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For decades, clandestine foreign military and intelligence operations have been the deadly, destabilizing engine of American foreign policy. Today, as exposed by investigative journalist Seth Harp in his new book The Fort Bragg Cartel, 21st-century Special Forces operations have become their brutal, logical successor.

Harp joins host Chris Hedges on this episode of The Chris Hedges Report to highlight the dark culture of violence inflicted by Special Forces operators both abroad and domestically. These operators exist in a world where battlefield impunity spirals into rampant drug use and trafficking, extrajudicial killings and domestic violence. Harp’s reporting insists that these are not isolated events but rather part of a system built on secrecy and unaccountable violence.

“The book,” according to Harp, “is not a work of history, it’s intended to be a murder mystery at the heart of it, kind of a police beat reporting but in order to tell the backstory of these operators’ lives, I recapitulate a brief history of the Global War on Terrorism with a focus on Fort Bragg soldiers in particular, because Fort Bragg is really the beating heart of the global special operations complex, and many people are unaware of its centrality in all of these events.”

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Host

Chris Hedges

Producer:

Max Jones

Intro:

Diego Ramos

Crew:

Diego Ramos and Victor Castellanos

Transcript:

Diego Ramos

Chris Hedges

The decades of warfare in the Middle East and “Global War on Terror” has spawned a vast secret army embodied in special operations units such as the Green Berets, Navy Seals and the shadowy Delta Force. Seth Harp, in his book The Fort Bragg Cartel, calls Delta Force, for example, “a high-tech death squad dedicated to covertly liquidating the male population base of a recalcitrant ethnic and tribal groups that resist U.S. military occupation.”

These secret units, whose very existence is not officially acknowledged and whose vast budgets are hidden, number some 70,000. Harp in his book details how these units are beyond scrutiny or accountability, how they swiftly went rogue when deployed overseas, murdering and torturing with impunity as well as ingesting and trafficking prodigious quantities of drugs.

These elite soldiers returned to the U.S. with not only the skill sets of professional killers, but layers of trauma and rage that fuel acts of violence, including murder, sometimes of their wives and partners. Harp documents dozens of unsolved killings and suicides, some of which appear highly suspicious, in and around Fort Bragg where units such as Delta Force are based.

There were 105 deaths at the base between 2020 and 2021 alone. His book details how military alliances with the world’s leading drug dealers, especially in Afghanistan where the US-backed puppet state was the world’s preeminent heroin cartel, led many in these units to engage in the distribution and sale of vast quantities of narcotics up and down the eastern seaboard.

He chronicles the corruption that came with the deliveries of vast sums of money in shrink wrapped pallets to buy allegiances in Afghanistan, deliveries that saw some of these soldiers pilfer funds — billions of dollars’ worth — and come home with tens of thousands of dollars taped to their bodies, money often used to jump start drug dealing. Catherine Lutz in her book Homefront, her 2002 study on Fayetteville, where Fort Bragg is located, calls the town “a dumping ground for the problems of the American century of war and empire, where the wounds of war have pierced most deeply and are most visible.”

Along with narcotics, elite soldiers sell pilfered weapons from military bases on the black market, sales that may have amounted to billions in lost dollars. Joining me to discuss his book The Fort Bragg Cartel and the rise of these secret armies is Seth Harp.

First of all, it’s a great book. It does what all great — it’s very well written — what all great works of nonfiction should do, which is take a microcosm and extrapolate outwards to explain a cultural or social milieu. I can’t praise it enough. It’s also just a great read. So let’s begin, Seth, with defining for us Delta Force itself, how it was formed as a product, of course, of the Vietnam War and what it does.

Seth Harp

Thanks Chris. Delta Force is what’s called a special mission unit, which are secretive and elite units especially drawn from the Special Forces of the Army, Army Special Forces or Green Berets, also the Army Rangers. It’s open to service members from all branches, but primarily draws from those Army formations.

So it’s kind of a higher tier to the Special Forces, or the most elite tier of the Special Forces, and it’s entirely dedicated to covert actions or things that the government either will deny or will say nothing about their own role in. And as you alluded to earlier, during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the unit effectively functioned as what I describe as a death squad.

Chris Hedges

And, what are they? So I had a friend of mine who was a ranger in Afghanistan and they would be based in a certain area. They would build relationships with local leaders and then suddenly in the middle of the night, one of these black ops units would descend and shoot a bunch of people, and then disappear and they would bear the brunt of all the understandable rage and anger, including the attacks from the Taliban.

I mean, he saw these forces. And I think, as you mentioned in the book [Former US Army General Norman] Schwarzkopf [Jr.] did as well, as really counterproductive to the stated mission of those who were trying to domesticate Iraq and Afghanistan.

Seth Harp

Yeah, that’s not an uncommon sentiment to hear from either tier 2 special forces or guys in the conventional military, regular army, that these units, because they’re so secretive and siloed off because they don’t share any their operational plans with anybody and never talk about them afterwards they kind of come in and do their own thing which typically tends to be striking a target and leaving everyone there dead and the building on fire and then just leaving and nobody can really explain where the intel for that operation came from in many cases perhaps as high as 50% of the cases they’re hitting targets based on faulty intelligence by mistake.

So completely unaccountable and those assassinations were very counterproductive in Afghanistan in particular. The Afghan client state that we set up, as pliable as it was under Hamid Karzai and later under Ashraf Ghani, complained constantly about these night raids.

Drone strikes we have heard a lot more about; there have been more reporting and more books and research done on drone strikes but the other component of it was these night raids or these assassination missions which were designed or intended to decapitate and incapacitate the Taliban resistance but, of course, wholly failed to achieve that mission in the end.

Chris Hedges

Well, as you point out in the book, the way they got target lists was often confiscating cell phones under interrogation and then just adding the people on the cell phones to the list. Isn’t that correct?

Seth Harp

That’s correct, and honestly, even if you share, even if you subscribe to the policy assumptions and are supportive of US foreign policy and support these wars, you should still