The Free Press -- Independent News Media

Fri Mar 19 2010

Departments
International Issues

Burma U.S. military
by Richard S. Ehrlich
October 25, 2005

BANGKOK, Thailand -- America wants to install "a puppet government" in Burma and seize an island in the Andaman Sea and a mountain near China so the Pentagon can build military bases and attack Asia, according to Burma's official media.

"If the [U.S.] power has a naval base on our Coco Kyun Island, it can launch a blitzkrieg against the eastern or the western hemisphere," the military regime's official New Light of Myanmar newspaper said.

Burma, mainland Southeast Asia's biggest country, is also known as Myanmar and has been ruled by its military since 1962.

"If the big nation [America] can deploy troops and missiles in the north of Myanmar, it can target and attack any specified country in and around the region," it said.

The Coco Islands are two dots just north of India's Andaman and Nicobar Islands, off southern Burma where the Bay of Bengal mingles with the Andaman Sea, at about the same latitude as Thailand's capital, Bangkok.

China has constructed a "signals intelligence" unit on the Coco Islands, according to the Washington-based Federation of American Scientists, which monitors intelligence facilities worldwide.

Jane's Defense Weekly, a British magazine, earlier reported Burma, with Chinese assistance, was expanding its "sigint" facility on the bigger of the two Coco Islands.

Signals intelligence in that location could help China and Burma share maritime reconnaissance, the monitoring of missile tests, electronic eavesdropping, telecommunications jamming, and training.

India's media reported that Burma "leased" the Coco Islands to China in 1994.

The headquarters of India's Joint Andaman and Nicobar Strategic Defense Command is in Port Blair in the nearby Andaman Islands.

Northern Burma, where Rangoon insists the Pentagon also wants a military base, shares much of its mountainous border with China, but also abuts India's oil-rich, insurgency-stricken northeast.

"There are naval flotillas, including war planes and marine commandos, of a power [the U.S.] in the eastern Atlantic, Mediterranean Sea and Indian Ocean," the New Light of Myanmar said on Thursday (Oct. 20).

America "has over 150,000 soldiers in Iraq...and thousands of troops in Afghanistan," the report warned.

"It also has troops in Africa, the Indian Ocean and the Gulf region, in addition to its air bases in the Middle East, Uzbekistan and Tajikistan.

"All the Pacific Ocean and Hawaii in the western hemisphere are full with its troops. The nation has military bases on Guam and other islands in the eastern Pacific, the Republic of Korea, Japan, Australia and New Zealand. It stations its troops and bases almost all around the globe."

Southeast Asia is a gap in the Pentagon's global reach, the regime noted.

"Its chain of military bases, and troops, loses links in Southeast Asia."

According to the Burmese junta, Western nations led by the U.S. and Britain are trying to destabilize resource-rich Burma, so Washington and London can again invade -- similar to the way they combined forces during World War II to oust the Japanese.

"They are making accusations one after another against the [Burmese] nation to install a puppet government, build military bases to dominate the whole region militarily, and to make political and economic gains."

Burma is currently running a daily campaign in its government-controlled media against former Czech president Vaclav Havel and South Africa's retired archbishop Desmond Tutu, for demanding the United Nations intervene over allegations of forced labor, torture, opium production, child soldiers and mass rape.

Washington is attempting to convince the UN's Security Council to pressure Rangoon to release Aung San Suu Kyi and more than 1,000 other political prisoners struggling for democracy.

Mrs. Suu Kyi, 60, is the world's only Nobel Peace Prize laureate in detention, and has spent much of the past 16 years under house arrest.

The regime claims she is a patsy of the U.S. and the West, and would create a pliant government.

Burma has never been on the UN's Security Council agenda.

China is Burma's closest ally and is expected to block any UN intervention. Russia would probably do likewise.

Burma's unelected prime minister, General Soe Win, led a large delegation to China which ended on Thursday (Oct. 20) after they met Chinese Vice President Zeng Qinghong and others.

Email this article to a friend