{"id":392241,"date":"2019-01-09T21:59:13","date_gmt":"2019-01-09T20:59:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/bases-bases-everywhere\/"},"modified":"2019-01-09T21:59:13","modified_gmt":"2019-01-09T20:59:13","slug":"bases-bases-everywhere","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/bases-bases-everywhere\/","title":{"rendered":"Bases, Bases, Everywhere\u2026"},"content":{"rendered":"

The U.S. military is finally\u00a0withdrawing<\/a>\u00a0(or\u00a0not<\/a>) from its base at al-Tanf. You know, the place that the\u00a0Syrian government<\/a>\u00a0long claimed was a\u00a0training ground<\/a>\u00a0for\u00a0Islamic State<\/a>\u00a0(ISIS) fighters; the land corridor just inside Syria, near both the Iraqi and Jordanian\u00a0borders<\/a>, that Russia has called a\u00a0terrorist hotbed<\/a>\u00a0(while floating the idea of\u00a0jointly administering<\/a>\u00a0it with the United States); the location of a camp where\u00a0hundreds<\/a>\u00a0of U.S. Marines joined Special Operations forces last year; an outpost that U.S. officials\u00a0claimed<\/a>\u00a0was the key not only to\u00a0defeating<\/a>\u00a0ISIS, but also, according to General Joseph Votel, the commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East, to countering \u201cthe malign activities that Iran and their various proxies and surrogates would like to pursue.\u201d You know,\u00a0that<\/em>\u00a0al-Tanf.<\/p>\n

Within hours of President Trump\u2019s announcement of a withdrawal of U.S. forces from Syria, equipment at that base was already being inventoried for removal. And just like that, arguably the most important American garrison in Syria was (maybe<\/a>) being struck from the Pentagon\u2019s books — except, as it happens, al-Tanf was never actually on the Pentagon\u2019s books.\u00a0Opened in 2015<\/a>and, until recently, home to hundreds of U.S. troops, it was one of the many military bases that exist somewhere between light and shadow, an acknowledged foreign outpost that somehow never actually made it onto the Pentagon\u2019s official inventory of bases.<\/p>\n

Officially, the Department of Defense (DoD) maintains 4,775 \u201csites,\u201d spread across all 50 states, eight U.S. territories, and 45 foreign countries. A total of 514 of these outposts are located overseas, according to the Pentagon\u2019s\u00a0worldwide property portfolio<\/a>. Just to start down a long list, these include bases on the Indian Ocean island of Diego…<\/p>\n

Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The U.S. military is finally\u00a0withdrawing\u00a0(or\u00a0not) from its base at al-Tanf. You know, the place that the\u00a0Syrian government\u00a0long claimed was a\u00a0training ground\u00a0for\u00a0Islamic State\u00a0(ISIS) fighters; the land corridor just inside Syria, near both the Iraqi and Jordanian\u00a0borders, that Russia has called a\u00a0terrorist hotbed\u00a0(while floating the idea of\u00a0jointly administering\u00a0it with the United States); the location of a camp […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-392241","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/392241","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=392241"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/392241\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=392241"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=392241"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=392241"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}