Jeremy Scahill has found gold in the form of confirmation for stories written by he and Seymour Hersh. Today on Democracy Now he discusses JSOC operations in Pakistan, previously denied by Pentagon spokesman, Geoff Morrell.

what the cables say is that on two occasions U.S. special operations forces were embedded with Pakistani units and engaged in offensive combat operations. I have to say, though, that it seems as though either U.S. Ambassador Anne Patterson is out of the loop—she’s the ambassador to Pakistan—or she’s blatantly lying, because U.S. special operations forces have been operating in offensive—in an offensive capacity in Pakistan basically since 9/11. And some would say even before 9/11 there were U.S. covert operations going on there.

Well, that’s one of the reasons why these kinds of operations, these kinetic, direct actions, these lethal operations, are not done by the State Department and they’re not done by the conventional military. When JSOC forces go into a country, as we’ve seen throughout the course of the so-called war on terror, they don’t inform the ambassador as a matter of practice that they’re going to be operating there. In fact, these operations are so compartmentalized, so highly classified, that when I talked to a military veteran who worked with JSOC on Pakistan about these cables, he expressed shock that this was only classified at the secret level. He couldn’t believe his eyes when he saw the JSOC designation in a U.S. embassy cable talking about offensive combat operations. He was outraged that the U.S. embassy even put this on paper, because of where it would go. But the point I’m making here is that oftentimes—and was particularly true under the Bush administration—the U.S. embassy, the CIA station chief, the government of the country where they’re operating, wouldn’t even know if JSOC guys were there. So, you know, this is just the tip of the iceberg of what we know.

Full transcripts available here

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