No security in Australia-US war ties
By Paul Buckberry
While we are all assessing the budget damage done and counting who has been left standing, John Howard quarantined defence from any cuts and defence minister Ian McLachlan vowed to give the military more "combat punch" in the Pacific region.
The form that this "combat punch" is to take was outlined in decisions at the AUSMIN meeting (Australia and United States ministerial talks) in July.
These decisions included the news that the Pine Gap war base is to be upgraded and its lease extended by 10 years; that every two years almost 20,000 US soldiers are going to conduct "exercises" in the Northern Territory and Queensland with a few thousand Australians; and that, in the longer term, the chief of the US marines is looking at Australia as an alternative location to the Japanese bases which now hold 47,000 US troops.
All of these announcements were presented by the establishment media as entirely positive. According to Greg Sheridan of the Australian, the government apparently had "the talks of its dreams" and got "everything it could have wanted". With the most lethal killing machine in the world swarming around our country, we are more secure than ever before!
This brain-warping "logic" is completely flawed. The damage that the US military has wreaked on the planet is immeasurable. Whether at war or peace, around the globe, the armed forces of the US have left a trail of devastation and destruction that will still be felt millennia from now.
Track record
It is instructive to examine the record of these global police in their other foreign bases.
The US has 375 bases around the world. On the small Pacific island of Guam, where half of the available land is used by the US military, ¾ of the island's 175,000 residents are facing increased risks of cancer, liver, kidney, nervous system damage and birth defects after their "protectors" dumped engine degreaser and anti-freeze solutions into a drinking water aquifer over several decades.
Fifteen million litres of untreated waste were poured into Subic Bay in the Philippines each day, year after year. Such instances are not confined to Third World countries. In West Germany, 1.1 million litres of jet fuel have been allowed to leak from the Rhein-Main Air Force Base into Frankfurt's water supply. In 1986 it was discovered that fewer than one in three US military officials had any knowledge of the environmental regulations of their host countries.
It is perhaps indicative of a total disregard for life of any form that the scorecard at home is no better. The US Army Corps of Engineers has tallied 7118 sites contaminated by the military in the US. Toxic plumes are leaching toward the city of Denver, and the tap water of the southern half of New Jersey is contaminated with aviation fuel and other carcinogens from the US Air Force. Such instances pale into insignificance, though, when we recall that this is the army that has actively conducted radiation experiments on its own civilians.
In 1994 the US energy secretary revealed that there had been 204 unannounced nuclear explosions and experiments in the US. Although these are mostly classified, we have learned that 131 West Coast prison inmates had their testes irradiated at 600 roentgens — 100 times the yearly permissible dose. Residents around test sites were encouraged to watch tests rather than flee; they now suffer mental retardation, bone and thyroid cancer rates far above the national averages.
In tests at the Hanford Nuclear Facility and in New Mexico, radiation was deliberately released to study its effects on the local population. There are now 400,000 radiation victims in the US. This figure does not include animals. In 1987 alone, US army researchers "used" 5 million dogs, monkeys and mice in radiation experiments.
Questions for Australia
- 2500 troops are to land in Shoalwater Bay
The USS Longbeach has leaked hundreds of litres of radioactive coolant into the water at five different ports of call. The US Navy has logged 1596 nuclear accidents aboard its ships and submarines. Are we to invite this kind of floating disaster onto the Great Barrier Reef?
- 20,000 soldiers to do manoeuvrers in central Queensland
If there can be any comparison, according to the Worldwatch Institute, NATO exercises in West Germany cost at least $100 million a year "in assessed, quantifiable damage to crops, forests and private property".
- Pine Gap to be upgraded
The last time Pine Gap was "actively" used was during the Gulf War (and perhaps in the latest US attacks on Iraq), in which 15,000 civilians were slaughtered by the US-led coalition in one day, in which tonnes of depleted uranium rounds were left on the ground for children to play amongst. This was the war in which 8000 camels were shot and the largest oil spill and environmental disaster of all time was unleashed. According to a UN report, the US-led economic sanctions against Iraq have since killed half a million Iraqi children. Is this the sort of thing we wish to silently give our consent to?
It could be argued that ridding Saddam Hussein of all those chemical and biological weapons justified all this. But let's not forget that the US is the world's largest producer of chemical weapons, with a chemical-biological warfare budget of $90 million at the start of the decade. The technology and infrastructure in those Iraqi plants was mostly supplied by US companies.
All the patriotic hype, corporate profit, ecological destruction and misinformation were made possible by the data streaming to the Pentagon via Pine Gap. What kind of crimes against humanity and nature are going to occur in the next 10 years of this lease?
In the middle of this year, the US military directly endangered the lives of 600 civilians in or near Australia. In the first incident, two US fighter jets triggered the collision warning system of a Cathay Pacific 747 over the Northern Territory. Nine days later, a Qantas 747 en route from Tokyo to Sydney was forced to rise 1 kilometre in under a minute to avoid the "dangerous and intimidating" action of two US Navy fighter pilots.
These incidents carry overtones of the tragic 1988 event in which the US navy shot down a commercial airliner in the Arab-Persian Gulf, killing 290 civilians. There was an instant cover-up, and the men responsible were awarded military decorations.
If the Tandem Thrust operations announced at AUSMIN go ahead, can we trust the military to contain its "thrusting" games?
In 1989 two US Navy attack planes bombed a desert camping ground in California, injuring a camper and terrifying others. The camp was three kilometres outside a practice range. The same month another fighter plane crashed into a Georgia apartment building and exploded. A pregnant woman and a five year old girl were dug out of the rubble in critical condition. Given such instances, and there are many more of their type, is it even relevant whether we are "enemies" or "allies" of the US government?
No security
With the entire populations of two Pacific Islands having been irradiated and forcibly relocated more than once, with Moruroa cracked and leaching radioactive poison into global currents, with the Hawaiian ancestral island of Kahoolawe having been bombed practically into the water for "practice" by militaries including our own, it is obvious that greater "combat punch" in the Australian region is a giant step away from any kind of security.
Anyone who sees validity in the US role of disarming regional warlords who resist the economic agenda of NAFTA and the World Trade Organisation should realise that the last five times the US has been to war (Panama, Iraq, Somalia, Haiti and Bosnia) it was faced with weaponry supplied by US companies. It seems that ultimately the US are offering us protection against themselves.
Resisting this war against the earth by refusing the US military a presence in our country is a luxury remaining to only a few nations. We must take it.
[Much of the information in this article was extracted from Scorched Earth — the military's assault on the environment by William Thomas, New Society Publishers, British Columbia, Canada.]