Thread: SURPRISE: U.S. sends military forces to Jordan...

Panetta: US sends forces to Jordan

By LOLITA C. BALDOR and PAULINE JELINEK | Associated Press – 58 mins ago


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Associated Press/Virginia Mayo - United States Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta gestures while speaking during a media conference after a meeting of NATO Defense Ministers at NATO headquarters in Brussels …more

on Wednesday, Oct. 10, 2012. NATO defense ministers gathered in Belgium Wednesday to begin deliberating the next phase of the Afghanistan war and to hear how military commanders plan to tamp down the insider attacks that have killed or injured 130 allied forces. (AP Photo/Virginia Mayo) less

BRUSSELS (AP) — The United States has sent military troops to the Jordan-Syria border to bolster that country's military capabilities in the event that violence escalates along its border with Syria, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said Wednesday.

Speaking at a NATO conference of defense ministers in Brussels, Panetta said the U.S. has been working with Jordan to monitor chemical and biological weapons sites in Syria and also to help Jordan deal with refugees pouring over the border from Syria. The troops are also building a headquarters for themselves.

But the revelation of U.S. military personnel so close to the 19-month-old Syrian conflict suggests an escalation in the U.S. military involvement in the conflict, even as Washington pushes back on any suggestion of a direct intervention in Syria.

It also follows several days of shelling between Turkey and Syria, an indication that the civil war could spill across Syria's borders and become a regional conflict.

"We have a group of our forces there working to help build a headquarters there and to insure that we make the relationship between the United States and Jordan a strong one so that we can deal with all the possible consequences of what's happening in Syria," Panetta said.

The development comes with the U.S. presidential election less than a month away, and at a time when former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, the Republican nominee, has been criticizing President Barack Obama's foreign policy, accusing the administration of embracing too passive a stance in the convulsive Mideast region.

The defense secretary and other administration officials have expressed concern about Syrian President Bashar Assad's arsenal of chemical weapons.

Panetta said last week that the United States believes that while the weapons are still secure, intelligence suggests the regime might have moved the weapons to protect them. The Obama administration has said that Assad's use of chemical weapons would be a "red line" that would change the U.S. policy of providing only non-lethal aid to the rebels seeking to topple him.

Pentagon press secretary George Little, traveling with Panetta, said the U.S. and Jordan agreed that "increased cooperation and more detailed planning are necessary in order to respond to the severe consequences of the Assad regime's brutality."

He said the U.S. has provided medical kits, water tanks, and other forms of humanitarian aid to help Jordanians assist Syrian refugees fleeing into their country.

Little said the military personnel were there to help Jordan with the flood of Syrian refugees over its borders and the security of Syria's stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons.

"As we've said before, we have been planning for various contingencies, both unilaterally and with our regional partners," Little said in a written statement. "There are various scenarios in which the Assad regime's reprehensible actions could affect our partners in the region. For this reason and many others, we are always working on our contingency planning, for which we consult with our friends."

A U.S. defense official in Washington said the forces are made up of 100 military planners and other personnel who stayed on in Jordan after attending an annual exercise in May, and several dozen more have flown in since, operating from a joint U.S.-Jordanian military center north of Amman that Americans have used for years.

He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk about the mission on the record.

In Jordan, the biggest problem for now seems to be the strain put on the country's meager resources by the estimated 200,000 Syrian refugees who have flooded across the border — the largest fleeing to any country.
Several dozen refugees in Jordan rioted in their desert border camp of Zaatari early this month, destroying tents and medicine and leaving scores of refugee families out in the night cold.

Jordanian men also are moving the other way across the border — joining what intelligence officials have estimated to be around 2,000 foreigners fighting alongside Syrian rebels trying to topple Assad. A Jordanian border guard was wounded after armed men — believed trying to go fight — exchanged gunfire at the northern frontier.

Turkey has reinforced its border with artillery guns and deployed more fighter jets to an air base close to the border region after an errant Syrian mortar shell killed five people in a Turkish border town last week and Turkey retaliated with artillery strikes.

Turkey's military chief Gen. Necdet Ozel vowed Wednesday to respond with more force to any further shelling from Syria, keeping up the pressure on its southern neighbor a day after NATO said it stood ready to defend Turkey.

Panetta: US sends forces to Jordan - Yahoo! News

U.S. Troops In Jordan: Not New And Certainly No Surprise

October 12, 2012 by Bob Livingston


The mainstream media give the impression that events in the Mideast are building on their own, and the United States is just responding to them. For instance, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta announced Wednesday that U.S. troops had been sent to the Jordan-Syria border — as if this were a new development — in the event that violence there escalates.

The truth is the United States is manipulating events there and has been for some time. It’s all part of a plan developed in September 2000 by the neocon organization The Project for the New American Century and reinforced last March by the Brookings Institute. This was the blueprint President George W. Bush used for the Iraq invasion, which he was planning before he took office. It was continued by the President Barack Obama regime.

This deployment of American troops to Jordan is not new. I personally know Marines who were deployed to this same Jordanian base in June 2011, where they worked to train Jordanian soldiers and built up the infrastructure at this staging area. This was just as the U.S.-backed uprising was beginning to bloom.

The road to Iran leads through Syria. Turkey is working hard to get into a shooting war with Syria to form a pretext for a NATO invasion, since both Russia and China vetoed the idea at the United Nations. American troops in Jordan and Turkish troops along the border between those countries force Syria to continue to stretch its defenses thinner to deal with threats from multiple directions.

The globalist power brokers want continued war and instability in the region, and have for more than a decade. They are getting their wish.

U.S. Troops In Jordan: Not New And Certainly No Surprise : Personal Liberty Digest™

America Close to War with Syria: Obama Deployed US Troops to Jordan “Without Notifying Congress”.

Dennis Kucinich: the deployment of American troops in Jordan brings the US "immeasurably" closer to War with Syria

By Global Research News
Global Research, October 13, 2012

US Troops have been deployed to Jordan. They are close to the Syrian border. According to a statement of Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, 100 troops have been deployed to the Syrian border.

US News reports upon a phone interview with Congressman Dennis Kucinich:

Ohio Democratic Rep. Dennis Kucinich believes the deployment of American troops in Jordan — which was announced Wednesday — brings the United States “immeasurably” closer to being dragged into the civil war in Syria.

“I can see in a moment how it happens: we’re a few dozen miles from the Syrian border and all of a sudden we are within the reach of physical danger.

All it takes is a single incident,” Kucinich said in a phone interview with U.S. News.

The Ohio congressman pointed to the fact that this troop deployment, which is described by the Amman government as “routine” (under a bilateral US-Jordan cooperation agreement) was ordered by the president and commander-in-chief “without notifying Congress.”

Defense Secretary Leon Panetta disclosed on Wednesday that over 100 American troops had been sent to near the Jordanian border with Syria.

“As we’ve said before, we have been planning for various contingencies, both unilaterally and with our regional partners,” explained Pentagon spokesman George Little in a statement reported by The Associated Press.

According to Kucinich:

“Putting U.S. troops on that border draws the U.S. much closer to war in Syria, which is a nightmare already and can be more of a nightmare for our country”

“There’s a trail of causality here, … Once you position U.S troops on the border of a conflict area, it immeasurably increases the possibility of the U.S. getting drawn into the conflict — because we’re there.” (quoted in usnews.com, October 10, 2012)

America Close to War with Syria: Obama Deployed US Troops to Jordan “Without Notifying Congress”. | Global Research

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