Defense contractors fought NoDAPL

SUBHEAD: DAPL Company hired "War on Terror" defense contractors to suppress Native American uprising.

By Lauren McCauley on 27 May 2017 for Common Dreams -
(https://www.commondreams.org/news/2017/05/27/dapl-company-hired-war-terror-contractors-suppress-native-uprising)


Image above:The Morton County Sheriff's Department deployed a military tank and sprayed peaceful protesters with a water cannon amid below-freezing temperatures on November 20, 2016. Photo byDark Sevier. From original article.

Leaked docs reveal the collusion between local police forces, pipeline company, and defense contractors as they executed 'military-style counterterrorism measures' to suppress the water protectors.

The years-long, Indigenous-led fight against the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) briefly captured the nation's attention last fall as images of peaceful resisters being sprayed with water canons and surrounded by police in tanks and other military-grade equipment were spread widely, fueling global outrage and a fierce protest movement against the oil pipeline.

Now that the pipeline is operational and already leaking, internal documents obtained by The Intercept and reported on Saturday reveal the deep collusion between local police forces, the pipeline company, and defense contractors as they executed "military-style counterterrorism measures" to suppress the water protectors.

TigerSwan, described as a "shadowy international mercenary and security firm" that "originated as a U.S. military and State Department contractor helping to execute the global war on terror," was hired by Energy Transfer Partners to spearhead "a multifaceted private security operation characterized by sweeping and invasive surveillance of protesters," The Intercept wrote.

Reportedly, one of TigerSwan's contractors leaked 100 internal documents to reporters Alleen Brown, Will Parrish, and Alice Speri, who were able to assemble roughly 1,000 more via public records requests.

The trove paints a damning picture of the police response to the Indigenous-led effort to block construction of the pipeline on sacred, treaty land and is a shocking example of how anti-terrorist rhetoric and tactics could be applied to any uprising the government would like to suppress.
According to the reporting:

Internal TigerSwan communications describe the movement as "an ideologically driven insurgency with a strong religious component" and compare the anti-pipeline water protectors to jihadist fighters. One report, dated February 27, 2017, states that since the movement "generally followed the jihadist insurgency model while active, we can expect the individuals who fought for and supported it to follow a post-insurgency model after its collapse." Drawing comparisons with post-Soviet Afghanistan, the report warns, "While we can expect to see the continued spread of the anti-DAPL diaspora...aggressive intelligence preparation of the battlefield and active coordination between intelligence and security elements are now a proven method of defeating pipeline insurgencies."

"As policing continues to be militarized and state legislatures around the country pass laws criminalizing protest," Brown, Parrish, and Speri write, "the fact that a private security firm retained by a Fortune 500 oil and gas company coordinated its efforts with local, state, and federal law enforcement to undermine the protest movement has profoundly anti-democratic implications."

Indeed, in the wake of the 2016 election, Republican legislatures in at least 19 states introduced various anti-protest laws, many with a deliberate nod to the uprising in North Dakota.

Not only that, but Morton County Sheriff Kyle Kirchmeier, who oversaw the police response to the DAPL resistance, has been advising other law enforcement on how to deal with protests and demonstrations.

Indeed, the documents reportedly show that Energy Transfer Partners has "continued to retain TigerSwan," despite the fact that the anti-DAPL camps have disbanded. The security firm continues to produce so-called situation reports that document "the threat of growing activism around other pipeline projects across the country."

These reports include "intelligence on upcoming protests," information gleaned from social media, and "extensive evidence of aerial surveillance and radio eavesdropping, as well as infiltration of camps and activist circles."

In some cases, persons "of interest" were even tracked when they crossed over state lines.

What's more, the documents obtained via open records requests include "communications among agents from the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, the U.S. Justice Department, the Marshals Service, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs, as well as state and local police," that reveals interagency collusion and information sharing on the anti-DAPL protesters.

Read the extensive reporting and several published documents at The Intercept.

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Change can be a bitch!

SUBHEAD: 2017 will be the year where most people's favorite worldview flies off the rails.

By Raul Ilargi Meijer on 13 January 2107 for The Automatic Earth -
(https://www.theautomaticearth.com/2017/01/2017-change-can-be-a-bitch/)


Image above: From Revelers bundle up while gathered at Times Square during a New Year's Eve celebration Saturday, Dec. 31, 2016, in New York. Photo by Julio Cortez. (https://www.abqjournal.com/918871/ringing-in-change.html).

2016 brought a lot of changes, or rather, brought them to light. In reality, the world has been changing for many years, but many prominent actors benefitted from the changes remaining hidden. Simply because their wealth and power and worldviews are better served that way.

It’s entirely unclear whether we will ever get a chance to see to what extent the efforts to hide developments have been successful, or even been perpetrated at all, because we don’t know to what extent truth and reality will be accessible in the future.

What we can say at this point in time is that the changes 2016 delivered were urgently needed. There are many people out there who just want to turn back the clock, and change everything back to how it was, but they can’t, and that’s a good thing, because the way things were was hurting too many people.

2016 will go down in history as the year when a big divide between groups of people in the western world became visible, a divide that had until then been papered over by real or imaginary wealth, as well as by ignorance and denial.

When politics and media conspire to paint for the public a picture of their choosing, they can be very successful, especially if that picture is what people very much wish to see, true or not.

But as we’ve seen recently, our traditional media have become completely useless when it comes to reporting news; the vast majority have switched to reporting their own opinions and pretending that is news.

On the one hand, there is a segment of society that either has noticed no changes, or is so desperate to hold on to what they have left, that they resist seeing them. On the other hand, there are those who feel left behind by that first group, and by the idea that the world that is still functioning and even doing well.

The first group has been captivated by, and believed in, the incessantly promoted message of recovery from an economic, financial and gradually also political crisis. The second see in their lives and that of their friends and neighbors that this recovery is an illusion.

It’s like the old saying goes: you can’t fool all of the people all of the time. And that’s why you have Brexit and Trump and why you’re going to have much more of that, certainly across Europe. Things are not going well, and there is no recovery, for a large enough percentage of people that their votes and voices now swing the debates and elections.

It’s not even complicated. This week there was a report from Elevate’s Center for the New Middle Class that concluded that half of Americans, 160 million people, can’t afford to have a broken arm treated (at $1,400).

And sure, you can say that perhaps that number is a bit too high, but there have been many such reports, that for instance say the majority of Americans have less than $1000 in savings, and can’t even afford a car repair.

In Britain numbers are not much different. Over the past decade, the country has been very busy creating an entire new underclass. If your economy is not doing well, and your answer to that is budget cuts and austerity, it’s inevitable that this happens, that you create some kind of two-tier or three-tier society. And then come election time, you run the risk of losing.

Both Britain and the US boast low unemployment numbers, but as soon as you lift the veil, what you see is low participation rates, low wages and huge numbers of part-time jobs stripped of all the benefits a job used to guarantee. It allows those who still sit pretty to continue doing that, but it’ll come right back to haunt you if you don’t turn it around, and fast enough.

For many people, Obama, Merkel, Cameron and the EU cabal have been disasters. For too many, as we now know. That doesn’t mean that Trump will fix the economic problems, but that’s not the issue.

People have voted for anything but more of the same. Which in Britain they’re not even getting either, so expect more mayhem there.

In most places, some variety of right wing alternative is the only option available that is far enough removed from ‘more of the same’. Moreover, many if not most incumbent parties are in a deep identity crisis. Trump did away with the Republicans AND the Democrats, and they had better understand why that is, or they’ll be wholly irrelevant soon.

In Britain, the most important votes in many decades was lost by the Tories, who subsequently performed a musical chairs act and stayed in power. You lost! Losers are not supposed to stay in power! But the other guys are all too busy infighting to notice.

That identity crisis, by the way, is not a new thing. If you look across the western political spectrum, there are all these left wing and right wing parties happily working together, either in coalition governments or through other ‘productive’ forms of cooperation.

So who are people going to vote for when they’re unhappy with what they’ve got? Where is that ‘change’ that they want? Not on the traditional left or right.

So you get Podemos and M5S and Trump and UKIP and Le Pen. It’s not their fault, or the voters’ fault, it’s the political establishment that has tricked itself into believing in the same illusion it’s been promoting to voters.

And yes, they have now proven that it’s possible to stave off, for a number of years, a deeper crisis, depression, by borrowing and printing ‘money’. Especially if you can at the same time hit the poorest in your society with impunity.

But in the end no amount of fake or false news on the economic front will allow you to continue the facade for too long, because people know when they can’t afford things anymore. The evidence here is somewhat more direct than with regards to political fake news, though they may well both follow the same pattern of ‘discovery’.

Our societies are still run as if there is no real crisis, as if it’s all just a temporary glitch, as if the incumbent models function just fine, and as if recovery is just around the corner. And we can make it look as if that is true, but only for an ever smaller amount of time, and for an ever smaller amount of people.

The basic issue here is not a political one. It’s economic. Our economic systems have failed, and they can’t be repaired. We should always have realized that no growth is forever, but at least we now know. Or could know, it’ll take a while to sink in.

Next up is a redo and revamp of those economic systems, but that is not going to be easy, and may not get done at all. The resistance may be too strong, warfare -economic or physical- may seem like a way out, there are many unknowns.

We could, ironically, get quite far in that redo if we simply cut all the waste for our economic processes, but then again, that would have us find out that much of the system runs entirely on wasting stuff, and wasting less kills the system.

However that may be, and however it may turn out, this is where we find ourselves. Protesting Trump and Brexit is inevitable, but it doesn’t address any core issues. From a purely economic point of view, Obama failed spectacularly, as did David Cameron, as does Angela Merkel. And as do, we will find out in 2017, many other incumbent ‘leaders’.

Their successors, whatever political colors they may come from, will all come to power promising, and subsequently attempting, to restart growth. Which is no longer feasible across an entire country, or even if it were, it would mean squeezing other countries. With corresponding risks.

Trump and Brexit are necessary, perhaps even long overdue, in order to break the illusion that things could go on as they were. But they are not solutions. America needs a big wake-up. Trump looks likely to deliver one. That is needed for the rest of the country to wake from its slumber.

Ask yourself: are you going to get weaker from dealing with a Trump presidency? Maybe not the best question, or at least not before having asked: do you know how weak you are right now?

For Britain to leave the EU is a great first step. As I’ve said many times, centralization is not an option without growth. And Brussels has shown us quite a few of the worst consequences of centralization. Nobody should want to be a part of that.

Summarized: for most people, 2017 will be the year of the inability to understand where their favorite worldview flew off the rails. Change can be a bitch. But change is needed to keep life alive.

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Navy Injury & Death Toll

SOURCE: Lyn McNutt (zensea1@gmail.com)
SUBHEAD: Deaths of marine mammals in Mariana Islands from US Navy training and testing activities.

By Staff on 19 March 2014 for National Marine Fisheries Service -
(http://regulations.justia.com/regulations/fedreg/2014/03/19/2014-05833.html)


Image above: Australian Navy denied its sonar activity had the effect of standing and killing these whales in Tasmania. From (http://www.smh.com.au/news/national/fatal-shore-for-130-whales/2005/10/26/1130302827201.html).

[Source's note: This was important enough to be issued under separate cover in the Federal Register.]

[IB Publisher's note: In getting ready for RIMPAC 2014 the Navy is getting the permissions required to injure or kill ocean mammels en masse. We have taken excerpts from the National Marine Fisheries Service proposed rules for those activities. PTS are initials for Permanent Threshold Shift indicating loss of hearing or deafness. TTS is Temporary Threshold Shift. Obviously during times of TTS marine mammals could loose ability to navigate or feed themselves.]

To read full document click here (http://www.islandbreath.org/2014Year/03/140319navytake.pdf)

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Background of Request
Page 3 of PDF - Page 15389 Federal Register
The National Marine Fisheries Service (NMFS) has received a request from the U.S. Navy (Navy) for authorization to take marine mammals incidental to the training and testing activities conducted in the Mariana Islands Training and Testing (MITT) study area from March 2015 through March 2020. Pursuant to the Marine Mammal Protection Act (MMPA), NMFS is requesting comments on its proposal to issue regulations and subsequent Letter of Authorization (LOA) to the Navy to incidentally harass marine mammals.

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Potential Effectson Marine Mammals
Page 12 of PDF - Page 15398 Federal Register
The Navy has requested authorization for the take of marine mammals that may occur incidental to training and testing activities in the Study Area. The Navy has analyzed potential impacts to marine mammals from impulsive and non-impulsive sound sources and vessel strike...

...NMFS’ effects assessments serve four primary purposes:
(1) To prescribe the permissible methods of taking (i.e., Level B harassment (behavioral harassment), Level A harassment (injury), or mortality, including an identification of the number and types of take that could occur by harassment or mortality) and to prescribe other means of effecting the least practicable adverse impact on such species or stock and its habitat (i.e., mitigation);

(2) to determine whether the specified activity would have a negligible impact on the affected species or stocks of marine mammals (based on the likelihood that the activity would adversely affect the species or stock through effects on annual rates of recruitment or survival);

(3) to determine whether the specified activity would have an unmitigable adverse impact on the availability of the species or stock(s) for subsistence uses; and (4) to prescribe requirements pertaining to monitoring and reporting.

More specifically, for activities involving non-impulsive or impulsive sources, NMFS’ analysis will identify the probability of lethal responses, physical trauma, sensory impairment (permanent and temporary threshold shifts and acoustic masking), physiological responses (particular stress responses), behavioral disturbance (that rises to the level of harassment), and social responses (effects to social relationships) that would be classified as a take and whether such take would have a negligible impact on such species or stocks.

Vessel strikes, which have the potential to result in incidental take from direct injury and/or mortality, will be discussed in more detail in the Estimated Take of Marine Mammals section. In this section, we will focus qualitatively on the different ways that non-impulsive and impulsive sources may affect marine mammals (some of which NMFS would not classify as harassment).

Then, in the Estimated Take of Marine Mammals section, we will relate the potential effects to marine mammals from non-impulsive and impulsive sources to the MMPA definitions of Level A and Level B Harassment, along with the potential effects from vessel strikes, and attempt to quantify those effects.

Non-Impulsive Sources Direct Physiological Effects
Based on the literature, there are two basic ways that non-impulsive sources might directly result in physical trauma or damage: noise-induced loss of hearing sensitivity (more commonly- called ‘‘threshold shift’’) and acoustically mediated bubble growth. Separately, an animal’s behavioral reaction to an acoustic exposure might lead to physiological effects that might ultimately lead to injury or death, which is discussed later in the Stranding section.

Threshold Shift (noise-induced loss of hearing)—When animals exhibit reduced hearing sensitivity (i.e., sounds must be louder for an animal to detect them) following exposure to an intense sound or sound for long duration, it is referred to as a noise-induced threshold shift (TS). An animal can experience temporary threshold shift (TTS) or permanent threshold shift (PTS).

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 Range Effects
Page 31 of PDF - Page 15417 Federal Register 
PREDICTED RANGES TO EFFECTS AND MITIGATION ZONE RADIUS FOR MINE COUNTERMEASURE AND NEUTRALIZATION ACTIVITIES USING POSITIVE CONTROL FIRING DEVICES

[IB note: It does not appear mitigation zone includes predicted maximum radius of TTS. Charge sizes range up to 2000 lbs]
 
Charge size net explosive weight 11–20 lb.
Predicted average range to TTS radius 766 yards (381acre area)
Predicted average range to PTS radius 288 yards  (54 acres)
Predicted maximum range to PTS radius 648 yards (272 acre area) 
Recommended Mitigation Zone radius is 800 yards (415 acre area)

Missile Exercises up to 500 lb. Surface Target.
Predicted average range to TTS radius 1,832 yards (2,178 acres)
Predicted average range to TTS radius 991 yards (637)
Predicted maximum range to PTS radius 2,474 yards (3973 acres)
Recommended Mitigation Zone radius is 2,500 yards (4059 acre area)

[IB Publisher's note: With these areas of impact the Navy will never know the extent of suffering, damage and death they have brought ocean mammals in the Mariana Islands. But they will have a spreadshhet they can show to regulators to meet specifications.]

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Injury, or Mortality
Page 49 of PDF - Page 15434 Federal Register
NMFS believes that many marine mammals would deliberately avoid exposing themselves to the received levels of active sonar necessary to induce injury by moving away from or at least modifying their path to avoid a close approach. Additionally, in the unlikely event that an animal approaches the sonar vessel at a close distance, NMFS believes that the mitigation measures (i.e., shutdown/ powerdown zones for MFAS/HFAS) would typically ensure that animals would not be exposed to injurious levels of sound. As discussed previously, the Navy utilizes both aerial (when available) and passive acoustic monitoring (during all ASW exercises) in addition to watchstanders on vessels to detect marine mammals for mitigation implementation.

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Preliminary Determination
Page 50 of PDF - Page 15436 Federal Register
Based on the analysis contained herein of the likely effects of the specified activity on marine mammals and their habitat, and taking into consideration the implementation of the proposed mitigation and monitoring measures, NMFS preliminarily finds that the total marine mammal take form the Navy’s training and testing activities in the MITT Study Area will have a negligible impact on the affected marine mammal species or stocks.

Impact on Availability of Affected Species for Taking for Subsistence Uses
There are no relevant subsistence uses of marine mammals implicated by this action. Therefore, NMFS has preliminarily determined that the total taking of affected species or stocks would not have an unmitigable adverse impact on the availability of such species or stocks for taking for subsistence purposes.

Endangered Species Act (ESA)
There are five marine mammal species under NMFS jurisdiction that are listed as endangered or threatened under the ESA with confirmed or possible occurrence in the Study Area: blue whale, humpback whale, fin whale, sei whale, and sperm whale.

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See also:
Ea O Ka Aina: US Navy plans to damage Marianas 12/17/13
The U.S. Navy's draft environmental impact statement for the Mariana Islands Training and Testing.

Ea O Ka Aina: Help save Mariana Islands 11/17/13
Because the Mariana Islands, located in the western Pacific, are nowhere near as renowned as the Galapagos, the U.S. Navy can test there.

Ea O Ka Aina: Pagan Island beauty threatened 10/26/13
US Navy plans for destroying Pagan Island in the Marianas

Ea O Ka Aina: Navy to conquer Marianas again 9/3/13
Shoreline along eastern Pagan Island in the Marianas to be used by US military for target prectice.




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Asymmetric Warfare Group

SUBHEAD: U.S. Army builds ‘Fake City’ in Virginia to train soldiers for domestic warfare in America.

By Paul Joseph Watson on 14 February 2014 for SHTF Plan -
(http://www.shtfplan.com/headline-news/u-s-army-builds-fake-city-in-virginia-to-practice-military-occupation_02142014)


Image above: Still from video below of typical American small town Christian church built domestic warfare training center in Virginia. 

The U.S. Army has built a 300 acre ‘fake city’ complete with a sports stadium, bank, school, and an underground subway in order to train for unspecified future combat scenarios.

The recently opened site is located in Virginia and was built at a cost of $96 million dollars, taking just two years to complete.

While the city was ostensibly built to prepare U.S. troops for the occupation of cities abroad, some will undoubtedly fear that the real intention could be closer to home. Although the site includes a mosque, the town looks American in every other way, with signs in English.

The fact that, as the Telegraph reports, “The subway carriages even carry the same logo as the carriages in Washington DC,” could suggest that the site was built to double both as a foreign city and a mock domestic town.

According to Colonel John P. Petkosek, “This is the place where we can be creative, where we can come up with solutions for problems that we don’t even know we have yet….This is where we’ll look at solutions for the future–material solutions and non-material solutions…anything from how you’re going to operate in a subterranean environment to how you dismount a Humvee to avoid an IED strike.”

The increasing demonization of domestic political groups as extremists has prompted numerous scenarios where commentators have suggested that U.S. Army and National Guard personnel could be needed to quell civil unrest.

In 2012, an academic study about the future use of the military as a peacekeeping force within the United States written by a retired Army Colonel depicted a shocking scenario in which the U.S. Army is used to restore order to a town that has been seized by Tea Party “insurrectionists”.

The study dovetailed with a leaked U.S. Army manual which revealed plans for the military to carry out “Civil Disturbance Operations” during which troops would be used domestically to quell riots, confiscate firearms and even kill Americans on U.S. soil during mass civil unrest.

The manual also describes how prisoners will be processed through temporary internment camps under the guidance of U.S. Army FM 3-19.40 Internment/Resettlement Operations, which outlines how internees would be “re-educated” into developing an “appreciation of U.S. policies” while detained in prison camps inside the United States.

Fort Hood soldiers are also being taught by their superiors that Christians, Tea Party supporters and anti-abortion activists represent a radical terror threat, mirroring rhetoric backed by the Department of Homeland Security which frames “liberty lovers” as domestic extremists.

Last year, former Navy SEAL Ben Smith warned that the Obama administration is asking top brass in the military if they would be comfortable with disarming U.S. citizens, a litmus test that includes gauging whether they would be prepared to order NCOs to fire on Americans.

During a recent Ohio National Guard exercise, second amendment proponents were portrayed as domestic terrorists as part of a mock disaster drill.


Image above: US Army video press release 1/24/14 on Asymmetric Warfare Training Center opening at Fort Hill, Virginia. From (http://youtu.be/LkPkvVMpoak).


Image above: Compilation of TV news articles on U.S> military preparedness for fighting Americans at home. From (http://youtu.be/Jv124RD-G3k).

See also:
Ea O Ka Aina: Training for supression of Americans 4/10/12

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Navy Network Information Center

SUBHEAD: RIMPAC - MIRC - PMRF Whether you are a military cyberbot, an intelligence agency or Navy defense contractor you've been punked.

[Author's update 11/21/13: I guess they are listening. Not only did the Navy Network Information Center (in Lexington Park, Maryland) get punked by this story so did Lockheed Martins (Denver Colorado). Thanks for dropping by and hearing a bit of criticism.]

By Juan Wilson on 20 November 2013 for Island Breath -
(http://islandbreath.blogspot.com/2013/11/navy-network-information-center.html)


Image above: Concept illustration from Legendary Pictures of battle between a US Navy Aircraft Carrier group and Godzilla. From (http://www.thetimewarriors.co.uk/blog/?p=15150).

I frequently check on who is reading our website through a service provided free from StatCounter.com. They list the ISP of visitors and tell when and which posts on our site that they visit. Yesterday we had several visits from the Navy Network Information Center.

This morning when I saw the NNIC was back on our site I typed "navy network information center" into Google (just to see what would pop-up this time) the top result (past a paid ad by the US Navy) was an article CrashWorthy: Navy Network Information Center. 

The author (AliMaui) appears to be the wife of a USN submariner who is stationed on the USS San Juan (SSN-751) is a Los Angeles Class nuclear submarine that carries 12 Tomahawk missiles with an assignment with Submarine Group TWO, North Atlantic, Groton, CT. AliMaui writes:

I have learned that NNIC shows up ANY time someone is accessing my blog (or anyone's site) from a Navy Controlled computer. Whether that be some admiral in Washington DC, a petty officer on the Enterprise, or a land locked recruiter at his computer in Kansas City, it will all show up the same. So conspiracy theorists, put your theories to rest. No one is stalking you...

... I am sure I have been flagged because I occasionally talk about our crazy navy life. Or perhaps the crazy women of the San Juan have started to ruffle more feathers than those of the BB housing office. Perhaps they are worried I am going to divulge national secrets amongst my my musings. No secrets to be had here. I think that is the one thing that I find most annoying...I can ask my husband a question that seams pretty innocent, but the lack of comment and the nasty look that follows indicates that information is not for my ears.

Well, AliMaui, you are not the only one of interest to someone through the NNIC, We also are visited by US Navy controlled computers. Every once in a while we post an article that tweaks the interest of the US military and its supporters. We first noticed this back in 2007 during our coverage of the Hawaii Superferry... particularly in articles that connected it to the Navy through John Lehman; CEO of the Superferry corporationa and Navy Secretary under President Reagan.

Other subjects have interested the NNIC as well. For example coverage RIMPAC Navel operations every two years; the expansion of Navy operations in Guam; the new nuclear aircraft carrier port on Jeju Island in South Korea; US Navy opeations on Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean; and the creation of a Marianas Islands Range Complex (targeting Pagan Island and others).

This last item has created a fury of NNIC visits in recent days. See a partial list for yesterday (image below) monitoring such visits to the article "Help Save Mariana Islands (http://islandbreath.blogspot.com/2013/11/help-save-mariana-islands.html).


Image above: Screenshot from StatCounter visitor monitor showing Navy Network Information Interest in post about the Mariana Islands. Click to enlarge.

The three Navy computers most active were in Honolulu, Pearl Harbor and San Diego. We have received so many hits from these specific ISP addresses that we have labeled them "Navy Spies". Note the earliest (bottom of list) visit from the Navy was through an encrypted search from the San Diego computer. The last search (top of the list) was not from the Navy, but from a private corporation named ManTech, headquartered in Fairfax, Virginia. There were multiple visits from the Mantech ISP subsequently.

Recent @ManTech twitter feed:

@ManTech ranked 5th on #Military Friendly Employer list: http://ow.ly/qP9ef 

@ManTech Wins $24 Million Option to Support Naval Air System Command - Congrats! http://bit.ly/1jglf7q

ManTech Corporation says of itself (http://www.mantech.com/about/Pages/about.aspx):

ManTech was founded in 1968 to provide advanced technological services to the United States government. We began with a single contract with the U.S. Navy to develop war-gaming models for the submarine community. Over the years, our government’s technology needs have increased dramatically in scope and sophistication, and we have grown to meet that challenge.

For more than 40 years, we kept a careful eye on where emerging technologies were taking the government, and we developed the resources to master those technologies—by staying close to our customers and anticipating their needs, hiring talented professionals to propel us into the future, and acquiring companies with proven capabilities.

Today, we are a $3 billion public company that provides the innovation, adaptability, and critical thinking our government needs for success in defense, intelligence, law enforcement, science, administration, and other fields—throughout the nation and in many countries throughout the world. We are now applying the lessons learned in the unforgiving arena of national security to help the private sector protect networks and critical information.

In other words; ManTech is a private information and technology corporation operated by the US Military - like Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, ITT, Sandia Labs et al.

I continue to hold that the US Navy is the most destructive single organization threatening life on planet Earth. The world would be better off without nuclear weapons; nuclear power and the US Navy.

There is plenty of evidence that the US Navy has woken up to Peak Oil and Climate Change. In fact they have been early adopters. They are quickly moving to be energy independent throughout their operations and here on Kauai. They also see the need for local food production here on Kauai.

Unfortunately the US Navy mission (http://www.navy.mil/navydata/organization/org-top.asp) is still:

The mission of the Navy is to maintain, train and equip combat-ready Naval forces capable of winning wars, deterring aggression and maintaining freedom of the seas.

Too bad they do not see the that their mission should be the protection of the health of oceans and shorelines of the islands and continents that border them. Certainly the list of dangers that cannot be "shot down or sunk" is far more threatening to America than the enemies the Navy is preparing for. They include:

• Radiation contamination of the Pacific Ocean by the catastrophe at Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant.
  
• Global Warming intensification of hurricanes and typhoons to heavily populated coastlines.
  
• Acidification of the oceans and subsequent reef die-off from CO2 pollution by fossile fuel emmsissions.
  
• Mammoth gyres of plastic litter that is mistaken for food by ocean fauna and also mimics organic material that interferes with Nature's chemistry.
  
• "Strip Mining" of fish by dragging operations that have removed more than 90% of mega-fauna from the oceans.
  
• Deep water drilling for petroleum that has destroyed the habitat of the Gulf of Mexico and now threatens the melting Acrtic Circle.

I suggest that the Navy take another look at its plans for RIMPAC 2014 scheduled for next summer and sill include several Pacific Rim nations in war game simulations with real depleted uranium wmunitions and brain shattering sonar affecting large ocean mammals.

Perhaps the RIMPAC members could think about turning from the Dark Side and joining Team Life.  If they can't they should simply save us some money and grief by cancelling the games.

Are you listening NNIC?

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The latest Gaza catastrophe

SUBHEAD: Many aspects of the current assault on Gaza pass under the radar screens of world conscience.

By Richard Falk on 19 November 2012 for Al Jazerra -
(http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/11/2012111874429224963.html)


Image above: Palestinian woman is removed from rubble in Gaza after Israeli bombing. From original article.


The media double standards in the West on the new and tragic Israeli escalation of violence directed at Gaza were epitomised by an absurdly partisan New York Times front page headline: "Rockets Target Jerusalem; Israel girds for Gaza Invasion" (NYT, Nov 16, 2012). Decoded somewhat, the message is this: Hamas is the aggressor, and Israel when and if it launches a ground attack on Gaza must expect itself to be further attacked by rockets. This is a stunningly Orwellian re-phrasing of reality.

The true situation is, of course, quite the opposite: Namely, that the defenseless population of Gaza can be assumed now to be acutely fearful of an all out imminent Israeli assault, while it is also true, without minimising the reality of a threat, that some rockets fired from Gaza fell harmlessly (although with admittedly menacing implications) on the outskirts of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv. There is such a gross disproportion in the capacity of the two sides to inflict damage and suffering due to Israeli total military dominance as to make perverse this reversal of concerns to what might befall Israeli society if the attack on Gaza further intensifies.

The reliance by Hamas and the various Gaza militias on indiscriminate, even if wildly inaccurate and generally harmless, rockets is a criminal violation of international humanitarian law, but the low number of casualties caused and the minor damage caused, needs to be assessed in the overall context of massive violence inflicted on the Palestinians. The widespread non-Western perception of the new cycle of violence involving Gaza is that it looks like a repetition of Israeli aggression against Gaza in late 2008, early 2009, that similarly fell between the end of American presidential elections and scheduled Israeli parliamentary elections.

Pointing fingers

There is the usual discussion over where to locate responsibility for the initial act in this renewed upsurge violence. Is it some shots fired from Gaza across the border and aimed at an armoured Israeli jeep or was it the targeted killing by an Israeli missile of Ahmed Jabari, leader of the military wing of Hamas, a few days later? Or some other act by one side or the other? Or is it the continuous violence against the people of Gaza arising from the blockade that has been imposed since mid-2007?

The assassination of Jabari came a few days after an informal truce that had been negotiated through the good offices of Egypt, and quite ironically agreed to by none other than Jabari acting on behalf of Hamas. Killing him was clearly intended as a major provocation, disrupting a carefully negotiated effort to avoid another tit-for-tat sequence of violence of the sort that has periodically taken place during the last several years.

An assassination of such a high profile Palestinian political figure as Jabari is not a spontaneous act. It is based on elaborate surveillance over a long period, and is obviously planned well in advance partly with the hope of avoiding collateral damage, and thus limiting unfavourable publicity. Such an extra-judicial killing, although also part and parcel of the new American ethos of drone warfare, remains an unlawful tactic of conflict, denying adversary political leaders separated from combat any opportunity to defend themselves against accusations, and implies a rejection of any disposition to seek a peaceful resolution of a political conflict. It amounts to the imposition of capital punishment without due process, a denial of elementary rights to confront an accuser.

Putting aside the niceties of law, the Israeli leadership knew exactly what it was doing when it broke the truce and assassinated such a prominent Hamas leader, someone generally thought to be second only to the Gaza prime minister, Ismail Haniya. There have been rumours, and veiled threats, for months that the Netanyahu government plans a major assault of Gaza, and the timing of the ongoing attacks seems to coincide with the dynamics of Israeli internal politics, especially the traditional Israeli practice of shoring up the image of toughness of the existing leadership in Tel Aviv as a way of inducing Israeli citizens to feel fearful, yet protected, before casting their ballots.

Under siege

Beneath the horrific violence, which exposes the utter vulnerability, of all those living as captives in Gaza, which is one of the most crowded and impoverished communities on the planet, is a frightful structure of human abuse that the international community continues to turn its back upon, while preaching elsewhere adherence to the norm of "responsibility to protect" whenever it suits NATO. More than half of the 1.6 million Gazans are refugees living in a total area of just over twice the size of the city of Washington, DC. The population has endured a punitive blockade since mid-2007 that makes daily life intolerable, and Gaza has been harshly occupied ever since 1967.

Israel has tried to fool the world by setting forth its narrative of a good faith withdrawal from Gaza in 2005, which was exploited by Palestinian militants at the time as an opportunity to launch deadly rocket attacks. The counter-narrative, accepted by most independent observers, is that the Israeli removal of troops and settlements was little more than a mere redeployment to the borders of Gaza, with absolute control over what goes in and what leaves, maintaining an open season of a license to kill at will, with no accountability and no adverse consequences, backed without question by the US government.

From an international law point of view, Israel's purported "disengagement" from Gaza didn't end its responsibility as an Occupying Power under the Geneva Conventions, and thus its master plan of subjecting the entire population of Gaza to severe forms of collective punishment amounts to a continuing crime against humanity, as well as a flagrant violation of Article 33 of Geneva IV. It is not surprising that so many who have observed the plight of Gaza at close range have described it as "the largest open air prison in the world".

The Netanyahu government pursues a policy that is best understood from the perspective of settler colonialism. What distinguishes settler colonialism from other forms of colonialism is the resolve of the colonialists not only to exploit and dominate, but to make the land their own and superimpose their own culture on that of indigenous population. In this respect, Israel is well served by the Hamas/Fatah split, and seeks to induce the oppressed Palestinian to give up their identity along with their resistance struggle even to the extent of asking Palestinians in Israel to take an oath of loyalty to Israel as "a Jewish state".

Actually, unlike the West Bank and East Jerusalem, Israel has no long-term territorial ambitions in Gaza. Israel's short-term solution to its so-called "demographic problem" (that is, worries about the increase in the population of Palestinians relative to Jews) could be greatly eased if Egypt would absorb Gaza, or if Gaza would become a permanently separate entity, provided it could be reliably demilitarised. What makes Gaza presently useful to the Israelis is their capacity to manage the level of violence, both as a distraction from other concerns (eg backing down in relation to Iran; accelerated expansion of the settlements) and as a way of convincing their own people that dangerous enemies remain and must be dealt with by the iron fist of Israeli militarism.

No peace

In the background, but not very far removed from the understanding of observers, are two closely related developments. The first is the degree to which the continuing expansion of Israeli settlements has made it unrealistic to suppose that a viable Palestinian state will ever emerge from direct negotiations. The second, underscored by the recent merger of Netanyahu and Lieberman forces, is the extent to which the Israeli governing process has indirectly itself irreversibly embraced the vision of Greater Israel encompassing all of Jerusalem and most of the West Bank.

The fact that world leaders in the West keep repeating the mantra of peace through direct negotiations is either an expression of the grossest incompetence or totally bad faith. At minimum, Washington and the others calling for the resumption of direct negotiations owe it to all of us to explain how it will be possible to establish a Palestinian state within 1967 borders when it means the displacement of most of the 600,000 armed settlers now defended by the Israeli army, and spread throughout occupied Palestine. Such an explanation would also have to show why Israel is being allowed to quietly legalise the 100 or so "outposts", settlements spread around the West Bank that had been previously unlawful even under Israeli law. Such moves toward legalisation deserve the urgent attention of all those who continue to proclaim their faith in a two-state solution, but instead are ignored.

This brings us back to Gaza and Hamas. The top Hamas leaders have made it abundantly clear over and over again that they are open to permanent peace with Israel if there is a total withdrawal to the 1967 borders (22 percent of historic Palestine) and the arrangement is supported by a referendum of all Palestinians living under occupation.

Israel, with the backing of Washington, takes the position that Hamas as "a terrorist organisation" that must be permanently excluded from the procedures of diplomacy, except of course when it serves Israel's purposes to negotiate with Hamas. It did this in 2011 when it negotiated the prisoner exchange in which several hundred Palestinians were released from Israeli prisons in exchange for the release of the Israel soldier captive, Gilad Shalit, or when it seems convenient to take advantage of Egyptian mediation to establish temporary ceasefires.

As the celebrated Israeli peace activist and former Knesset member, Uri Avnery, reminds us a cease-fire in Arab culture, hudna in Arabic, is considered to be sanctified by Allah, has tended to be in use and faithfully observed ever since the time of the Crusades. Avnery also reports that up to the time he was assassinated, Jabari was in contact with Gershon Baskin of Israel, seeking to explore prospects for a long-term ceasefire that was reported to Israeli leaders, who unsurprisingly showed no interest.

Waiting for justice

There is a further feature of this renewal of conflict involving attacks on Gaza. Israel sometimes insists that since it is no longer, according to its claims, an occupying power, it is in a state of war with a Hamas governed Gaza. But if this were to be taken as the proper legal description of the relationship between the two sides, then Gaza would have the rights of a combatant, including the option to use proportionate force against Israeli military targets. As earlier argued, such a legal description of the relationship between Israel and Gaza is unacceptable. Gaza remains occupied and essentially helpless, and Israel as occupier has no legal or ethical right to engage in war against the people and government of Gaza, which incidentally was elected in internationally monitored free elections in early 2006.

On the contrary, its overriding obligation as Occupier is to protect the civilian population of Gaza. Even if casualty figures in the present violence are so far low as compared with Operation Cast Lead, the intensity of air and sea strikes against the helpless people of Gaza strikes terror in the hearts and minds of every person living in the Strip, a form of indiscriminate violence against the spirit and mental health of an entire people that cannot be measured in blood and flesh, but by reference to the traumatising fear that has been generated.

We hear many claims in the West as to a supposed decline in international warfare since the collapse of the Soviet Union twenty years ago. Such claims are to some extent a welcome development, but the people of the Middle East have yet to benefit from this trend, least of all the people of Occupied Palestine, and of these, the people of Gaza are suffering the most acutely. This spectacle of one-sided war in which Israel decides how much violence to unleash, and Gaza waits to be struck, firing off militarily meaningless salvos of rockets as a gesture of resistance, represents a shameful breakdown of civilisation values. These rockets do spread fear and cause trauma among Israeli civilians even when no targets are struck, and represent an unacceptable tactic. Yet such unacceptability must be weighed against the unacceptable tactics of an Israel that holds all the cards in the conflict.

It is truly alarming that now even the holiest of cities, Jerusalem, is threatened with attacks, but the continuation of oppressive conditions for the people of Gaza, inevitably leads to increasing levels of frustration, in effect, cries of help that world has ignored at its peril for decades. These are survival screams! To realise this is not to exaggerate! To gain perspective, it is only necessary to read a recent UN Report that concludes that the deterioration of services and conditions will make Gaza uninhabitable by 2020.

Completely aside from the merits of the grievances on the two sides, one side is militarily omnipotent and the other side crouches helplessly in fear. Such a grotesque reality passes under the radar screens of world conscience because of the geopolitical shield behind which Israel is given a free pass to do whatever it wishes. Such a circumstance is morally unendurable, and should be politically unacceptable. It needs to be actively opposed globally by every person, government, and institution of good will. 

• Richard Falk is the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Palestinian human rights.

See also:
Ea O Ka Aina: Israeli Attack on Mavi Mamarra 6/5/10
Ea O Ka Aina: Surfing in Gaza 4/20/11
Ea O Ka Aina: Impending Collapse if Israel 10/2/10

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Unproved Osprey on Kauai

SUBHEAD: The Marines accident plagued new helicopter will darken our skies and sister island Kaula.  

By Juan Wilson on 21 August 2012 for Island Breath -  
(http://islandbreath.blogspot.com/2012/08/unproved-osprey-on-kauai.html)
 
Image above: An April crash of an Osprey V-22, that killed two Marines in Morocco, was blamed on pilot error. From (http://rpdefense.over-blog.com/article-morocco-usmc-mv-22-osprey-crash-due-to-pilot-error-109197905.html).  

[Author's note: Kaula island is south west of Niihau and is part of Kauai County. It was once a way point for traditional Hawaiian navigators heading to the northwest Hawaiian Islands. If the Osprey comes, will it be safe to navigate traditionally in the future? Moreover, it is now occupied by many animal plant species who will be targeted by US Marines as collateral damage. Didn't we learn anything from the disaster of Navy bombardment of Kahoolawe?]

The westside of Kauai is where Kauai goes to do bad things that make some people rich and some people more comfortable.

• We have Port Allen with barges of petroleum delivered to a fuel farm as to well as a diesel powered electrical generating station that supplies 80% the island's juice. Hey folks from Hanalei, would you like a noisy power station in your bay to spread some of the load?
• We have the corn seed companies DOW Agroscience, Syngenta, Dupont Pioneer, and Monsanto Dekalb stirring up dust and poison that carries into our schools and homes with the constant threat of a GMO accident going wrong. Hey, Wailua Heights would you like a Pioneer field of GMO corn field full of pesticides upwind of you?
• We have the Kekaha Landfill as the depository for all the garbage and junk on the island. It sits adjacent to the ocean and full of toxins and chemicals just waiting for the next hurricane or tsunami to drag it across our reefs. Hey, Kilauea, thanks so much for the biohazard deliveries of dioxen and arsenic?
• We have the Pacific Missile Range Facility and all it entails. Dangerous and unhealthy activities on land, in the sea and in the air. We just got through hosting RimPac 2012.

Now bad things are going to be turned up another notch. The US Marines are coming. From Joan Conrow's Kauai Eclectic (http://kauaieclectic.blogspot.com/2012/08/thesky-was-bed-of-smoldering-coals.html):

In case you hadn't heard, the military's crash-prone Osprey helicopters — and their entourage of some 1,000 Marines — are coming to Hawaii. But Kaneohe isn't the only place that will get to enjoy the ear-splitting, peace-shattering noise. They plan to fly them over here at PMRF, too, using Kaula as a live-fire target. Gee, I hadn't realized the poor nesting seabirds there had declared war on the U.S. — not that that's a prerequisite for American aggression.

From Hawaii News Now (http://www.hawaiinewsnow.com/story/19290479/osprey-helicopter-heading-to-hawaii):

One of the military's newest and perhaps most controversial helicopters is heading to Hawaii and Kaneohe residents are concerned over the noise and environmental impact.
By 2014 windward residents will see as many as two dozen MV-22 Osprey's flying around Kaneohe Bay.
The Osprey has been cleared to come to Hawaii. The tilt rotor Osprey takes off and lands like a helicopter but can fly like a plane. However it's had its troubles.
The fleet was grounded in 2000 after two fatal crashes killed 23 people. Two months ago one crashed in Florida injuring five. Four months ago a crash in Morocco killed two Marines.

Still the Marines maintain safety isn't a problem.

"These aircraft are safer than any aircraft we've everv had," said Capt. Derek George, Director of Environmental Compliance MCBH.

Then there are the noise concerns. Windward residents have complained to lawmakers about all the flying.

"In terms of noise we really need to make sure it does stay at a reasonable level. I live near the base and we do hear it at night. It's something I've heard throughout my life living near the base," said State Senator Jill Tokuda, (D) Kaneohe, Kailua.=

The Marines say the Osprey will fly the same hours as other aircraft which is 8:00 am to 10:00 pm and on occasion to midnight. But training will mostly be over the ocean, not over neighborhoods. And they maintain it's not going to be much louder than what's been flying around the base since before World War II.

"As far as the noise is concerned the noise of the MV22 is very comparable to the noise of the CH 53's we have now," said Capt. George.

"The noise factor between the Osprey and other aircraft flying around here, there is going to be no difference," said Lt. Col. Armando Espinoza, Marine Corp Air Station Operations Air Field Operation Officer.

"It's not really noise, its training. These guys are fighting for our country, risking their lives. As a veteran I say that's the sound of freedom," said State Representative Ken Ito, (D) Kaneohe, Heeia, Haiku Valley.

In addition to the Osprey, 15 Cobra and 12 Huey helicopters will also be stationed in Hawaii. Some are already here in Kaneohe.

The Marines say the final environmental impact statement says the aircraft will not affect the ocean or wildlife. However some historic buildings on base will be demolished or renovated in order to make room for the 1,000 new military personnel that will be coming in with all the aircrafts.

To read the final environmental impact, the signed record of decision and other related documents click here (http://www.mcbh.usmc.mil/mv22h1eis/documents.html).

 Image above: Figure 3 map from report below identifying primary bases to be used by Marines and their Osprey V-22s.

 From Environmental Impact Statement for Basing of MV-22 and H-1 Aircraft in Support of III Marine Expeditionary Force Elements in Hawai‘i (http://www.mcbh.usmc.mil/documents/fact_sheet_2010-08-05.pdf)

Preliminary alternatives were developed to meet specific requirements. They vary by development footprints, layouts, and locations for aviation fa- cilities at MCB Hawaii Kaneohe Bay. The EIS will also evaluate a no-action alternative. Except for No Action, the alternatives involve construction of aviation facilities at MCB Hawaii Kaneohe Bay, landing zone improvements at selected sites such as Marine Corps Training Area Bellows (Bellows) in Waimānalo and Molokai Training Support Fa- cility, and training and readiness operations by the VMM and HMLA squadrons at various training facilities statewide that are currently used by the Marine Corps (Figures 2 and 3). In addition to MCB Hawaii Kaneohe Bay and Bellows, VMM and HMLA squadrons may train at Wheeler Army Air- field, Dillingham Airfield, and various U.S. Army training areas on O‘ahu; Pōhakuloa Training Area on the island of Hawai‘i; Moloka‘i Training Sup- port Facility and Kalaupapa Airfield on Moloka‘i; and the Pacific Missile Range Facility on Kaua‘i.

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Navy to increase war on Pacific

SOURCE: Ken Taylor (taylork021@hawaii.rr.com) SUBHEAD: US Navy plans are to increase war games and sonar activity in a huge sector of Pacific Ocean.  

By Kohola Leo on 9 June 2012 in Island Breath - 
  (http://islandbreath.blogspot.com/2012/06/navy-to-increase-war-on-pacific.html)
   
Image above: A still from from Superbowl ad for movie "Battleships", filmed in Hawaii. Note ship firing all its weapons at sunset near what looks like northern coast of Kauai. From (http://www.youtube.com/v/20cvxGcT0tY).

 

The Navy is coming to discuss the EIS for the Hawaii-California region that basically covers everything in the Eastern Pacific ocean north of the equator. THEY ARE PROPOSING A REAL INCREASE TO THEIR ACTIVITIES, ESPECIALLY WAR GAMES AND SONAR.

SONAR TORTURES AND KILLS whales and dolphins. Please come to these meetings and be a voice for Cetaceans (whales and dolphins) and help protect them and all marine life. You can also send comments via the link below.

The public meetings will be held between 5:00 p.m. and 8:00 p.m. on the following dates and locations:

1. KAUAI - June 12, 2012 (Tuesday) at the
Wilcox Elementary School Cafeteria,
4319 Hardy Street, Lihue, HI.  

[IB Publisher's note: We have been informed by Kip Goodwin (kgoodwin@hawaiiantel.net) that on on the day representatives of the Navy will appear in public to promote their Expansion Plan for war preparation exercises in the eastern Pacific a demonstration is planned. While the topic is an EIS addressing potential harm to marine mammals, many see an opportunity to address the exercises in a greater perspective: 

Who are the real winners and losers in US military power projection in the Pacific basin? A demonstration with signs will begin at 4:15pm, prior to the 5pm event start, and the attached flyer will be handed out. Anyone who wishes can bring a sign and participate. We will be in front of the meeting venue at Wilcox Elementary, across the street from Lihue Library.]
 

2. MAUI - June 13, 2012 (Wednesday) at Maui Waena Intermediate School Cafeteria, 795 Onehee Avenue, Kahului, HI.

3. BIG ISLAND June 14, 2012 (Thursday) at East Hawaii Cultural Center, 141 Kalakaua Street, Hilo, HI.

4. OAHU - June 15, 2012 (Friday) at McKinley High School Cafeteria, 1039 South King Street, Honolulu, HI.

5. CALIFORNIA - June 20, 2012 (Wednesday) at Marina Village Conference Center, Starboard Room, 1936 Quivira Way, San Diego, CA

Here is the link for more information and where you can provide comments:

http://hstteis.com

The Draft EIS/OEIS was distributed to Federal, State and local agencies, elected officials, as well as other interested individuals and organizations. Copies of the Draft EIS/OEIS are also available for public review at the following libraries: 

1. KAUAI - Lihue Public Library, 4344 Hardy Street, Lihue, HI 96766.

2. MAUI - Wailuku Public Library, 251 High Street, Wailuku, HI 96793. 3. BIG ISLAND - Hilo Public Library, 300 Waianuenue Avenue, Hilo, HI 96720.

4. BIG ISLAND - Kailua-Kona Public Library, 75–138 Hualalai Road, Kailua-Kona, HI 96740.

5. OAHU - Hawaii State Library, Hawaii and Pacific Section Document Unit, 478 South King Street, Honolulu, HI 96813.

Documents also available at: http://hstteis.com/DocumentsandReferences/HSTTDocuments/DraftEISOEISPosters.aspx

For the whales and healthy Oceans, Mahalo, Koholā Leo

http://www.koholaleo.com/

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A 51st State for Armed Drones

SUBHEAD: 94,000 square miles over Colorado and New Mexico could be given over to remote-controlled flying murder machines. By David Swanson on 27 October 2011 for War Is a Crime - (http://warisacrime.org/content/51st-state-armed-robotic-drones) Image above: Detail of map of Colorado and New Mexico affected by plan. Click to see all. From (http://www.not1moreacre.net).

Weaponized UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles), also known as drones, have their own caucus in Congress, and the Pentagon's plan is to give them their own state as well.

Under this plan, 7 million acres (or 11,000 square miles) of land in the southeast corner of Colorado, and 60 million acres of air space (or 94,000 square miles) over Colorado and New Mexico would be given over to special forces testing and training in the use of remote-controlled flying murder machines. The full state of Colorado is itself 104,000 square miles. Rhode Island is 1,000 square miles. Virginia, where I live, is 43,000 square miles.

The U.S. military (including Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines) is proceeding with this plan in violation of the public will, new state legislation on private property rights, an exceptionally strong federal court order, and a funding ban passed by the United States Congress, and in the absence of any approved Environmental Impact Statement. Public pressure has successfully put the law on the right side of this issue, and the military is disregarding the law.

I spoke with Jean Aguerre, whose organization "Not 1 More Acre" ( http://not1moreacre.net ) is leading the pushback against this madness. Jean told me she grew up, during the 1960s, on the vast grasslands of southeast Colorado, where the Comanche National Grasslands makes up part of a system of grasslands put in place to help the prairie recover from the dust bowl. The dust bowl, Aguerre says, was the worst environmental disaster in the United States until BP filled the Gulf of Mexico with oil. The dust bowl had been brought on by the government's policy of requiring homesteaders to plow the prairie. The recovery programs created large tracts of land, of 100,000 acres and more, owned by "generational ranchers," that is families that would hand the ranches off to their children.

Aguerre said she grew up on a ranch of incredible beauty and natural wealth, with a 165-million-year-old dinosaur track way and petroglyphs from 12,000 years back. Grasslands are the most threatened ecosystems in the world because they are so accessible, Aguerre says, and the only intact short grassland left in this country is the one being targeted for the "51st state."

Round One began in the 1980s. Fort Carson, an Army base in Colorado Springs, had been kept open after World War II and now began looking for more land. The people of the area were opposed. The U.S. Congressman representing the area agreed to oppose any landgrab. But Senator Gary Hart took the opposite position. As a result, during the early 1980s, the Army Corps of Engineers started telling ranchers to sell out or risk seeing their land condemned and taken from them.

The ranch next to Aguerre's is called Wine Glass Rourke. It was sold to a shill, as Aguerre describes the buyer. He ran the place into the ground with too many cattle, she says, and then sold it to the military, "And they were off and running!" With condemnations the military put together 250 thousand acres. Ranchers, along with their cattle, were moved off their own land by federal marshals. "We didn't know when we'd be next," Aguerre says of her own family.

Luckily for the people of Colorado and New Mexico, and all of us, Aguerre got involved in politics. She became a political director for Congressman Tim Werth who later became a U.S. senator. Aguerre took him to see the Wine Glass Rourke ranch and told him "Let's take it back." Werth dedicated his staff to the effort for three years, resulting in the transfer to the Forest Service of 17,000 key acres.

The Army used its new land less than twice a year for maneuvers, but caused horrible environmental damage whenever it did. That was the case for about 30 years, until the activity of recent years made everything that came before look sensitive and sustainable.

In the meantime, people like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld were theorizing the transformation of the U.S. military into a force for robotic warfare. Aguerre believes it was in 1996 that a decision was made that the military would need a robotic warfare center. Around 1999 the Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement was created. This precedes the more specific Site Environmental Impact Statements. The U.S. public, just like the public of any foreign nation where new U.S. bases are being planned, was told nothing.

In 2006, Aguerre was working in Oregon when friends started asking her to come home and help because something big was happening. An Army land expansion map had been leaked that showed plans for taking over 6.9 million acres, the whole southeast corner of the state. Aguerre thought she would come home for two weeks but has never left. An Environmental Impact Statement for the site was about to be released, and Aguerre knew that meant the project was pretty far along. She formed organizations and found a lawyer in Colorado Springs named Steve Harris to help. The two of them, she says, were absolutely dedicated to NEPA and FOIA. NEPA is the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969. FOIA is the Freedom of Information Act of 1966. "NEPA is intended to prevent our government taking our world apart piece by piece without our knowing it," explains Aguerre.

Aguerre and others persuaded the area's county commissioners to vote against the military's plans in 2006, and the state legislature to pass a private property rights bill in January 2007 -- a bill that required approval of such plans by the state legislature.

Ken Salazar was the military's hired servant. He had been Attorney General of Colorado from 1999 to 2005. He was a U.S. Senator from 2005 to 2009. President Barack Obama has made him Secretary of the Interior. Around 2007, Jean Aguerre recounts, Salazar held a public meeting in Pueblo, Col., with about 300 ranchers packing the room. He turned his palms up to the ceiling and announced: "I will lift the golden curtain that falls at the end of El Paso county so that prosperity can flow onto the eastern plains." This meant that military spending was economically beneficial. Military expansion, people were being told, was good for them -- even if it stole their families' land, and regardless of what momentum it created for the launching and continuing of wars.

"Instead of putting together frameworks for nonproliferation," says Aguerre, "Ken Salazar worked to destroy the last intact short grass prairie because the money was too good."

Senators Wayne Allard, who would join the military lobbyist company the Livingston Group within weeks of leaving the Senate, and Ken Salazar passed an authorization for taking land as part of the 2007 John Warner Defense Authorization Act. "None of the ranchers knew they were in line to be condemned for the second damn time," says Aguerre.

John Salazar, Ken's brother, at this time represented Colorado's third congressional district, while Republican Marilyn Musgrave represented the fourth. Musgrave was persuaded by ranchers that there was no need for the government to take their land. Aguerre worked with Musgrave's staff to draft a one-sentence funding ban. Aguerre and her allies then organized massive public pressure to recruit John Salazar as a Democratic co-sponsor. Ken Salazar failed in his effort to block this measure in the Senate. The ban passed both houses and became law, but it must be renewed every year.

In 2009, Aguerre and her allies won a federal court ruling throwing out the military's Environmental Impact Statement with harsh and unequivocal language -- "one of the strongest court orders under NEPA," says Aguerre. By 2008, the military had begun using its land a lot more, and the court ruling did not stop them.

The funding ban, too, is not stopping increased activity. This past year, the funding ban was missing from a committee chairman's markup in which it had appeared in previous years. Not 1 More Acre and its allies pressured Third-District Congressman Scott Tipton. People from all over the country phoned his office. They were told that as non-constituents their views did not matter. Aguerre advised people to reply: "When you pick my pocket you don't ask what district I'm from." Tipton was won over, and the funding ban, for what it's worth, remains for now.

Nonetheless, says Aguerre, the military is proceeding with and increasing trainings and environmental destruction daily .

Senators Mark Udall and Michael Bennet of Colorado and Tom Udall of New Mexico don't receive high marks from Jean Aguerre. "Mark Udall on Armed Services and Michael Bennet on Agriculture sit with their thumbs in their pie. Udall has never once come to southeastern Colorado and looked young ranchers in the eye and said 'this is why we need this military takeover of your lands.'"

Aguerre continues: "And Tom Udall puts out this pap the other day, mumbo jumbo about the Air Force. It's not Air Force; it's Special Operations. Aguerre said that her group and others are preparing a comment letter seeking legal standing to challenge the Air Force, and potentially to pry loose more information from the iron grip of our "transparent" government. Aguerre points out that the Air Force Special Operations Command Environmental Assessment was written by SAIC, a global military contractor that also makes voting machines.

"We found out that the state national guard is completely involved in UAV warfare," says Aguerre. "So when your house floods and you don't have the national guard there, they may be remotely piloting something somewhere else."

Aguerre says that in 2006 she knew of four countries that were manufacturing armed UAVs, and that now she knows of 56. So, the argument that drones keep "people" out of harm's way (with people redefined to mean U.S. citizens) doesn't hold up very solidly. We have also already had a suicide bomb attack on a drone piloting location and had drone pilots commit suicide, not to mention the risks of long-term blowback, the damage being done to the rule of law, and all the human beings killed and injured from among the non-U.S. 95% of humanity.

Aguerre asks scientists who love unarmed UAVs to consider the full effect of supporting such technology. I would ask environmentalists to consider the full effect of not resisting the destruction of what Not 1 More Acre describes as:

• unique bioregions of canyonlands, forested mesas, grasslands and riparian systems providing habitat for diverse flora and fauna found nowhere else on Earth and the largest block of native prairie remaining on the High Plains;
• restored Dust Bowl lands – Comanche, Kiowa and Rita Blanca National Grasslands — offering robust safe haven to threatened and endangered species of plants and animals, including rare insects and reptiles yet to be named;
• wild rivers and complex wetlands vital to native fish, migrating birds, unique wildlife and environmental health.

I would ask opponents of drone warfare to consider the likely impact of setting aside 60 million acres of air space for testing drones.

"We cannot allow the sacrifice of our democracy to politicians who are bought by military contractors," says Aguerre. "If they are able to get this 51st state for robotic warfare, I think the economy will be irretrievably lost. These are unbelievably beautiful and pristine lands. Our rural areas are where the genetically modified seeds are being planted, where the lands and mountains are being mined, and where the military is going to destroy an area the size of a state, because the rural people are so few. Gary Hart was able to attack the last short grass prairie without political cost."

Why is there no political cost? Because "we can't get the word out."

Let's help get the word out by sharing this link: http://not1moreacre.org

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