Phoenix court
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- NOTE 3
- NOTE 4
- ADDITIONAL NOTE
- DIEGO GARCIA
NOTE 2The SR71 Blackbird reconnaissance aircraft was a futuristic aircraft which flew “on the edge of space”. Unfortunately, however, its weakness was that at top speed, it burned up more than 8,000 gallons of fuel every hour. On some flights, it had to be refuelled at least 5 times by 16 tankers! + + + + + NOTE 3Way back in 1974, Victor Marchetti and John D. Marks in their book, The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence (p.67), revealed that CIA technicians worked with Lockheed at a secret site in Nevada, to develop the A11 and later the SR-71, although they did not locate the site at Area 51. + + + + + NOTE 4There is, as I have already mentioned, the Bermuda Triangle, an area which includes Andros Island. There is, however, also the Nevada Triangle, located by Reno and the Sierra Nevada mountains to the northwest, Schell Creek to the northeast, and Spring Mountain and Las Vegas to the south. Area 51, Canyon Park and Bishops Airport are apparently within the Nevada Triangle, which comprises deserts, pine forests and, of course, mountains. ADDITIONAL NOTETimothy Good, in his Beyond Top Secret, writes: “Area 51 at Groom Dry Lake (also called ‘Dreamland’) has been America’s most secret installation since the early 1950s, where many spy planes (such as the U-2, SR71, and the Aurora aircraft) as well as stealth aircraft (such as F-117A) were test-flown. There is also allegedly a super-secret site – S-4 – at Papoose Dry Lake in the Nevada Test Site, 10 to 15 miles south of Groom Lake. Both sites have been mentioned in connection with recovered alien vehicles…Mike Hunt, for example, who held an Atomic Energy Commission ‘Q’ clearance and an inter-agency Top Secret Clearance, claims to have seen a disc-shaped aircraft on the ground at Area 51 during the early 1960s, and to have been present during take-offs and landings (though he was not allowed to observe these). Hunt believed that a highly secret programme connected with these discs – known as Project Red Light – was in operation at Area 51 at the time” (p.492). + + + + +
DIEGO GARCIACompared to Area 51 in Nevada, Diego Garcia is tiny. It is, however, the largest of 64 coral islands and atolls of the Chagos Archipelago, in the Indian Ocean, south of the Maldive Islands and 2,000 miles east of Africa. Diego Garcia is an irregular U-shaped or distorted horseshoe-shaped atoll 40 miles from end to end, but less than one mile wide except for a small area in the northwest corner. It surrounds a coral-studded lagoon. It has been said that he who controls Diego Garcia, controls the Indian ocean and most of southern Asia. Around the middle of the last century about 2,000 people lived on the islands of the Chagos Archipelago, of whom around 1,800 lived on Diego Garcia. They were the indigenous Ilois, first brought in as slaves, by the French, in the 18th century, from Mozambique and Madagascar, to work on a coconut plantation; and then by the British, in the mid-19th century, as indentured labourers from India. Most of the Chagossians were fourth and fifth generation islanders. They supplemented their living by fishing, as well as growing tomatoes, chillies and aubergines. They kept chickens and ducks; and their main pets were dogs. Their language is Creole French. Some time in 1961, two Americans secretly arrived at the jetty on Diego Garcia. One of them was Rear-Admiral Grantham of the U.S. Navy, whose objective was to locate a suitable island in the middle of the Indian Ocean for a military and naval base. Together with a number of British government officials, they first chose Aldebra, but after their decision leaked out, they chose Diego Garcia. Apparently, the U.S. military was first interested in establishing a base in the Chagos Archipelago in 1959. In February 1964, a secret Anglo-American conference, on the subject, was held in London. In 1965, Britain granted Mauritius, a British colony, independence on the condition that the United Kingdom be permitted to purchase Diego Garcia and most of the Chagos islands, which were formerly included in the colony, and create a new British colony or Dependency to be called the British Indian Ocean Territory (BIOT), which included some other islands detached from the Seychelles. The Labour government of Harold Wilson paid Mauritius a mere £3m for the islands. Indeed, the BIOT is the only British colony created since the end of the Second World War, on 8 November 1965, almost certainly on American insistence. John Pilger says it was a fake. It still is! On 3 November 1966, Britain signed a defence agreement, entitled “Availability at Certain Indian Ocean Islands for Defence Purposes (TIAS 6169)”, with the United States, leasing the BIOT to America for 50 years, with an option of a further 20. In December, the agreement was witnessed by Lord Chalfont, a British Foreign Office minister, in Washington. There was only one fly in the ointment: The Americans insisted that there were to be no inhabitants on Diego Garcia or any of the other islands; they had to be expelled or as one U.S. official put it, “the islands were to be swept and sanitized”. And what did the British government get from the agreement? In 1975, a U.S. Senate committee revealed that the British government had secretly been compensated with a discount of $14m off the price of a Polaris nuclear submarine. Neither the British Parliament nor Congress were informed of the deal. And the inhabitants of the Chagos Islands? The evacuation, or to be more accurate, the deportation of the Ilois began as early as 1965, and was finally completed before the end of 1972, despite Britain’s violation of United Nations articles IX and XIII, which state that “no one should be subjected to arbitrary exile”. The British government assigned the task of resettling the islanders to the Chagos-Apalega Company, coconut exporters and the only employer on Diego Garcia. They were deported to Mauritius. And they were only permitted to take with them “a minimum of possessions in one small crate”. The few last remaining islanders were told: “If you don’t leave you will not be fed.” The only ship arriving at Diego Garcia, brought no food. All their pet dogs were killed by gassing or poisoning by U.S. naval personnel. By 1975, almost all of the former islanders were existing in shacks, in gross poverty, in the slums of Mauritius. Some of the older ones soon died. In 1978, the British government gave the Ilois £650,000 in compensation, but only on condition that they renounced their rights to return to the islands. In 1982, the government gave them a further £4m as a “full and final settlement”. The government of Mauritius was paid £12m. The money then disappeared! A joint UK-US memorandum stated: “There is no native population on the Islands.” The Ilois had become unpeople. They still are. + + + + + In December 1970, the British and United States governments agreed to establish a communications facility on Diego Garcia, which was a secure, and far more secretive, alternative to the former NSA facility at Kagnew Station Asmara, in Ethiopia. The first American contingent arrived, with a construction team on 20 March 1971; a radio receiver site was established in July, and a transmitter site in August. Equipment was moved from Kagnew. By 1973, the U.S. established a naval Signals Intelligence (SIGINT) station to monitor radio signals throughout the Indian Ocean. With British Royal Navy participation, the U.S. National Security Group set up its monitoring station. It became a “ground control” base for the U.S-British-Australian CLASSIC WIZARD Ocean Surveillance Satellite System network for electronic satellites, controlled by the NRO. By 1974, Diego Garcia became a major GCHQ/NSA Signals Intelligence station, manned by 200 US and 30 British personnel. Jeffrey Richelson and Desmond Ball comment: “Although the station is officially described as a ‘joint US-British’ facility, US officials have testified that normal day-to-day operations are ‘conducted simply on the basis of the US military commander on the island informing his British counterpart’. That is all that is required” (p.205). + + + + + Diego Garcia soon developed as a military base. Port facilities were constructed; the coral reef was blasted, and the lagoon dredged. Writing in the Times (2 June 2011), Philippa Gregory noted that an “armada of massive cargo ships the size of the Empire State Building were parked, filled with tanks, helicopters, ammunition and fuel, together with an aircraft carrier and nuclear submarines”. An airstrip was developed on the northwest of the island, together with an airbase to the north. In 1976, a UK-US treaty regularised the construction of an “anchorage, airfield, support and supply elements, and ancillary services”. Access to Diego Garcia was then restricted to American and British military personnel, and construction workers, brought in from outside. Aircraft using the base have included RAF Hawker Siddeley MR2 marine reconnaissance aircraft, Lockheed p-3 Orion transport aircraft and anti-submarine aircraft capable of patrolling for up to four hours; USAAF Boeing B-52 Stratofortress heavy bombers, capable of carrying nuclear devices stored on the island. During both wars against Iraq, U.S. B-52 bombers were used in attacks, and Diego Garcia was used as a refuelling point for such bombers. It was also used against Afghanistan. It has, again, been widely reported, and since confirmed by members of the British government, that the island base has been used to hold “terrorist suspects”, and as a stop-over, prior to them being “rendered” (known as “extraordinary rendition”) to other countries for torture. (See Guardian, 1 November 2011, 9 April 2012 and 10 October 2012). These have included Libya, Morocco, the United States and the Yemen. A particularly notorious example was Britain’s role in the rendition of the Libyan dissident, Abdel Hakim Belhaj, his pregnant wife and two children, to Muamma Gaddafi’s not-very-secret police, and their subsequent torture. Apparently the CIA’s plane carrying the family refuelled on Diego Garcia on its way to Libya. On the 13th of December 2005, however, Britain’s foreign secretary Jack Straw, told the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee: “Unless we all believe in conspiracy theories, and that the officials are lying, and that I am lying, that there is some kind of secret state which is in league with the United States, there is simply no truth in the claims that the United Kingdom has been involved in rendition, full stop, as we have never been” (See Guardian, 10 March 2013). However, Sir Mark Allen, SIS/MI6 former head of counterterrorism, stated that rendering the Libyan dissidents to Gaddifi’s intelligence chief, Moussa Koussa, “was the least we (the U.K.) could do for you to demonstrate the remarkable relationship we have built up over the years. I am so glad”. Either Mr. Straw has, or had, a very poor memory, or he was being “economical with the actualité”, with the truth! Indeed, Seumas Milne, writing in the Guardian (24 April 2013), says: “The scale of torture, kidnapping and detention without trial unleashed by the US government after 9/11 is, as the US Constitution Project reports found ‘indisputable’. And at every stage, it’s been backed and emulated by its closest allies. At least 54 states, including Britain and 24 others in Europe, took part in the CIA’s secret ‘extraordinary rendition’ programme. And British forces have carried out plenty of beatings and torture in Afghanistan and Iraq, either on their own or in cahoots with US and local forces, as multiple reports and inquiries have now made clear.” It has also been reported (The Guardian, 10 July, 2014) that “a US senate report will identify Diego Garcia as a location where the CIA established a secret prison as part of its extraordinary rendition programme. According to one report, classified CIA documents say it was established with the 'full cooperation' of the UK government” in which the UK is in breach of “a raft of international and domestic laws”. (see also the Observer, 13 July, 2014) And also “How we torture our own ... At the end of 2012, the Obama administration nominated its top counter-terrorism adviser, and 25-year CIA veteran, John Brennan, to be a key architect of its secret drone programme. Previously, in 2008, Brennan had, in the words of the Guardian (8 January 2013), faced vocal objections for “his support for the torture policy of the then president George W. Bush”. See also “How we torture our own citizens” (Guardian Weekend, 20 October 2012). This is an edited extract from Cruel Britannia: A Secret History of Torture, by Ian Cobain. Portobello Book, London, November 2012. Furthermore, analysts of the United States Space Surveillance Network (USSSN) on Diego Garcia, almost certainly with British assistance, track 24-hours-a-day, 365-days-a-year, more than 8,000 man-made objects now orbiting the Earth. The USSSN is responsible for detecting, tracking, cataloguing and identifying all artificial objects, including active, spent inactive, rockets and debris orbiting Planet Earth. Of course, all attempts by the Chagossians to return to Diego Garcia and the other islands have been blocked by both the British and American governments. + + + + + Directory: wp-content -> uploads -> 2014 2014 -> For want of a nail 2014 -> Stop Militarizing Law Enforcement Act of 2014 2014 -> Ihbb asian Championships 2014 middle school bowl Round 4 First Quarter 2014 -> Ihbb european Championships 2014 Bowl Round 4 First Quarter 2014 -> International History Bee and Bowl 2013-14 Asian Division Question Set Bowl Round Six 2014 -> United states patent and trademark office 2014 -> Coffs harbour eisteddfod vocal syllabus 2014 -> Listen News Programs Schedule pledge now 2014 -> Slow club announce third album complete surrender Download 305.05 Kb. Share with your friends:
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