“The Force That Orders The Universe But Can’t Be Seen”

The Washington Post has an excerpt today from Dana Priest and William Arkin’s upcoming book Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State that explores the rise of the military’s secretive Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) and reveals many previously unreported details:

The CIA’s armed drones and paramilitary forces have killed dozens of al-Qaeda leaders and thousands of its foot soldiers. But there is another mysterious organization that has killed even more of America’s enemies in the decade since the 9/11 attacks.

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

Since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, this secretive group of men (and a few women) has grown tenfold while sustaining a level of obscurity that not even the CIA 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. When members of this elite force killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan in May, JSOC leaders celebrated not just the success of the mission but also how few people knew their command, based in Fayetteville, N.C., even existed.

Over the past year, we’ve been reporting with Priest and Arkin on the rise of the terrorism-industrial complex; watch a preview of our upcoming film Top Secret America above. It airs Tuesday night at 9 pm; check your local listings here.