450 Bases and it's Not Over Yet: The Pentagon’s Plans for Prisons, Drones, and Black Ops in

[xchrom]

http://www.alternet.org/story/154112/450_bases_and_it%27s_not_over_yet%3A_the_pentagon%E2%80%99s_plans_for_prisons%2C_drones%2C_and_black_ops_in_afghanistan/

450 Bases and it's Not Over Yet: The Pentagon’s Plans for Prisons, Drones, and Black Ops in Afghanistan

In late December, the lot was just a big blank: a few burgundy metal shipping containers sitting in an expanse of crushed eggshell-colored gravel inside a razor-wire-topped fence. The American military in Afghanistan doesn’t want to talk about it, but one day soon, it will be a new hub for the American drone war in the Greater Middle East.

Next year, that empty lot will be a two-story concrete intelligence facility for America’s drone war, brightly lit and filled with powerful computers kept in climate-controlled comfort in a country where most of the population has no access to electricity. It will boast almost 7,000 square feet of offices, briefing and conference rooms, and a large “processing, exploitation, and dissemination” operations center -- and, of course, it will be built with American tax dollars.

Nor is it an anomaly. Despite all the talk of drawdowns and withdrawals, there has been a years-long building boom in Afghanistan that shows little sign of abating. In early 2010, the U.S.-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) had nearly 400 bases in Afghanistan. Today, Lieutenant Lauren Rago of ISAF public affairs tells TomDispatch, the number tops 450.

The hush-hush, high-tech, super-secure facility at the massive air base in Kandahar is just one of many building projects the U.S. military currently has planned or underway in Afghanistan. While some U.S. bases are indeed closing up shop or being transferred to the Afghan government, and there’s talk of combat operations slowing or ending next year, as well as a withdrawal of American combat forces from Afghanistan by 2014, the U.S. military is still preparing for a much longer haul at mega-bases like Kandahar and Bagram airfields. The same is true even of some smaller camps, forward operating bases (FOBs), and combat outposts (COPs) scattered through the country’s backlands. “Bagram is going through a significant transition during the next year to two years,” Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Gerdes of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ Bagram Office recently told Freedom Builder, a Corps of Engineers publication. “We’re transitioning... into a long-term, five-year, 10-year vision for the base.”

[Angry Dragon]

1. ..................

[xchrom]

2. indeed. nt

[marmar]

3. Will we ever be free of the 'disease of militarism', as Chris Hedges calls it?

nt

[xchrom]

4. In our life time? Nt

[bongbong]

5. What's it called?

Occupation by any other name wouldn't smell so sweet!

[jtuck004]

6. From this story, it says that

"Next year, that empty lot will be a two-story concrete intelligence facility for America’s drone war, brightly lit and filled with powerful computers kept in climate-controlled comfort in a country where most of the population has no access to electricity."

And we could use our forces to protect engineers that provide the expertise and materials for local villages to build electric power plants (solar, whatever) in a grid across the place. Actually give people a chance to do something other than pick up a rifle for people who seem to share their interests. Interconnect it with others so they have to cooperate. Then pull back.

Electricity helped modernize the South, it could improve conditions for a lot of people here too. Then maybe we wouldn't have to be paying as many people to sit at "combat outposts (COPs) scattered through the country’s backlands", waiting to kill someone for us, or be killed.