U.S. Marines in Trinidad & Tobago

This Sea Stallion helicopter, attached to the United States Marines, currently on a visit to Trinidad and Tobago, scouts out the area over Barataria yesterday.

From one of Trinidad’s news dailies, Newsday, this very disappointing piece from Sunday, 26 October, 2008:

US Marines in TT

Sunday, October 26 2008

Members of the public in Laventille, Curepe, certain parts of the East and Central were jolted out of their beds early yesterday by the roaring sounds of two marine helicopters flying over their homes.

Some of the concerned persons even telephoned Sunday Newsday to ascertain if the United States Marine Corps were carrying out an exercise in the country.

One man said, “the noise from the engines was so powerful that I was awakened from sleep and when I looked out of my house the two helicopters were flying over my house, and I could see the US Marine officers inside,” he said.

Yesterday, Chief of Defence Staff Brigadier Edmund Dillon sought to clear the air on the matter.

He said members of the US Marine Corps are in Trinidad to carry out a number of humanitarian ventures. These include repairs to the Cyril Ross and St Jude’s Home for Girls.

The officers will also provide medical assistance to persons at the Arima and Couva hospitals.

On Monday, the US Marines will formally make public their mission in Trinidad [known] during a ceremony to mark their presence in the country.

Patrick Manning and George W. Bush, 2007

This is obviously occurring with the consent of the regime of Prime Minister Patrick Manning of the ruling “People’s National Movement” (an ironic name if ever there was one). The presence of the Marines is of no benefit to Trinidad — as if this industrialized, petroleum exporting nation could not repair a school — and is instead done to facilitate deeper U.S. military penetration. This is a means of positioning U.S. forces closer to Venezuela, a mere seven miles away. Indeed, Manning has been trying to serve as a counterweight to Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez (Manning stands as a featherweight in comparison). Chavez has spent vast amounts on health and development programs in the Caribbean and provided discounted oil. Manning, unwilling to address poverty at home, has tried to create an illusion of alleviating it among his neighbours, as if in a desperate competition with Chavez. One can wonder whether Manning has been put up to this effort by the same forces now rearing their ugly heads in Marine helicopters.

Patrick Manning and Ariel Sharon

This effort clearly brings into being the U.S. plans discussed in previous posts there and there.

In a situation of growing global economic crisis, there seems to be nothing less opportune than further imperial overstretch and increased militarization of the planet, save for the fact that U.S. regimes have committed themselves to war corporatism.

On the website of the Office of the Prime Minister, the only statement that exists for this date concerns the presence of “US Chiefs of Mission” for a HIV/AIDS conference. “Coincidentally,” in February of 2007 the U.S. military had a presence in Trinidad, to train 53 local military officers in HIV/AIDS awareness, as if local resources for the purposes did not exist.

Good luck to Trinidad’s anti-imperialist strugglers in getting rid of these dogs of war.

For more discussion online, see the Open Question at Yahoo!: “DO YOU THINK USA MARINES ARE IN TRINIDAD AND TOBAGO TO HELP TRINIDAD OR TO SPY ON VENEZUELA?“

More on the National Security State: “Militarizing the Homeland”

Two blogs that regularly produce very valuable items dealing with authoritarianism, hegemony, and the national security state have addressed the topic of the growing domestic national security state in the U.S.

Dissident Voice has a report by Tom Burghardt titled, “Militarizing the ‘Homeland’: NORTHCOM’s Joint Task Force-Civil Support” for October 13, 2008. This is largely based on reporting also by Tom Burghardt featured at:

Antifascist Calling whose report is titled, “Rumsfeld Updated Army’s Continuity of Operations Plan before 9/11,” and was posted October 6, 2008. There are some differences between the two pieces and they are both worth reading.

Some extracts:

…nine months prior to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Donald Rumsfeld signed off on revisions for the Pentagon’s secretive Continuity of Operations Program (COOP).

Based on a document (AR 500-3) published by the whistleblowing website Wikileaks, it described “all hazards COOP planning” as the mechanism by which “the Army remains capable of continuing mission-essential operations during any situation, including military attack, terrorist activities, and natural or man-made disasters.”

The Wikileaks document is all the more relevant since a September report in Army Times described how the 3rd Infantry Division’s 1st Brigade Combat Team (BCT) would be deployed October 1 “under the day-to-day control of U.S. Army North,” the “service component” of NORTHCOM.

…by current political trends in the U.S. Under cover of the “war on terror,” driftnet surveillance and moves toward suppressing dissent, most recently on display when protests during the Democratic and Republican National Conventions were criminalized and organizers were charged with “domestic terrorism” under the Patriot Act, are but the tip of the proverbial iceberg.

Wholesale spying on activists by the Pentagon’s now defunct Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA), as well as revelations that State police agencies in Maryland routinely spied on antiwar organizers, shared this information with the National Security Agency and classified them as “terrorists” in government-run databases, are viewed as exemplary means to “keep the rabble in line”–and under wraps, if necessary.

…

A highly-disturbing report by Christopher Ketchum in the May/June 2008 issue of Radar Magazine, outlined how the top secret Main Core database linked to Continuity of Government contingency planning, “includes dissidents and activists of various stripes, political and tax protesters, lawyers and professors, publishers and journalists, gun owners, illegal aliens, foreign nationals, and a great many other harmless, average people.”

Reporting in July for Salon, investigative journalist Tim Shorrock was told by a source that Main Core is “‘an emergency internal security database system’ designed for use by the military in the event of a national catastrophe, a suspension of the Constitution or the imposition of martial law. Its name … is derived from the fact that it contains ‘copies of the ‘main core’ or essence of each item of intelligence information on Americans produced by the FBI and the other agencies of the U.S. intelligence community’.”

…As with data mining, DHS spy-satellite surveillance, blanket CCTV coverage of American cities, illegal FBI deployment of infiltrators and provocateurs, “mission creep” by the Pentagon into civil affairs are signs that stronger measures to blunt the crisis may be in the offing.

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