U.S. Military has Special Ops “Boots on the Ground” in Mexico

[molly]

http://narcosphere.narconews.com/notebook/bill-conroy/2010/06/us-military-has-special-ops-%E2%80%9Cboots-ground%E2%80%9D-mexico

U.S. Military has Special Ops “Boots on the Ground” in Mexico
Posted by Bill Conroy - June 12, 2010 at 7:00 pm

Task Force is Embedded with Mexican Troops, CIA Operative Claims

A special operations task force under the command of the Pentagon is
currently in place south of the border providing advice and training
to the Mexican Army in gathering intelligence, infiltrating and, as
needed, taking direct action against narco-trafficking organizations,
claims a former CIA asset who has a long history in the covert
operations theater.

The U.S. unit, dubbed Task Force 7, since early 2009 , according to
the CIA operative, has helped to uncover a warehouse in Juarez packed
with U.S. munitions and under the control of drug traffickers; provide
critical intelligence that led to the raid of a Juarez sweatshop that
was manufacturing phony Mexican military uniforms; worked with the
Mexican military in uncovering a mass grave near Palomas, Mexico, just
south of Columbus, New Mexico; and, behind the scenes, cooperated with
the Mexican Navy in hunting down a major narco-trafficker, Arturo
Beltran Leyva -- who was killed by Mexican Navy special forces last
December during a raid on a luxury apartment complex in Cuernavaca,
Mexico.

“This task force [one of several in place in Mexico] is pretty heavily
armed and is embedded with the Mexican military,” says Willaim Robert
"Tosh" Plumlee, a former CIA contract pilot who flew numerous missions
delivering arms to Latin America and returning drugs to the United
States as part of the covert Iran/Contra operations in the 1980s.
“These are boots on the ground ... seven to eight of them [in Task
Force 7], working in a civilian capacity, meaning they are not in
uniform.”

Plumlee stresses that the task force’s presence in Mexico pre-dates
the Barack Obama administration, but that it remains active today. For
obvious reasons, information on the unit’s precise location in Mexico
now was not made available, though Plumlee says in the past the group
has operated along Mexico’s northern border, including in Juarez — a
border city south of El Paso, Texas.

Plumlee still has deep contacts in the U.S. intelligence world. His
efforts to expose past CIA complicity in the drug trade are documented
in a letter he sent in 1991 to then U.S. Sen. Gary Hart; in testimony
he provided that same year to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee,
and are spelled out in an exclusive story he provided to the San Diego
Reader in 1990.

In addition, Narco News sources, including former DEA undercover agent
Mike Levine, host of Pacifica Radio’s Expert Witness Radio Show,
contend Plumlee is the real thing.

“Before I invited Tosh to come on the air,” Levine told Narco News
previously, “because his story was so incredible, I vetted him through
government agents, all of whom said he is the real thing. I have a
copy of the air map he turned over to a San Diego weekly newspaper,
bearing notations of all his drug flights, which first sold me on the
guy.”

As evidence of his claims about the U.S. special operations task force
operating in Mexico, Plumlee in early April last year provided Narco
News with information he said he obtained from that task force
detailing the Mexican Army’s investigation of a mass grave site
located outside of Palomas, Mexico. About a month later, in early May
2009, the first press reports appeared in Mexican newspapers
indicating that a mass grave containing at least seven bodies had been
discovered at the same site identified by Plumlee.

At the time of the unearthing of the Palomas mass grave, Narco News
chose not to release specific information about the U.S. task force
for fear that it might compromise lives.

Since that time, however, Plumlee says task force members have become
convinced, due to corruption and leaks within the Mexican government,
that their presence in Mexico is now known to narco-trafficking
organizations. In addition, in recent weeks, there have been a series
of reports in mainstream newspapers, such as the Washington Post and
The Nation magazine, indicating that U.S. special forces teams are
operating in numerous foreign countries.

From a June 4 story in The Nation:

The Nation has learned from well-placed special operations sources
that among the countries where elite special forces teams working for
the Joint Special Operations Command have been deployed under the
Obama administration are: Iran, Georgia, Ukraine, Bolivia, Paraguay,
Ecuador, Peru, Yemen, Pakistan (including in Balochistan) and the
Philippines. These teams have also at times deployed in Turkey,
Belgium, France and Spain. JSOC has also supported US Drug Enforcement
Agency operations in Colombia and Mexico. [Emphasis added.]

Since the task force operations have already been exposed, at least to
the extent that narco-trafficking organizations are surely aware of
their presence in Mexico, Plumlee says making known in the U.S. the
information about Task Force 7 may actually help to protect its
members, via that public sunshine, despite the diplomatic
embarrassment it might prompt – given the U.S. State Department and
Mexican government’s sensitivity to admitting to any type of joint
operations on Mexico soil.

In any event, it is not a particularly closely guarded national
security secret that the U.S. Department of Defense is working
cooperatively with the Mexican military. A statement put out by the
White House back in March 2009 states the following:

DoD has been and is continuing to work with its Mexican counterparts
to increase information sharing, interoperability, and training and
equipping of counternarcotics forces.

In addition, a former U.S. government official who has experience
dealing with covert operations and who also asked not to be named,
says the presence of special operations forces in Mexico “is really
nothing new in terms of how we have dealt with Mexico in the past.”

“Black operations have been going on forever,” the official says. “The
recent [mainstream] media reports about those operations under the
Obama administration make it sound like it’s a big scoop, but it’s
nothing new for those who understand how things really work.”

In fact, U.S. special forces teams, including Delta Force and Navy
Seals, worked with a Colombian task force known as the Search Bloc,
and also, according to some reports, helped to train a paramilitary
death squad known as Los Pepes, as part of the effort to hunt down and
ultimately kill the notorious drug lord Pablo Escobar in the early
1990s.

Plumlee says he has no information or evidence that Task Force 7, or
other similar units he claims are now embedded in Mexico as part of a
drug-trafficking interdiction mission, are involved in training or
assisting Mexican military units to carry out assassinations of narco-
traffickers.

However, the former government official who spoke with Narco News says
it would not be surprising if “assassinations [targeting high-profile
narco-traffickers] were part of the mission.”

“It wouldn’t be the first time,” the official says.

Stay tuned ….