Washington, DC - February 7, 2002. In posting two previously undisclosed documents about the Special Operations Forces to their website (http://blowback.org), the political punk band Blowback is asking for their disturbing implications to be clarified. The documents were authored by a member of the US Army and sent to a researcher at the Library of Congress. Blowback is releasing the documents in conjunction with activities planned around a 7:00 PM lecture about the Special Forces at George Washington University by author Tom Clancy and retired General Carl Stiner.
"We must stop romanticizing the Special Forces and face the stark reality that they are trained killers," Blowback said. "While some of them may indeed be idealistic, the fact remains that they train some of the most vicious and repressive armies of the world." In addition to training the Indonesian Kopassus and the Colombian Army, the Special Forces distributed hundreds of copies of the so-called torture manuals in Latin America.
The new documents released by Blowback consist of a memorandum written by a member of the U.S. Army and a letter from that same person to a researcher at the Library of Congress. The researcher has since retired while the current status of the Army person is unclear. The author's identity will be kept confidential pending his notification.
The memorandum, dated 1989, is a hypothetical and whimsical comparison between the effectiveness of the Special Forces and the Rangers in a hostage rescue operation. In the Rangers' case, it concludes, "...the terrorists and most of the passengers would be dead and the airplane would be of no use to anyone but a scrap dealer." In the Special Forces case, "the plane would almost certainly not take off, the terrorists would be dead and have left signed confessions, all of the passengers would have suffered irreparable psychological harm, and all the women would be pregnant."
The letter, dated 1993, comments on a draft report to Congress, highlighting corruption within the Special Forces, concluding that this "deserves Congressional scrutiny because it implies the existence of an armed force that operates above and beyond the law."
The documents are being released by Blowback in the hope of sparking a discussion on the reality of the Special Forces at a time when they are bring glorified and held up as the answer to the so-called war on terrorism, perhaps exemplified by the Clancy/Steiner road show. Information will be distributed to those attending tonight's event.
The band Blowback performed at World Economic Forum protest-related shows in New York City last weekend, in spite of being banned from one New York club performance. Blowback combines activism with protest music. More information is available at http://www.blowback.org.