The Ruthless Truth blog

US military installations around the World

by Joan Roelofs

Global Research, February 20, 2010

Counterpunch – 2010-02-19

Despite United States economic weakness, although not unrelated to it, our military casts a heavy shadow everywhere on earth, far beyond the major and minor wars it is now conducting. The geographical and functional scope of the US military is cosmic. Formal alliances are an important element, but even such bloated, increasingly un-Atlantic and shockingly un-pacific institutions as NATO are only the tip of the iceberg. Nations generally regarded as “neutral” are now junior partners in NATO: Ireland, Austria, Switzerland, Finland, Malta, and Sweden. “In June 2009, war games ‘Loyal Arrow’ were conducted by 10 countries in Northern Sweden, as a preliminary move to extend US and NATO military presence into Arctic regions—and confronting Russia in that area,” as reported by Rick Rozoff .

Other affiliates are the NATO Mediterranean dialogue states: Algeria, Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Mauritania, Morocco, and Tunisia, and guests invited to NATO events: Australia, New Zealand, Japan, and South Korea. Whether committed or just coffee dates, NATO nations are required to meet exacting standards. This means, in most cases, not only increased power for their military institutions, but also secret agreements that negate democracy. If our ally’s elected government  is military-skeptical, prime ministers and their parliamentary supporters may be kept uninformed of the NATO arrangements, as in the case of the nuclear weapons that were stationed in Greenland in violation of the Danish Constitution. The “normalization” of NATO, its penetration into the European Union, and its effect on civilian life (East and West Europe and Central Asia) are rarely examined.

Another wing of the US military is training, supplied to NATO partners and the military and civilian personnel of over 150 nations. The School of the Americas (now Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation) at Fort Benning, GA, is notorious. However, there are 200 institutions in the US that train foreign military, and many overseas. Any nation that buys US military equipment—there are about 150 such countries–gets trainers with the deal.

The joint exercises with our Special Operations Forces are also “trainings” that provide mentors for foreign troops, so that we can insure “interoperability.”

The scope of operations blurs the distinction between military and civilian functions. Among the problems that may call for a military response, according to the 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review are:

Rising demand for resources, rapid urbanization of littoral regions, the effects of climate change, the emergence of new strains of disease, and profound cultural and demographic tensions in several regions are just some of the trends whose complex interplay may spark or exacerbate future conflicts.

US military serves humanitarian missions everywhere, in disasters as well as routine social service needs. One of its functions, according to the QDR, is “preventing human suffering due to mass atrocities or large-scale natural disasters abroad.” It also tries to win the hearts and minds of the people by operating dental and pet care clinics. The modern missionaries discover the lay of the land, make friends with ambitious, intelligent locals, and rarely leave. All these interactions—alliances, partnerships, training, and humanitarian services– create “networking,” collegial relationships with current and future elites, both civilian and military. Then there are the bases.

The Bases of Empire: The Global Struggle Against U.S. Military Posts, edited by Catherine Lutz (N.Y.: NYU Press, 2009) is a fitting sequel to another excellent book, The Sun Never Sets: Confronting the Network of Foreign U.S. Military Bases, edited by Joseph Gerson and Bruce Birchard (Boston: AFSC/South End Press, 1991). Gerson and Cynthia Enloe are represented in both books.

Lutz is an anthropologist; many activists and anthropologists are contributors to this volume, which bodes well for information about what is really going on, in contrast to foreign policy experts who tell us mostly about elite opinion and their own ideological presuppositions. For information about the size, location, and real estate value of US military bases (domestic and foreign), one can look at the DOD Base Structure Report. This understates the number, omitting the bases in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the forthcoming one in Yemen. Also not listed are foreign bases that grant access rights to the US military. The 2009 BSR claimed 4,742 bases in the US, 121 in our territories, and 716 foreign. Some have estimated the foreign bases as nearer to 1,000, and the cost for those alone at around $250 billion annually.

The Lutz volume describes their effect on host countries and their people, and also reports the extensive activism protesting bases, some of which has been successful. For support and inspiration, there is an International Network for the Abolition of Foreign Military Bases . The current status of anti-base protests can be found on its web site. The anti-base movements have considerable leadership and participation by women, indigenous people, and racial minorities. Ironically, the US military has  promoted multicultural democracy in foreign lands.

Lutz tells us what people don’t like about the bases. First of all, there is the sovereignty issue. Status of Forces Agreements often provide that the host countries’ criminal and environmental laws will not be applied to US personnel and bases. Secret agreements, such as those allowing for the presence of nuclear weapons, bypass parliamentary institutions, laws, and constitutions. Aside from formal provisions, a foreign military occupation confers power over the politics and society of the host. Thus the 235 bases currently in Germany are not without function. They have helped to keep the population “in line” with the “American way.” In addition, as everywhere, there is an economic stimulus to the restaurant, entertainment, and real estate industries, filling in the gaps where war and the globalization of manufacturing and agriculture have hollowed out local economies.

Nevertheless, another reason for unhappiness is the purpose of the installations. They are used for making war, spying on other countries, torture, and other activities that violate the host countries’ laws and the will of their people. To moral and legal concerns must be added the potential for “blowback,” as bases may be targeted by nations resentful of being attacked.

Locals are angry at the taking of their land, which may be rendered unfit forever for agriculture or tourism. Vicenza, Italy is a UNESCO heritage city; a second massive military base is being constructed there despite a longstanding protest movement. In all cases, the environmental consequences of base construction and operation are grave for land, sea, and air. The constant noise of overflights, artillery fire, and bombing practice is also a cause for complaint.

A prostitution industry and violent crimes are common followers of base installations.

One of the best-known and vigorous protest movement, that of Okinawa, was catalyzed by the 1995 rape of a 12 year old girl and the US refusal to surrender the suspects to local authorities. However, all of the above reasons motivated the protests. In addition, many Okinawans consider themselves a colonized population of Japan, and resent the placement of 75% of the US Japanese bases on their territory.

The Bases of Empire contains detailed case studies of Latin America and the Caribbean, Iraq, and Diego Garcia; US nuclear weapons bases in Europe; and protest movements in the Philippines, Okinawa, and Turkey. Furthermore, it includes anti-base activism on US territory in Hawaii and Vieques, Puerto Rico, which has served as a worldwide inspiration. The afterword, by Julian Aguon, a Chamoru (indigenous person of Guam), protests that his people are becoming extinct. Filipino and Korean workers were brought to Guam to build the bases, which are now slated for massive enlargement. In addition, Chamorus serve and die in the US armed forces at a disproportionate rate.

The overall picture may be bleak, yet there are signs of hope. The anti-base movements have had some successes. The US military is creating a new basing system for strategic reasons;unpopularity is also a motivator.

As Rumsfeld announced in 2004:

Our first notion is that our troops should be located in places where they are wanted, welcomed, and needed. In some cases, the presence and activities of our forces grate on local populations and have become an irritant for host governments. The best example is our massive headquarters in some of the most valuable downtown real estate in South Korea’s capital city, Seoul – long a sore point for many South Koreans. Under our proposed changes, that headquarters will be dramatically reduced in size and moved to a location well south of the capital.

Now some of the “main operating bases” with permanent structures, family housing, etc., will be closed in favor of "forward operating sites" and “cooperative security locations,” often maintained by contractors to shield the principals from the gaze of the locals.

After many years of protest, spurred by prostitution and ensuing disease as well as the constitutional ban on nuclear weapons, the Philippines bases were closed. This success is somewhat countered by joint military exercises, ship visits, and Special Forces operations, but the activism has not ceased.

Ecuadoran President Rafael Correa refused to extend the contract for the base at Manta, and it is closing. A major movement demands the end to all US bases in Latin America and the Caribbean, and deplores the US quest for new bases in Colombia. Although the Honduran request for the closure of the US base at Palmerola was not a success, it was a serious enough threat to trigger the overthrow squad. In Vieques, Puerto Rico, which was bombed for 180 days in a year, the protest began with environmental and health concerns, and was reinforced in 1999 when a security guard was killed by a stray bomb. Worldwide solidarity activists aided in the base closure, and the international movement continues today.

The environmental and political consequences of bases within the US are also worthy of investigation, yet one rarely sees comprehensive studies by journalists, social scientists, or activists. Political science and environmental studies textbooks mostly ignore them. At the very least, they represent another system of local government. The Military Toxics Project, which expressed serious concerns of military families and civilian base workers, has ceased for lack of funds. We are indebted to Catherine Lutz for authoring an earlier book on the impact of a domestic base: Homefront: A Military City and the American 20th Century (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002), a study of Fayetteville, NC, home of Fort Bragg. Her introduction asserts: “In an important sense, though, we all inhabit an army camp, mobilized to lend support to the permanent state of war readiness that has been with us since World War II.”

Joan Roelofs is Professor Emerita of Political Science, Keene State College, New Hampshire. She is the translator of Victor Considerant’s Principles of Socialism (Maisonneuve Press, 2006), and author of Foundations and Public Policy: The Mask of Pluralism (SUNY Press, 2003) and Greening Cities (Apex-Bootstrap Press, 1996). On her site is the outline of an adult education course on “The Military-Industrial Complex,” with images, citations, and links. Contact: joan.roelofs@myfairpoint.net

Global Research Articles by Joan Roelofs

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=17723

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

By Chuck Baldwin

Regular readers of this column will doubtless recall my recent column in which I reported on the new Council of Governors (CG) that President Barack Obama has created. See my column here.
Well, Obama’s CG is quickly beginning to take shape. According to the Associated Press (AP), "President Barack Obama has selected Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon to serve on an advisory council for defense and national security issues.
"Nixon was one of 10 governors named Thursday [February 4, 2009] by Obama to the newly created Council of Governors."
The 10 governors (and one of them is not even a State governor) selected by Obama are:
*Governor James Douglas (R-Vermont) *Co-chair
*Governor Chris Gregoire (D-Washington) *Co-chair
Governor Brad Henry (D-Oklahoma)
Governor Jay Nixon (D-Missouri)
Governor Martin O’Malley (D-Maryland)
Governor Janice Brewer (R-Arizona)
Governor Bob McDonnell (R-Virginia)
Governor Michael Rounds (R-South Dakota)
Governor Beverly Perdue (D-North Carolina)
Governor Luis G. Fortuno (R-Puerto Rico)
As I have already written, the creation of a CG should be of serious concern to all liberty loving Americans. That more of us are not as concerned as we should be can be traced to the mistaken belief that the American people have nothing to fear from an overreaching federal government. This is pure folly! As I have said many times, we have far more to fear from Washington, D.C., than from Iran, Iraq, North Korea, or any other potential terrorist state. It is Washington, D.C.,–and Washington, D.C., alone–that has the power, opportunity, and propensity to squash our freedom and sell us into tyranny.
As Kurt Nimmo reports, "In other words, with the stoke of a pen, Obama significantly increased the ongoing effort to federalize the states and take control of the National Guard in violation of the now more or less moribund Posse Comitatus Act. Posse Comitatus was effectively annulled by the 2006 John Warner National Defense Authorization Act. The act provides the president with power to declare martial law under revisions to the Insurrection Act and take charge of United States National Guard troops without state governor authorization. Parts of the act were repealed in 2008."
See the report at Infowars.com here.
What most Americans fail to realize (thanks to a national propaganda press corps that refuses to reveal the conspiratorial machinations of America’s ruling class, which, by and large, is totally disconnected from–or unaccountable to–elected officeholders: especially those in Congress) is that the subdivision of the United States into a 10-region country (thereby minimizing or even negating the sovereignty and authority of the 50 independent and autonomous states) goes all the way back to the Richard Nixon administration.
In response to pressure from the United Nations, President Richard Nixon issued Executive Order #11647 on February 10, 1972, which carved up the United States into 10 "standard Federal regions."
For the doubters out there, Wikipedia has a rather detailed web page mentioning the federal 10-region breakdown of the United States.
See the Wikipedia entry here.
See the map here.
Still not convinced? Try a casual web search of the 10 US regions and you will quickly discover that each major federal agency, such as the EPA, OSHA, DOT, FEMA, etc., has their agency already divided into these 10 regions. As an example, here is the official district map for FEMA.
Commenting on the creation of the 10 "super" regions initiated by President Nixon, CuttingEdge.org director David Bay very astutely said, "This regional system is also apparently a military structure." This is a very insightful observation, because I’m sure this was said long before President Obama took office, yet, that is exactly what his CG accomplishes. It grants federal executive power to these 10 governors–with the specific responsibility of providing leadership and direction to the National Guard and related homeland military activities. And is it any coincidence that the number of governors appointed to this new CG is exactly 10? Even more telling is the fact that the 10 governors come from each US region (the governor of Puerto Rico represents Region 2), except for Region 5, and guess what? Region 5 is President Obama’s region!
Now, get this: the only region that has two governors represented on the CG (making up for Region 5’s lack of a representative–who will be Obama himself, no doubt) is Region 3. And put this in your pipe and smoke it: the two governors from Region 3 are from Maryland and Virginia, which are the two states that border Washington, D.C. But all of this is mere coincidence, right? See the map on the EPA web site here.
And while it is true that President Jimmy Carter revoked President Nixon’s "Federal Regional Council" (what Nixon’s Executive Order created in 1972) in 1979, the concept never died. It was merely incorporated into other Executive Orders. And there can be no question that President Obama’s CG certainly builds on Nixon’s initial "Regional Council" model.
Neither is it a coincidence that Missouri Governor Jay Nixon is included in the list of 10 governors appointed to the CG. Why? Does anyone remember the MIAC flap in the State of Missouri last year? I sure do, because I (along with Ron Paul and Bob Barr) was listed in the MIAC report as being a potential dangerous militia member or terrorist. And anyone who supported or voted for the three of us was similarly maligned in the MIAC report. Plus, the report also targeted people who opposed any of the following as being potential dangerous militia members:
The New World Order
The United Nations
Gun Control
The violation of Posse Comitatus
The Federal Reserve
The Income Tax
The Ammunition Accountability Act
A possible Constitutional Convention (Con Con)
The North American Union
Universal Service Program
Radio Frequency Identification (RFID)
Abortion on demand
Illegal immigration
Remember, this was an official Missouri State Police report that was distributed to all Missouri State law enforcement officers. And Governor Jay Nixon authorized and strongly defended the MIAC report!
Later, of course, Governor Nixon and other State leaders were forced to withdraw the report, due to immense public pressure from both the citizens of Missouri and angry Americans all across the country.
I have a web page set aside with all the pertinent information regarding the MIAC fiasco, including the most recent updates.
Plus, here are my previous 3 columns regarding the MIAC report: Column 1, column 2, column 3.
Now we learn that President Obama has appointed this very same Governor Jay Nixon to the newly formed Council of Governors. Doubtless, Nixon’s support for the MIAC report brought him into the good graces of this Marxist President, who, in his inaugural address, pledged to "remake America." Without a doubt, the newly established Council of Governors is helping Obama do just that.
Of course, the big question is not, Is America being "remade"? It most certainly is–and it started long before Obama moved into the White House. The question is, Will this "remade" America be something we can live with?
Chuck Baldwin
chuck@chuckbaldwinlive.com
Chuck Baldwin Live
http://www.chuckbaldwinlive.com
Donate to Chuck Baldwin Live
http://www.chuckbaldwinlive.com/donate.php

More from Chuck Baldwin

http://www.covenantnews.com/baldwin100209.htm

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

nterview with Jean Saint-Vil

by Ish Theilheimer

Global Research, February 3, 2010

Straight Goods – 2010-01-26

Jean Saint-Vil: Canada should own up to hosting 2003 summit to plot Aristide’s overthrow
Last week, CBC’s Radio One’s The Current featured a panel discussion that included Ottawa-area resident Jean Saint-Vil, who is active with the solidarity network Canada Haiti Action. Afterwards, we invited him to visit at the Straight Goods News Ottawa bureau.

Media coverage of and political reaction to the Haitian disaster don’t offer much perspective on the situation. Saint-Vil explained that Haitian realities that go beyond the stereotypes of endemic poverty and corruption. He pointed to a racist subtext that subtly portrays Haitians as incompetent and ignores a centuries-old history of oppression and foreign meddling.

Saint-Vil said, for instance, that

Haiti has never recovered from reparations it was forced to pay to France, totaling $40 billion in modern currency. Returning that money to the Haitians would help them recover much better than a patchwork of foreign "aid" with all the vested interests and strings inevitably attached.

Jean Saint-Vil talks to Pat Van Horne about Haiti’s realities, part 1

Many Haitians are frustrated by relief NGOs whom they see as self-serving. "The organizations are getting bigger, stronger, more recognized. The people they’re helping are getting more desperate."

He compared the situation in Haiti with that of First Nations people in Canada, saying we must "acknowledge that the society in which we live was built on international crimes." White supremacists stole the "land of first nations people of Africa and the Americas."

Saint-Vil called for investment "in institutions of self-sustainability," especially agricultural production. "

"…The US is dumping rice on the Haitian market as part of aid to Haiti, but this is aid that kills, because a Haitian farmer cannot compete with the farmer in Texas, especially when that farmer is supported by the big machine, and the Haitian farmer ends up leaving his or her agricultural land, selling it to somebody who’s probablylooking for mining, and moves to the city. That’s why Port-au-Prince, a city that was built for 250,000 people, had 2.5 million people in it."

History of struggle
"The history of Haiti is one of a struggle. The island of Haiti was first inhabited by people of the Taino First Nation, who were almost all dead within fifty years after the arrival of Columbus. Some of the indigenous people escaped to Cuba, and Puerto Rico, but on the island, forget it. They were replaced by Africans," who, for three hundred years, suffered as slaves on the island before successfully rebelling aginst the French, leading to the creation of state of Haiti in 1803….

"This was the only place in the Americas where African people were not enslaved, but it also meant they couldn’t trade with anybody…"

Jean Saint-Vil talks to Pat Van Horne about Haiti’s realities, part 2

"In 1805, the French foreign minister Charles Talleyrand wrote to the US president to help them crush Haiti because they said the existence of the Negro people in arms is a terrible threat to all white nations. The response of the Americans was to impose an embargo on Haiti that was renewed several times…

"The whites returned and became the main merchants in the big cities, and every time there was some kind of event that threatened their existence, the Germans, for instance, would show up with their guns and their boats and they threaten to blow up the national palace in order to get ransom. A few weeks later, the Spanish show up and do the same thing.

"Thoughout the nineteenth century, you go and look in the history books and you will see eventually, you’d have countries like Denmark, Sweden, countries you’d never think about, were part of this, for instance, in 1883….

":In 1915, the US invaded, and stole Haiti’s national reserves, and took it to the National City Bank in New York and basically imposed what we call a string of Mulatto dictatorships. Mulatto, for those who don’t recognize what the term means, is the result of African women raped by white men, which created light-skinned Haitians, and these people were given higher status by the Americans. They became the whites of Haiti," and its political leaders…."

Coup follows coup follows…
Finally a black leader named Dumarsais Estimé came to power in 1946. He built rural schools but was deposed by an American coup. Another democratic leader, Fignolé, came to power in 1957 just before Duvalier.

"He lasted 19 days," said Saint-Vil. "The Americans deposed him. The Duvalier leadership in came under the same movement of black power. Duvalier pretended he was going to support the black masses, but in reality he was an equal-opportunity criminal. He killed Mulattos, he killed blacks. The Americans supported him because he said he was going to fight communism. Duvalier is the one who kicked Cuba out of the OAS [Organization of American States]."

In 1990, "finally the Haitian population managed to get democratic elections organized and participated en masse and named a liberation theologian President. At the time George Bush, the elder, was the American President. Seven months later they deposed Aristide in a bloody coup using the Haitian military.

"When Aristide came back with Bill Clinton, there was a lot of hoopla about that, but they didn’t realize that Aristide had to agree that the three years he spent in exile were part of his five year mandate. And the Haitian constitution does not allow him to take more than one five year term. And he had to sign a plan accepting to privatize state-owned enterprises….

"His justification for accepting it was that it was either that or let the military rule forever…." Once re-elected in 2000, "Aristide was declared to be a fraud by the so-called international community…. It’s not very hard to demonize a black leader. You can call any black leader a dictator and eventually people will believe it. But I’ll have people remember that when Aristide was elected in 2000, his popularity was the highest of any leader in the Americas"

Aristide, now living in South Africa, was rescued from exile in the Central African Republic by a group of US activists led by Amy Goodman .

Saint-Vil says Canada is in league with the USA and France in exploiting Haiti for its own purposes. "There’s a Canadian company called Eurasian Mines that has concessions on ten percent of the Haitian territory, digging gold. And Haiti is right beside Cuba, not too far from Venezuela."

Jean Saint-Vil talks to Pat Van Horne about Haiti’s realities, part 3

Canada, he says, was forced, under the Jean Chrétien government, to cooperate with the Americans on Haiti. He quotes former Canadian foreign minister Bill Graham as saying "There is a limit to how much we can constantly say No to the political masters in Washington…. Eventually we came onside on Haiti, so we got another arrow in our quiver."

Canada hosted an international summit on Haiti on January 31-Febuary 1, 2003 at Meech Lake, one year before the coup that removed Aristide. "That meeting is when they plotted the overthrow of Haiti’s president," according to Saint-Vil.

"The coup was not just against Jean-Bertrand Arisitide. There were 7,000 elected officals, they were removed in a single day, including some who were trained in search and rescue. They were all removed, so when the storm happened in September 2004, there was nobody trained and nobody with any equipment to do the search and rescue."

Addressing Haiti’s many problems begins with understanding their origins — and taking action to correct injustices. Outspoken activists like Jean Saint-Vil bring us a picture of Haiti’s realities that we didn’t hear from the Foreign Ministers’s summit.

Ish Theilheimer is founder and president of Straight Goods News and has been Publisher of the leading, and oldest, independent Canadian online newsmagazine, StraightGoods.ca, since September 1999. He is also Managing Editor ofPublicValues.ca. He lives wth his wife Kathy in Golden Lake, ON, in the Ottawa Valley.

Email: ish@straightgoods.com.

Global Research Articles by Ish Theilheimer

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=17351

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Part II

by Marguerite Laurent

Global Research, January 30, 2010

Open Salon – 2010-01-29

I wrote Part 1 of Oil in Haiti as the economic reasons for the US/UN occupation back in October, 2009.
After the earthquake I questioned whether oil drilling could have triggered the earthquake: Did mining and oil drilling trigger the Haiti earthquake?
Then suddenly, after spending years hitting myself against Officialdom’s colonial rock that kept denying Haiti had significant resources….
After being called crazy and un-American for writing that the 2010 earthquake gives the US the perfect disaster-capitalism opportunity to come out from behind the UN and openly occupy Haiti to secure Haiti’s oil, strategic location and other riches for the corporatocracy…
Just after, I wrote about oil drilling causing earthquakes, on the following Tuesday, a veteran oil company man comes forward in Business Week to say, and one wonders how he can so authoritatively speculate about the area of the faultline without intimate knowledge of the drillings, explorations,
Haiti’s wellheads and oil map, et al, but nonetheless his sudden, seemingly unprompted REVELATION, is that Haiti lies in an area that has undiscovered amounts of oil, it must have oil and the earthquake "may have left clues" to petroleum reservoirs! Oil that, uhmmm, "could aid economic recovery in the Western Hemisphere’s poorest nation, a geologist said." (Haiti Earthquake May Have Exposed Gas, Aiding Economy by Jim Polson, Jan. 26, 2010, Bloomberg.) Yep, yep he may really mean: "that could aid Haiti’s US-occupied economy recover its strategic oil reserves" for the global elite. No? I could be wrong, but I am thinking "and the cover up, starts." But I won’t say so. Let Stephen Pierce tell the story:

The Jan. 12 earthquake was on a fault line that passes near potential gas reserves, said Stephen Pierce, a geologist who worked in the region for 30 years for companies including the former Mobil Corp. The quake may have cracked rock formations along the fault, allowing gas or oil to temporarily seep toward the surface, he said yesterday in a telephone interview.

“A geologist, callous as it may seem, tracing that fault zone from Port-au-Prince to the border looking for gas and oil seeps, may find a structure that hasn’t been drilled,” said Pierce, exploration manager at Zion Oil & Gas Inc., a Dallas- based company that’s drilling in Israel. “A discovery could significantly improve the country’s economy and stimulate further exploration.
…The Greater Antilles, which includes Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico and their offshore waters, probably hold at least 142 million barrels of oil and 159 billion cubic feet of gas, according to a 2000 report by the U.S. Geological Survey. Undiscovered amounts may be as high as 941 million barrels of oil and 1.2 trillion cubic feet of gas, according to the report. Among nations in the northern Caribbean, Cuba and Jamaica have awarded offshore leases for oil and gas development. Trinidad and Tobago, South American islands off the coast of Venezuela, account for most Caribbean oil production, according to the U.S. Energy Department.

For the record, Haiti has a large reserve of oil and natural gas. How could it not? It shares the waters with oil producing island from all around. We noted this also. Besides, this is not new or a surprise to the United States and certainly shouldn’t be new to "a geologist who worked in the region for 30 years for companies including the former Mobil Corp."
There’s always been oil in Haiti. The US /USAID guaranteed an oil contract for an American businessman named Charles C. Valentine back in November 1962 that gave his company a monopoly control over pretty much everything to do with oil in Haiti and seems to have also paid him to back out of it.

Valentine successfully claimed $327,304 from the development agency, a sum USAID was itself able to extract from the Haitian government along with $4,396 in interest charges.

According to Haitian scholar Dr. Georges Michel, the US has known there’s oil and natural gas reserves in Haiti since 1908 and did their explorations in the 1950s and locked up what they found as "strategic reserves for the US" to be tapped when Middle Eastern oil became less available. (See, Oil in Haiti by Dr. Georges Michel)
I’ve been writing for years now that the US has been trying to get rid of Haiti’s democratically elected government since 1991 so they could get to "their" strategic reserves without any fear of a populous president nationalizing the oil and gas reserves to benefit the miserably poor majority in Haiti as has been done in Venezuela or elsewhere in Latin America. (See, Haiti is full of oil, say Ginette and Daniel Mathurin, where these scientist say there’s more oil in Haiti than in Venezuela.) No one has been listening. Not even the white liberals who are such defenders of Haiti. To the best of my knowledge, other than Haitians, over the long years before the earthquake, the only non-Haitian observers who ever paid attention and picked up on our reports and concerns about the plundering and pillaging of Haiti’s riches, were John Maxwell and Chris Scott of CKUT Radio in Canada.That’s it. All the others bought the State Department line that Haiti was a charity case and had no resources to mention. I supposed if they acknowleged Haiti could be self-reliant, these savoirs, wouldn’t have a gig to support themselves and their heroic self-image, right?
Today Haiti has oil and it’s all good cause 20,000 troops are down there to secure it and Haiti’s other riches while the vision is to perhaps herd the displaced earthquake victims – who don’t die from their TV-aid – into hastily constructed pre-fabricated houses and let the ghettos fester as they do in Kingston, Jamaica, while the areas the whites and Haitian oligarchy want are developed into tourist havens and all capital is flown out of Haiti.
Notice where the earthquake fault line is and its juxtaposition to the Bay of Port au Prince where the drilling was taking place and the damage at Kafou’s Morne Cabrit, the epicenter of the earthquake and where the poor built their houses on the mountainside and all around the Southern coastal towns by the Bay of Cayes where there’s oil according to Haitians and the geologist map of Haitian resources in the Lavalas white book. Notice how the earthquake was LOCALIZED to these areas and Port au Prince and never reached the Dominican Republic and there was no tsunami…

The Lavalas map of Haiti’s resources shows that Kafou’s Morne Cabrit housed a huge reservoi of oil. Here’s the article I wrote, last year documenting that Haiti had oil and that was the reason for the US/UN forced removal of President Jean Bertrand Aristide. I do so hope, this time, to honor the lives lost and really help protect the remaining survivors of Bush the first and Bush the lesser’s two regimes changes in Haiti and now this total occupation, that conscious Americans and all decent folks on this earth, are paying attention and will help us stop this latest travesty.

The just thing for now, is to allow former President Aristide who was kidnapped out of Haiti on a rendition plane by the US Special forces and has been practically under house arrest in South African for 6-years, forbidden first by US Secretary of State Condi Rice and now Hillary Clinton from returning home, to return to his country. He ought to be returned to Haiti so he may assist Haiti’s majority at this agonizing time and help in the relief and rebuilding of the nation. (Go to: Part I, Oil in Haiti and Oil Refinery – an old notion for Fort Liberte as a transshipment terminal for US supertankers )

Don’t fall for this hoax. The powers-that-be are already drilling and for years, HLLN has been pointing to the Lavalas’ white book detailing Haiti’s
resources as part of the reason for oustering President Aristide and putting in Haitian puppets to empire. Now that 20,000 US troops are in Haiti behind the pretext of humanitarian aid, oh yeah, by the way the EARTHQUAKE "may have left clues to petroleum reservoirs that could aid economic recovery in the Western Hemisphere’s poorest nation, a geologist said"!!!
Never mind that stealth offshore and on-land drilling may have disturbed the fault line, those Haitians are Black idiots anyway. Just yesterday, I was called CRAZY for saying Haiti had oil and substantial mineral resources. But today, today, if the white man says it, it must be true! Don’t fall for the empire’s latest spin and clean-up job. Two many defenseless people are still dying behind this earthquake and classquake. Too many long-suffering flesh and blood who won’t get rescue, recovery, relief and rebuilding, but the cold steel of military occupation.
Ezili Danto / Marguerite Laurent

Global Research Articles by Marguerite Laurent

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=17293

Bookmark It

Hide Sites

Did the desire for a new "US Embassy Compound" in Haiti provide the motive behind the Coup d’État of February 29, 2004?

by Randall White

HaitiAction.net – Port au Prince, Haiti — The US State Department has been unusually productive of late in implementing the reconstruction of most of its foreign mission buildings under a "New Initiatives Division" of the Overseas Buildings Operations Bureau (OBO). It’s certainly understandable, given the realities of the Post 9/11 era, that the Department should rethink its ability to secure the safety of the diplomatic corp and maintain consular services for US citizens abroad. What has now provoked controversy, however, is the scale of some of the "New Embassy Compounds" (NEC). Most notable, for us, is the imperious NEC-Port au Prince, Haiti.

How large does an embassy that, ostensibly, exists to maintain diplomatic relations with a foreign power need to be? And, in particular, why does the U.S. need such a behemoth emblem of its interest in such a small, beleaguered and impoverished nation as Haiti?

The 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings of Nairobi, Kenya and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, pre-staged the new era. Just last week, Belgrade once again showed that when the US actions provoke local populations the highest profile symbol of the United States government (USG) — the Embassy — becomes an easy target in the center of the capital. It is understandable that when you have a government in power that wishes to maintain a public profile that insists it doesn’t need to negotiate US foreign policy or sit down to listen to its opponents, then turning the foreign mission into a fortress is imperative.

To put this in perspective, out of the forty projects worldwide that the New Initiatives Division is completing this year, NEC-Port au Prince is the fourth largest in cost. That might not put a blip on your radar as you watch the Oscars, but let’s take a closer look at the simple details of "the top 4 out of 40."

It’s no surprise that, coming in at number one, the most expensive new embassy compound would be NEC-Bagdad.

Since the bold agenda of the New America is to wage a perpetual war in the Middle East (some may wish to differ with that analysis), dumping the most tax dollars securing the in-securable NEC-Bagdad in IRAQ is pretty much a no-brainer.
The number two position goes to the largest English-speaking country in the world — China. It makes perfect sense that the USG would put an ambitious project in Beijing. Pretending that you’re going to be the power in Beijing that will look after our ultimate security requires a big expensive embassy, in order to maintain what is exactly that — a pretense. Oh, and by the way…

(Speaking of embassies in Belgrade, does anyone remember who bombed the Chinese Embassy on May 7, 1999? Over a billion Chinese do…)

Number three spot goes to Berlin. Given that it maintains the fifth largest GDP at $2.585 trillion (US) — and that Germany is ten times as large as Haiti — it’s not hard to see why NEC Berlin is the third largest project.

So, Haiti will get the number four position, when the USG actually moves the Embassy outside of Port au Prince to the Tabarre suburb.

The current USG Embassy is walking distance — eight blocks — from the National Palace. Very convenient for "diplomacy." The new embassy will be eight miles away through the best (or worse, depending on your opinion) traffic that the world can offer.

So, if that still doesn’t pull you away from your TV, then consider this:

The next in line at #5 is NEC Mumbai. This metropolis of India’s largest city has twice the population of the entire country of Haiti.

Again, what is the backstory here? Could it be that this fourth-largest "transformation of diplomacy" endeavor — as Condoleezza Rice prefers to call the US expansion project — also provided the cadre who decided that Haiti needed it with the motive for sending in the US Marines to kidnap the democratically-elected President of Haiti, Jean Bertrand Aristide? (Whose family home is, interestingly enough, within walking distance of NEC Port au Prince.)

It’s as if you were walking your dog around the block and came upon your neighbor driving a few stakes in his front yard. You ask your friendly neighbor what he’s planning. "I’m putting in a new sprinkler system. You know, Think Green, and all that. Hehe…" A comment leads to a little chit-chat and you’re on your way before your pup decides to do something un-neighborly on that front lawn. Next week when you’re walking the dog and are curious about how your neighbor’s little "home improvement" project is going, you’re looking at three semi-trucks piled high with 12-inch diameter pipe, each pipe around 20 feet long. The first thing you have to say is, "…what’s really going on?"

If it "security" you’re really concerned with in foreign territory, one thing that is certain is that scaling back on non-essential services and moving as many of the redundant programs back to home base as possible, will insure that the critical services that have to remain are easier to sustain. With today’s information age and the fact that the overwhelming product that the US Embassy generates is printed text, then the task at hand isn’t "on the horizon" it is sitting right on your desk. Today a one terabyte (1T) disk can be had — from certain street vendors in Port au Prince, even — for less than $500 US. the average 1T hard disk will hold about 220 million pages of text. It’s unlikely that the US Embassy in Port au Prince has generated that much paper since 1804, let alone every year.

We’re not suggesting — not even for a minute — that the
honorable Ambassador Janet Sanderson and her cohorts can
be replaced by a 6×6x4 inch piece of hardware.

What should come to mind are questions of scale:

• "What is really ‘needed’ in Haiti?"
• "What is it, really?

Click image for larger view

18°33′50.84"N       72°14′58.18"W

Click here for Google Map

"The Mandate

• Our facilities play a critical role in Secretary Rice’s focus on transformational diplomacy
  
• Delicately put in place new and improved diplomatic platforms overseas that provide security and safety, and allow for the transformation of diplomacy for the United States Government"

-OBO publication

In the aftermath of the Coup d’État of February 29, 2004 Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice saw, yet another, "wonderful opportunity." With a US installed coup government of Gérard Latortue, and the UN occupation forces silencing any resistance, she could introduce a new vision. It was time to sell the diplomatic corp on her "transformational diplomacy." It was neo-conservative rehash of Manifest Destiny. In the post 9/11 era, US foreign policy was going to simply forge ahead and disregard the distractions of the timid. It was — more accurately — going to be a "diplomatic surge."

"A hundred years ago the Americans enlarged the concept of the Monroe Doctrine with the doctrine of Manifest Destiny. It was, they declared, the manifest destiny of the United States not simply to resist Old World aggression but to make the New World into an American protectorate. They proceeded to do just that, tearing Panama from

Colombia to build the Canal, invading or sponsoring insurrections in Honduras, Guatemala, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, El Salvador, the Dominican Republic , Haiti, Cuba and Puerto Rico. Cuba was a de facto colony of the US until the abolition of the Platt Amendment (to the Cuban Constitution) in 1934. Puerto Rico is still a colony. Those states which were not colonies were banana republics – owned and controlled by the American fruit and sugar companies.

"President Eisenhower in 1960 reaffirmed the Monroe Doctrine because of “Cuban hostility” towards the United States. This was because when the US decided to punish Cuba by denying her access to the American sugar market, Cuba promptly sold her sugar to the Soviet Union." -John Maxwell "When Worlds Collide" (June 1997)

Of course, there are strategies other than Rice’s "tranformational diplomacy" that could be less provacative. Last week presidential hopeful, Barack Obama, shocked proponents of American Exceptionalism in restating that he would sit down with the elected leaders of Cuba for dialogue.

Sen. Barack Obama: “The problem is if we think that meeting with the president is a privilege that has to be earned, I think that reinforces the sense that we stand above the rest of the world at this point in time, and I think that it’s important for us, in undoing the damage that has been done over the last seven years, for the president to be willing to take that extra step. That’s the kind of step that I would like to take as president of the United States.”

This is what our "diplomacy has transformed into

As pointed out before, NEC Port au Prince is actually in Tabarre and further from the purported "seat of power" in Haiti. However it is, much closer to the runway of the Toussaint Louverture International Airport (PAP) than before. Making it easier for those special renditions… I mean, those "special situations" demanded by this new "tranformation of diplomacy." Any demonstrators daring to make the trek out to the remote location will be faced by a new special feature of NEC Port au Prince, seven sparkling new gun-ports — to welcome them — along the top of the main building. This main building — amazingly close to the highway (for security-minded folk) — is ten times as large as the current Embassy downtown. (Plenty of room for that $500 1T drive that they’ll need for all the diplomatic work.)

So, there it is. This information should be enough to get you started on your own quest to find out what your government is up to in your name. This is the leap year, and finally, Haiti gets to commemorate their stolen history on a February 29th. There’s a lot more to this story, but we’re leaving some of that for Part 2. If you want to see that second part appear soon, drop us a message at info@haitiaction.org and send some of your thoughts.

©2008 Randall White – HaitiAction.net

http://www.haitiaction.net/News/RAW/2_28_8/2_28_8.html

Bookmark It

Hide Sites