whose support the coalition craves.

On the night of Monday 11 June 2007, the leaked logs reveal, the taskforce set out with Afghan special forces to capture or kill a Taliban commander named Qarl Ur-Rahman in a valley near Jalalabad. As they approached the target in the darkness, somebody shone a torch on them. A firefight developed, and the taskforce called in an AC-130 gunship, which strafed the area with cannon fire: "The original mission was aborted and TF 373 broke contact and returned to base. Follow-up Report: 7 x ANP KIA, 4 x WIA." In plain language: they discovered that the people they had been shooting in the dark were Afghan police officers, seven of whom were now dead and four wounded.