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| Nine reasons why we never sent our Special Operations Forces after al Qaeda before 9/11. |
| 2004-01-20 |
| Interesting article. Check out the link and read the rest. SINCE 9/11, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has repeatedly declared that the United States is in a new kind of war, one requiring new military forces to hunt down and capture or kill terrorists. In fact, for some years, the Department of Defense has gone to the trouble of selecting and training an array of Special Operations Forces, whose forte is precisely this. One president after another has invested resources to hone lethal "special mission units" for offensive—that is, preemptive—counterterrorism strikes, with the result that these units are the best of their kind in the world. While their activities are highly classified, two of them—the Army’s Delta Force and the Navy’s SEAL Team 6—have become the stuff of novels and movies. Prior to 9/11, these units were never used even once to hunt down terrorists who had taken American lives. Putting the units to their intended use proved impossible—even after al Qaeda bombed the World Trade Center in 1993, bombed two American embassies in East Africa in 1998, and nearly sank the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000. As a result of these and other attacks, operations were planned to capture or kill the ultimate perpetrators, Osama bin Laden and his top lieutenants, but each time the missions were blocked. A plethora of self-imposed constraints—I call them showstoppers—kept the counterterrorism units on the shelf... |
| Posted by:tipper |
| #2 |
| Posted by: Zhang Fei 2004-1-20 10:31:31 AM |
| #1 |
| Posted by: Zhang Fei 2004-1-20 10:27:54 AM |