From: Barry Stoller <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: WWIII update - Permanent war, secret war HTTP://WWW.STOPNATO.ORG.UK --------------------------- AP; Reuters. 22 October 2001. War Details Remain Secret for Years; Anti - Terrorism War Could Last Years - UK Military. WASHINGTON and MUSCAT -- A decade later, Americans still don't know how far special operations forces went inside Iraq during the Gulf War. Some parts of the fighting in Kosovo and Vietnam -- even Korea -- remain sketchy. Even in conventional wars, the secrets are many. In the war against terrorism, where special operations forces play a crucial, almost unprecedented role, the public may never learn more than a sliver of what happens inside Afghanistan. "If they catch someone on the most-wanted terrorist list, they might eventually acknowledge that," said John Pike, a military and intelligence analyst in Washington. "But not quickly. Anybody they'll catch, they're going to want to interrogate first" in secret, to help catch others. And when American special ops soldiers die? "They'll tell us that," Pike said. "But they may not say where -- or how." Saturday's overnight raids by 100 airborne Army Rangers and other special forces into southern Afghanistan were the first publicly acknowledged covert missions of the war -- and a bit of an anomaly. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Monday that no prisoners were taken. [N.B.] But he said officials would never again provide such detail. U.S. officials would not say what the raid's objectives were, beyond gathering "useful intelligence" on the movements of Taliban leaders, specifically leader Mullah Mohammed Omar. They wouldn't say what they found, beyond a cache of weapons and documents. They said two soldiers were killed in a helicopter crash in neighboring Pakistan, but provided almost no details. Two U.S. officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said troops were still conducting secret operations inside Afghanistan -- including some operations that will be kept secret even when they're over. "Some of the invisible operations we will provide information on," said Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. "There will be other invisible operations where we will not say a thing." Americans were so outraged by the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon that they will give the military much leeway to wage war, and will not demand constant accounting, said Ivo Daalder of the Brookings Institution. But over time, "If people don't get a sense of movement, that this is the direction things are headed, they are going to get extraordinarily antsy," said Dan Goure, a defense analyst at the Lexington Institute. The military will announce its successes, most believe, perhaps omitting details of how they happened. But secrecy also allows officials to hide bad news, at least temporarily. They might wait to announce troop deaths, for example, until they also can announce positive results. Goure noted that many military operations, both special ops and conventional, become public only when former soldiers tell war stories -- sometimes decades later. [N.B.] Details of the killing of refugees at No Gun Ri by Army troops in 1950 took a half-century to surface, Goure said. [N.B.] Information about Sen. Bob Kerrey's actions as a Navy SEAL in Vietnam came out more than 30 years later. Stories of special ops teams hunting Scud missile sites in the Gulf War have appeared, but there has been no hard information about how far the teams went into Iraq. It's still unclear where all the Apache helicopters were based during the Kosovo air campaign, Pike said. All of that secrecy will be magnified in Afghanistan -- and beyond. "Here, almost everything we do will be behind the line of secrecy," Daalder said. Meanwhile, Britain's military chiefs said on Monday that the international war on terrorism could go on for years and they are planning for the long haul. The stark assessment was made by Air Force and Navy commanders who flew into Oman for operation Swift Sword, Britain's biggest military exercise since the 1982 Falklands War. It was planned as a war game but now looks increasingly like a dress rehearsal for the real thing. Rear Admiral Alan West's assessment was blunt: "I have taken the prime minister (Tony Blair) at his word that it will go on for years because I think it will. I have looked at how to maintain levels of commitment for years." Air Chief Marshal Sir John Day, commander-in-chief of the Royal Air Force strike command, agreed: "We are into a long haul but it will depend on what the government decides it wants to do as its contribution." Operation Swift Sword, which has been four years in the planning [N.B.], has brought more than 20,000 British troops to this Arabian peninsula nation just as U.S. and British forces go to war over Afghanistan 600 miles to the north. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Barry Stoller http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ProletarianNews with continuing coverage of WWIII _________________________________________________ KOMINFORM P.O. Box 66 00841 Helsinki Phone +358-40-7177941 Fax +358-9-7591081 http://www.kominf.pp.fi General class struggle news: [EMAIL PROTECTED] subscribe mails to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Geopolitical news: [EMAIL PROTECTED] subscribe: [EMAIL PROTECTED] __________________________________________________
