Posted on 01/29/2024 1:44:05 PM PST by george76
In a press briefing on Jan. 17, Pentagon press secretary Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder said, “I’m not aware of any US forces on the ground.”
...
Troops are on the ground in Yemen, according to a report from the White House. When asked if there was a presence there, the Pentagon refused to acknowledge the reality earlier in January.
“A small number of United States military personnel are deployed to Yemen to conduct operations against al-Qa’ida in the Arabian Peninsula and ISIS,” the White House told Congress in a December 7 report.
In a press briefing on Jan. 17, Pentagon press secretary Brig. Gen. Pat Ryder was asked if he could say with confidence that troops were not on the ground in Yemen. He responded, saying, “I’m not aware of any US forces on the ground.”
After reporting on the contradiction, the Intercept reached out for comment from the US Department of Defense.
“Maj Gen Ryder’s prior assertion that there are no US forces on the ground in Yemen remains accurate,” DoD spokesman Lt. Col. Bryon McGarry told the outlet after the report's publication.
Erik Sperling, the executive director of Just Foreign Policy, told reporters, “It’s possible that US forces are spread so widely around the globe that not even the professional tasked with knowing that can keep track of it all."
“But it’s also possible that, given the dramatic expansion in US presence in the region in recent months, he is trying to skirt the question to avoid greater scrutiny," he continued.
> It’s simply not possible to make a plausible case… <
Sure you can. Just use this handy template:
We have to be in (insert foreign location) because if we aren’t (insert bad thing).
This template is nothing new. It was used by both the Roman and British Empires. And it helped cause their collapse. But this time it will be different.
/s
Troops in Yemen is almost meaningless unless you specify the group that is in control of the territory. The part controlled by AlQaeda / ISIS is pretty small.
It’s unlikely they are in Houthi country, at least not except on raids.
They are so bad, they even lie about lying….
Someone remind me again, how many wars did we get into when Donald Trump was ‘the sitting President”?
We don’t need all these clandestine operations. The US is not the world police.
Joe Biden does not plan to be there when the dead return from overseas either.
He is a rotten POS.
What the media labeled The Powell Doctrine I’m pretty sure I saw in the book “On Strategy” long before and Powell took most of his from Weinberg.
Yes.
Powell just refined it some more. All for the better I believe.
Re: 19 - you’re right. It’s pretty obvious many people lack the objectivity to answer the questions in a thoughtful way.
Some of it is ignorance / willful ignorance / intellectual inability or a combination thereof.
Haven’t we had troops in Yemen....like forever??
Better than Colonel Summers in his 1982 book?
While I remember how I first thought of Summers’s 1982 book when I first heard Powell’s version in 1992 my memory isn’t good enough to remember the wording in the book.
“the work of Colonel Harry G.
Summers, who was a classmate of Powell’s at the Command and General Staff
College, proved extremely influential. It is necessary to say a brief word about
how Summers’s book came about to understand its importance. Summers
wrote the book whilst a member of the faculty of the Army War College, and
was specifically tasked with writing an analysis of the failures of US strategy
in Vietnam. Unlike the memoirs mentioned above, Summers was a serving
Military Officer at the time of writing. As such, early drafts of Summers’s
work, which came to be came to be called On Strategy: A Critical Analysis of
the Vietnam War,
10 were distributed to and commented on by the Chief of Staff
of the Army, the Vice Chief of Staff of the Army, the Army Chief of
Operations and Plans, and the Commandant of the Army War College.11 The
original document that would become the book On Strategy also contained
contributions by the CIA and the State Department. On its publication, On
Strategy was incorporated into the course reading lists at both the Army War
College and the Army Command and General Staff College. As such,
Summers’s work, much more so than the memoirs and analyses mentioned
above, carries with it the authority of being at least a semi-official account of
the perceived failures of US strategy in Vietnam, and has been read more
widely within the US Armed Forces than the other works cited above.”
You already got two SEALs KIA, Joe.
Spit.
5.56mm
US troops in Ukraine — that’s kind of an open secret isn’t it.
These bastards aren’t honest about anything ...ever.
*************
That’s because everything is about THEM, not us, the people they are supposed to be serving.
Re: 30 - it’s been a long time since I read On Strategy - good read.
As you write, people have to answer questions about conflict involving U.S. forces in an intellectually honest manner.
Donut Dollies.
I guess so. I wonder how many have been killed and the Administration is keeping silent about it.
“I’m not aware of any US forces on the ground.”
Biden is a master of depleting resources money military freedom state security ...............................
It makes Xi and Putin plans much easier and quicker.
Our foreign policies are a dumpster fire.
Policies of sabotage.
White House admits US has troops on the ground in Yemen
____________________________________________________
We’re just about everywhere else. Why should the Yemenis be left out? But remember! All the other major powers in the world are the “aggressors”, “threats”, “authoritarians” and well...you know the drill.
"We know they are lying.
They know they are lying.
They know we know they are lying.
We know they know we know they are lying.
But they are still lying."
-- Alexandr Solzhenitsyn
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