Asheville NC: Secret Army training raises troubling questions

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http://www.mountainx.com/news/2005/0420wargames.php

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Apr 20, 2005 / vol 11 iss 37

Who's in charge here?

Secret Army training raises troubling questions
by Jon Elliston

Asheville resident Craig Sloan was just drifting off to sleep last Aug. 19 when helicopters with their lights off began buzzing low overhead, and he heard what sounded like gunfire and percussion grenades. For a moment, Sloan wondered whether prisoners had broken out of the nearby Buncombe County Jail.

Stepping outside, he looked toward City/County Plaza, the apparent locus of the commotion. "It was so black and so dark," remembers Sloan, an Army veteran who works at Mission Hospitals. "The jailhouse lights were off, and the courthouse lights were off. All you could see was flares. It was frightening. ... With the elevation of the terrorist threat, the first thing I was thinking was, we're being attacked."

What Sloan was seeing was indeed a raid of sorts – but not by any foreign force. Instead, it was an elite U.S. Army commando unit that swept into Asheville that night in a training operation quietly hosted by the Buncombe County Sheriff's Department. Cloaked in secrecy, the exercise left many Asheville residents feeling startled and confused (see "Ground Zero: Asheville?" Sept. 1, 2004, Xpress).

Top local officials first learned about the Army's plans in a hush-hush meeting in 2002 that some say may have run afoul of the state's open-meetings law (see "None of Your Business?"). At the time, the Army apparently assured these local leaders that the public would not be endangered, and indeed, the Aug. 19 exercise doesn't seem to have done lasting harm. But similar operations elsewhere have caused extensive property damage and even loss of life. And while the mayors of some other cities, citing the risks, have said no to hosting military training, city and county leaders here appear willing to accept whatever the Army tells them.

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