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Banned
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The bottom sentence, in bold print in the bottom quote box of this post, sez it all....
Those who do not question and challenge authority now, while still legally permitted to do so, will ultimately have blood on their hands, because they stood by and did nothing while the opportunity for a non-violent and effective restoration of the pre-9/11 provisions of the American Consitution was still a possibility.
Meet the new boss....same as the old boss....
The <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubris">hubris</a> that leaps off the pages of
this thread and in the posts of the most prolific participants these days at this political
forum, is offensive to a number of us who exhibit a different way of looking at current events
in The U.S. and in the UK. Note the time frame when the Diego Garcia "Op" was executed.
The islanders were forcibly evacuated in the early 70's and U.S. military construction began in
1976. The "adults" were "in charge" of the U.S. government in those days....initially Nixon,
and subsequently, after Nixon's resignation, Ford was POTUS and Cheney was his COS, and <a href="http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/pentagon/paths/ford.html">Rumsfeld</a> was his SOD....and....they're back......and too many Americans and Brits are still willing to follow them over a cliff....<b>in the name of C-O-R-P-O-R-A-T-I-S-M not L-I-B-E-R-T-Y</b>
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“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced corporate power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes.” - President Eisenhower
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The first stage of fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of State and corporate power -LOOK IT UP
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http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/3177682.stm
Last Updated: Thursday, 9 October, 2003, 14:28 GMT 15:28 UK
<b>Q&A: Chagos Islands dispute</b>
The High Court in London has dealt a setback to thousands of islanders battling for compensation from the British Government.
<b>What started the dispute?</b>
The forced removal by the British Government of around 2,000 islanders from the Chagos group of islands, in the Indian Ocean, between 1967 and 1973.
They were moved so the United States could build a military airbase on the island of Diego Garcia, the biggest of the archipelago......
.....<b>What has the US done with the territory?</b>
A massive construction effort was launched on Diego Garcia in 1976, and ten years and £300m later it was fully operational as a US airbase.
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Quote:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/08/in...05spiegel.html
U.S. Military Bases
Indian Ocean Islanders Take On a Superpower
By Padma Rao,
Der Spiegel
Published: December 8, 2005
The island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean is located perfectly from a strategic point of view. But when the US military adopted it as a military base in the 1960s and 70s, it was inconveniently populated. The natives were driven out -- but now, they want their home back.....
.......The story begins in the 1960s, when the English -- then as now led by Queen Elizabeth II -- depopulated the islands. The Chagossians were starved out, pets were gassed before the eyes of the islands' children, and finally, the islanders were loaded onto freighters and shipped off to the Seychelles and Mauritius.
What to do with the inhabitants?
The emptied islands didn't remain empty for long, though. For $14 million -- paid indirectly in the form of a discount on Polaris rockets purchased by Great Britain from the United States -- America leased the largest island in the archipelago in 1966. Diego Garcia soon became one of the US's most important military bases the world over.........
......A net of lies and fabrications
But the United States wanted Diego Garcia swept clean -- and they also wanted to avoid embarrassing questions by the United Nations over the fate of the local inhabitants. To satisfy the Americans' demands, the British Foreign Office began weaving a net of lies and fabrications. According to one proposal, the Chagossians would be classified as migrant workers from Mauritius and the Seychelles, which would conveniently legitimize their deportation. But the plan was quickly discarded when the results of an anthropological study showed that this was not the case. Ultimately, the British decided simply to keep quiet about the islanders' whereabouts..........
.........Nowadays about 5,500 Chagossians and their offspring live in exile -- 4,500 in Port Louis, 650 in the Seychelles and 300 near London's Gatwick Airport. Although London paid each deported Chagossian about £3,000 in compensation, most of the islanders quickly slipped into poverty, succumbing to unemployment, drug addiction, alcoholism, prostitution, AIDS and high rates of suicide. The Creole word the Chagossians themselves use to describe their melancholy condition is "chagrin" -- longing.
But in 1998 they decided to fight back, and filed a lawsuit against the British government. The Chagossians' legal representatives, led by Nelson Mandela's attorney Sydney Kentridge, discovered a treasure trove in the Public Records Office: the many handwritten files that documented the fate of Diego Garcia. In 2000, the High Court declared the deportations illegal and ruled that the displaced Chagossians were within their rights in seeking to return to the islands.
"7.20 S, 72.25 E"
But the United States had absolutely no intention of giving up "7.20 S, 72.25 E," as the base is known in military circles. For the Americans, Diego Garcia is an indispensable launching pad for sorties over Afghanistan, Iraq and other destinations throughout half of Asia -- an ideal hub for a powerful fleet of B-52 and Stealth bombers.
The island has a harbor that can accommodate 30 warships. It also has shooting ranges and other training facilities, crude oil and gasoline storage tanks. From its vantage point on Diego Garcia, Washington monitors the region's tanker routes, as well as the activities of rising global players India and China. The island is home to about 4,000 troops, as well as civilian employees, mainly from Sri Lanka and the Philippines, but none from the Chagos Islands.
"Diego Garcia is experiencing steady growth, so as to meet professional and personal needs," raves the US Marines' Web site. But the archipelago is off-limits to visitors. With the exception of a British representative without any authority and the families of US military personnel, no one else is permitted to set foot on the islands.
In June 2004, the Americans made it clear that they intend to neither leave Diego Garcia nor tolerate any expatriate locals on the neighboring islands, claiming that they could "set up jamming transmitters and obstruct important military missions." The British Foreign Office, for its part, urged Queen Elizabeth II to issue a rare "Order in Council," an order made possible under the rules of the revised constitution that invalidates all previous court rulings while circumventing the British parliament. In doing so, the Queen appears to have banned the Chagossians from their native islands once and for all.....
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Quote:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/...in558378.shtml
Diego Garcia: Exiles Still Barred
June 13, 2003
The military base employs several thousand civilians but bars anyone who used to live on the island from working there. (CBS)
.....Back then when the island was a British colony, Marcel Moulinie managed the coconut plantation. He was ordered to ship the people out.
“Total evacuation. They wanted no indigenous people there," says Moulinie.
"When the final time came and the ships were chartered, they weren't allowed to take anything with them except a suitcase of their clothes. The ships were small and they could take nothing else, no furniture, nothing."
The people of Diego Garcia say they left paradise and landed in hell when they were dumped here in the urban slums of Mauritius. They had brought no possessions and as islanders who had lived off fishing and farming they had no real professional skills.
No one helped them resettle or pay for the homes they lost. They were forced to become squatters in a foreign land.
Before the final evacuation, the British had cut off the ships carrying food and medicine to Diego Garcia.....
....The islanders say the other force that got them out was fear when British officials ordered their pets to be exterminated. They were gassed with exhaust fumes from American military vehicles.
"You can imagine the pressure it put on the population there," says Alexis.
"We were crying, we were hanging onto our mothers' skirts crying, because although we were very young we understood that we were leaving something very valuable behind, and that was our home."
And for the next 30 years, the world never knew what happened to Diego Garcia's original people.
No outsiders are allowed onto Diego Garcia, so this secret stayed hidden until one of the exiled islanders, Olivier Bancoult, started organizing his community.
Bancoult was angry by the years of misery his people were forced to endure. Three of his own brothers drank themselves to death, dispirited by their poverty and unemployment. And one sister was so homesick she committed suicide.
"That's very sad, that's why I will never give up," says Bancoult. "All the difficulty is because of U.S. and UK, they turned peoples' life into a nightmare."
So three years ago, Olivier traveled to London to take the British government to court. His big break came when he and his lawyer, Richard Gifford, found secret documents that had recently been declassified that described the agreement between the United States and British governments to build the base on Diego Garcia.
"Here we have the legal expert in the foreign office, in which he's got a paragraph headed, maintaining the fiction," says Gifford, referring to the fiction that Diego Garcia had no native people.
These British documents reveal that colonial officials thought no one would notice if they deported the islanders......
....Another British document confirms that "evicting the people and leaving the island to the seagulls" was done at the request of the United States. It reads: "The United States Government will require the removal of the entire population of the atoll by July."
"And the British were only too happy to oblige," says Gifford.
What did the British get in return for providing the Americans a population-free island? Polaris missiles for their submarines. The U.S. reduced the price by $14 million dollars, or $5 million British pounds.
"So five million pounds was a massive incentive compared with a very modest conscience problem," says Gifford.
Uncovering the paper trail brought Gifford and Bancoult a stunning victory. Britain's highest court ruled that deporting Diego Garcia's native population was illegal.
But the euphoria didn't last long because the court didn't propose a remedy -- neither money nor what the people wanted most - to return home and have the right to earn a living on the base.
"The position of the islanders is that they never objected to the U.S. base on Diego, but the islanders are extremely bitter that they are denied employment on the base. Precisely because they come from there," says Gifford.
The base currently employs several thousand civilian workers from other countries like the Philippines - and they don't want visitors. When the islanders asked to visit their family graves, they were told from the British government that the U.S. had to grand permission........
........"It's an important base, I agree, but at the same time they should have realized that people are also important," says Alexis.
<h4>"The Americans and the British always talk about the champions of human rights. What they did to us they should rectify, they should look after us. You know, they should do what they preach."</h4>
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Last edited by host; 02-22-2006 at 01:15 AM..
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