OMNI
US GLOBAL MILITARY BASES NEWSLETTER #3, SEPTEMBER 21, 2017.
Compiled by Dick Bennett for Peace, Justice, and the Environment.
(#1 Dec. 9, 2012; #2, Nov. 25, 2015).
Contents US GLOBAL MILITARY BASES NEWSLETTER #3, SEPTEMBER 21, 2017. (UN International Day of Peace).
US Middle East Bases
Gambrell, Large US Bases at the Gulf
Tomgram and David Vine, Greater Middle East Bases
Additional Harms
Hickman, Burning Waste
Global Warming and Flooded Bases
Union of Concerned Scientists
Say No to Bases
Apel and Percy, Cuba Conferences: Symposia for Closure
4thand 5th International Seminars at Guantanamo for Abolishing Foreign Bases
Ann Wright, Report on the 5th Seminar
Direct Action against Bases in Okinawa
[By reading this newsletter we become at least an outrider of the Movement to curtail the US constellation of bases from S. Europe and the Middle East to Africa and SW Asia and Pacific. Do you want health care for all, repaired bridges, better schools? Then advocate conversion of imperial $trillions to pressing needs. Pass this on. –Dick]
US FOREIGN BASES
[I read Arkansas’ statewide newspaper every morning for a bit of breaking international news. Fortunately the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette subscribes to the Associated Press, many of whose reporters are well-informed and able to provide contexts for their stories, as in the following where we learn, in a few paragraphs about our base in Qatar, about the many recent major bases nearby. –Dick]
Qatar diplomatic crisis weighs on U.S. base
By JON GAMBRELL The Associated Press.
Posted: September 15, 2017 at 3:13 a.m.
Qatari Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani (center front) poses for a photo Monday with the Emiri Air Force at al-Udeid Air Base in Doha, Qatar.
Qatari Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani (center front) poses for a photo Monday with the Emiri Air Force at al-Udeid Air Base in Doha, Qatar.
Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani’s visit to the air base throws into sharp relief the delicate balancing act the U.S. faces in addressing the Qatar crisis.
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates -- Qatar's emir recently received a warm welcome at the sprawling military base his troops share with thousands of American soldiers, despite being persona non grata to four U.S.-allied Arab states that accuse his wealthy Persian Gulf nation of sponsoring extremists.
Qatar's al-Udeid Air Base, a crucial staging ground for U.S. operations in Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, is one of several American military outposts across the Gulf that are intended to serve as a bulwark against Iran but now put Washington in a delicate balancing act. . . .
The U.S. has deepened its military relationships across the region in the nearly two decades since it helped expel Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein's forces from Kuwait.
The island nation of Bahrain hosts the U.S. Navy's 5th Fleet. Kuwait, which has also sought to mediate the Qatar dispute, is home to 13,500 American troops and the forward command of U.S. Army Central. The United Arab Emirates' lage Jebel Ali port in Dubai is the Navy's biggest port of call outside of the U.S., while American forces also fly out of al-Dhafra Air Base near Abu Dhabi.
Some 10,000 American troops are stationed in Qatar, a small, energy-rich peninsular nation that sticks out like a thumb into the Persian Gulf. Most work out of the vast al-Udeid Air Base just south of the capital, Doha, which hosts the forward operating base of the U.S. military's Central Command. By comparison, experts estimate Qatar's own military strength at some 11,800 troops, one of the region's smallest forces. MORE http://www.nwaonline.com/news/2017/sep/15/qatar-diplomatic-crises-weighs-on-u-s-b/ [On arms deals, role of Israel, and more.]
For more on US efforts to control the Middle East read the following essay by David Vine and Col. (ret.) Andrew Bacevich’s America’s War for the Greater Middle East.
[When you feel dispirited by the ever-widening US empire pressing against the boundaries of designated “enemies,” especially during this week of Burns and Novick’s Vietnam War series on PBS which reminds us how US Cold Warriors invaded Viet Nam, remember also the exemplary US scholars who are exposing US global militarism, like Tom Engelhardt and David Vine. Any citizencan be empowered by them to speak up to generals like Lieutenant General Raymond “Tony” Thomas.–Dick]
Tomgram: David Vine, Enduring Bases, Enduring War in the Middle East. ![Return to TomDispatch Home]()
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/176090/tomgram%3A_david_vine,_enduring_bases,_enduring_war_in_the_middle_east/
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/176090/tomgram%3A_david_vine,_enduring_bases,_enduring_war_in_the_middle_east/Posted by David Vine at 7:42am, January 14, 2016.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter @TomDispatch. Email Print
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter @TomDispatch. Email Print
Meet the hottest new commander in the increasingly secretive world of American warfare, Lieutenant General Raymond “Tony” Thomas. A rare portrait in the Washington Post paints him as a “shadowy figure” -- an appropriate phrase for the general who has been leading the U.S. military’s “manhunters,” aka Joint Special Operations Command, or JSOC. They are considered the crème de la crème among America’s ever-larger crew of Special Operations forces, now at almost 70,000 and growing. Thomas is reportedly slated to take over Special Operations Command, or SOCOM, and so head up that now massive secret military cocooned inside the U.S. military. To put its ranks in perspective, think of the active duty militaries of Argentina (73,000), Australia (56,000), Canada (66,000), Chile (61,000), or South Africa (62,000). In other words, our secret “warriors” now outnumber the military contingents of major nations.
As America’s leading counterterror general, Thomas has a reputation for bluntness. In a rare public interview last April, he offered these striking comments about the country’s global war on terror: “[Y]ou can’t look at the array [of metrics] right now and not sense that we’re losing -- we’re losing right across the board from the North African littoral through to Afghanistan and Pakistan. There are some good news stories... [but] across the board we’re not winning and I don’t think you need a lot of empirical data to tell you that.” TomDispatch has long said the same thing, of course, but never better.
Still, if you’re trying to imagine what a man with such views sees in his crystal ball when it comes to America’s failing wars and conflicts, don’t for a second think that he’s in favor of cutting back. In the same interview, he mentions how “disappointed” he’s been by the “tempered” nature of Washington’s response to “the long war” against terrorism and wonders why the U.S. isn’t ramping up its efforts, if not to a “World War II level,” then at least to a “Vietnam War level.” (Remind me, General Thomas, how did that Vietnam ramping-up turn out?) [And compare General Westmoreland’s many ramping up appeals to LBJ, who resisted at first and then “surged” again and again with tens of thousands of lethal troops and more bombs than were dropped in WWII. –D]
His rise to the command of SOCOM should highlight something that, despite all the publicity given to America’s special ops troops, seldom comes through here. On a startling, even monstrous scale, American war, like much else in American life, has headed to the dark side. For our own “safety,” Americans are to know ever less about what those elite warriors are doing in our name as they operate in the shadows in at least 147 countries across the planet.
Today, TomDispatch regular David Vine, author of Base Nation: How U.S. Military Bases Abroad Harm America and the World, analyzes an allied topic, also seldom brought up in this country: that, to do what they do, those secret forces will make use of the historically unprecedented “empire of bases” Washington has been constructing across the Greater Middle East for decades and has more recently been building in Africa as well. Let him fill you in on those hundreds of military bases scattered around the planet that are the face our country presents so prominently to so many foreigners and that Americans almost never notice.
Let me just add one thing: it’s worth asking what those special ops forces of “ours,” relied on ever more heavily from one administration to the next, and settling into so many bases, actually represent. It’s hard to argue that they are there for the defense of this country. Like the bases themselves, they are, it seems, carrying out the increasingly messy business of empire in the far reaches of the planet. They are, you might say, Washington’s imperial shock troops. Tom
Doubling Down on a Failed Strategy
The Pentagon’s Dangerous “New” Base Plan
By David Vine [Also available in Veterans for Peace, Peace in Our Times (Winter 2016), where I read it. –Dick]
The Pentagon’s Dangerous “New” Base Plan
By David Vine [Also available in Veterans for Peace, Peace in Our Times (Winter 2016), where I read it. –Dick]
Amid the distractions of the holiday season, the New York Times revealed that the Obama administration is considering a Pentagon proposal to create a “new” and “enduring” system of military bases around the Middle East. Though this is being presented as a response to the rise of the Islamic State and other militant groups, there's remarkably little that’s new about the Pentagon plan. For more than 36 years, the U.S. military has been building an unprecedented constellation of bases that stretches from Southern Europe and the Middle East to Africa and Southwest Asia.
The record of these bases is disastrous. They have cost tens of billions of dollars and provided support for a long list of undemocratic host regimes, including Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, and Djibouti. They have enabled a series of U.S. wars and military interventions, including the 2003 invasion of Iraq, which have helped make the Greater Middle East a cauldron of sectarian-tinged power struggles, failed states, and humanitarian catastrophe. And the bases have fueled radicalism, anti-Americanism, and the growth of the very terrorist organizations now targeted by the supposedly new strategy.
If there is much of anything new about the plan, it’s the public acknowledgement of what some (including TomDispatch) have longsuspected: despite years of denials about the existence of any “permanent bases” in the Greater Middle East or desire for the same, the military intends to maintain a collection of bases in the region for decades, if not generations, to come.
Thirty-Six Years of Base Building
According to the Times, the Pentagon wants to build up a string of bases, the largest of which would permanently host 500 to 5,000 U.S. personnel. The system would include four "hubs" -- existing bases in Afghanistan, Iraq, Djibouti, and Spain -- and smaller "spokes" in locations like Niger and Cameroon. These bases would, in turn, feature Special Operations forces ready to move into action quickly for what Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter has called “unilateral crisis response” anywhere in the Greater Middle East or Africa. According to unnamed Pentagon officials quoted by theTimes, this proposed expansion would cost a mere pittance, just "several million dollars a year."
Far from new, however, this strategy predates both the Islamic State and al-Qaeda. In fact, it goes back to 1980 and the Carter Doctrine. That was the moment when President Jimmy Carter first asserted that the United States would secure Middle Eastern oil and natural gas by “any means necessary, including military force.” Designed to prevent Soviet intervention in the Persian Gulf, the Pentagon build-up under Presidents Carter and Ronald Reagan included the creation of installations in Egypt, Oman, Saudi Arabia, and on the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia. During the first Gulf War of 1991, the Pentagon deployed hundreds of thousands of troops to Saudi Arabia and neighboring countries. After that war, despite the disappearance of the Soviet Union, the U.S. military didn't go home. Thousands of U.S. troops and a significantly expanded base infrastructure remained in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. Bahrain became home to the Navy’s Fifth Fleet. The Pentagon built large air installations in Qatar and expanded operations in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Oman.
Following the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan and the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the Pentagon spent tens of billions of dollars building and expanding yet more bases. At the height of those U.S.-led wars, there were more than 1,000 installations, large and small, in Afghanistan and Iraq alone. Despite the closing of most U.S. bases in the two countries, the Pentagon still has access to at least nine major bases in Afghanistan through 2024. After leaving Iraq in 2011, the military returned in 2014 to reoccupy at least six installations. Across the Persian Gulf today, there are still U.S. bases in every country save Iran and Yemen. Even in Saudi Arabia, where widespread anger at the U.S. presence led to an official withdrawal in 2003, there are still small U.S. military contingents and a secret drone base. There are secret bases in Israel, four installations in Egypt, and at least one in Jordan near the Iraqi border.Turkey hosts 17 bases, according to the Pentagon. In the wider region, the military has operated drones from at least five bases in Pakistan in recent years and there are nine new installations in Bulgaria and Romania, along with a Clinton administration-era base still operating in Kosovo.
In Africa, Djibouti’s Camp Lemonnier, just miles across the Red Sea from the Arabian Peninsula, has expanded dramatically since U.S. forces moved in after 2001. There are now upwards of 4,000 troops on the 600-acre base. Elsewhere, the military has quietly built a collection of small bases and sites for drones, surveillance flights, and Special Operations forces from Ethiopia and Kenya to Burkina Faso and Senegal. Large bases in Spain and Italysupport what are now thousands of U.S. troops regularly deploying to Africa.A Disastrous Record
After 36 years, the results of this vast base build-up have been, to put it mildly, counterproductive. As Saudi Arabia illustrates, U.S. bases have often helped generate the radical militancy that they are now being designed to defeat. The presence of U.S. bases and troops in Muslim holy lands was, in fact, a major recruiting tool for al-Qaeda and part of Osama bin Laden’s professed motivation for the 9/11 attacks.
Across the Middle East, there’s a correlation between a U.S. basing presence and al-Qaeda’s recruitment success. According to former West Point professor Bradley Bowman, U.S. bases and troops in the Middle East have been a “major catalyst for anti-Americanism and radicalization” since a suicide bomber killed 241 Marines in Lebanon in 1983. In Africa, a growing U.S. base and troop presence has “backfired,” serving as a boon for insurgents, according to research published by the Army’s Military Reviewand the Oxford Research Group. A recent U.N. report suggests that the U.S. air campaign against IS has led foreign militants to join the movement on “an unprecedented scale.”
Part of the anti-American anger that such bases stoke comes from the support they offer to repressive, undemocratic hosts. For example, the Obama administration offered only tepid criticism of the Bahraini government, crucial for U.S. naval basing, in 2011 when its leaders violently cracked down on pro-democracy protesters with the help of troops from Saudi Arabia and the UAE. Elsewhere, U.S. bases offer legitimacy to hosts the Economist Democracy Index considers “authoritarian regimes,” effectively helping to block the spread of democracy in countries including Cameroon, Central African Republic, Chad, Djibouti, Egypt, Ethiopia, Jordan, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE.
Low-Balling
The Pentagon’s basing strategy has not only been counterproductive in encouraging people to take up arms against the United States and its allies, it has also been extraordinarily expensive. Military bases across the Greater Middle East cost the United States tens of billions of dollars every year, as part of an estimated $150 billion in annual spending to maintain bases and troops abroad. Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti alone has an annual rent of $70 million and at least $1.4 billion in ongoing expansion costs. With the Pentagon now proposing an enlarged basing structure of hubs and spokes from Burkina Faso to Afghanistan, cost estimates reported in the New York Times in the “low millions” are laughable, if not intentionally misleading. (One hopes the Government Accountability Office is already investigating the true costs.)
The only plausible explanation for such low-ball figures is that officials are taking for granted -- and thus excluding from their estimates -- the continuation of present wartime funding levels for those bases. In reality, further entrenching the Pentagon’s base infrastructure in the region will commit U.S. taxpayers to billions more in annual construction, maintenance, and personnel costs (while civilian infrastructure in the U.S. continues to be underfunded and neglected).
The idea that the military needs any additional money to bring, as the Timesput it, "an ad hoc series of existing bases into one coherent system" should shock American taxpayers. After all, the Pentagon has already spent so many billions on them. If military planners haven't linked these bases into a coherent system by now, what exactly have they been doing?
In fact, the Pentagon is undoubtedly resorting to an all-too-familiar funding strategy -- using low-ball cost estimates to secure more cash from Congress on a commit-now, pay-the-true-costs-later basis. Experience shows that once the military gets such new budget lines, costs and bases tend to expand, often quite dramatically. Especially in places like Africa that have had a relatively small U.S. presence until now, the Pentagon plan is a template for unchecked growth. As Nick Turse has shown at TomDispatch, the military has already built up “more than 60 outposts and access points.... in at least 34 countries” across the continent while insisting for years that it had only one base in Africa, Camp Lemonnier in Djibouti. With Congress finally passing the 2016 federal budget, including billions in increased military spending, the Pentagon’s base plan looks like an opening gambit in a bid to get even more money in fiscal year 2017.
Perpetuating Failure
Above all, the base structure the Pentagon has built since 1980 has enabled military interventions and wars of choice in 13 countries in the Greater Middle East. In the absence of a superpower competitor, these bases made each military action -- worst of all the disastrous invasion of Iraq -- all too easy to contemplate, launch, and carry out. Today, it seems beyond irony that the target of the Pentagon’s “new” base strategy is the Islamic State, whose very existence and growth we owe to the Iraq War and the chaos it created. If the White House and Congress approve the Pentagon’s plan and the military succeeds in further entrenching and expanding its bases in the region, we need only ask: What violence will this next round of base expansion bring?
Thirty-six years into the U.S. base build-up in the Greater Middle East, military force has failed as a strategy for controlling the region, no less defeating terrorist organizations. Sadly, this infrastructure of war has been in place for so long and is now so taken for granted that most Americans seldom think about it. Members of Congress rarely question the usefulness of the bases or the billions they have appropriated to build and maintain them. Journalists, too, almost never report on the subject -- except when news outlets publish material strategically leaked by the Pentagon, as appears to be the case with the “new” base plan highlighted by the New York Times.
Expanding the base infrastructure in the Greater Middle East will only perpetuate a militarized foreign policy premised on assumptions about the efficacy of war that should have been discredited long ago. Investing in “enduring” bases rather than diplomatic, political, and humanitarian efforts to reduce conflict across the region is likely to do little more than ensure enduring war.
David Vine, a TomDispatch regular, is associate professor of anthropology at American University in Washington, D.C. His latest book, Base Nation: How U.S. Military Bases Abroad Harm America and the World, has recently been published as part of the American Empire Project (Metropolitan Books). He has written for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian, and Mother Jones, among other publications. For more information, visitwww.basenation.us and www.davidvine.net.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, Nick Turse’s Tomorrow’s Battlefield: U.S. Proxy Wars and Secret Ops in Africa, and Tom Engelhardt's latest book, Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World. Copyright David Vine
ADDITIONAL NEGATIVE EFFECTS OF US BASES
The Burn Pits: The Poisoning of America's Soldiersby Joseph Hickman.
· Details
· Reviews
Thousands of American soldiers are returning from the battlefields of Iraq and Afghanistan with severe wounds from chemical war. They are not the victims of ruthless enemy warfare, but of their own military commanders. These soldiers, afflicted with rare cancers and respiratory diseases, were sickened from the smoke and ash swirling out of the “burn pits” where military contractors incinerated mountains of trash, including old stockpiles of mustard and sarin gas, medical waste, and other toxic material.
Based on thousands of government documents, over five hundred in-depth medical case studies, and interviews with more than one thousand veterans and active-duty GIs, The Burn Pits will shock the nation. The book is more than an explosive work of investigative journalism—it is the deeply moving chronicle of the many young men and women who signed up to serve their country in the wake of 9/11, only to return home permanently damaged, the victims of their own armed forces’ criminal negligence.
Based on thousands of government documents, over five hundred in-depth medical case studies, and interviews with more than one thousand veterans and active-duty GIs, The Burn Pits will shock the nation. The book is more than an explosive work of investigative journalism—it is the deeply moving chronicle of the many young men and women who signed up to serve their country in the wake of 9/11, only to return home permanently damaged, the victims of their own armed forces’ criminal negligence.
John Kiriakou, OtherWords: Joseph Hickman's The Burn Pits exposes a link between military service near burn pits in Iraq and Afghanistan and serious maladies. The Pentagon's ban on the book comes despite the fact that it's an Amazon best seller and has been reviewed favorably in media around the world. Read the Article
GLOBAL WARMING, MILITARY BASES, RISING SEAS, PENTAGON, AND CONGRESS. [I wonder if the latest Pentagon budget of $700 billion includes money for base adaptation to global warming. $700 billion more and the bill rising?! --Dick]
Don't let congress block the military's climate action plans
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This article about the Pentagon's response to rising seas threatening US bases around the world doesn’t mention UCS participation in the global peace movement to oppose US imperialism with its some 800 bases. The world would be better off without these bases. Would that end US rampages? No. But it would end worry over their flooding.
Dick Bennett
Movement to Eliminate Military Basesbelonging to the U.S., the United Kingdom, and France which are located in countries other than their own.
Cuba Conference Opposes Foreign Bases
by Dennis Apel and Lindis Percy. Space Alert! (Winter/Spring 2016). Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space.
The Symposium for the Closure of Foreign Military Bases is a gathering of concerned citizens from around the world and is held in Guantanamo, Cuba. The fourth annual gathering was held this year from November 23 through 25. The conference was attended by well over 200 people from 33 countries. The Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space sent two representatives; Lindis Percy from the United Kingdom and Dennis Apel from the United States, both of whom presented at the conference.
Throughout the conference it was clear that Cuba is taking the lead in the movement to eliminate military basesbelonging to the U.S., the United Kingdom and France which are located in countries other than their own. The United States leads the three with over 800 military installations on foreign soil (even the Pentagon does not know how many U.S. bases there are!). The U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo is possibly the most notorious detention centre in modern times which still holds 170 people, many of whom have been victims of torture and indefinite detention without charges.
When Obama took office, the prison held 242 detainees, down from a peak of about 680 in 2003. Today, with little more than a year remaining in his presidency, it still holds 107 detainees. Dennis’s presentation gave an overview of the mission of the Global Network as well as the impact of the U.S. Army base on Kwajalein Island in the Marshall Islands, including the history of above-ground nuclear testing after World War II and the continued testing of Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles whose warheads land in the lagoon at Kwajalein Atoll…(Continued at http://www.space4peace.org/newsletter/Space%20Alert%2033.pdf)
https://www.facebook.com/CubaNetwork/posts/1579993288892154
4th INTERNATIONAL SEMINAR FOR PEACE AND ABOLITION OF FOREIGN MILITARY BASES CALL The World Peace Council (WPC) and theV Fifth International Seminar of Peace and the Abolition of Foreign Military Bases being held in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, from May 4 to 6, 2017. O A MAY 4 to 6, 2017![http://theinternationalcommittee.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/10/logo-web-120x85.png]()
About MAY 4 to 6, 20Home » Featured Articles » V INTERNATIONAL SEMINAR OF PEACE AND FOR THE ABOLITION OF FOREIGN MILITARY BASES. GUANTANAMO CUBA MAY 4 to 6, 2017INVITATION
About MAY 4 to 6, 20Home » Featured Articles » V INTERNATIONAL SEMINAR OF PEACE AND FOR THE ABOLITION OF FOREIGN MILITARY BASES. GUANTANAMO CUBA MAY 4 to 6, 2017INVITATIONThe World Peace Council, the Cuban Movement for Peace and Sovereignty of the People and the Cuban Institute of Friendship with the Peoples (ICAP), along with the co-sponsorship of the Organization of Solidarity with the Peoples of Africa, Asia and Latin America (OSPAAAL), the Martin Luther King Jr. Center and the Center for Reflection Oscar Arnulfo Romero, call organizations, fighters for peace, anti-war and others committed to the idea that a better world is possible, to participate in the V International Seminar of Peace and the Abolition of Foreign Military Bases being held in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, from May 4 to 6, 2017. The presence of military bases of U.S. imperialism and its NATO allies in many countries around the world, are against the will of the vast majority of people in those countries. The bases represent flagrant interference in the internal affairs of these countries and represent a clear violation of the independence and sovereignty of these nations where they have been installed.
As in the previous four occasions, this International Seminar will take place in Guantanamo province where 117 square kilometers of its territory has been illegal occupied by a US naval base that was turned into a center of torture. It is well known that the base has become a center of the most horrendous violations of human rights of the prisoners who have been there now for more than a decade.
In addition, the V International Seminar will be held in the context of the process of normalization of relations between Cuba and the United States, whose cornerstone includes the Cuba’s demand for the cessation of the economic, commercial and financial blockade that the United States has imposed against Cuba and the return of the illegally occupied territory at Guantánamo. This gross violation has taken place against the legitimate will of the Cuban people for more than half a century.
The V Seminar will take place at a time when an offensive by imperialism with the Latin Americanoligarchies is underway against several social and political progressive countries in the region, such as Brazil, Argentina, Venezuela, Bolivia and Ecuador. The imperialists, using all the political tricks they have operating in conjunction with the corporate media, seek to reverse the progress gains made by these governments. Their plan is to dismantle the processes of integration and development in the region.
In this regard, the V Seminar will endorse once again the validity of the proclamation that Latin America and the Caribbean are Zones of Peace, adopted by all Heads of State and Governments of the Region at a meeting in Havana in January of 2014.
Those interested in attending the V Seminar can write to Silvio Platero Yrola, President of the MovPaz at the following emails: presidmp@enet.cu , movpaz@enet.cu and movpazri@enet.cu
Those interested in attending the V Seminar can write to Silvio Platero Yrola, President of the MovPaz at the following emails: presidmp@enet.cu , movpaz@enet.cu and movpazri@enet.cu
In addition, participants will have the opportunity for 10 minutes for presentations of papers and interventions. Participants wishing to make a presentation need to send their intervention in advance to Movpaz for the purposes of translation into the corresponding language.
The AMISTUR CUBA S.A Travel Agency of the Cuban Institute of Friendship with the Peoples (ICAP) will be responsible for ensuring the accommodations, transportation, and the general logistics of the event.
See Program of the V Seminar and the tourist package offered by AMISTUR for the participants in the Seminar.
Cuban Movement for Peace and the Sovereignty of the Peoples.
January 2017
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REPORT ON THE SEMINAR BY ANN WRIGHT
worldbeyondwar.org/guantanamo-cuba-international-peacemakers-say-no-foreign-mi...
By Ann Wright, June 19,2017. ... The theme of the seminar was “A World of Peace is Possible.” ... The U.S. has the overwhelming number of military bases in the lands of other ... Photo of Veterans for Peacedelegation to the symposium ... Interestingly, Guantanamo Bay is not closed to Cuba commercial cargo freighters.
Resistance and Victory in Okinawa
By Tarak Kauff. Peace in Our Times. Fall 2016.
http://www.classwars.org/PeaceTimesFall2016.pdf
A delegation of six members of Veterans For Peace spent 10 days in Okinawa in September standing with the Okinawan people against expansion of U.S. military facilities on the island. Although the island is .6 percent of the Japanese land mass, it hosts 70 percent of the U.S. military bases in the country. Half the size of Long Island, the island is the site of 30 bases and home to 50,000 troops. The Okinawan people have been carrying out militant nonviolent protests against the construction of helipads in the Yanbaru forests of the northern Takae region, which the United States already uses for jungle warfare training, as well as against the creation of a landing strip that will jut out into pristine Oura Bay at Henoko. (Continued here: http://www.classwars.org/PeaceTimesFall2016.pdf)
Contents #2 US Bases Imperialism
Friedman, Founding Fathers’ Principles
Nick Turse, US Wars Today
From Tacoma to Takijistan, Encircling Iran
US Foreign Bases 800, Russia 1
Lutz, Struggle Against US Bases
Oppose New Base on Okinawa
Two Books by David Vine
New Essay and Book on Diego Garcia, Island of Shame
How U.S. Military Bases Abroad Harm America and the World