Tyler Durden -- Why Is The Government Turning 11 Military Bases Inside The US Into Quarantine Camps?

 Why Is The Government Turning 11 Military Bases Inside The US Into Quarantine Camps? 

by Tyler Durden

Tue, 02/11/2020 - 12:45

Authored by Michael Snyder via TheMostImportantNews.com,

If this coronavirus outbreak is not a serious threat, then why is the U.S. government preparing to quarantine victims all over America? As you will see below, 11 U.S. military bases located close to major airports are being converted into “quarantine centers” for potential patients. When I first learned about this, I was greatly alarmed, because we have all seen what is going on in China right now. People are literally being physically dragged out of their homes and are being forcibly relocated to “mass quarantine camps” with hordes of other very sick people. Sadly, many of them will never come out of those camps alive. If this virus starts spreading like wildfire here in the United States, is it possible that something similar could start happening here?

The vast majority of the confirmed cases are still in China, but over the last couple of weeks the number of cases in the rest of the world has escalated dramatically.

U.S. House of Representatives Creates Requirement That There Be Some Basis for Any Foreign Bases

Please republish and share, but only without editing and with credit and link to original included. Thanks! U.S. House of Representatives Creates Requirement That There Be Some Basis for Any Foreign Bases By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, July 11, 2019 https://worldbeyondwar.org/u-s-house-of-representatives-creates-requirement-that-there-be-some-basis-for-any-foreign-bases/ By a vote of 219 to 210, at 2:31 p.m. on Thursday, the U.S. House of Representatives passed an amendment introduced by Congresswoman Ilhan Omar requiring that the U.S. military provide Congress with the cost and the supposed national security benefits of every foreign military base or foreign military operation. World BEYOND War had flooded Congressional offices with the demand for Yes votes. Here is the text of the amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act as passed: At the end of subtitle G of title X, insert the following: SEC. 10. REPORT ON FINANCIAL COSTS OF OVERSEAS UNITED STATES MILITARY POSTURE AND OPERATIONS. Not later than March 1, 2020, the Secretary of Defense shall submit to the congressional defense committees a report on the financial costs and national security benefits of each of the following for fiscal year 2019: (1) Operating, improving, and maintaining overseas military infrastructure at installations included on the enduring location master list, including adjustments that take into account direct or in-kind contributions made by the host nations of such enduring locations. (2) Operating, improving, and maintaining overseas military infrastructure supporting forward-deployed forces at overseas contingency locations, including adjustments that take into account direct or in-kind contributions made by the host nations of such enduring locations. (3) Overseas military operations, including support to contingency operations, rotational deployments, and training exercise. In this video from Wednesday on C-Span, at 5:21, Rep. Omar makes the case for a need to justify foreign military bases, not just blindly fund unlimited and unknown empire. At 5:25 Rep. Adam Smith makes the case as well. One of their colleagues argues in opposition, but it’s difficult to find coherent meaning in what he says, and it’s hard to imagine what a persuasive case could be for the 210 No votes recorded. What could be the advantage of coating the globe with military bases without bothering to know what each one costs or whether each one plausibly makes you safer or actually endangers you?

The Lily-Pad Strategy: How the Pentagon Is Quietly Transforming Its Overseas Base Empire

The Lily-Pad Strategy: How the Pentagon Is Quietly Transforming Its Overseas Base Empire

By David Vine

How the Pentagon Is Quietly Transforming Its Overseas Base Empire and Creating a Dangerous New Way of War

Cross-posted with TomDispatch.com

The first thing I saw last month when I walked into the belly of the dark grey C-17 Air Force cargo plane was a void — something missing. A missing left arm, to be exact, severed at the shoulder, temporarily patched and held together.  Thick, pale flesh, flecked with bright red at the edges. It looked like meat sliced open. The face and what remained of the rest of the man were obscured by blankets, an American flag quilt, and a jumble of tubes and tape, wires, drip bags, and medical monitors.

That man and two other critically wounded soldiers — one with two stumps where legs had been, the other missing a leg below the thigh — were intubated, unconscious, and lying on stretchers hooked to the walls of the plane that had just landed at Ramstein Air Base in Germany. A tattoo on the soldier’s remaining arm read, “DEATH BEFORE DISHONOR.”

I asked a member of the Air Force medical team about the casualties they see like these. Many, as with this flight, were coming from Afghanistan, he told me. “A lot from the Horn of Africa,” he added. “You don’t really hear about that in the media.”

“Where in Africa?” I asked.  He said he didn’t know exactly, but generally from the Horn, often with critical injuries. “A lot out of Djibouti,” he added, referring to Camp Lemonnier, the main U.S. military base in Africa, but from “elsewhere” in the region, too.

Since the “Black Hawk Down” deaths in Somalia almost 20 years ago, we’ve heard little, if anything, about American military casualties in Africa (other than a strange report last week about three special operations commandos killed, along with three women identified by U.S. military sources as “Moroccan prostitutes,” in a mysterious car accident in Mali). The growing number of patients arriving at Ramstein from Africa pulls back a curtain on a significant transformation in twenty-first-century U.S. military strategy.

These casualties are likely to be the vanguard of growing numbers of wounded troops coming from places far removed from Afghanistan or Iraq. They reflect the increased use of relatively small bases like Camp Lemonnier, which military planners see as a model for future U.S. bases “scattered,” as one academic explains, “across regions in which the United States has previously not maintained a military presence.”

Disappearing are the days when Ramstein was the signature U.S. base, an American-town-sized behemoth filled with thousands or tens of thousands of Americans, PXs, Pizza Huts, and other amenities of home. But don’t for a second think that the Pentagon is packing up, downsizing its global mission, and heading home. In fact, based on developments in recent years, the opposite may be true. While the collection of Cold War-era giant bases around the world is shrinking, the global infrastructure of bases overseas has exploded in size and scope.

Unknown to most Americans, Washington’s garrisoning of the planet is on the rise, thanks to a new generation of bases the military calls “lily pads” (as in a frog jumping across a pond toward its prey). These are small, secretive, inaccessible facilities with limited numbers of troops, spartan amenities, and prepositioned weaponry and supplies.

Around the world, from Djibouti to the jungles of Honduras, the deserts of Mauritania to Australia’s tiny Cocos Islands, the Pentagon has been pursuing as many lily pads as it can, in as many countries as it can, as fast as it can. Although statistics are hard to assemble, given the often-secretive nature of such bases, the Pentagon has probably built upwards of 50 lily pads and other small bases since around 2000, while exploring the construction of dozens more.

As Mark Gillem, author of America Town: Building the Outposts of Empire, explains, “avoidance” of local populations, publicity, and potential opposition is the new aim. “To project its power,” he says, the United States wants “secluded and self-contained outposts strategically located” around the world. According to some of the strategy’s strongest proponents at the American Enterprise Institute, the goal should be “to create a worldwide network of frontier forts,” with the U.S. military “the ‘global cavalry’ of the twenty-first century.”

Such lily-pad bases have become a critical part of an evolving Washington military strategy aimed at maintaining U.S. global dominance by doing far more with less in an increasingly competitive, ever more multi-polar world. Central as it’s becoming to the long-term U.S. stance, this global-basing reset policy has, remarkably enough, received almost no public attention, nor significant Congressional oversight. Meanwhile, as the arrival of the first casualties from Africa shows, the U.S. military is getting involved in new areas of the world and new conflicts, with potentially disastrous consequences.

Transforming the Base Empire

You might think that the U.S. military is in the process of shrinking, rather than expanding, its little noticed but enormous collection of bases abroad. After all, it was forced to close the full panoply of 505 bases, mega to micro, that it built in Iraq, and it’s now beginning the process of drawing down forces in Afghanistan. In Europe, the Pentagon is continuing to close its massive bases in Germany and will soon remove two combat brigades from that country. Global troop numbers are set to shrink by around 100,000.

Yet Washington still easily maintains the largest collection of foreign bases in world history: more than 1,000 military installations outside the 50 states and Washington, DC. They include everything from decades-old bases in Germany and Japan to brand-new drone bases in Ethiopia and the Seychelles islands in the Indian Ocean and even resorts for military vacationers in Italy and South Korea.

In Afghanistan, the U.S.-led international force still occupies more than 450 bases. In total, the U.S. military has some form of troop presence in approximately 150 foreign countries, not to mention 11 aircraft carrier task forces — essentially floating bases — and a significant, and growing, military presence in space. The United States currently spends an estimated $250 billion annually maintaining bases and troops overseas.

The Worldwide Network of US Military Bases

The Worldwide Network of US Military Bases

The Global Deployment of US Military Personnel

By Prof. Jules Dufour

Global Research, March 09, 2018

Global Research 1 July 2007

Region: USA

Theme: Militarization and WMD, US NATO War Agenda

This important analysis and review of US military might by award winning Canadian geographer Professor Jules Dufour,  was first published by Global Research in 2007.  Jules Dufour passed away after a long illness in August 2017. 

US military presence around the World has expanded dramatically in the course of the last five years.  This study is largely based on data for the period 2001-2005.

*      *      *

The Worldwide control of humanity’s economic, social and political activities is under the helm of US corporate and military power. Underlying this process are various schemes of direct and indirect military intervention. These US sponsored strategies ultimately consist in a process of global subordination.

Where is the Threat?

The 2000 Global Report published in 1980 had outlined “the State of the World” by focusing on so-called  “level of threats” which might negatively influence or undermine US interests.

Twenty years later, US strategists, in an attempt to justify their military interventions in different parts of the World, have conceptualized the greatest fraud in US history, namely “the Global War on Terrorism” (GWOT). The latter, using a fabricated pretext  constitutes a global war against all those who oppose US hegemony. A modern form of slavery, instrumented through militarization and the “free market” has unfolded.

Major elements of the conquest and world domination strategy by the US refer to:

1) the control of the world economy and its financial markets,

2) the taking over of all natural resources (primary resources and nonrenewable sources of energy). The latter constitute the cornerstone of US power through the activities of its multinational corporations.

Geopolitical Outreach: Network of Military Bases

The US has established its control over 191 governments which are members of the United Nations. The conquest, occupation and/or otherwise supervision of these various regions of the World is supported by an integrated network of military bases and installations which covers the entire Planet (Continents, Oceans and Outer Space). All this pertains to the workings of  an extensive Empire, the exact dimensions of which are not always easy to ascertain.

Known and documented from information in the public domaine including Annual Reports of the US Congress, we have a fairly good understanding of the strucuture of US military expenditure, the network of US military bases and  the shape of this US military-strategic configuration in different regions of the World.

The objective of this article is to build a summary profile of the World network of military bases, which are under the jurisdiction and/or control  of the US. The spatial distribution of these military bases will be examined together with an analysis of the multibillion dollar annual cost of their activities.

In a second section of this article, Worldwide popular resistance movements directed against US military bases and their various projects will be outlined. In a further article we plan to analyze the military networks of other major nuclear superpowers including  the United Kingdom, France and Russia.

I. The Military Bases

Military bases are conceived for training purposes, preparation and stockage of military equipment, used by national armies throughout the World. They are not very well known in view of the fact that they are not open to the public at large. Even though they take on different shapes, according to the military function for which they were established; they can broadly be classified under four main categories :

a) Air Force Bases (see photos 1 and 2);

b) Army or Land Bases;

c) Navy Bases and

d) Communication and Spy Bases.

Photo 1. Air Base of Diego Garcia located in the Indian Ocean

Reference : http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Diego_Garcia_%28satellite%29.jpg