Articles (Jan – Mar 2010)
USAF Welford prepare to ship 800 tons of munitions – US cluster bombs still in UK
by Staff Sgt. Joel Mease,
501st Combat Support Wing Public Affairs – March 10, 2010
Airmen at RAF Welford are preparing to ship more than 90,000 munitions and parts during the 2010 Turbo Containerized Ammunition Distribution System exercise by to be completed mid May.
Turbo CADS is an Air Force-wide exercise that tests the capability of units to transport large quantities of munitions via military shipping containers. The operation also gives the 420th Munitions Squadron an opportunity to move out expired stock and purge the supplies of both RAF Welford and RAF Lakenheath’s cluster bomb units, said Capt. Kurt Umlauf, 420 MUNS.
“During the upcoming weeks we will pack more than 50 containers at RAF Welford and receive about 40 containers from RAF Lakenheath,” Capt. Umlauf said. “In mid May we will then assist with transporting all of those containers out to a port where they’ll be placed onto a vessel to be transported out of the country. Not only will this allow us to make room for new stock, but it adds to our storage capability for (U.S. Air Forces in Europe).”
In order to move roughly 800 tons of munitions and equipment, planning for the exercise started at the beginning of the year.
The Cluster bombs Bill (having cleared the Lords) is scheduled to have its second reading in the Commons on 17th March, and clear all remaining stages on 23rd March 2010.
NATO: AFRICOM’s Partner In Military Penetration Of Africa
Australia.to News
March 21, 2010
Written by Rick Rozoff
The world’s oldest extant military bloc (formed 61 years ago) and the largest in history (twenty eight full members and as many partners on five continents), the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, counts among its major member states all of Africa’s former colonial powers: Britain, France, Portugal, Spain, Italy, Germany and Belgium. …
With the end of the Cold War and the breakup of the Soviet Union nearly twenty years ago, the major Western powers on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, united under the aegis of NATO, saw that as with the Balkans and the former republics of the Soviet Union itself, Africa was now wide open for penetration and domination.
NATO’s largest, most powerful and dominant member is of course the United States. On October 1, 2007 the Pentagon established United States Africa Command (AFRICOM) under the temporary wing of United States European Command, which at the time included in its area of responsibility all of Africa except for four island nations in the Indian Ocean and the Horn of Africa states and Egypt. …
A year to the day later AFRICOM was launched as the first new U.S. regional military command outside North America since Central Command was activated 25 years earlier in 1983. It takes in far more nations – 52 – than any other military command in history. …
The distinction between the Pentagon and NATO in relation to Europe and Africa – and increasingly the Caucasus, the Caspian Sea Basin, Central Asia, South Asia and the Indian Ocean – is blurred and more and more of a strictly formal nature.
NATO has now joined AFRICOM’s first war, in Somalia.
The bloc’s Allied Command Operations website announced on March 18 that from March 5-16 the North Atlantic military alliance had airlifted 1,700 Ugandan troops from their homeland to the Somali capital of Mogadishu for the intensified fighting that began there earlier this month.
The Pentagon supplied the transport planes “under the NATO banner” and the operation was “undertaken by USA contracted DynCorp International.”
The commander of AFRICOM, General William Ward, recently informed the Senate Armed Services Committee of plans to focus the military command’s attention on East Africa and indicated plans to assist the formal government of Somalia to reclaim the country’s capital.
In May the European Union is to began training 2,000 Ugandan troops for deployment to war-wracked Somalia to assist the regime being propped up by the West.
NATO recently confirmed that it has prolonged an agreement to provide strategic sealift and airlift support for African (Ugandan, Rwandan and Burundian) troops to assist Somalia’s Transitional Federal Government in the nation’s civil war.
The bloc’s European command, Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE), “delegated the authority to Joint Command Lisbon to have the operational lead for NATO engagements with the African Union and they provide the majority of the personnel to support the mission.”
As with the government of Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan, the Western-backed Transitional Federal Government doesn’t even control its own capital. Since last week fighting there has led to hundreds of people being killed and wounded and thousands displaced.
Six days earlier NATO effected a changing of the guard “in the Gulf of Aden and Somali Basin” as part of its Operation Ocean Shield, and five warships of the Standing NATO Maritime Group 2 joined four from the Standing NATO Maritime Group 1 in Djibouti, where there are some 2,000 U.S. troops and where AFRICOM bases its Combined Joint Task Force-Horn of Africa. Djibouti also hosts over 1,000 French soldiers and France’s second largest military base abroad. …
US Okinawa Military Bases
Virtual Okinawa Blog
Reasons why there are U.S. Military Bases in Okinawa
Okinawa Prefecture comprises only 0.6% of the whole Japanese territory. In that small island, 75% of the Military installations still remain and are used by U.S. Forces. Why are there so many installations (bases) in such a small island? …
The Future of OKINAWA
There are still many U.S. Military bases in Okinawa. But there is a proposal that will change the bases a lot. The proposal is a plan to return all 40 U.S. Military facilities (bases) that are located in the prefecture by the year of 2015 (which is the target year for the Cosmopolitan City Formation Concept).
On the one hand, Okinawa’s new basic goal is to establish Okinawa as a unique and cultural development area. That means establish Okinawa as a Southern (Asia) international exchange land. In order to proceed with this plan, the U.S. Military bases, which take approximately 20% of the small land, are the huge obstacles. So as to enable the smooth, planned and gradual return of the bases, Okinawa has come up with the Base Return Action Program.
It is just a proposal, so we do not know whether this plan will be managed or not. But not everybody who lives in Okinawa agrees to this proposal. Because by proceeding with the plan, natural beauty and old peculiar culture of Okinawa might disappear.
In the modernization of Okinawa (Establish Okinawa as a more resort land in order to grow up Okinawa’s economy.), we have to consider about Okinawa’s natural beauty and old peculiar culture all the time. Improving the economy is an important thing for Okinawa people, but I think more an important thing for them is to save their great natural beauty and unique culture that only Okinawan people have.
www.virtualokinawa.com/about_okinawa/articles/bases.html
Central Asia Pipeline Plan Begins to Emerge
Bruce K. Gagnon
Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space (Space4Peace)
March 14, 2010
The Washington Post today introduces us to a controversy over Afghanistan war strategy. The Post reports that operations in Delaram (in the southwest) are “far from a strategic priority for senior officers at the international military headquarters in Kabul. One calls Delaram, a day’s drive from the nearest city, ‘the end of the Earth.’ Another deems the area ‘unrelated to our core mission’ of defeating the Taliban by protecting Afghans in their cities and towns.”
Why then are the Marines fighting in this part of the country?
The Post continues, “The Marines are constructing a vast base on the outskirts of town that will have two airstrips, an advanced combat hospital, a post office, a large convenience store and rows of housing trailers stretching as far as the eye can see. By this summer, more than 3,000 Marines — one-tenth of the additional troops authorized by President Obama in December — will be based here.”
Again the Post adds, “They [some officials] question whether a large operation that began last month to flush the Taliban out of Marja, a poor farming community in central Helmand, is the best use of Marine resources. Although it has unfolded with fewer than expected casualties and helped to generate a perception of momentum in the U.S.-led military campaign, the mission probably will tie up two Marine battalions and hundreds of Afghan security forces until the summer.”
And finally the Post reports, “Brig. Gen. Lawrence D. Nicholson, the top Marine commander in Afghanistan now wants Marine units to push through miles of uninhabited desert to establish control of a crossing point for insurgents, drugs and weapons on the border with Pakistan. And he wants to use the new base in Delaram to mount more operations in Nimruz, a part of far southwestern Afghanistan deemed so unimportant that it is one of the only provinces where there is no U.S. or NATO reconstruction team.”
When you check the maps above a clearer picture emerges. The bottom map is the proposed pipeline route to move Caspian Sea oil through Turkmenistan into Afghanistan and then finally through Pakistan to ports along the Arabian Sea where U.S. and British tankers would gorge themselves with the black gold. …
http://space4peace.blogspot.com/2010/03/central-asia-pipeline-plan-begins-to.html
Obama weighs future of vast US nuclear arsenal
Khaleej Times – March 2, 2010
The United States maintains a vast nuclear arsenal that officials say President Barack Obama plans to scale back in a bid to promote arms control and prevent the spread of atomic weapons.
Here is a brief summary of the country’s array of nuclear weapons built up during the Cold War …
Warheads: The United States has about 2,200 “operational” nuclear warheads and an additional 2,500 warheads in reserve that can be activated if necessary. It also has 500 short-range “non-strategic” warheads, some of which are deployed at NATO bases in European countries.
With nuclear weapons based on land, long-range bombers and submarines, just about any target on the planet is within reach of the US arsenal.
ICBMs: The US military has 450 Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missiles, which have a range of 3,500 miles (5,500 kilometers). These missiles — based on land and on submarines — are armed with separate nuclear warheads, or multiple independently targetable reentry vehicles (MIRVs), enabling a single missile to strike multiple targets. Scenarios for all-out nuclear war assume ICBMs as the primary weapon.
SLBMS: Submarine-launched ballistic missiles were developed to hide nuclear weapons from the Soviets, guaranteeing that any attack on the United States would result in massive retaliation. A US fleet of 14 Ohio-class submarines carry an estimated 288 ballistic missiles or 1,152 warheads — about 43 percent of the US “operational” arsenal. The nuclear-powered subs are equipped with the more recent Trident II D5 missiles, which have three types of warheads ranging from 100-kilotons to 455-kilotons.
Bombers: The US Air Force has about 500 nuclear weapons that can be launched with long-range bombers, the B-2A Spirit and B-52H Stratofortress aircraft. Analysts estimate that about 60 of the 113 long-range bombers are assigned to the nuclear mission. The planes can be armed with a B61-7 “strategic bomb” and a B83-1 high-yield bomb.
Shorter-Range Weapons: During the Cold War, both the Americans and Soviets developed shorter-range or “non-strategic” weapons, which carry less explosive power than the massive ICBMs. These weapons could be launched by troops on the battlefield to strike tactical objectives, and a significant number were deployed in Europe. The United States retains an estimated 500 tactical nuclear weapons, including more than 300 Tomahawk cruise missiles that can be fired from submarines, as well as gravity bombs — deployed in part at some NATO bases.
U.S. Missile Defenses Enhanced to Deal With Growing Threat, General Says
Global Security Newswire – March 4, 2010
A senior U.S. Defense Department official said the rising risk of missile attack has led the United States to pursue a concerted expansion of its missile defenses, the Washington Times reported today …
“We can’t get the genie back in the bottle … the threat is growing and proliferating … it is inherently unpredictable, and we need a flexible missile-defense program that is responsive,” the head of the Missile Defense Agency, Army Lt. Gen. Patrick O’Reilly, said in recent remarks on the 2010 Ballistic Missile Defense Review.
An agency newsletter last week detailed the latest plans for fielding new land-and sea-based defenses across the globe. Plans encompass a program to deploy by October 30 long-range missile interceptors in Alaska and California.
Within two years, the Pentagon is expected to have another 10 naval vessels equipped with Aegis ballistic missile defense systems. Nineteen warships are already using the technology. By the end of this year, 20 Navy ships with 61 Standard Missile 3 interceptors are also anticipated to be deployed. …
Pacific Pushback: Has the U.S. Empire of Bases Reached Its High-Water Mark?
John Feffer – TomDispatch.com – March 4, 2010
For a country with a pacifist constitution, Japan is bristling with weaponry. Indeed, that Asian land has long functioned as a huge aircraft carrier and naval base for U.S. military power. We couldn’t have fought the Korean and Vietnam Wars without the nearly 90 military bases scattered around the islands of our major Pacific ally.
Even today, Japan remains the anchor of what’s left of America’s Cold War containment policy when it comes to China and North Korea. From the Yokota and Kadena air bases, the United States can dispatch troops and bombers across Asia, while the Yokosuka base near Tokyo is the largest American naval installation outside the United States.
You’d think that, with so many Japanese bases, the United States wouldn’t make a big fuss about closing one of them. Think again. The current battle over the Marine Corps air base at Futenma on Okinawa — an island prefecture almost 1,000 miles south of Tokyo that hosts about three dozen U.S. bases and 75% of American forces in Japan — is just revving up. …
What makes this so strange, on the surface, is that Futenma is an obsolete base. Under an agreement the Bush administration reached with the previous Japanese government, the U.S. was already planning to move most of the Marines now at Futenma to the island of Guam. …
Polish president gives the green light to US troops’ deployment in Poland
RT.com – Published 27 February, edited 02 March 2010
Polish President Lech Kaczynski has ratified the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) with the US, laying out the conditions for the deployment of US troops on Polish soil.
According to the agreement, about 100 American soldiers will service up to eight US Patriot missile launchers that are to be integrated into Poland’s national security system. Once American soldiers are based in Poland, they will be subject to Polish law.
The SOFA agreement also regulates the rules by which American transport can enter Poland and the principles of compensation to Polish citizens if any harm is caused to them by the actions of American troops. A temporary US base is to start operations at the end of March–beginning of April this year, and in 2012 it is to become permanent.
The Missile Shield Deadlock between the US and Russia
Spiegel Online
By Christian Nee
March 3, 2010
The US and Russia are currently negotiating a successor to the START nuclear disarmament treaty. But continued American plans for a missile shield in Europe have proven to be a major stumbling block. President
Obama’s vision of a nuclear-free world is in danger.
There is good news on the disarmament front: US President Barack Obama is fine-tuning a new nuclear strategy. As White House officials said last week during a meeting between Obama and Defense Secretary Robert Gates, he plans to reach a decision by April. The new strategy could include the scrapping of “thousands of nuclear weapons,” and even a commitment by the United States not to develop any new nuclear weapons.
In addition, what may be the final round of Russian-American talks on the further reduction of strategic offensive weapons started on Tuesday in Geneva. The successor for the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) is “almost 100 percent complete,” says a Moscow negotiator. “We have agreed on the number of launch systems and the warheads, as well as the inspection and destruction of the nuclear payloads. All problems have been solved.”
So much optimism has rarely been seen in Moscow and Washington, particularly when it comes to the two countries’ arsenals of nuclear weapons.
Unfortunately, though, the elation is not genuine. The idea that the world can become a planet free of nuclear weapons one day — as in his visionary speech last year in Prague — remains a fallacy for the time being. …
Read the full article: www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,682734,00.html
Okinawa and the new domino effect
By John Feffer
Asia Times
March 6, 2010
For a country with a pacifist constitution, Japan is bristling with weaponry. Indeed, that Asian land has long functioned as a huge aircraft carrier and naval base for United States military power.
We couldn’t have fought wars in Korea (1950-1953) and Vietnam (1959-1975) without the nearly 90 military bases scattered around the islands of our major Pacific ally. Even today, Japan remains the anchor of what’s left of America’s Cold War containment policy when it comes to China and North Korea. From the Yokota and Kadena air bases, the United States can dispatch troops and bombers across Asia, while the Yokosuka base near Tokyo is the largest American naval installation outside the United States.
You’d think that, with so many Japanese bases, the United States wouldn’t make a big fuss about closing one of them. Think again. The current battle over the US Marine Corps air base at Futenma on Okinawa – an island prefecture almost 1,600 kilometers south of Tokyo that hosts about three dozen US bases and 75% of American forces in Japan – is just revving up. In fact, Washington seems ready to stake its reputation and its relationship with a new Japanese government on the fate of that base alone, which reveals much about US anxieties in the age of President Barack Obama.
What makes this so strange, on the surface, is that Futenma is an obsolete base. Under an agreement the George W Bush administration reached with the previous Japanese government, the US was already planning to move most of the Marines now at Futenma to the island of Guam. Nonetheless, the Obama administration is insisting, over the protests of Okinawans and the objections of Tokyo, on completing that agreement by building a new partial replacement base in a less heavily populated part of Okinawa.
The current row between Tokyo and Washington is no mere “Pacific squall”, as Newsweek dismissively described it. After six decades of saying yes to everything the United States has demanded, Japan finally seems on the verge of saying no to something that matters greatly to Washington, and the relationship that Dwight D Eisenhower once called an “indestructible alliance” is displaying ever more hairline fractures. Worse yet, from the Pentagon’s perspective, Japan’s resistance might prove infectious – one major reason why the United States is putting its alliance on the line over the closing of a single antiquated military base and the building of another of dubious strategic value. …
Over the last several decades, with US bases built cheek-by-jowl in the most heavily populated parts of the island, Okinawans have endured air, water, and noise pollution, accidents like a 2004 US helicopter crash at Okinawa International University, and crimes that range from trivial speeding violations all the way up to the rape of a 12-year-old girl by three Marines in 1995.
According to a June 2009 opinion poll, 68% of Okinawans opposed relocating Futenma within the prefecture, while only 18% favored the plan. Meanwhile, the Social Democratic Party, a junior member of the ruling coalition, has threatened to pull out if Hatoyama backs away from his campaign pledge not to build a new base in Okinawa. …
www.atimes.com/atimes/Japan/LC06Dh01.html
A new approach to ballistic missile defence in Europe?
Demystifying the end of the ‘third site’
Andrew Futter
Oxford Research Group
February 2010
On 17th September last year President Barack Obama announced that the Pentagon would be cancelling the plan proposed by George W Bush to place long-range interceptor missiles and large X-band radar in Europe to counter the growing missile threat from Iran. The decision to end the ‘third site plan’ – so called because it would complement the existing missile defence assets in Alaska and California – has been widely perceived as marking something of a sea-change in US ballistic missile defence policy, with many viewing the announcement as a tangible manifestation of Obama’s pledge to renew US foreign policy by reining in a programme pursued so vigorously by his predecessor. But a closer examination of the decision reveals that the cancellation of the system may not in fact be as revolutionary as has been widely assumed, for whilst the third site plan has been terminated the ‘Phased Adaptive Approach’ to missile defence in Europe – the programme which replaces it – may in fact prove to a be larger, more comprehensive system, involving far more assets, and that is almost certain to become operational far quicker than the third site. Moreover there is strong reason to believe that many of the political and diplomatic – not to mention technological – problems that hampered the previous system will be prolonged if not exacerbated.
Whilst the third site plan had called for 10 long-range interceptor missiles to be placed in Poland and a large X-band radar in the Czech Republic sometime towards the end of the current decade, the ‘Phased Adaptive Approach’ announced by Obama envisages four stages of deployment beginning in 2011 …
The Return Of Missile Defense
By Daniel Larison
After the administration scrapped the central European missile defense plan, Obama’s domestic critics were horrified by the “betrayal” and “appeasement” that it represented.
We have heard this for the last year from Republicans (it may be the one thing on which almost all of them agree), and we recently heard it echoed in some of the CPAC speeches earlier this week. This complaint was always absurd. There were some administration supporters who unrealistically expected that the decision would yield greater Russian cooperation on pressuring Iran. For my part, I exaggerated the significance of the decision and neglected to notice how little the policy had actually changed. As we have been seeing in recent weeks with the announcement of an agreement with Romania to establish an installation there, there was always little reason to expect improved Russian cooperation when the re-configured missile defense plan was likely to irritate Moscow in much the same way that the earlier plan did. …
In the event that Iran ever develops a missile that could reach Berlin or Paris or even London, it is not going to launch strikes against any of them. It will not for the same reason that it is not going to launch missiles against any of our allies in the Near East and the Gulf that it can conceivably attack now. Quite simply, Iran will not do this because it does not want to suffer retaliation from U.S. and allied forces. …
From The American Conservative: Read the full article article
Wars sending U.S. into ruin
Obama the peace president is fighting battles his country cannot afford.
In fact, it’s another potent fix given to a sick patient deeply addicted to the dangerous drug — debt.
More empires have fallen because of reckless finances than invasion. The latest example was the Soviet Union, which spent itself into ruin by buying tanks.
Washington’s deficit (the difference between spending and income from taxes) will reach a vertiginous $1.6 trillion US this year. The huge sum will be borrowed, mostly from China and Japan, to which the U.S. already
owes $1.5 trillion. Debt service will cost $250 billion.
To spend $1 trillion, one would have had to start spending $1 million daily soon after Rome was founded and continue for 2,738 years until today. …
Obama seeks record $708 billion
in 2011 defense budget
President Barack Obama asked Congress to approve a record $708 billion in defense spending for fiscal 2011, but vowed to continue his drive to eliminate unnecessary, wasteful weapons programs.
The budget calls for a 3.4 percent increase in the Pentagon’s base budget to $549 billion, plus $159 billion to fund U.S. military missions in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Obama’s spending freeze on other parts of the budget, designed to rein in the deficit, did not apply to the military.
United States finishes
Ballistic Missile Defense Review
The U.S. Defense Department conducted its first ever Ballistic Missile Defense (BMD) Review, released on February 1st, along with a 48-page report.
download here (2.87 MB).
The review emphasized that regional missile threats were more urgent than the more slowly emerging long-range threats, noting that the United States would continue to develop its long-range defense capabilities, but not: “at the same accelerated rate or with the same level of risk as in recent years. Rather, the United States will refocus its homeland BMD program as it began to do with the fiscal year (FY) 2010 budget—maintaining the current level of capability with 30 ground-based interceptors (GBIs) and further developing proven capabilities that will enhance homeland defense should a new threat emerge.” (p. iv)
Particular emphasis was given to the development of mobile and regional defenses, such as the SM-3, for example, with the “phased adaptive approach” for the revamped missile defense system planned for NATO Europe. The report noted that this approach would allow for eventual Russian cooperation, if “political circumstances make that possible.” (p.34)
The review recommended that a comprehensive approach be taken toward ballistic missile threats, with prevention, international engagement, and continued use of deterrence, both conventional and nuclear, saying, “While missile defenses play an important role in regional deterrence, other components will also be significant. Against nuclear-armed states, regional deterrence will necessarily include a nuclear component (whether forward deployed or not).” (p.23)
Comment from British American Security Information Council (BASIC)
Space systems and missile defense in 2010
All of their other neighbors, especially Russia, North Korea. and India, have been building up their rocket forces at a rapid rate. …
For both Europe and China, any effective ballistic missile defense requires space-based early warning sensors similar to the US Defense Support Program satellites based in geosynchronous orbit …
Watch What They Spend, Not What They Say
The Obama administration says
missile defense isn’t as important as it used to be.
Its budget says otherwise.
Afghanistan: propaganda of the deed
By Paul Rogers
The deluge of publicity about a large-scale military operation against the Taliban must be set against Afghan realities that tell a different story.
The military campaign now being waged in the Afghan province of Helmand is being described in much of the world’s media as the biggest such operation since the one which secured “regime-change” in Kabul in October-November 2001. A coordinated military assault involving 15,000 troops – from the United States, Britain and Afghanistan itself – aims to seize the town of Marjah and surrounding areas, which are described as the Taliban’s last stronghold in Helmand.
Operation Moshtarak (the word means “together” in the Dari language), even before its launch, has been the subject of a series of high-profile news stories with an almost uniformly positive “spin”. Their consistent core is that the operation’s purpose is to curb Taliban influence over Helmand as a whole; that the province is, alongside neighbouring Kandahar, the pivot of Taliban power in Afghanistan; and, therefore, that victory would be likely to turn the whole course of the war in Afghanistan in favour of the Nato/Isaf project. …
STOP PRESS: the news is that ‘Operation Moshtarak’ is now underway (11 February 2010)- don’t the decision makers ever learn from the history of failed attempts to ‘tame’ Afghanistan?
VANDENBERG MISSILE TEST
“DANGEROUS, DESTABILIZING AND PROVOCATIVE”
Watch this slideshow!
The Nuclear Age Peace Foundation today condemned Sunday’s scheduled missile defense test from Vandenberg Air Force Base as “dangerous, destabilizing and provocative.”
The test involves a missile being fired from the Marshall Islands to simulate an attack on the United States by Iran, a country that neither possesses nuclear weapons nor long-range missiles capable of reaching the United States. An interceptor missile will be fired from Vandenberg AFB in an attempt to collide with the incoming missile.
Latest: The Missile Defense Test Flops
Over the weekend, the Missile Defense Agency released news of another failed intercept test. And no, the interceptor didn’t fail to lift off or fly off course. This time, the tracking radar that wasn’t up to scratch.
According to an military news release, a Sea-Based X-Band (SBX) radar in the middle of the Pacific Ocean was supposed track a target missile launched from Kwajalein Atoll, relaying the data to a ground-based interceptor launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base, Calif. While both the target missile and interceptor launched successfully, the interceptor failed to hit the target. According to the agency, the SBX “did not perform as expected.”
European Parliament votes down SWIFT agreement with the USA
The Parliament refused on Thursday to give its consent to the EU’s interim agreement on banking data transfers to the USA via the SWIFT network, amid concerns for privacy, proportionality and reciprocity. This move renders the text signed between the US and the 27 EU Member states legally void. MEPs propose to negotiate a new agreement.
The resolution rejecting the agreement was approved by 378 votes to 196, with 31 abstentions.
A proposal by the EPP and ECR groups to postpone the vote was rejected by 290 votes to 305, with 14 abstentions.
Background: Hilary Clinton (US Secretary of State) and Timothy Geithner (US Secretary of Treasury) are putting pressure on the parliament urging the parliament to change its mind: Clinton-Geithner letter to EP (pdf).
Letter from the President of the European Parliament to the Council of the European Union: EP Letter (pdf).
And in the flurry of activity the Council (27 governments) has adopted a Declaration: Draft Council declaration (pdf) and under pressure from the parliament to provide more information have published: Declassified Council Decision (pdf)
See also:
- SWIFT: Civil Liberties Committee recommends rejecting the agreement (EP press release (pdf)
- Draft EP Resolution (pdf)
- Opinion of the EP Legal Service
- Opinion of the European Data Protection Supervisor (pdf)
- Opinion of the Article 29 Working Party (pdf)
- Draft EU-USA SWIFT Agreement
Same Empire, Different Emperor
February 11, 2010
by Laurence M. Vance
Just as Hadrian succeeded Trajan, Domitian succeeded Titus, Nero succeeded Claudius, and Caligula succeeded Tiberius, so Kennedy replaced Eisenhower, Nixon replaced Johnson, Reagan replaced Carter, and Obama replaced Bush.
Same empire, different emperor.
The extent of the U.S. global empire is almost incalculable. We know enough, however, about foreign bases, physical assets, military spending, and foreign troop levels to know that we have an empire in everything but the name.
There are, according to the Department of Defense’s “Base Structure Report” for FY 2009, 716 U.S. military bases on foreign soil in thirty-eight countries. Yet, according to the expert on this subject, Chalmers Johnson, the author of Blowback, The Sorrows of Empire, and Nemesis, that number is far too low: “The official figures omit espionage bases, those located in war zones, including Iraq and Afghanistan, and miscellaneous facilities in places considered too sensitive to discuss or which the Pentagon for its own reasons chooses to exclude – e.g. in Israel, Kosovo, or Jordan.” Johnson places the real number of foreign bases closer to 1,000.
This same Base Structure Report states that the DOD’s physical assets consist of “more than 539,000 facilities (buildings, structures and linear structures) located on more than 5,570 sites, on approximately 29 million acres.” The 307,295 buildings occupied by the DOD comprise over 2.1 billion square feet. The DOD manages almost 30 million acres of land worldwide. …
Read on: http://republicbroadcasting.org/?p=6726
Totally Occupied: 700 Military Bases Spread Across Afghanistan
February 11, 2010
Existing in the shadows, the US base-building program is staggering in size and scope and also extraordinarily expensive.
In the nineteenth century, it was a fort used by British forces. In the twentieth century, Soviet troops moved into the crumbling facilities. In December 2009, at this site in the Shinwar district of Afghanistan’s Nangarhar Province, U.S. troops joined members of the Afghan National Army in preparing the way for the next round of foreign occupation. On its grounds, a new military base is expected to rise, one of hundreds of camps and outposts scattered across the country. …
Such bases range from relatively small sites like Shinwar to mega-bases that resemble small American towns. Today, according to official sources, approximately 700 bases of every size dot the Afghan countryside, and more, like the one in Shinwar, are under construction or soon will be as part of a base-building boom that began last year. …
Read on: www.alternet.org
With Nuclear, Conventional Arms Pacts Stalled,
U.S. Moves Missiles And Troops To Russian Border
On January 13 the Associated Press reported that the White House will submit its Quadrennial Defense Review to Congress on February 1 and request a record-high $708 billion for the Pentagon. That figure is the highest in absolute and in inflation-adjusted, constant (for any year) dollars since 1946, the year after the Second World War ended. Adding non-Pentagon defense-related spending, the total may exceed $1 trillion.
The $708 billion includes for the first time monies for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq which in prior years were in part funded by periodic supplemental requests, but excludes what the above-mentioned report adds is the first in the new administration’s emergency requests for the same purpose: A purported $33 billion.
Three Good Reasons To Liquidate Our Empire
And Ten Steps to Take to Do So
by Chalmers Johnson
1. We Can No Longer Afford Our Postwar Expansionism
2. We Are Going to Lose the War in Afghanistan and It Will Help Bankrupt Us
3. We Need to End the Secret Shame of Our Empire of Bases
‘A History of American Imperialism’
by Noam Chomsky
US cost of Iraq and Afghanistan wars tops $1 trillion.
But Obama wants a lot more.
The cost to U.S. taxpayers of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan since 2001 has topped $1 trillion, and President Barack Obama is expected to request another $33 billion to fund more troops this year.
Over two-thirds of the money has been spent on the conflict in Iraq since 2003. This year is the first in which more funds are being spent in Afghanistan than Iraq, as the pace of U.S. military operations slows in Iraq and quickens in Afghanistan. Reuters
Why the US owes Haiti billions and why finding the money is a no-brainer!
Follow the Stop the War Coalition debate on Twitter
‘Save the Earth, Close the Pentagon!’
(Bryan Farrell’s new book, The Green Zone: The Environmental Costs of Militarism).
How to Exit Afghanistan
The Nation
By Selig S. Harrison
This article appeared in the January 11, 2010 edition of The Nation.
With the Taliban growing steadily stronger, 30,000 more US troops will not lead to the early disengagement from the Afghan quagmire envisaged by President Obama, even in the improbable event that Hamid Karzai delivers on his promises of better governance. What is needed is a major United Nations diplomatic initiative designed to get Afghanistan’s regional neighbors to join in setting a disengagement timetable and to share responsibility for preventing a Taliban return to power in Kabul.
The timetable should provide not only for the early withdrawal of all US combat forces within, say, three years but also for the termination of US military access to air bases in Afghanistan within five years. It should set the stage, in short, for the military neutralization of Afghanistan.
A commitment to categorical disengagement has long been demanded by Taliban leaders as the condition for negotiations. It would test whether they are ready for the local peace deals that the Obama administration appears prepared to accept, or will insist on power-sharing in Kabul as the price of peace. …
www.thenation.com/doc/20100111/harrison
Bush to Obama – a toxic legacy
openDemocracy
January 8, 2010
By Paul Rogers
A cascade of bad news for the United States from a series of frontlines – Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, and even the American homeland itself – is provoking a series of emphatic statements of concern and resolve from President Barack Obama. It is becoming clear that the abortive attempt to explode a device on a plane close to landing at Detroit on 25 December 2009 and the bombing of a key CIA station in eastern Afghanistan on 30 December (to name but the most embarrassing incidents) are striking examples of intelligence failure that illustrate the depth of the US’s strategic predicament. The inherited “war on terror” refuses to die.
The Afghan winter
The CIA attack involved a trusted Jordanian official meeting the head of forward operating base (FOB) Chapman in Khost province, along with most of her senior staff and a senior Jordanian intelligence officer. The official was expected to provide new information on the location of al-Qaida leaders, possibly including Osama bin Laden’s deputy and the group’s ideological figurehead, Ayman al-Zawahiri. Instead he detonated a hidden explosive charge which killed the station head, six of her colleagues and the Jordanian agent, and wounded six more people …
The Yemeni shards
The CIA disaster in Afghanistan comes at a time when Yemen has suddenly entered the frame following the near-disaster over Detroit on 25 December 2009. Many commentators in western Europe have yet to appreciate the impact of the Detroit incident within the United States; a reading of the president’s remarks in his statement of 7 January 2010 leaves no doubt about the deep concern at the highest level. For the past eight years domestic opposition to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has grown slowly but steadily. Always, though, has been the thought that at least the United States itself has not suffered another major assault on the model of 9/11. London, Madrid, Istanbul, Jakarta, Amman, Casablanca, Mumbai, Islamabad and many others may have been hit, but the US had been spared.
The Detroit attack came very close to changing that. …
The Iraqi shards
A very rare piece of positive news in the past couple of months for the United States has been the report from Iraq that December 2009 marked the first month since the war began in which no US military personnel were killed in combat. This came at the end of a year in which the loss of civilian lives was also sharply reduced. Iraq Body Count (IBC) estimates that 4,497 civilians were killed by violence up to 16 December, compared with 9,226 in 2008.
This combination of indicators might seem to suggest that at last Iraq is becoming more secure. But a closer look at developments in Iraq leads to less positive conclusions …
The deep muddy
Much of the surge in activity across northern and central Iraq is aimed at breaking confidence in the elections scheduled for January 2010; its ferocity and persistence make clear that the insurgency is far from over. In particular, it looks as though the withdrawal of US troops from the majority of their urban combat-patrols since 30 June 2009 is allowing insurgent groups to act with much more boldness. This would be serious enough if their aim was primarily to foster intercommunal violence; but their systematic (and often successful) targeting of heavily protected state facilities indicates a more refined strategic objective, and causes even greater concern.
Barack Obama’s administration has many problems in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and is now likely to become much more deeply involved in Yemen. There was at least the hope that the situation in Iraq was improving, but even that is looking markedly over-optimistic. …
Read the entire article: www.opendemocracy.net/paul-rogers/bush-to-obama-toxic-legacy
Save the Earth, Close the Pentagon!
Climate and Capitalism
By Sara Flounders
January 9, 2010
How is it possible that the worst polluter of carbon dioxide and other toxic emissions on the planet is not a focus of any conference discussion or proposed restrictions?
In evaluating the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen — with more than 15,000 participants from 192 countries, including more than 100 heads of state, as well as 100,000 demonstrators in the streets — it is important to ask: How is it possible that the worst polluter of carbon dioxide and other toxic emissions on the planet is not a focus of any conference discussion or proposed restrictions?
By every measure, the Pentagon is the largest institutional user of petroleum products and energy in general. Yet the Pentagon has a blanket exemption in all international climate agreements.
The Pentagon wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; its secret operations in Pakistan; its equipment on more than 1,000 U.S. bases around the world; its 6,000 facilities in the U.S.; all NATO operations; its aircraft carriers, jet aircraft, weapons testing, training and sales will not be counted against U.S. greenhouse gas limits or included in any count. …
Just how did the Pentagon come to be exempt from climate agreements? At the time of the Kyoto Accords negotiations, the U.S. demanded as a provision of signing that all of its military operations worldwide and all operations it participates in with the U.N. and/or NATO be completely exempted from measurement or reductions.
After securing this gigantic concession, the Bush administration then refused to sign the accords. …
More than emissions:
Besides emitting carbon dioxide, U.S. military operations release other highly toxic and radioactive materials into the air, water and soil.
U.S. weapons made with depleted uranium have spread tens of thousands of pounds of microparticles of radioactive and highly toxic waste throughout the Middle East, Central Asia and the Balkans.
The U.S. sells land mines and cluster bombs that are a major cause of delayed explosives, maiming and disabling especially peasant farmers and rural peoples in Africa, Asia and Latin America. …
Environmental war at home:
Moreover, the Defense Department has routinely resisted orders from the Environmental Protection Agency to clean up contaminated U.S. bases. …
U.S. testing of nuclear weapons in the U.S. Southwest and on South Pacific islands has contaminated millions of acres of land and water with radiation. …
Around the world, on past and still operating bases in Puerto Rico, the Philippines, South Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Japan, Nicaragua, Panama and the former Yugoslavia, rusting barrels of chemicals and solvents and millions of rounds of ammunition are criminally abandoned by the Pentagon. …
Read the entire article: http://climateandcapitalism.com/?p=1534
The Question No U.S. Official Dare Ask
By Willam Pfaff
January 7, 2010
It is time to ask a question that virtually no one in an official or political position in the United States is willing to contemplate asking. For a person in a responsible public position to pose this question would be to risk exclusion from the realm of “serious” policy discussion. It could be, as they say in the bureaucracies, “a career destroyer.”
It would be like declaring that after long analysis you had come to the conclusion that the world is indeed flat, and not round. A round earth is merely an illusion, which everyone has accepted, and adapted to—and fears challenging.
My question is the following. Has it been a terrible, and by now all but irreversible, error for the United States to have built a system of more than 700 military bases and stations girdling the world? Does it provoke war rather than provide security?
Each of six world regions now has a separate U.S. commander with his staff and intelligence, planning and potential operational capabilities. Central Command, based in Florida, currently is responsible for America’s Middle Eastern and Central Asian wars.
The other five commands—Atlantic, Pacific, Southern (for Latin America), Africa and Europe—oversee in detail what goes on in their assigned portions of the world, generating analyses, appreciations, and scenarios of possible reactions to a myriad of perceived or possible threats to the United States.
Each commander also makes contact with regional government military forces, so far as possible, cultivating good relations, professional exchanges and training. Each promotes training missions to the U.S. and military aid, and supports equipment purchases.
Each regional commander controls “main operating bases” abroad, which in turn support fully manned “forward operating sites,” usually including permanently stationed American forces and an air base.
Beyond them, “cooperative security locations” are established, shared with the forces of allies or clients. …
The unthinkable question with which I began this article was whether all of this has been a ghastly mistake. Many Americans question or oppose this system, but ordinarily with anti-militarist motives, or because they see it as imperialist, or part of an interventionist or aggressive foreign policy outlook that they oppose.
My reason for questioning it is that it generates apprehension, hostility and fear of the United States; frequently promotes insecurity; and has already provoked wars—unnecessary wars.
It is an obstacle to peaceful long-term relations between the United States and other countries, and with the international community as a whole.
Today the United States is involved in two and a half—or even more—wars provoked by this system of global American military engagement. …
Read on: www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_question_no_us_official_dare_ask_20100107/
Obama presses review of nuclear strategy
The Boston Globe
January 3, 2010
… The Pentagon is rethinking the unthinkable: Making major changes to Cold War arsenal. In a thorough review expected to be completed early this year, the size, structure, and even the very mission of America’s nuclear arsenal are being reconsidered as part of President Obama’s pledge to reduce the role of the world’s most deadly weapons. …
Obama has already reached a tentative agreement with Russia to reduce the number of warheads on both sides from about 2,200 to between 1,500 and 1,675 in the next several years, while also slashing the missiles and submarines designed to carry them to between 500 and 1,000. The so-called Nuclear Posture Review, led by the Pentagon, could recommend going even further, to 1,000 warheads or fewer …
www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2010/01/03/obama_presses_review_of_nuclear_strategy/
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