National Security Agency plays a significant, central role in the U.S. assassination program.

" America's global capture/kill machine "
“We just had a field day,” a senior JSOC commander told the Post.

In 2002 Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld established the Strategic Support Branch (SSB), which included "new clandestine teams" made up of "case officers, linguists, interrogators and technical specialists" who were deployed alongside JSOC forces.

Together these teams contributed to a system where JSOC's intelligence operations "were feeding its action and often that intelligence WAS NOT VETTED de of the JSOC structure," Scahill writes. "The priority was to keep hitting targets

The insulated intelligence led to a lot of people being killed — some of whom were innocent.

"You go in and you get some intelligence ... and [Special Ops forces] kill 27, 30, 40 people, whatever, and they capture seven or eight," U.S. Army Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson (Ret.), who served as Secretary of State Colin Powell's chief of staff (2002-05) , told Scahill. "Then you find out that the intelligence was bad and you killed a bunch of innocent people and you have a bunch of innocent people on your hands, so you stuff 'em in Guantanamo. No one ever knows anything about that.
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No wonder they didn't want them tried in the US we would of found out they were innocent.

excerpts from:
 Spencer Ackerman of Wired
"Dirty Wars: The World Is A Battlefield,"