Perhaps extinguishing any flicker of confidence many Americans might still retain in the honesty of a Biden Department of Defense and the U.S. Congress that already has shown decades of utter contempt for the U.S. Constitution, Department of Defense (DoD) spokesman Maj. Gen Patrick Ryder told reporters on December 19 that, well shucks, you know how we’ve been telling you for almost a year that there were 900 U.S. troops in Syria? Well, we JUST DISCOVERED that there are more than DOUBLE THAT NUMBER deployed there.
"As you know, we have been briefing you regularly that there are approximately 900 U.S. troops deployed to Syria. In light of the situation in Syria and the significant interest, we recently learned that those numbers were higher. So asked to look into it, I learned today that, in fact, there are approximately 2,000 U.S. troops in Syria.”
His claim of ignorance was almost as insulting as the reality that, without any official Declaration of War from Congress, no U.S. troops are supposed to be “deployed” overseas. Not 2,000, not 900, not one.
And he made it worse by trying to normalize this stunning breach of American constitutionalism.
“These additional forces are considered temporary rotational forces that deploy to meet shifting mission requirements, whereas the core 900 deployers are on longer-term deployments.”
Again, if there are any ethical people still working in D.C., could they mention to Maj. General Ryder that this is a distinction without a difference – the fundamental baseline being that NONE of them are supposed to be there, with the added insult of the DoD lying to us for many months about the overall number?
Journalist Michael Tracey put it succinctly on X, posting a clip of the insufferable Ryder’s inane statement, and writing:
“Would love to know how the Pentagon suddenly ‘learned’ that it had at least 1,100 more troops deployed to Syria than it had previously acknowledged”
Absolutely right. Did the soldiers walk there? Perhaps they appeared out of Hammer Space, as if they were in a Mario and Luigi video game.
All while the U.S. wanders like a blind beggar into $36 TRILLION in debt.
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Of course, given the track record here, we can’t even be sure we can trust this NEW number.
But, while Ryder did make a court jester of himself and expose how much contempt the current U.S. military brass, D.C. politicians, and federal bureaucrats have for us, he was honest about one thing. At the close of the clip provided by Michael Tracey, one can see him admitting that the U.S. has been in Syria for a long time.
Some of us have been trying to sound the alarms about this for a long time.
He said:
“These forces, which augment the ‘Fight ISIS’ mission, were there before the fall of the Assad regime.”
No kidding. Again, some of us have known that. In fact, we’ve known that the U.S. has been working with ISIS-affiliations and occupying nearly one-third of Syria for 10 years, and that the area is Syria’s richest oil land and contains its best growing fields. In fact, Donald Trump himself admitted this on numerous occasions while he was President, presiding over the occupation, and even stating during a meeting with Turkey’s leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan five years ago, in part:
“We’re keeping the oil. We have the oil. The oil is secure.”
And, as much as some supporters of Mr. Trump might try to justify this, perhaps thinking that it represents some kind of payment for the U.S. doing something they think is beneficial in the region, there simply is no constitutional or ethical excuse for this, period. Not only has the U.S. Congress NOT offered a Declaration of War to move troops overseas and possibly engage in hostility that could see them killed or see them kill others, internationally-agreed treaties prohibit the occupation of sovereign nations.
Not, of course, that any of the federal bureaucrats and war-hungry politicians in D.C. much care, so long as they keep collecting their cushy taxpayer-funded salaries.