Ecuador wants military base in Miami
Ecuador’s leftist President Rafael Correa said Washington must let him open a military base in Miami if the United States wants to keep using an air base on Ecuador’s Pacific coast.
Correa has refused to renew Washington’s lease on the Manta air base, set to expire in 2009. U.S. officials say it is vital for counter-narcotics surveillance operations on Pacific drug-running routes.
“We’ll renew the base on one condition: that they let us put a base in Miami — an Ecuadorean base,” Correa said in an interview during a trip to Italy.
“If there’s no problem having foreign soldiers on a country’s soil, surely they’ll let us have an Ecuadorean base in the United States.”
The U.S. embassy to Ecuador says…
jack:
hey sorry to post this here but i couldnt find anywhere to contact stan or anyone directly. are you all following the Scott Beauchamp bagdad diaries story thats unfolding? turns out (and maybe i’m just slower than ever one else, there are some interesting connections the military is using with specific media outlets to smear this guy. maybe stan can comment further.
25 October 2007, 10:03 amStan:
Just ran a quick search, and saw the usual suspects smearing… Weekly Standard, Little Green Footballs, the regulars at the wingnut table…
Whether the military is doing it is a different question. Why would the military have to? The wingnuts are always pissing and prancing in their starting gates.
“The military,” whomever that refers to, is so inefficient and bureaucratic that it seldom does anything except make and clean up messes.
25 October 2007, 3:06 pmjack:
no, i think that the issue is more of a direct link between the weekly standard and drudge report and the pentagon feeding info/documents to these two outlets specifically. greg glenwald has a post on it on his column over at salon. i realize the pentagon is rather sprawling and uncoordinated, but this just goes to show how they are coming out of the closet with their political….. hmmm. i just caught myself sounding like a liberal. i guess this really is just business as usual. i thought you might take interest in the actual stuff being written by this scott guy. anyhow. keep up the good fight. you need a contact email so this stuff can be talked about without eating up comment space.
ps dont have to post this up if you dont want.
STAN: Not a problem. I don’t know much about Scott’s case. Do you have a link to the Glenwald piece? I didn’t mean to imply that the Pentagon doesn’t do PR. I’ve written about this pretty eshaustively here and elswhere. Rendon, Hill-Knowlton, Lincoln, etc. These outifts go into action on things like the Jessica Lynch and Pat Tillman stories to create fables. I’ve just not seen their direct hands in smears. My own memory of reactions to whistleblowers was always, “neither confirm nor deny.”
25 October 2007, 8:44 pmjack:
here’s the link : http://salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/10/25/military/index.html
after a closer read, greenwald doesn’t back up what he’s saying with any hard evidence. i generally like what he’s got to say, but he fails to look much deeper than the bush administration. to me this all seems like decades old tendencies being forced into the open by a unwinnable conflict. its one thing to spin and conceal and lie for a week or even a few months at a time, especially if you’ve just crushed some tiny foe, its entirely different when you’ve been thrashing around in two separate snake pits slowly bleeding out all the while telling anyone within ear shot every things just fine, just give me a second to kill this last snake.
anyhow. totally unrelated, are you still working on the insurgents hand book?
26 October 2007, 8:56 amLegume Sam:
Say, does Ecuador still use the US Dollar as its national currency?
Correa may wish to change that at some point…
29 October 2007, 2:06 pmStan:
Hard to say. During the campaign, Correa said he did not anticipate re-issuing an Ecuadoran currncy. He’s been in office since January, I think. Which is barely time to consolidate his position by changing the government’s administrative guard, and iirc dissolving and re-electing the constituent assembly (which was this month). That’s what puts him in the driver’s seat, so this latest funny ouburst is evidence that he feels pretty comfortable.
Where the armed forces are on all this, I have no clue right now. There are surely US allies among them… but young officers in LA are often intensely nationalistic (a good thing in this case).
If he follows Chavez’ example, he’ll now reconfigure the Constitution to codify increased popular power against the elites. I would guess that he won’t move against the dollar (and I don’t know what the immediate ramification might be, econmically) until that re-writing is completed and approved.
Another variable is ALBA (Alternativa Bolivariana para los Pueblos de Nuestra América), the Chavez-inspired Latin American trade bloc idea being counterpoised to US “free trade” schemes in LA. The dollar may or may not be either leverage or a detriment.
???
29 October 2007, 5:24 pmLegume Sam:
Well, it’s just that if the US Dollar is going to decline in value, then why would Ecuador wish to retain it as a currency?
30 October 2007, 8:24 amchris:
The guy has a sense of humour. More serioulsy, you have to wonder why the Cubans havn’t done the same to the U.S. re: Guantanamo. Nearly 50 years of embargo fromt he people you rent a mmilitary base to? I dont’ get it.
30 October 2007, 2:10 pm