Pauline Jelinek
Associated Press
via Breitbart.com
10/10/2012
WASHINGTON–A U.S. defense official says an American military team is in Jordan to help with upheaval created by the crisis in neighboring Syria.
He says some 100 military planners and other personnel stayed in Jordan after attending an annual May exercise 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.
The official stressed that the team is not there to fight, but rather for contingency planning on a number of issues including how to handle the flood of Syrian refugees in Jordan and creating a buffer zone to protect the ally in the continuing crisis.
Related: U.S. sends troops to Jordan to monitor Syrian chemical weapons sites
(CNN) — The United States deployed troops to Jordan to help monitor Syria’s stockpile of chemical weapons and determine what efforts to take if violence spreads to neighboring nations, the U.S. defense chief said.
The announcement follows recent news that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s forces moved some of the weapons for security reasons. Reports have emerged that rebels are focusing their efforts on capturing some of the storage sites.
“We continue to be concerned about security at those sites,” U.S. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta said Wednesday after a meeting of NATO ministers in Brussels, Belgium.
“We want to ensure that security is maintained and we want to be very sure that those (weapons) do not fall into the wrong hands.”
Roughly 150 U.S. Army special operations soldiers have been working with Jordanian forces to monitor the chemical and biological weapons sites in Syria while trying to determine how to respond should an issue arise, according to the defense chief…
Is Jordan about to experience its first big moment of the Arab spring?
…The king is under pressure from his western friends to respond convincingly to growing demands for change. Crucially, though, he plans to retain the power to appoint the prime minister and dismiss parliament at will. Overall the proposed new electoral system is still rigged in favour of regime supporters; Palestinian-Jordanians in particular will be significantly under-represented. Critics complain that reforms are more apparent than real…
