rigorousintuition.ca

http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/287695-1

David Vine talked about his book Island of Shame: The Secret History of the U.S. Military Base on Diego Garcia (Princeton University Press; May 20, 2009). In the book about the U.S. military base on the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean and the 2000 residents of the island who were forcibly exiled from there by the Americans and the British in the late 1960s and early 1970s he reveals what he terms a long hidden history of lies, conspiracy, and empire. He talked about his research and the efforts of the Chagossian people to win the right to return to their homeland and be compensated for their removal. He also talked about the Cold War origins of the base and its use as a launch pad for aircraft used in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and as a site for prisoner detention by the Central Intelligence Agency. He responded to questions from members of the audience.

Tomgram: David Vine, U.S. Empire of Bases Grows
Posted by David Vine at 5:32pm, July 15, 2012.

It was January 15, 2004, and TomDispatch had only been in existence for a year when Chalmers Johnson, author of the prophetic book Blowback (published in 2000 and a bestseller after the 9/11 attacks), did a piece for this site entitled “America’s Empire of Bases.” He wrote then: “Due to government secrecy, our citizens are often ignorant of the fact that our garrisons encircle the planet. This vast network of American bases on every continent except Antarctica actually constitutes a new form of empire -- an empire of bases with its own geography not likely to be taught in any high school geography class. Without grasping the dimensions of this globe-girdling Baseworld, one can't begin to understand the size and nature of our imperial aspirations or the degree to which a new kind of militarism is undermining our constitutional order.”

It was a benchmark essay for TomDispatch and a theme -- the unprecedented way Washington was garrisoning the planet -- that Johnson would return to repeatedly and that others of us would take up. This mattered because, despite the crucial role that Washington's empire of bases played in the American way of war and its dreams of global dominance, bases were then, and remain today, a phenomenon largely ignored in the mainstream media.

In 2004, the Pentagon was, for instance, already building the first of its 505 bases, the biggest among them meant to be “enduring,” in Iraq -- American ziggurats, I called them at the time. Some of these were large enough to qualify as full-scale American towns, with PXs, fire departments, bus routes, the usual range of fast-food joints, internet cafes, and the like -- and yet it was the rare American reporter who saw a story of any sort in them, even when visiting one of them. The same was true in Afghanistan, where the U.S. was building (and is still upgrading) 400 or more bases. No one even bothered to try to count them up until Nick Turse did so in February 2010 for this site. (Ann Jones took TomDispatch readers onto one of them in August of that same year.)

In his books and at TomDispatch, Johnson put significant effort into trying to come up with a number for the bases the Pentagon garrisoned outside the United States. In January 2011, Turse returned to that task and found that number to be well over 1,100. Again, it’s not a figure you normally see reported in the mainstream. In March 2010, John Feffer reminded TD readers of just how far the Pentagon would go to hang onto a single major base, among so many, on the Japanese island of Okinawa.

One of the last essays Chalmers Johnson published at this site before his death in 2010 was entitled “Dismantling the Empire” and it was concerned with just how the U.S. could downsize its global mission and end its empire of bases. David Vine, anthropologist and author of Island of Shame: The Secret History of the U.S. Military Base on Diego Garcia, has been touring American bases for the past three years. In a major survey of the changing shape of our Baseworld, he suggests that unfortunately it isn’t shrinking at all, and that “dismantling” isn’t yet on the American horizon. This means that -- until the mainstream finally stumbles upon the import of this story -- TomDispatch has little choice but to stay on the bases beat for the foreseeable future. (To catch Timothy MacBain's latest Tomcast audio interview in which Vine discusses his experiences with the Pentagon’s empire of bases, click here or download it to your iPod here.) Tom

The Lily-Pad Strategy
How the Pentagon Is Quietly Transforming Its Overseas Base Empire and Creating a Dangerous New Way of War
By David Vine

The first thing I saw last month when I walked into the belly of the dark grey C-17 Air Force cargo plane was a void -- something missing. A missing left arm, to be exact, severed at the shoulder, temporarily patched and held together. Thick, pale flesh, flecked with bright red at the edges. It looked like meat sliced open. The face and what remained of the rest of the man were obscured by blankets, an American flag quilt, and a jumble of tubes and tape, wires, drip bags, and medical monitors.

That man and two other critically wounded soldiers -- one with two stumps where legs had been, the other missing a leg below the thigh -- were intubated, unconscious, and lying on stretchers hooked to the walls of the plane that had just landed at Ramstein Air Base in Germany. A tattoo on the soldier’s remaining arm read, “DEATH BEFORE DISHONOR.”

I asked a member of the Air Force medical team about the casualties they see like these. Many, as with this flight, were coming from Afghanistan, he told me. “A lot from the Horn of Africa,” he added. “You don’t really hear about that in the media.”

“Where in Africa?” I asked. He said he didn’t know exactly, but generally from the Horn, often with critical injuries. “A lot out of Djibouti,” he added, referring to Camp Lemonnier, the main U.S. military base in Africa, but from “elsewhere” in the region, too.

Since the “Black Hawk Down” deaths in Somalia almost 20 years ago, we’ve heard little, if anything, about American military casualties in Africa (other than a strange report last week about three special operations commandos killed, along with three women identified by U.S. military sources as “Moroccan prostitutes,” in a mysterious car accident in Mali). The growing number of patients arriving at Ramstein from Africa pulls back a curtain on a significant transformation in twenty-first-century U.S. military strategy.

These casualties are likely to be the vanguard of growing numbers of wounded troops coming from places far removed from Afghanistan or Iraq. They reflect the increased use of relatively small bases like Camp Lemonnier, which military planners see as a model for future U.S. bases “scattered,” as one academic explains, “across regions in which the United States has previously not maintained a military presence.”

Disappearing are the days when Ramstein was the signature U.S. base, an American-town-sized behemoth filled with thousands or tens of thousands of Americans, PXs, Pizza Huts, and other amenities of home. But don’t for a second think that the Pentagon is packing up, downsizing its global mission, and heading home. In fact, based on developments in recent years, the opposite may be true. While the collection of Cold War-era giant bases around the world is shrinking, the global infrastructure of bases overseas has exploded in size and scope.

Unknown to most Americans, Washington’s garrisoning of the planet is on the rise, thanks to a new generation of bases the military calls “lily pads” (as in a frog jumping across a pond toward its prey). These are small, secretive, inaccessible facilities with limited numbers of troops, spartan amenities, and prepositioned weaponry and supplies.

Around the world, from Djibouti to the jungles of Honduras, the deserts of Mauritania to Australia’s tiny Cocos Islands, the Pentagon has been pursuing as many lily pads as it can, in as many countries as it can, as fast as it can. Although statistics are hard to assemble, given the often-secretive nature of such bases, the Pentagon has probably built upwards of 50 lily pads and other small bases since around 2000, while exploring the construction of dozens more.

As Mark Gillem, author of America Town: Building the Outposts of Empire, explains, “avoidance” of local populations, publicity, and potential opposition is the new aim. “To project its power,” he says, the United States wants “secluded and self-contained outposts strategically located” around the world. According to some of the strategy’s strongest proponents at the American Enterprise Institute, the goal should be “to create a worldwide network of frontier forts,” with the U.S. military “the ‘global cavalry’ of the twenty-first century.”

Such lily-pad bases have become a critical part of an evolving Washington military strategy aimed at maintaining U.S. global dominance by doing far more with less in an increasingly competitive, ever more multi-polar world. Central as it’s becoming to the long-term U.S. stance, this global-basing reset policy has, remarkably enough, received almost no public attention, nor significant Congressional oversight. Meanwhile, as the arrival of the first casualties from Africa shows, the U.S. military is getting involved in new areas of the world and new conflicts, with potentially disastrous consequences.

Transforming the Base Empire

You might think that the U.S. military is in the process of shrinking, rather than expanding, its little noticed but enormous collection of bases abroad. After all, it was forced to close the full panoply of 505 bases, mega to micro, that it built in Iraq, and it's now beginning the process of drawing down forces in Afghanistan. In Europe, the Pentagon is continuing to close its massive bases in Germany and will soon remove two combat brigades from that country. Global troop numbers are set to shrink by around 100,000.

Yet Washington still easily maintains the largest collection of foreign bases in world history: more than 1,000 military installations outside the 50 states and Washington, DC. They include everything from decades-old bases in Germany and Japan to brand-new drone bases in Ethiopia and the Seychelles islands in the Indian Ocean and even resorts for military vacationers in Italy and South Korea.

In Afghanistan, the U.S.-led international force still occupies more than 450 bases. In total, the U.S. military has some form of troop presence in approximately 150 foreign countries, not to mention 11 aircraft carrier task forces -- essentially floating bases -- and a significant, and growing, military presence in space. The United States currently spends an estimated $250 billion annually maintaining bases and troops overseas.

Some bases, like Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, date to the late nineteenth century. Most were built or occupied during or just after World War II on every continent, including Antarctica. Although the U.S. military vacated around 60% of its foreign bases following the Soviet Union’s collapse, the Cold War base infrastructure remained relatively intact, with 60,000 American troops remaining in Germany alone, despite the absence of a superpower adversary.

However, in the early months of 2001, even before the attacks of 9/11, the Bush administration launched a major global realignment of bases and troops that’s continuing today with Obama’s “Asia pivot.” Bush’s original plan was to close more than one-third of the nation’s overseas bases and shift troops east and south, closer to predicted conflict zones in the Middle East, Asia, Africa, and Latin America. The Pentagon began to focus on creating smaller and more flexible “forward operating bases” and even smaller “cooperative security locations” or “lily pads.” Major troop concentrations were to be restricted to a reduced number of “main operating bases” (MOBs) -- like Ramstein, Guam in the Pacific, and Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean -- which were to be expanded.

Despite the rhetoric of consolidation and closure that went with this plan, in the post-9/11 era the Pentagon has actually been expanding its base infrastructure dramatically, including dozens of major bases in every Persian Gulf country save Iran, and in several Central Asian countries critical to the war in Afghanistan.

Hitting the Base Reset Button

Obama’s recently announced “Asia pivot” signals that East Asia will be at the center of the explosion of lily-pad bases and related developments. Already in Australia, U.S. marines are settling into a shared base in Darwin. Elsewhere, the Pentagon is pursuing plans for a drone and surveillance base in Australia’s Cocos Islands and deployments to Brisbane and Perth. In Thailand, the Pentagon has negotiated rights for new Navy port visits and a “disaster-relief hub” at U-Tapao.

In the Philippines, whose government evicted the U.S. from the massive Clark Air Base and Subic Bay Naval Base in the early 1990s, as many as 600 special forces troops have quietly been operating in the country’s south since January 2002. Last month, the two governments reached an agreement on the future U.S. use of Clark and Subic, as well as other repair and supply hubs from the Vietnam War era. In a sign of changing times, U.S. officials even signed a 2011 defense agreement with former enemy Vietnam and have begun negotiations over the Navy’s increased use of Vietnamese ports.

Elsewhere in Asia, the Pentagon has rebuilt a runway on tiny Tinian island near Guam, and it’s considering future bases in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Brunei, while pushing stronger military ties with India. Every year in the region, the military conducts around 170 military exercises and 250 port visits. On South Korea’s Jeju island, the Korean military is building a base that will be part of the U.S. missile defense system and to which U.S. forces will have regular access.

“We just can’t be in one place to do what we’ve got to do,” Pacific Command commander Admiral Samuel Locklear III has said. For military planners, “what we’ve got to do” is clearly defined as isolating and (in the terminology of the Cold War) “containing” the new power in the region, China. This evidently means “peppering” new bases throughout the region, adding to the more than 200 U.S. bases that have encircled China for decades in Japan, South Korea, Guam, and Hawaii.

And Asia is just the beginning. In Africa, the Pentagon has quietly created “about a dozen air bases” for drones and surveillance since 2007. In addition to Camp Lemonnier, we know that the military has created or will soon create installations in Burkina Faso, Burundi, the Central African Republic, Ethiopia, Kenya, Mauritania, São Tomé and Príncipe, Senegal, Seychelles, South Sudan, and Uganda. The Pentagon has also investigated building bases in Algeria, Gabon, Ghana, Mali, and Nigeria, among other places.

Next year, a brigade-sized force of 3,000 troops, and “likely more,” will arrive for exercises and training missions across the continent. In the nearby Persian Gulf, the Navy is developing an “afloat forward-staging base,” or “mothership,” to serve as a sea-borne “lily pad” for helicopters and patrol craft, and has been involved in a massive build-up of forces in the region.

In Latin America, following the military's eviction from Panama in 1999 and Ecuador in 2009, the Pentagon has created or upgraded new bases in Aruba and Curaçao, Chile, Colombia, El Salvador, and Peru. Elsewhere, the Pentagon has funded the creation of military and police bases capable of hosting U.S. forces in Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Costa Rica, and even Ecuador. In 2008, the Navy reactivated its Fourth Fleet, inactive since 1950, to patrol the region. The military may want a base in Brazil and unsuccessfully tried to create bases, ostensibly for humanitarian and emergency relief, in Paraguay and Argentina.

Finally, in Europe, after arriving in the Balkans during 1990’s interventions, U.S. bases have moved eastward into some of the former Eastern Bloc states of the Soviet empire. The Pentagon is now developing installations capable of supporting rotating, brigade-sized deployments in Romania and Bulgaria, and a missile defense base and aviation facilities in Poland. Previously, the Bush administration maintained two CIA black sites (secret prisons) in Lithuania and another in Poland. Citizens of the Czech Republic rejected a planned radar base for the Pentagon’s still unproven missile defense system, and now Romania will host ground-based missiles.

A New American Way of War

A lily pad on one of the Gulf of Guinea islands of S­ão Tomé and Príncipe, off the oil-rich west coast of Africa, helps explain what’s going on. A U.S. official has described the base as “another Diego Garcia,” referring to the Indian Ocean base that’s helped ensure decades of U.S. domination over Middle Eastern energy supplies. Without the freedom to create new large bases in Africa, the Pentagon is using S­ão Tomé and a growing collection of other lily pads on the continent in an attempt to control another crucial oil-rich region.

Far beyond West Africa, the nineteenth century “Great Game” competition for Central Asia has returned with a passion -- and this time gone global. It’s spreading to resource-rich lands in Africa, Asia, and South America, as the United States, China, Russia, and members of the European Union find themselves locked in an increasingly intense competition for economic and geopolitical supremacy.

While Beijing, in particular, has pursued this competition in a largely economic fashion, dotting the globe with strategic investments, Washington has focused relentlessly on military might as its global trump card, dotting the planet with new bases and other forms of military power. “Forget full-scale invasions and large-footprint occupations on the Eurasian mainland,” Nick Turse has written of this new twenty-first century military strategy. “Instead, think: special operations forces... proxy armies... the militarization of spying and intelligence... drone aircraft... cyber-attacks, and joint Pentagon operations with increasingly militarized ‘civilian’ government agencies.”

Add to this unparalleled long-range air and naval power; arms sales besting any nation on Earth; humanitarian and disaster relief missions that clearly serve military intelligence, patrol, and “hearts and minds” functions; the rotational deployment of regular U.S. forces globally; port visits and an expanding array of joint military exercises and training missions that give the U.S. military de facto “presence” worldwide and help turn foreign militaries into proxy forces.

And lots and lots of lily-pad bases.

Military planners see a future of endless small-scale interventions in which a large, geographically dispersed collection of bases will always be primed for instant operational access. With bases in as many places as possible, military planners want to be able to turn to another conveniently close country if the United States is ever prevented from using a base, as it was by Turkey prior to the invasion of Iraq. In other words, Pentagon officials dream of nearly limitless flexibility, the ability to react with remarkable rapidity to developments anywhere on Earth, and thus, something approaching total military control over the planet.

Beyond their military utility, the lily pads and other forms of power projection are also political and economic tools used to build and maintain alliances and provide privileged U.S. access to overseas markets, resources, and investment opportunities. Washington is planning to use lily-pad bases and other military projects to bind countries in Eastern Europe, Africa, Asia, and Latin America as closely as possible to the U.S. military -- and so to continued U.S. political-economic hegemony. In short, American officials are hoping military might will entrench their influence and keep as many countries as possible within an American orbit at a time when some are asserting their independence ever more forcefully or gravitating toward China and other rising powers.

Those Dangerous Lily Pads

While relying on smaller bases may sound smarter and more cost effective than maintaining huge bases that have often caused anger in places like Okinawa and South Korea, lily pads threaten U.S. and global security in several ways:

First, the “lily pad” language can be misleading, since by design or otherwise, such installations are capable of quickly growing into bloated behemoths.

Second, despite the rhetoric about spreading democracy that still lingers in Washington, building more lily pads actually guarantees collaboration with an increasing number of despotic, corrupt, and murderous regimes.

Third, there is a well-documented pattern of damage that military facilities of various sizes inflict on local communities. Although lily pads seem to promise insulation from local opposition, over time even small bases have often led to anger and protest movements.

Finally, a proliferation of lily pads means the creeping militarization of large swaths of the globe. Like real lily pads -- which are actually aquatic weeds -- bases have a way of growing and reproducing uncontrollably. Indeed, bases tend to beget bases, creating “base races” with other nations, heightening military tensions, and discouraging diplomatic solutions to conflicts. After all, how would the United States respond if China, Russia, or Iran were to build even a single lily-pad base of its own in Mexico or the Caribbean?

For China and Russia in particular, ever more U.S. bases near their borders threaten to set off new cold wars. Most troublingly, the creation of new bases to protect against an alleged future Chinese military threat may prove to be a self-fulfilling prophecy: such bases in Asia are likely to create the threat they are supposedly designed to protect against, making a catastrophic war with China more, not less, likely.

Encouragingly, however, overseas bases have recently begun to generate critical scrutiny across the political spectrum from Republican Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison and Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul to Democratic Senator Jon Tester and New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof. With everyone looking for ways to trim the deficit, closing overseas bases offers easy savings. Indeed, increasingly influential types are recognizing that the country simply can’t afford more than 1,000 bases abroad.

Great Britain, like empires before it, had to close most of its remaining foreign bases in the midst of an economic crisis in the 1960s and 1970s. The United States is undoubtedly headed in that direction sooner or later. The only question is whether the country will give up its bases and downsize its global mission by choice, or if it will follow Britain’s path as a fading power forced to give up its bases from a position of weakness.

Of course, the consequences of not choosing another path extend beyond economics. If the proliferation of lily pads, special operations forces, and drone wars continues, the United States is likely to be drawn into new conflicts and new wars, generating unknown forms of blowback, and untold death and destruction. In that case, we’d better prepare for a lot more incoming flights -- from the Horn of Africa to Honduras -- carrying not just amputees but caskets.

Guantánamo’s ghosts and the shame of Diego Garcia
22.10.07

One of the more sordid and long-running stories in Anglo-American colonial history –- that of Diego Garcia, the chief island of the Chagos Archipelago in the Indian Ocean –- reared its ugly head again on Friday when the UK’s all-party foreign affairs committee announced plans to investigate long-standing allegations that the CIA has, since 2002, held and interrogated al-Qaeda suspects at a secret prison on the island.



The shameful tale of Diego Garcia began in 1961, when it was marked out by the US military as a crucial geopolitical base. Ignoring the fact that 2,000 people already lived there, and that the island –- a British colony since the fall of Napoleon –- had been settled in the late 18th century by French coconut planters, who shipped in African- and Indian-born labourers from Mauritius, establishing what John Pilger called “a gentle Creole nation with thriving villages, a school, a hospital, a church, a prison, a railway, docks, a copra plantation,” the Labour government of Harold Wilson conspired with the administrations of Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon to “sweep” and “sanitize” the islands (the words come from American documents that were later declassified).

Although many islanders traced their ancestry back five generations, a British Foreign Office official wrote in 1966 that the government’s aim was “to convert all the existing residents … into short-term, temporary residents,” so that they could be exiled to Mauritius. Having removed the “Tarzans or Men Fridays,” as another British memo described the inhabitants, the British effectively ceded control of the islands to the Americans, who established a base on Diego Garcia, which, over the years, has become known as “Camp Justice,” complete with “over 2,000 troops, anchorage for 30 warships, a nuclear dump, a satellite spy station, shopping malls, bars and a golf course.” So thoroughly were the islands cleared –- and so stealthy the procedure –- that in the 1970s the British Ministry of Defence had the effrontery to insist, “There is nothing in our files about a population and an evacuation.”



Diego Garcia’s former residents in happier times.

Suffering in exile, the Chagos islanders have struggled in vain to secure the right to return to their ancestral home, winning a stunning victory in the High Court in 2000, which ruled their expulsion illegal, but then suffering a setback in 2003, when, with typically high-handed authoritarianism, Tony Blair invoked an ancient and archaic “royal prerogative” to strike down their claims once more. Although the appeal court reversed this decision in May 2006, ruling that the islanders’ right to return was “one of the most fundamental liberties known to human beings,” it remains to be seen how this belated judicial recognition of their rights can be squared with the Americans’ insistence that their military-industrial archipelago must remain unsullied by outsiders.

In their resistance to the islanders’ claims, Blair and the Foreign Office were clearly protecting the interests of their American allies, for whom the geopolitical importance of Diego Garcia as a strategic base had recently been augmented by its use –- and the use of some of the ships moored there –- as fabulously remote offshore prisons in which to hold and interrogate “high-value” al-Qaeda suspects.

The suspicion, which the foreign affairs committee has pledged to investigate, is that on Diego Garcia the Americans found a far more compliant partner in torture –- the British government –- than they found in most other locations chosen for secret CIA prisons. According to various reports over the years, the Americans’ other partners in the offshore torture game –- Thailand, Poland and Rumania, for example –- were only prepared to be paid off for a while before they got cold feet and sent the CIA packing.

Whether the committee will probe deeply or not remains to be seen. The British-based legal charity Reprieve, which has called for such an investigation for some time, has already told the committee in a submission that it believes that the British government is “potentially systematically complicit in the most serious crimes against humanity of disappearance, torture and prolonged incommunicado detention.” Clive Stafford Smith, Reprieve’s legal director, told the Guardian that he is “absolutely and categorically certain” that prisoners have been held on the island.

When questioned by diligent MPs like Andrew Tyrie, the Conservative MP for Chichester, who is a staunch opponent of the CIA’s use of “extraordinary rendition,” the British government has persistently maintained that it believes “assurances” given by the US government that no terror suspects have been held on the island, but there are several compelling reasons for concluding, instead, that the government is actually being economical with the truth.

Studies of planes used by the CIA for its rendition program –- which can be found on Stephen Grey’s excellent Ghost Plane site –- have established that on September 11, 2002, the day that 9/11 plotter Ramzi bin al-Shibh was seized after a firefight in Karachi, one of the CIA’s planes flew from Washington to Diego Garcia, via Athens. Bin al-Shibh did not resurface again until September 2006, when he was moved to Guantánamo, and he has not spoken about his experiences. Unlike his supposed mentor Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, he refused to take part in his tribunal at Guantánamo earlier this year, but this is not the only piece of the torture jigsaw that has been reconstructed by diligent researchers.

In June 2006, Dick Marty, a Swiss senator who produced a detailed report on “extraordinary rendition” for the Council of Europe, also concluded that Diego Garcia had been used as a secret prison. Having spoken to senior CIA officers during his research, he told the European Parliament, “We have received concurring confirmations that United States agencies have used Diego Garcia, which is the international legal responsibility of the UK, in the ‘processing’ of high-value detainees.”

Anecdotally, Marty’s findings have been confirmed by other sources. Manfred Novak, the UN’s Special Rapporteur on Torture, declared that he heard from “reliable sources” that the US has “held prisoners on ships in the Indian Ocean,” and detainees in Guantánamo have also told their lawyers that they were held on US ships –- in addition to those held on the USS Bataan and the USS Peleliu, which are discussed in my book The Guantánamo Files. One detainee told a researcher from Reprieve, “One of my fellow prisoners in Guantánamo was at sea on an American ship with about 50 others before coming to Guantánamo. He told me that there were about 50 other people on the ship; they were all closed off in the bottom. The people detained on the ship were beaten even more severely than in Guantánamo.”

The most incriminating evidence of all, however, has come not from opponents of Guantánamo, or, indirectly, from those subjected to some of the regime’s most horrendous abuses, but from an upstanding insider. Barry McCaffrey, a retired four-star US general, who is now professor of international security studies at the West Point military academy (whose recent report on Guantánamo was ridiculed here), has twice let slip that Diego Garcia has, as the administration’s opponents have struggled to maintain, been used to hold terror suspects. In May 2004, he blithely declared, “We’re probably holding around 3,000 people, you know, Bagram air field, Diego Garcia, Guantánamo, 16 camps throughout Iraq,” and in December 2006 he slipped the leash again, saying, “They’re behind bars … we’ve got them on Diego Garcia, in Bagram air field, in Guantánamo.”

Do we need any further proof?

Okinawa orders halt to work related to US base relocation
By ASSOCIATED PRESS
PUBLISHED: 07:41 EST, 23 March 2015 | UPDATED: 07:42 EST, 23 March 2015

TOKYO (AP) — The governor of the southern Japanese island of Okinawa ordered a Defense Ministry branch to suspend all work at the site where a key U.S. military air base is to be relocated, in a growing confrontation between the island and the central government.
Gov. Takeshi Onaga told a news conference Monday that a concrete anchor thrown into the sea for a drilling survey of the reef at the designated site is believed have damaged coral.
It was his first specific action to interfere with the relocation since taking office four months ago after winning an election over a predecessor whose approval of the plan had allowed the Defense Bureau to begin preparing the site known as Henoko for eventual transfer of the U.S. Marine Corps Air Station Futenma.

Japanese police officers stand guard as a protester against the relocation of U.S. Marine Corps Air Station Futenma, as protesters stage a rally outside Camp Schwab, an American base near a planned relocation site, in Nago, Okinawa Prefecture, Monday, March 23, 2015. The governor of the southern Japanese island of Okinawa has ordered a Defense Ministry branch to suspend all work at the site where a key U.S. military air base is to be relocated. The U.S. and Japan reached the relocation agreement in 1996. The banner reads: "Henoko, Block reclamation." (AP Photo/ Eugene Hoshiko)
Onaga said the use of concrete blocks was not part of the initial approval and was unauthorized. He said the prefecture needs to conduct its independent survey to assess the damage, and demanded the Defense Bureau stop all activity related to the relocation within one week, or revoke the license for the drilling work, which could put the entire relocation on hold.
The central government's effort to gain Okinawa's understanding is "insufficient," he said. "I urge the Defense Bureau to take the order seriously and take a responsible step."
It was not immediately clear whether his order would be observed.
Chief Cabinet Secretary Yoshihide Suga told a news conference that officials are currently studying the suspension order, but that the survey should proceed regardless of the governor's order. He criticized Onaga for one-sidedly changing the concession that Okinawa had made under its previous leadership.
"I don't see any reason why we should halt the operation," Suga said. "This is a law-abiding nation. It is extremely regrettable that (Onaga) submitted the document (ordering the suspension) at this stage."
The Futenma base now is in a densely populated part of the island, and the transfer is intended to address safety and nuisance concerns of the population. But many people on Okinawa want Futenma moved completely off the island. Opponents also say the construction would endanger the coral reef, tropical fish and other marine life.
The underwater drilling, which had been halted ahead of the November election in an apparent attempt by Tokyo to avoid controversy, resumed earlier this month, to prepare for the land reclamation needed to build an airstrip over the water from Camp Scwab, another American military base.
The Futenma relocation to Henoko is part of a broader realignment of the U.S. military presence in Okinawa, home to about half of 50,000 American troops based in Japan under a bilateral security treaty. The relocation plan, agreed upon in 1996, has been delayed as previous plans had failed.
Prime Minister Shinzo Abe's government has repeatedly said the plan is crucial to Japan's military alliance with the U.S. amid China's military rise and North Korea's nuclear ambitions.

Okinawa Gov. Takeshi Onaga speaks during a news conference in Naha on the southern Japanese island of Okinawa Monday, March 23, 2015. Onaga has ordered a Defense Ministry branch to suspend all work at the site where a key U.S. military air base is to be relocated. Onaga told the news conference that a concrete anchor thrown into the sea for a drilling survey of the reef at the designated site known as Henoko is believed have damaged coral. (AP Photo/Kyodo News, Keiichiro Hoshino) JAPAN OUT, CREDIT MANDATORY

Protesters against the relocation of U.S. Marine Corps Air Station Futenma, dance as they stage a rally in front of Camp Schwab, an American base near a planned relocation site, in Nago, Okinawa Prefecture Monday, March 23, 2015. The governor of the southern Japanese island of Okinawa has ordered a Defense Ministry branch to suspend all work at the site where a key U.S. military air base is to be relocated. The U.S. and Japan reached the relocation agreement in 1996. (AP Photo/ Eugene Hoshiko)

Protesters against the relocation of U.S. Marine Corps Air Station Futenma, stage a rally in front of Camp Schwab, an American base near a planned relocation site, in Nago, Okinawa Prefecture Monday, March 23, 2015. The governor of the southern Japanese island of Okinawa has ordered a Defense Ministry branch to suspend all work at the site where a key U.S. military air base is to be relocated. The U.S. and Japan reached the relocation agreement in 1996. (AP Photo/ Eugene Hoshiko)

Protesters against the relocation of U.S. Marine Corps Air Station Futenma, stage a rally in front of Camp Schwab, an American base near a planned relocation site, in Nago, Okinawa Prefecture Monday, March 23, 2015. The governor of the southern Japanese island of Okinawa has ordered a Defense Ministry branch to suspend all work at the site where a key U.S. military air base is to be relocated. The U.S. and Japan reached the relocation agreement in 1996. The banners read: "Henoko, Block the reclamation." (AP Photo/Eugene Hoshiko)

Protesters against the relocation of U.S. Marine Corps Air Station Futenma, stage a rally in front of Camp Schwab, an American base near a planned relocation site, in Nago, Okinawa Prefecture Monday, March 23, 2015. The governor of the southern Japanese island of Okinawa has ordered a Defense Ministry branch to suspend all work at the site where a key U.S. military air base is to be relocated. The U.S. and Japan reached the relocation agreement in 1996. The banners read: "Henoko, Block the reclamation." (AP Photo/Eugene Hoshiko)

Protesters against the relocation of U.S. Marine Corps Air Station Futenma ties black and red ribbons on the fence of Camp Schwab, an American base near a planned relocation site, in Nago, Okinawa Prefecture Monday, March 23, 2015. The governor of the southern Japanese island of Okinawa has ordered a Defense Ministry branch to suspend all work at the site where a key U.S. military air base is to be relocated. The U.S. and Japan reached the relocation agreement in 1996.(AP Photo/Eugene Hoshiko)
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Protesters against the relocation of U.S. Marine Corps Air Station Futenma, dance during a rally outside Camp Schwab, an American base near a planned relocation site, in Nago, Okinawa Prefecture Monday, March 23, 2015. The governor of the southern Japanese island of Okinawa has ordered a Defense Ministry branch to suspend all work at the site where a key U.S. military air base is to be relocated. The U.S. and Japan reached the relocation agreement in 1996. (AP Photo/Eugene Hoshiko)

Protesters against the relocation of U.S. Marine Corps Air Station Futenma, stage a rally in front of Camp Schwab, an American base near a planned relocation site, in Nago, Okinawa Prefecture Monday, March 23, 2015. The governor of the southern Japanese island of Okinawa has ordered a Defense Ministry branch to suspend all work at the site where a key U.S. military air base is to be relocated. The U.S. and Japan reached the relocation agreement in 1996. The banners read: "Henoko, Block the reclamation." (AP Photo/Eugene Hoshiko)

A banner which reads "Oppose New Base", is lifte by a protester against the relocation of U.S. Marine Corps Air Station Futenma, during a rally outside Camp Schwab, an American base near a planned relocation site, in Nago, Okinawa Prefecture Monday, March 23, 2015. The governor of the southern Japanese island of Okinawa has ordered a Defense Ministry branch to suspend all work at the site where a key U.S. military air base is to be relocated. The U.S. and Japan reached the relocation agreement in 1996. (AP Photo/Eugene Hoshiko)

U.S. Marines official dismissed over Okinawa protest video leak
BY JON MITCHELL
MAR 23, 2015

NAHA, OKINAWA PREF. – The Pentagon has reportedly dismissed a senior U.S. Marine Corps official in Okinawa following the leak of on-base surveillance video to a Japanese neo-nationalist group.

According to Japanese media, Robert Eldridge, deputy assistant chief of staff of government and external affairs, lost his job over the unauthorized release of footage from a security camera located within the marines’ Camp Schwab base in Nago city, northeastern Okinawa. The leaked film, which showed the arrest of Okinawan peace campaigner Hiroji Yamashiro last month, was uploaded to YouTube on March 9.


In response to inquiries from journalists in Okinawa, a U.S. Marine Corps spokesman initially denied the footage had been leaked. However, on March 14 the military admitted the video had been released without authorization and pledged to punish the party involved.

Referring to Pentagon policy, U.S. officials refrained from confirming that Eldridge had been held responsible. Requests by The Japan Times for comment from Eldridge and the U.S. military in Okinawa have so far gone unanswered.

Eldridge, a former academic, began working for the marines in 2009.

Yamashiro, chairman of the Okinawa Peace Movement Center, was arrested by base security guards at Camp Schwab for crossing its boundary line during a demonstration on Feb. 22. Following his detention, he was handed over to Japanese police, who released him the next day while they conduct further inquiries.

The arrest by security guards caused uproar on the island, since it was the first time that the Marine Corps has taken direct action against Okinawans protesting plans to build a new U.S. facility in Nago to replace the troubled Futenma air base in Ginowan city in central Okinawa.

The surveillance video — which shows Yamashiro stepping over the installation’s yellow demarcation line — was apparently leaked to justify the arrest.

The footage was uploaded to YouTube by a user called “Tedokon Bogii,” who is believed to be a presenter for the far-right Internet TV network Channel Sakura. Dubbing itself a Japanese culture channel, Sakura’s programs regularly glorify Japan’s role in World War II; they also claim anti-base protests on Okinawa are the work of Chinese, Korean and communist agitators.

Last month The Japan Times revealed that Eldridge had appeared on Channel Sakura twice — including one appearance in January where he branded Okinawa protests “hate speech.” In comments on The Japan Times website, Eldridge also referred to Okinawan demonstrations as “mob rule” and claimed there had been “many physical attacks on Americans” by protesters.

In December, Eldridge and a Channel Sakura host were invited to talk on the Pentagon’s local military radio network, AFN Okinawa. United States Forces Japan did not reply to requests from The Japan Times to clarify who had authorized the joint appearance; the issue is currently the subject of U.S. Freedom of Information Act proceedings.

Revelations of collaboration between the U.S. military and Japanese neo-nationalists come at a critical time for Tokyo-Washington relations. Next month, newly appointed U.S. Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter is expected to make his first visit to Japan to discuss, among other matters, the long-stalled Okinawa base relocation plan. The Japanese government insists it is committed to the project despite overwhelming opposition in Okinawa.

On Saturday, 3,900 demonstrators converged on Nago in one of the largest shows of Okinawan anger to date.