Campaign for the Accountability of American Bases

JuneauEmpire.com
March 5, 2010
Associated Press

Another interceptor missile has been installed at Fort Greely.

The Fairbanks Daily News-Miner reported Thursday that the missile installed last month is the 22nd at the Missile Defense Agency site outside Delta Junction.

The Pentagon plans to install 26 of the missiles at Fort Greely by October.

The missiles are part of the Ballistic Missile Defense System and are designed to shoot down enemy warheads in mid-flight outside the Earth’s atmosphere.

Fort Greely is one of two sites for the missiles, with three installed at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, the Missile Defense Agency says.

The new missiles are being installed in silos at Missile Fields No. 2 and No. 3 at Fort Greely. Missiles at the original field, which held six interceptors, are being moved to those fields because of plumbing problems and other reliability concerns at the hastily built early silos, the newspaper said.

www.juneauempire.com/stories/030510/sta_571149474.shtml

Stop NATO
March 6, 2010
By Rick Rozoff

Along with plans to base anti-ballistic missile facilities in Poland near Russia’s border (a 35 mile distance) and in Bulgaria and Romania across the Black Sea from Russia, Washington and the self-styled global military bloc it leads, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, have arranged a series of military exercises on and near Russia’s borders this year.

While the White House, Pentagon and State Department pro forma identify al-Qaeda, Taliban, Iran, North Korea, climate change, cyber attacks and a host of other threats as those the U.S. is girding itself to combat, Washington is demonstrating its true strategic objectives by deploying interceptor missiles and staging war games along Russia’s western and southern borders. …

The NATO war games included troops from 15 nations, among them – in addition to the U.S. – Britain, Austria, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway and Sweden. Austria, Finland and Sweden are Partnership for Peace affiliates of the North Atlantic military bloc. …

American author Edward Herman recently presented a similar perspective in pointing out that since the end of the Cold War “Across the globe…U.S. military bases are expanding, not contracting. The encirclement of Russia and steady stream of war games and exercises in the Baltic, Caspian, Mediterranean and Western Pacific areas continue, the closer engagement with Georgia and effort to bring it into NATO moves ahead, as do plans for the placement of missiles along Russia’s borders and beyond.” …

American and other NATO member states’ troops, warplanes and warships are visiting Russia’s neighborhood more frequently and approaching its borders more precariously. Over the past five years the Pentagon and NATO have secured permanent air, naval and training bases in Poland, Bulgaria, Romania and Lithuania and interceptor missile sites in the first three nations. …

As Indian journalist M K Bhadrakumar remarked, NATO’s post-Cold War drive to the east began in the Balkans and has proceeded inexorably to the Black Sea, the Caucasus, Central Asia and Afghanistan. It has also turned the Baltic Sea into a U.S. and Alliance lake, with Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Germany, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Sweden within the Western military phalanx – all have troops in Afghanistan under NATO command, for example – and Russia left alone in the region.

That trajectory – from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea, the Caucasus and Central Asia – places U.S. and NATO military presence along a substantial portion of the land borders of European Russia.

http://rickrozoff.wordpress.com/

Faxts.com
March 4, 2010

So far this year the United States has succeeded in inflaming tensions with China and indefinitely holding up a new strategic arms reduction treaty with Russia through its relentless pursuit of global interceptor missile deployments.

On January 29 the White House confirmed the completion of a nearly $6.5 billion weapons transfer to Taiwan which includes 200 advanced Patriot anti-ballistic missiles. Earlier in the same month it was reported that Washington is also to provide Taiwan with eight frigates which Taipei intends to upgrade with the Aegis Combat System that includes the capacity for ship-based Standard Missile-3 interceptors. …

If the proposed placement of U.S. missile shield components in Poland, the Czech Republic, Japan, Australia, South Korea, Alaska and elsewhere were explained by alleged missile threats emanating from Iran and North Korea, the transfer of U.S. Patriot Advanced Capability-3 (PAC-3) missiles to Taiwan – and, as was revealed in January, 35 miles from Russian territory in Poland – represents the crossing of a new threshold. The Patriots in Taiwan and Poland and the land- and sea-based missiles that will follow them are intended not against putative “rogue states” but against two major nuclear powers, China and Russia. …

In fact the current U.S. administration has by no means abandoned plans to surround Russia as well as China with a ring of interceptor missile installations and naval deployments. …

…the ring encircling China can also be expanded at any time in other directions….Washington is hoping to sell India and other Southeast Asian countries the Patriot Advanced Capability (PAC)-3 missile defense system. …

Airborne laser anti-missile weapons will join the full spectrum of land, sea, air and space interceptor missile components to envelope the world with a system to neutralize other nations’ deterrence capacity and prepare the way for conventional and nuclear first strikes.

www.faxts.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=436:us-tightens-missile-shield-encirclement-of-china-and-russia&catid=72:politics