STOP NATO: ˇNO PASARAN! - HTTP://WWW.STOPNATO.ORG.UK --------------------------- ListBot Sponsor -------------------------- Have you visited eBayTM lately? The Worlds Marketplace where you can buy and sell practically anything keeps getting better. From consumer electronics to movies, find it all on eBay. What are you waiting for? Try eBay today. http://www.bcentral.com/listbot/ebay ---------------------------------------------------------------------- [Via Communist Internet... http://www.egroups.com/group/Communist-Internet ] . . ----- Original Message ----- From: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <undisclosed-recipients:;> Sent: Sunday, July 01, 2001 11:38 PM Subject: Disarming the US Military Hub in Latin America Puerto Rico Update, Number 32, Spring 2001 Disarming the U.S. Military Hub in Latin America The Vieques-Iraq Connection by Luis Monterrosa When U.S. warplanes from the USS Harry S. Truman bombed targets south of Baghdad on February 16, it was one in a long string of such bombing attacks conducted by U.S. and British forces that, according to the Gulf News of Dubai, have killed 311 Iraqis since December 1998. Exactly since six months before the February attack, the same USS Harry S. Truman conducted its final bombing practice runs -- in Vieques, Puerto Rico. (Embedded image moved to file: pic18467.jpg) And when Navy officials announced April 12 that bombing would resume in Vieques in late April, it was for a deployment of the USS Enterprise to the Persian Gulf immediately afterward. Since the 1940's, Vieques has served as a dress rehearsal in the U.S.' global theater of war. In recent times the cast has included the U.S. military, NATO and South American and Caribbean allied forces, although the protagonist has always been the U.S. Navy. U.S. military bombing exercises have made Vieques the sneak preview of the U.S. military's foreign acts of aggression. During the Vietnam War, for instance, the military used Vieques to practice carpet bombings and its ignoble napalm program, the jellied gasoline used against the Vietnamese people. It was also from Vieques that the United States prepared for its military intervention in Guatemala in 1954 and the Dominican Republic in 1965, and conducted its final rehearsal for the invasion of Grenada in 1983. In this way, the military has created an involuntary, mutually destructive relationship between Vieques and countries subject to U.S. military foreign policy. Since the beginning of the Gulf War in 1991, the most salient of these relationships between Vieques and the outside world has been with Iraq. About 50,000 troops train on Vieques every year, including virtually all naval and Marine troops entering combat in the Gulf War. According to Admiral Diego Hernández, U.S. forces' "success" in Iraq is due to the troops' extensive dress rehearsals in Vieques. The U.S. bombings' destruction of Iraq is well known. Less known is its destructive precursor relationship to Vieques. As Roberto Rabin, of the Committee for the Defense and Rescue of Vieques recently acknowledged, "If [the U.S. military] did it in Iraq, you know they practiced it first in Vieques." According to a July 1999 study conducted by the Secretary of the Navy, entitled The National Security Need For Vieques, forward deployed naval forces engage in military activity on average every five weeks, necessitating a constant tuning of their military apparatus. Two U.S. carriers, USS ENTERPRISE and USS THEODORE ROOSEVELT, are good examples of this. In November, 1998, the ENTERPRISE battle group trained in Vieques and left for the Arabian Gulf. Shortly upon arrival, the battle group began military operations, "expending more than 690,000 pounds of ordnances on Iraqi targets in a 70-hour time period," according to the Navy study. In early 1999, the ENTERPRISE battle group also launched a Tomahawk missile land attack on Kosovo. The ENTERPRISE, which also conducted training in Vieques in December of 2000, is currently slated to deploy to the Mediterranean and Persian Gulf in May of this year. After practicing on the Vieques range in February of 1999, the THEODORE ROOSEVELT battle group also engaged in the NATO Kosovo operation. From May 12 to June 12, 1999, aircraft from ROOSEVELT's airwing flew more than 2,500 combat sorties, launching nearly a thousand precision guided munitions at Yugoslavian and Kosovar targets. Referring to these military operations, the Commander U.S. Second Fleet and Commander U.S. Marine Corps Forces Atlantic illustrate Vieques' utility: "Every facet of naval training refined on the Vieques range complex was immediately demonstrated under stress." The skills acquired by the Navy in Vieques included high altitude, single and multiple aircraft bombing sorties using guided munitions. According to Jay, L. Johnson, chief of naval operations, and Gen. James L. Jones, commandant of the Marine corps, "The fundamental value of the Vieques facility is proven every day by our forward deployed naval forces. The Aircraft Carrier Battle Groups and the Amphibious Ready Group that trained at Vieques within the last year [1999] ended up flying combat operations over Iraq and Kosovo within days of their arrival overseas. They delivered many of their attacks from high altitude, and their ability to do so successfully was directly related to their training at Vieques." During the last decade the U.S. has consistently propped up the Iraq threat to justify its continued bombing exercises in Vieques. In light of widespread protest against the military's presence in Vieques, the U.S. Navy has set the stage for its theater by attempting to put the argument for Vieques in the context of the evil antagonist -- Saddam Hussein. In March of this year, Rear Admiral Richard Naughton of the USS GEORGE WASHINGTON was quoted on AP wires with his dramatic quip ""The No. 1 thing that would make Saddam Hussein happy would be to parade an American fighter pilot down the streets of Baghdad." High-altitude bombings have become the signature method of U.S. military operations. As Michael Ignatieff has pointed out, "If pilots fly high, they can't identify targets accurately and the risks of horrifying accidents increase. Flying low improves accuracy but the risk to pilots is significantly increased." For example, when U.S. and British warplanes launched ten missiles on targets in southern Iraq in August 2000, they missed several, killing a civilian and injuring twenty, according to Agence France Presse. But preventing U.S. casualties has become a mantra for the politics in Washington of U.S. military action overseas. "Our interest was in addressing the question of the safety of the pilots that are flying those missions," Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said of February attacks on Baghdad, and added "that the Navy munitions did not find their targets precisely." According to an internal UN Security Sector report, during one five-month period, 41 per cent of the victims of bombings were civilians. The places hit were farmland, villages, fishing jetties, and barren valleys where sheep graze. In January 2000 an American missile hit Al Jumohria, a street in a poor residential area, killing six children and injuring sixty-three people, a number of them badly burned. Navy officers also cited the military's Kosovo operations for why it must bomb Vieques. Admiral Conrad Lautenbacher, Deputy Chief of Naval Operations stated that "events in Kosovo should remind us of the value of the forward presence provided by combat-ready Carrier Battle Groups and Amphibious Ready Groups... The THEODORE ROOSEVELT Battle Group commenced highly successful strike operations three days after entering the Mediterranean and only 10 days after beginning her regularly scheduled deployment." The ROOSEVELT battle group's performance, said Lautenbacher, "is noteworthy for its many successes: scores of fixed targets destroyed, more than 400 tactical targets destroyed or damaged, and in excess of 3,000 sorties without a single loss...It takes a proper level of resources and the most realistic training we can provide prior to deploying -- precisely the type of coordinated, live fire training conducted at the Atlantic Fleet Weapons Testing Facility at Vieques." As The Washington Times explained last year: "In December 1998, the USS Carl Vinson battle group was in combat within eight hours of arriving on station in the Persian Gulf, firing cruise missiles against Iraq. The last seven carrier battle groups deployed have seen combat in such places as Iraq, Kosovo and Afghanistan. Vieques prepared them." On June 25 - 27, 2000, five ships of the USS GEORGE WASHINGTON Carrier Battle Group trained in Vieques prior to deploying to the Mediterranean and Arabian Gulf that summer. The training included ship-to-shore gunnery as well as air to ground bombing exercises. According to the Navy, Vieques is the only location in the Atlantic where naval units can conduct the Combined Arms training required prior to deploying to "...areas of potential hostilities in support of U.S. Foreign Policy." It is clear that as tiny an island as Vieques is, it serves as the military springboard for the most powerful military force in all of history. In this sense, Vieques is a symbolically important place for peace and demilitarization in the Middle East and anywhere that U.S. foreign interests bring war. Its significance lies in how a vibrant movement from a small island has, together with supporters from Puerto Rico and around the world, formed a phalanx of justice that is nonviolently marching closer to ousting a belligerent and colossal military brute. Sources: "Navy drops napalm on Vieques," in: www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/43/023.html; Edwin Meléndez and Edgardo Meléndez, The Colonial Dilemma, 59; Wall Street Journal, 11/15/99; peacehost.net/EPI-Calc/Vieques.html; Roberto Rabin interview, 4/4/01; Commander, U.S. Second Fleet, National Security Need for Vieques, 7/15/99; San Juan Star 1/14/01; Miami Herald, 11/15/99; The Washington Times 5/21/00; Navy web site: www.navyvieques.navy.mil/news14.htm); The Guardian Daily. 3/4/00; Chris Allen-Doucot; Princeton Packet, 2/12/99; Associated Press, 3/29/00, 5/21/00; Ignatieff, NY Review of Books, 7/20/00; Journal of Aerospace and Defense Industry News. 12/10/99; Vice Admiral Conrad C. Lautenbacher Jr. Fellowship of Reconciliation Puerto Rico Campaign Produced by the Fellowship of Reconciliation Task Force on Latin America and the Caribbean 2017 Mission St. #305, San Francisco, CA 94110 Tel: (415) 495-6334, Fax: (415) 495-5628, E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ______________________________________________________________________ To unsubscribe, write to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
