Welcome to CAAB
You will find the latest information and some data from our previous website on all matters concerning US bases and in particular the issue of the US Missile Defense system. We are still working on some of the pages so we ask for your patience please. Click on the SITE MAP for a listing of all the pages. We suggest this is checked regularly as the site is updated frequently.
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FORWARD PLANS for KEEP SPACE FOR PEACE WEEK
(2-9 October 2010)
The Global Network (GN) Against Weapons and Power in Space
(website: www.space4peace.org) is once again calling for an international week of protest against the US Missile Defense (substitute Offense) system. CAAB will be organising something around the American base at Menwith Hill on Saturday 2 October 2010 – more details nearer the time.
CAAB has responded to the call to oppose the dangerous and futile US Missile Defense system every year since 2000. We suggest you click on to the GN website which has a mass of interesting and comprehensive information and news about Missile Defense. Also on the website details of what is going on round the world for Keep Space for Peace week.
Afghanistan: wind of change
From Open Democracy, written By Paul Rogers
September 9, 2010
The annual report for 2010 of the International Institute of Strategic Studies, a leading establishment think-tank, raises the prospect of a shift in western policy in Afghanistan.
The London-based International Institute of Strategic Studies (IISS) is one of the world’s leading security think-tanks with a high status in defence circles in western Europe and north America. Its two main annual publications, The Military Balance (an assessment of military capabilities and defence economics worldwide, published in February) and Strategic Survey (a review of global security, published in September) are studied and taken seriously by governments and opinion-formers. The IISS is very much a mainstream organisation, heavily engaged with the defence and security establishment. As such it carries considerable weight.
On 24 May 2004, only fourteen months after the start of the Iraq war, the IISS’s Strategic Survey 2003-04 caused some consternation among the Tony Blair government in arguing that: “…the substantially exposed US military deployment in Iraq represents al-Qaida with perhaps its most ‘iconic’ target outside US territory…Galvanised by Iraq, if compromised by Afghanistan, al-Qaida remains a viable and effective ‘network of networks’”.
This interpretation was not greatly different from analyses by more radical if less establishment sources, some of them presented in earlier columns in this series (see “Iraq in a wider war“, 5 May 2004); but the prestige of the IISS meant that it carried greater weight.
This year’s document – Strategic Survey 2010: The Annual Review of World Affairs - is published only weeks before the Afghan war enters its tenth year, has once again caused flurries in government circles. Its assessment of the state of the conflict in Afghanistan is blunt (see Richard Norton-Taylor, “Al-Qaida and Taliban threat is exaggerated, says security thinktank”, Guardian, 7 September 2010).
The IISS comments: “The Afghan campaign has involved not just mission creep but mission multiplication”; and that “..for western states to be pinned down militarily and psychologically in Afghanistan will not be in the service of their wider political and security interests”.
At the core of its analysis is the view that: “It is not clear that it should be axiomatically obvious that an Afghanistan freed of an international combat presence in the south would be an automatic magnet for al-Qaeda’s concentrated reconstruction. Al-Qaeda leadership, such as it is, may be quite content to stay where it is, while Taliban leaders who remained in Afghanistan might think twice of the advantages to them of inviting al-Qaeda back after the experience of the last decade.”
To repeat, this kind of assessment is shared elsewhere by more radical analysts; the significance here is the status of IISS in and around the corridors of power. It does not advocate withdrawal of all military forces as the answer, but does point in the direction of a very considerable drawdown as part of substantial changes in overall policy.
Indian Government says NO to Global Network’s Planned International Conference
October 9-12th 2010
This conference that was to be held in Nagpur, India will not happen. For some strange undemocratic reason, our Indian hosts had to have the permission of their government in order to hold such an international peace confab.
There can be no doubt that the Indian government feared angering the U.S. by allowing such a conference to happen just before Obama’s trip. It is no secret that the U.S. has for several years been pushing India to develop a Space Command and to become a junior partner in the Pentagon’s growing Star Wars program.
See http://space4peace.blogspot.com/2010/08/indian-government-says-no-to-global.html
‘No seminar on nuclear disarmament’
from the Times of India:
“NAGPUR: In an apparent move to curb an ‘unwanted’ congregation, the ministry of external affairs (MEA) has struck down the application by a city-based activist known for his left leaning to hold a global seminar on nuclear disarmament in city.”
Lindis Percy and Laila Packer (Coordinators CAAB) were to have gone to this conference.
| Chomsky: Obama’s Imperialist Policies |
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Noam Chomsky criticizes Obama’s rightwing policies, war making, medical care, coziness with commercial interests . He warns of the coming war in Kandahar and Israel’s possible attack on Iran that could go nuclear. In the Q & A, moderated by Karen, Chomsky comments on BP’s Gulf Oil disaster, the likely next financial crisis, the Free Gaza Flotilla incident, urges Guantanamo being returned to Cuba and tortured detainees either being tried or released. |
RAF Menwith Hill
Mr Fabian Hamilton: To ask the Secretary of State for Defence what his most recent estimate is of the cost of Operation Phoenix at RAF Menwith Hill; and who bears the cost of that operation.
Nick Harvey: The works associated with Project Phoenix at RAF Menwith Hill are funded by the US authorities. The most recent estimate of the cost is some £52 million, which includes £39.5 million of enabling works.
House of Commons Hansard. Written Answers for 24 July 2010.
Finally the 1946 UKUSA Agreement is public.
It created a world-wide network of listening posts run by the US National Security Agency (NSA) and the UK’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), which endures today.
In 1948 Canada joined and in 1956 Australia and New Zealand too – though they have always been junior partners. The latter, being Commonwealth countries, provide an important geographical spread as does GCHQ in Cyprus (which monitors the Middle East).
Read more here: www.caab.org.uk/the-american-bases/statewatch-org
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”Margaret Mead
