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Washington claims its only direct involvement in France’s military intervention in Mali includes the US Air Force flying in French soldiers and 124 tons of equipment. Beyond that, the Pentagon will only admit vaguely to “intelligence support.” Whether the US is flying drones in Mali, whether Special Operations teams are secretly conducting operations inside Mali, and whether the CIA is covertly involved – the Pentagon has no comment.<\/p>\n
Danger Room<\/a>:<\/p>\n [George Little, the Pentagon\u2019s chief spokesman]\u00a0wouldn\u2019t discuss any unarmed U.S. surveillance drones reportedly\u00a0considered for use over Mali at French request<\/a>. Nor would he discuss the use of any special-operations forces in the conflict. Since 9\/11, unconventional forces and surveillance aircraft have often been a\u00a0vanguard for a direct U.S. role in campaigns against terrorist organizations<\/a>\u00a0that relocate to areas where they perceive they won\u2019t be pursued.<\/p>\n But the emerging line from the Pentagon is that, for now at least, the Mali war isn\u2019t going to be like that. U.S. troops are \u201cnot contributing\u201d to a training effort for African forces that France wants to conduct ground operations in Mali, Little said. The Pentagon is still considering a French request for midair refueling aircraft. And outside a handful of Air Force communications specialists who helped direct traffic at an air base near Bamako, U.S. personnel haven\u2019t been on the ground in Mali.<\/p>\n \u201cOur support of French operations in Mali does not involve what is traditionally referred to as boots on the ground,\u201d Little told reporters during a Tuesday briefing. There\u2019s a caveat: \u201cWe don\u2019t have any plans to put on the ground at this time in support of French operations.\u201d And Little wasn\u2019t speaking to any possible\u00a0CIA<\/em>\u00a0involvement in Mali; it\u2019s worth noting that the CIA has placed operatives on the ground\u00a0in places where the U.S. has publicly stated it wouldn\u2019t send ground troops<\/a>.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n There has already been some evidence that in the months preceding the French intervention, the US had been flying drones over Mali<\/a> and secretly conducting special operations inside the country<\/a>. They didn’t tell us about that; I’m not sure why they’d tell us whether it was going on now.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Washington claims its only direct involvement in France’s military intervention in Mali includes the US Air Force flying in French soldiers and 124 tons of equipment. Beyond that, the Pentagon will only admit vaguely to “intelligence support.” Whether the US is flying drones in Mali, whether Special Operations teams are secretly conducting operations inside Mali, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":86,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-17886","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17886","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/86"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17886"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17886\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17889,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17886\/revisions\/17889"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17886"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17886"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17886"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=17886"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}