Campaign for the Accountability of American Bases

Defense Industry Daily
January 18, 2010

In January 2001, a commission headed by then US Defense Secretary-designate Donald Rumsfeld warned about a possible “space Pearl Harbor” in which a potential enemy would launch a surprise attack against US-based military space assets, disabling them. These assets include communications satellites and the GPS system, which is crucial for precision attack missiles and a host of military systems.

“The US is more dependent on space than any other nation. Yet the threat to the US and its allies in and from space does not command the attention it merits,” the commission warned.

One of the systems that grew out of the commission’s report was the Space Based Space Surveillance (SBSS) project, which is developing a constellation of satellites to provide the US military with space situational awareness using visible sensors. …

The SBSS system is intended to detect and track space objects, such as satellites, anti-satellite (ASAT) weapons, and orbital debris, providing information to the US Department of Defense as well as NASA. The SBSS is a stepping stone toward a functional space-based space surveillance constellation. …

The initial SBSS satellite is expected to improve the US government’s ability to detect deep space objects by 80% over the MSX/SBV system.

The MSX/SBV system was a late 1990s missile defense test satellite; by 2002 most of its sensors had failed. However, 1 small package called the SBV sensor was able to search and track satellites in geosynchronous orbit (GEO) using visible light. …

Building on the success of the MSX/SBV visible sensor, the SBSS Block 10 will further develop the technology and replace the SBV sensor. Block 10 will involve the development of 1 satellite as a pathfinder for a full-constellation of space-based sensors. …

Jan 15, 2010: Boeing in Seal Beach, CA received a $30.9 million contract exercising the option for CY2010 maintenance and operations services to provide the requirements for the development and delivery of the logistics infrastructure of the Space Based Space Surveillance Block 10 system. At this time, $7.8 million has been obligated.

www.defenseindustrydaily.com/Preventing-a-Space-Pearl-Harbor-SBSS-Program-to-Monitor-the-Heavens-06106/

Stars and Stripes
By Halimah Abdullah, McClatchy Newspapers
January 16, 2010

Eight years of war in Afghanistan and Iraq have etched indelible scars on the psyches of many of the nation’s service members, and the U.S. military is losing a battle to stem an epidemic of suicides in its ranks.

Despite calls by top Pentagon officials for a sea change in attitudes about mental health, millions of dollars in new suicide-prevention programming and thousands of hours spent helping soldiers suffering from what often are euphemistically dubbed “invisible wounds,” the military is losing ground.

The Department of Defense Friday reported that there were 160 reported active-duty Army suicides in 2009, up from 140 in 2008. Of these, 114 have been confirmed, while the manner of death in the remaining 46 remains to be determined.

“There’s no question that 2009 was a painful year for the Army when it came to suicides,” said Col. Christopher Philbrick, the deputy director of the Army Suicide Prevention Task Force, in a statement, despite what he called “wide-ranging measures last year to confront the problem.”

While the military’s suicide rate is comparable to civilian rates, the increase last year is alarming because the armed services traditionally had lower suicide rates than the general population did.

“I look at the numbers of each service, and that rate has gone up at the same rate across the services,” Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a gathering of military mental health professionals and advocates last week. “This isn’t just a ground force problem.”

Some of the suicides are young men, fresh from deployments and haunted by memories, who shoot themselves after they return from their second or third tours in Iraq or Afghanistan, or when romantic relationships turn sour, sometimes due to long separations or post-traumatic stress.

Others are career officers who quietly nurse addictions to drugs or alcohol and finally decide to silence their ghosts.

An increasing number are female soldiers, who rarely committed suicide before but now are killing themselves at a much higher rate. …

www.stripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=67285

Stars and Stripes
by Terry Weaver
January 17, 1010

The federal government has been slow to respond to Guam’s infrastructure requirements and public needs as the military looks to use the island to base at least 8,000 Marines Gov. Felix Camacho said Friday.

In the 3½ years since the expansion plans were announced, he said, many concerns have gone unanswered as Guam tries to secure money for transportation, water, sewage, landfill and other improvements needed to accommodate the influx of people and construction. …

Frustrations about the buildup — which could temporarily bring nearly 80,000 people to the island of 178,000 people — are mounting on Guam in the wake of the military’s public hearings on the massive project.

Repeated comments from young protesters at the hearings have swayed some public officials to ask for more time to study the proposal. Others, such as Sen. Judith Guthertz, have changed their positions on working with the military to secure more land on the island for the Marines’ base and a firing range. Bases currently sit on about a third of Guam’s 212 square miles.

Much of the land the military wants is controlled by the government of Guam, including some reserved for a homesteading program for native Chamorro families. …

www.stripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=67275

China View – Xinhua
January 17, 2010

Russia should firmly defend its security interests in talks with the United States over a new nuclear arsenal cut deal, Russian parliamentary leaders said Saturday.

“Our interests of national security must be our primary goal in signing the new treaty,” said Sergei Mironov, Federation Council Speaker and leader of the Fair Russia party, in a meeting with President Dmitry Medvedev at Zavidovo of Tver region.

The new document to replace the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty(START-1) that expired on Dec. 5, 2009, said Mironov, should be signed on an equal basis.

When Moscow engaged in negotiations with Washington over specific issues such as number of nuclear warheads and delivery vehicles, he said, no compromise shall be made at the cost of national interests.

Russia and the U.S. “must undoubtedly have equal rights and duties under the new treaty,” which first and foremost applies to mutual inspections, said Boris Gryzlov, Russian State Duma Speaker, as cited by the Interfax news agency.

He also voiced support on the linkage between the issues of strategic weapons cut and missile defense, while downplaying U.S. edge on the missile defense.

Equal reductions of warheads would be detrimental to Russia and lead to Moscow’s “geographical lose-out,” said Liberal Democratic leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky, as Russia is surrounded by multiple U.S. missile bases.

Zhirinovsky insisted Russia must not slash its deployment of multiple independent reentry vehicles, and ensure equal rights on mutual inspections.

The strategic arms reduction shall not pose threat to Russia’s basis security, said Communist leader Gennady Zyuganov.

If Russia cannot retain its current nuclear power, he said, its security will be intimidated and it will not become U.S. equal.

“There can be no parity with the Americans anyway because they have 30-fold superiority over us in terms of conventional armaments. We can’t make a minimum concession,” he said.

Insisting Russia and the United States ratify the new START treaty simultaneously, Medvedev also stressed its significance to Russia.

“This is a foreign policy issue, but it is of extreme importance and will, in the final analysis, determine the face of Russia for years to come,” he said.

Moscow and Washington have exerted intense efforts trying to clinch a deal on the new START treaty.

The talks are expected to resume in the second half of this month, said Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov earlier.

The START-1, signed in 1991 between the then Soviet Union and the United States, obliged both sides to reduce the number of their nuclear warheads to 6,000 and delivery vehicles to 1,600.

The new treaty’s outline agreed by the two presidents at a July summit in Moscow included slashing nuclear arsenals to 1,500-1,675operational warheads and delivery vehicles to 500-1,000.

http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2010-01/17/content_12822678.htm

The New York Times
By Andrew Jacobs and Jonathan Ansfield
January 12, 2009

China said late Monday that it had successfully tested the nation’s first land-based missile defense system, announcing the news in a brief dispatch by Xinhua, the official news agency. “The test is defensive in nature and is not targeted at any country,” the item said.

Even if news accounts on Tuesday did not provide details about the test — and whether it destroyed its intended target — Chinese and Western analysts say there is no mistaking that the timing of the test, coming amid Beijing’s fury over American arms sales to Taiwan, was largely aimed at the White House.

In recent days, state media have been producing a torrent of articles condemning the sale of Patriot air defense equipment to Taiwan. China views the self-ruled island as a breakaway province, separated since the civil war of the 1940s, and sees arms sales as interference in an internal matter.

The Defense and Foreign Ministries have released a half-dozen warnings over the weapons deal, saying it would have grave consequences for United States-China relations. …

www.nytimes.com/2010/01/13/world/asia/13china.html

The Huntsville Times
January 9, 2010

The Army has awarded a $577 million contract to Northrop Grumman for engineering and manufacturing development of the Integrated Air and Missile Defense Battle Command System.

In an announcement Friday, the Army said the program’s aim is to give soldiers a single system that simplifies workload while providing the Army’s contribution to a Joint Single Integrated Air Picture that can be used across all the armed forces.

In 2008, the Army narrowed competition for the work to Northrop Grumman and Raytheon. At that time, a Northrop Grumman executive said during an appearance in Huntsville the company was looking forward to developing and demonstrating some novel concepts for the system, which could be a large program for the company and the Army. …

www.al.com/business/huntsvilletimes/index.ssf?/base/business/1263032160182970.xml&coll=1

PRESS TV
January 7, 2010

Yemen’s government is to allow the US to set up a military base on its territory, a political analyst says.

The US can no longer rely on Yemen’s government to fight al-Qaeda because it is losing its legitimacy and becoming weaker, Ali Al-Ahmed, a political analyst, told Press TV on Wednesday.

Al-Ahmed added that his sources have revealed that the Yemeni government has decided to let the US military establish the air base on an island called Socotra located off the coast of Yemen.

According to the Saudi scholar, the island is a natural wildlife refuge. The information about the US air base will be made public in the next few weeks. …

www.presstv.ir/detail.aspx?id=115536&sectionid=351020206

Thai News Agency MCOT
January 3, 2010

The United States plans to fortify Guam, upgrading its military base on the island into a strategic staging post that would allow rapid access to potential flashpoints in the Pacific region.

More troops, including 9,182 Marines, army soldiers and their dependents from Okinawa, Japan, will be relocated to this island, while more than 9,000 transient troops, mainly from the navy’s carrier strike group, will also be based here.

The ”overarching purpose” of beefing up Guam as a military fortress is ”to provide mutual defense, deter aggression, and dissuade coercion in the Western Pacific Region, according to a draft impact report recently released by the U.S. Defense Department.

The proposed buildup would allow U.S. military forces to respond to regional threats and contingencies in a ”flexible” and ”timely manner” as they work to ”defend U.S., Japan and allied interests,” the study says.

”Moving these forces to Guam would place them on the furthest forward element of sovereign U.S. territory in the Pacific, thereby maximizing their freedom of action,” it says.

According to the report, the United States envisions Guam as a ”local command and control structure” manned, equipped, trained, and sustained by a modern logistics infrastructure.

The relocation and buildup cost, including expansion of infrastructure needed to maintain a permanent base for Marines and U.S. Army troops on Guam and Tinian, an island 160 kilometers to the northeast, is pegged at $12 billion.

Japan has agreed to chip in $6.09 billion of the total.

The plan would entail ”increased operational activities,” more frequent berthing by aircraft carriers and other warships, building aviation training ranges and upgrading of harbors, wharves and ports.

The existing Andersen Air Force Base on Guam would be expanded to include the air elements of the Marines. A new Marine base would be built ”right next door,” …

http://enews.mcot.net/view.php?id=13543

Lew Rockwell
by Rick Rozoff

With senator and once almost vice president Joseph Lieberman’s threat on December 27 that “Yemen will be tomorrow’s war” and former Southern Command chief and NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe Wesley Clark’s two days later that “Maybe we need to put some boots on the ground there,” [5] it is evident that America’s new war for the new year has already been identified. In fact in mid-December U.S. warplanes participated in the bombing of a village in northern Yemen that cost the lives of 120 civilians as well as wounding 44 more [6] and a week later “A US fighter jet…carried out multiple airstrikes on the home of a senior official in Yemen’s northern rugged province of Sa’ada….”

The pretext for undertaking a war in Yemen in earnest is currently the serio-comic “attempted terrorist attack” by a young Nigerian national on a passenger airliner outside of Detroit on Christmas Day. The deadly U.S. bombing of the Yemeni village mentioned above occurred ten days earlier and moreover was in the north of the nation, although Washington claims al-Qaeda cells are operating in the other end of the country.

Asia, Africa and the Middle East are not the only battlegrounds where the Pentagon is active. On October 30 of 2009 the U.S. signed an agreement with the government of Colombia to acquire the essentially unlimited and unrestricted use of seven new military bases in the South American nation, including sites within immediate striking distance of both Venezuela and Ecuador. [9] American intelligence, special forces and other personnel will be complicit in ongoing counterinsurgency operations against the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) in the nation’s south as well as in rendering assistance to Washington’s Colombian proxy for attacks inside Ecuador and Venezuela that will be portrayed as aimed at FARC forces in the two states.

Targeting two linchpins of and ultimately the entire Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America (ALBA), Washington is laying the groundwork for a potential military conflagration in South and Central America and the Caribbean. After the U.S.-supported coup in Honduras on June 28, that nation has announced it will be the first ALBA member state to ever withdraw from the Alliance and the Pentagon will retain, perhaps expand, its military presence at the Soto Cano Air Base there.

A few days ago “The Colombian government…announced it is building a new military base on its border with Venezuela and has activated six new airborne battalions” [10] and shortly afterward Dutch member of parliament Harry van Bommel “claimed that US spy planes are using an airbase on the Netherlands Antilles island of Curaçao” off the Venezuelan coast.

In October a U.S. armed forces publication revealed that the Pentagon will spend $110 million to modernize and expand seven new military bases in Bulgaria and Romania, across the Black Sea from Russia, where it will station initial contingents of over 4,000 troops.

In early December the U.S. signed a Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) with Poland, which borders the Russian Kaliningrad territory, that “allows for the United States military to station American troops and military equipment on Polish territory.” The U.S. military forces will operate Patriot Advanced Capability-3 (PAC-3) and Standard Missile 3 (SM-3) batteries as part of the Pentagon’s global interceptor missile system.

At approximately the same time President Obama pressured Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan to base missile shield components in his country. “We discussed the continuing role that we can play as NATO allies in strengthening Turkey’s profile within NATO and coordinating more effectively on critical issues like missile defense,” in the American leader’s words.

“Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu has hinted his government does not view Tehran [Iran] as a potential missile threat for Turkey at this point. But analysts say if a joint NATO missile shield is developed, such a move could force Ankara to join the mechanism.”

2010 will see the first foreign troops deployed to Poland since the breakup of the Warsaw Pact in 1991 and the installation of the U.S.’s “stronger, swifter and smarter” (also Obama’s words) interceptor missiles and radar facilities in Eastern Europe, the Middle East and the South Caucasus …

www.lewrockwell.com/orig10/rozoff4.1.1.html

The Times
December 31, 2009

The Pentagon is drawing up urgent plans for increased military co-operation with Yemen, including possible retaliatory strikes against al-Qaeda targets, according to US officials engaged in a high-stakes bid to neutralise Islamist militants without enraging the Arab world.

The Obama Administration, caught out by the Christmas Day attempt to blow up a Northwest Airlines aircraft, is reviewing every possible response and has not ruled out military strikes if targets linked directly to the failed attack by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab can be identified. …

In line with the terms of a secret military assistance pact agreed last year, Abu Bakr al-Qirbi, the Yemeni Foreign Minister, insisted yesterday that any attacks on al-Qaeda targets in Yemen would be by Yemeni government forces. …

The US has never publicly acknowledged the rapid build-up of its military presence in and near Yemen since last year but sources say that attacks already mounted by Yemeni government forces on al-Qaeda training camps would have been impossible without American hardware and knowhow. Future strikes could involve the use of US drones, fighter jets and ship-launched cruise missiles. …

www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article6972110.ece