Campaign for the Accountability of American Bases

We would like to draw your attention to this video in which Bruce Gagnon (Co-founder and Coordinator of the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space) says how it is concerning the US Missile Defense system. It is very informative and well worth watching it all. He has been on a month long speaking tour in the US.

There are more excellent videos (one from Angie Zelter about Jeju Island and Jeremy Cahill at the recent Drone Summit). See Bruce’s blog: space4peace.blogspot

Japan and the US have agreed to relocate thousands of US marines from Okinawa in a move aimed at reducing the island’s military burden amid lingering anger among residents over pollution, accidents and crime.

Under a deal reached in Washington late on Thursday, about 9,000 marines will move from the southern Japanese island to the US Pacific territory of Guam and other locations in the region, including Hawaii and Australia.

By shifting a large number of the 19,000 marines on Okinawa, leaders in Tokyo and Washington said they hoped to reduce the US military footprint on the island while retaining a strong enough presence to deal with security emergencies in the region.

In a joint statement, the US defence secretary, Leon Panetta, and the secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, said the agreement would honour Washington’s commitment to defending Japan and maintaining stability in an “increasingly uncertain security environment”.

“Japan is not just a close ally, but also a close friend,” Panetta said separately. “And I look forward to deepening that friendship and strengthening our partnership as, together, we address security challenges in the region.”

No date has been given for the $8.6bn (£5.3bn) move – of which Japan will pay $3.1 billion – and questions remain over the fate of Futenma, a sprawling marine base located in Ginowan, an Okinawan city of 95,000 people. …

Read on: www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/apr/27/us-marines-out-of-japan

The Utah spy center will contain near-bottomless databases to store all forms of communication collected by the agency. This includes the complete contents of private emails, cell phone calls and Google searches, as well as all sorts of personal data trails — parking receipts, travel itineraries, bookstore purchases and other digital “pocket litter.”Read more: http://truth-out.org/video/item/8044-exposed-inside-the-nsas-largest-and-mos

Barack Obama says the drone attacks he authorises are targetted only at named people on a list of active terrorists who are a direct threat to America. The facts tell a different story.

from: Stop the War Coalition

Vanunu speaks about Israel’s Nuclear Weapons before going back to solitary confinement for 78 days in 2010-which was the outcome of his freedom of speech trial and the punishment for speaking to foreign media in 2004!

HELP FREE VANUNU and ESTABLISH a NUCLEAR FREE MIDDLE EAST by DISSEMINATING this YT and learn more at www.facebook.com/events/375553329140552/

US Aid to Iranian Group Tied to Scientist Killings

Journalist Seymour Hersh has revealed that the Bush administration secretly trained an Iranian opposition group on the State Department’s list of foreign terrorists. Hersh reports the U.S. Joint Special Operations Command trained operatives from Mujahideen-e-Khalq, or MEK, at a secret site in Nevada beginning in 2005. According to Hersh, MEK members were trained in intercepting communications, cryptography, weaponry and small unit tactics at the Nevada site up until President Obama took office. The MEK has been listed as a foreign terrorist groups since 1997 and is linked to a number of attacks, spanning from the murders of six U.S. citizens in the 1970s to the recent wave of assassinations targeting Iranian nuclear scientists.

From: http://truth-out.org/news/item/8442-training-terrorists-in-nevada-seymour-he

The Gillard Government has confirmed it is considering allowing US military surveillance drones to be based on Australian soil on the Cocos Islands.

From: www.abc.net.au/lateline/content/2012/s3466086.htm

A sensation of unbearable, sudden heat seems to come out of nowhere — this wave, a strong electromagnetic beam, is the latest non-lethal weapon unveiled by the US military this week.

“You’re not gonna see it, you’re not gonna hear it, you’re not gonna smell it: you’re gonna feel it,” explained US Marine Colonel Tracy Taffola, director the Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate, Marine Corps Base Quantico, at a demonstration for members of the media.

The effect is so repellant, the immediate instinct is to flee — and quickly…

Read on: www.physorg.com/news/2012-03-military-unveils-non-lethal-ray-weapon.html

Early in the morning on February 25, the United States Air Force test-launched a first-strike, nuclear-capable Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) despite the largest anti-test demonstrations in almost 30 years. The launch took place in the dark fog of night at 2:46 a.m. from Vandenberg Air Force Base (VAFB) on the central California coast, firing the missile to the other end of the Ronald Reagan Missile Range in the Marshall Islands over 4,000 miles away. Despite the military’s ability to follow through with the test, the offensive nature of delivery systems and the threatening message of their test flights is growing in significance in anti-nuclear circles around the globe.

The next test-launch was scheduled for March 1, extremely soon after last Saturday’s test, but was canceled abruptly on Tuesday, just as a media campaign began to cancel the test. March 1 is the anniversary of the tragic “Castle Bravo” test of a hydrogen bomb in the Bikini atoll for which the swimwear received its name. That test dropped radioactive fallout on the people of Rongelap, leading to catastrophic health and genetic problems that continue to this day, necessitating the on-going evacuation of their island. It also sparked the Japanese anti-nuclear movement which had been prevented to exist under the U.S. occupation that followed World War II. …

Read on: http://wagingnonviolence.org/2012/03/movement-challenging-u-s-missile-testing-grows/

The guided missile destroyers Ross, Donald Cook and Porter will move from their current home in Norfolk , Virginia to the US base at Rota in Spain, near the famous Rock of Gibraltar.
According to WAVY-TV, the ships are being sent to Spain to help “beef-up” Europe’s Ballistic Missile Defence systems. The news was originally released in October 2011 but it was on Feb.16 that full details of the move were released by the US navy. The first two ships, USS Ross and USS Donald Cook will arrive sometime after October 2013 and the USS Porter will move in 2015. …

Read on: www.digitaljournal.com/article/319823

Some analysts say the US – bogged down in wars and pressed by emerging powers – will have to rethink its role in world affairs. Norwegian sociologist Johan Galtung, a peace and conflict expert, goes further by predicting the fall of the “US Empire”. “Iraq is not at all turning out the way they hoped, certainly not Afghanistan either. The same will happen in Yemen and Somalia and a number of other countries where they now have undercover operations,” he told RT.

CATHERINE LUTZ is the editor of the book “The Bases of Empire: The Struggle Against U.S. Military Posts,” Lutz said today [Jan 5, 2012]: “Despite alarms sent up by politicians looking only at Pentagon press releases or their military industry backers’ interests, the new proposal for Department of Defense base budget reductions over the next five years represents only a 4 percent decline in real, or inflation-adjusted, terms, according to the Project on Defense Alternatives. And the Pentagon’s budget will remain far larger than it was ten years ago. On top of this, all of these calculations exclude, as they should not, billions in funding for the current wars.” Lutz is a department chair at Brown University and co-director of the “Costs of War” study done there.