Fascinating piece today from Bill Arkin, in his Early Warning blog, on Jordanian-American security cooperation, which nicely complements Ken Silverstein's piece in the LA Times last week:
King Abdullah II, himself a former commander of Jordan's special operations force, has forged ever closer military and intelligence ties with the United States.
U.S.-Jordanian intelligence cooperation grew in the 1990's as the Iraqi population and Iraqi commerce grew in the country. Iraqi refugees, businessmen and defectors who set up shop in Amman were exploited and recruited, and Amman became a hub for anti-Saddam operations. After 9/11, according to reporting in the Los Angeles Times, the United States increased funding and technical support for Jordan's General Intelligence Directorate, which today is considered the most effective allied counter-terrorism operation in the Middle East.
The U.S. has also established permanent signals intelligence (SIGINT) monitoring stations in Jordan. There have also been reliable reports that Jordanian secret services and intelligence personnel have done much “dirty work” for their American counterparts, including interrogations and targeted killings. Jordan has been a hub for extraordinary "renditions," or kidnappings, of high value terrorist suspects, and Jordan has tortured and interrogated detainees for the United States.
Most of this work, though obviously known to the bad guys, goes on in the shadows. But this is not the case when it comes to the military cooperation. Jordan flies American F-16s and its units carry out public exchanges with the 162nd Fighter Wing in Tucson, Arizona. The U.S. and Jordan have an active -- and mostly public -- combined exercise program, and since 1993, annual exercises have taken place and U.S. ships pay regular visits to Aqaba.
Jordan was officially designated a combat zone for U.S. personnel on Sep. 19, 2001 and the country has not only provided "secret" basing of U.S. military and intelligence collection personnel, but also was a key anchor of U.S. western Iraqi operations to overthrow Saddam Hussein.
This era of modern U.S.-Jordanian military relations goes back to March 1995, when almost 1,200 personnel and 34 American F-15s and F-16s set up camp at two airbases -- Shaheed Mwaffaq airbase (Muaffaq-as Salti) and H-5 (Prince Hassan) -- near Azraq for almost three months, partly to enforce the Iraqi southern no fly zone. These bases eventually became part of the secret network of U.S. facilities in the Gulf region, and as the 2003 Iraq war neared, U.S., British and Australian special operations forces and intelligence operatives flooded into the country.
On Jan. 30, 2003, Jordan granted blanket overflight rights, facilitating aircraft carrier strikes on Iraq from the eastern Mediterranean. By the eve of the 2003 war, Florida national guardsmen were protecting U.S. bases and supporting special operations efforts at the Iraqi border, communicators of the Rhode Island air national guard had deployed to Jordan to enlarge the infrastructure, five U.S. Patriot missile fire units set up around the Jordanian capital, and Army intelligence aerial surveillance planes were flying along the Iraqi border.
By the beginning of Operation Iraqi Freedom, over 5,000 U.S. and coalition troops were stationed in the country operating Joint Task Force-West under Maj. Gen. Jonathan S. Gration. The UK deployed Harrier Jump jets to support SAS operations in Western Iraq, and Australia deployed helicopters of its 5 th Aviation Regiment.
All of this has been already described in numerous media articles and my book Code Names. Still, the Associated Press reported after the suicide bombings that "the U.S. military has a small presence in Jordan, 71 personnel, at last count," as if this publicly admitted accounting is to be taken seriously.
As Arkin says, none of this is really secret... but it isn't really discussed very much. Certainly in Jordan the topic is treated as having the utmost sensitivity... Jordanians know that the regime has close ties to the United States, but the Jordanian media rarely touches on the extent or nature of that cooperation. It is absolutely vital context for understanding American unwillingness to seriously pressure Jordan on democracy issues. And it's of obvious relevance to understanding the targeting of Jordan by Zarqawi, even if it just as obviously doesn't justify that atrocity.
I read that the woman "suicider" in the Amman bombings, Sajida al-Rishawi, attributed her attempted crime on revenge for the death of her three brothers, including Samer al Rishawi, at the hands of the US military.
And just what about that shoot-out at a jail in Kosovo between US female MPs and Jordanian police? We never got the details on that.
Posted by: Nur al-Cubicle | November 17, 2005 at 10:11 AM