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Airborne radio station beams messages to IraqU.S. military urging soldiers to stop supporting Saddam
From Barbara Starr
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The U.S. military is using aircraft to broadcast radio signals into southern Iraq, encouraging Iraqi military forces to stop supporting the regime of President Saddam Hussein. The signals are coming from a type of modified Air Force transport plane known as "Commando Solo," which saw similar action over Afghanistan when personnel aboard broadcast messages that urged the Taliban to surrender. These are the first such broadcasts to the Iraqi region by the U.S. military since the recent escalation of tension began between Washington and Baghdad, a Pentagon official said Tuesday.
The radio programming is transmitted during flights of EC-130J aircraft operated by the 193rd Special Operations Wing of the Pennsylvania Air National Guard, based near Middletown, Pennsylvania. The flights began Thursday, and the signals are to be transmitted between 6 p.m. and 11 p.m. local time in southern Iraq every day, depending on the weather. The planes remain in Kuwaiti airspace. Military officials said the broadcasts include songs in Arabic and English to encourage Iraqi soldiers to listen. U.S.-backed political messages are also played. Officials said the themes of the broadcasts include:
• Saddam's diversion of money intended for food to weapons production, and previous Iraqi "intransigence" on U.N. Security Council resolutions • Saddam's use of chemical weapons on his own people • Saddam's previous military "misadventures," and his "squandering" of money on personal pursuits such as palaces The U.S. military has used "Commando Solo" aircraft before as tools of "psychological operations" or propaganda, defense sources have confirmed. Some of the signals sent to Afghanistan last year were monitored by short-wave radio hobbyists in the United States. President Bush has threatened possible military action against Iraq if it refuses to abide by U.N. resolutions calling for it to abandon weapons of mass destruction. Baghdad has repeatedly denied possessing such chemical, nuclear and biological weapons. (Iraqi opposition groups meet in London) On December 7, Iraq delivered to U.N. weapons inspectors 11,000 pages of what Baghdad said were details of its weapons of mass destruction programs and facilities that might be used to develop them. U.N. Resolution 1441 -- passed unanimously by the Security Council on November 8 -- demanded the Iraqi documents be handed over by December 8. (Powell says declaration has "problems") The resolution also called on Iraq to abide by all the U.N. resolutions that Iraq promised to follow in a cease-fire agreement reached in 1991 after the Persian Gulf War.
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