NO REST FOR THE AWAKE - MINAGAHET CHAMORRO

The Independence for Guahan Task Force held their second monthly general meeting last week and it was a significant success, with 70 members of the community coming to listen to educational presentations and provide feedback. Here are some media reports on the meeting, both before and after. As you'll read below the educational portion of the evening focused first on security threats to Guam due to it being a strategically important unincorporated territory of the United States. Second, it contained a presentation on Singapore, the first model of an independent nation that Guam can look to in terms of inspiration as it pursues independence itself. Each monthly meeting will feature a new independent nation to analyze and compare. ****************************** Does the US military turn Guam into a regional target? By Timothy Mchenry Pacific News Center September 20, 2016 The topic was chosen after audience members at the first general assembly co

Guam is on the edge of another large buildup of forces. The political stumbling blocks that existed in Washington D.C. for several years, stalling and slowing the US military buildup are now disappearing. The buildup isn't the psychotic, frenetic, diplomatic-cocaine-fueled nightmare that it was almost ten years ago when it was first announced and proposed. It is somewhat smaller and will take place over a longer period. At that time, the focus was on Pagat. Now, new locations have been mixed in, Fena, Litekyan, Pagan and Tinian. These sites were always there on the map of American militarization in the Marianas. There are maps that link them together. There are study documents that discuss and theorize them in tandem. There are lists of resources or assets in the regions that connect them. In some ways, when the US military and its analysts and its decision-makers look at the region, they do a much better job linking locations together than many activists or even average people

I have been working for the past week on answering some questions for an antibase group in Italy. Through David Vine, best known for his book Islands of Shame about Diego Garcia, they held a virtual meeting amongst demilitarization activists from around the Pacific and Europe. A physical gathering of antibase activists in Italy coordinated virtual presentations from speakers representing struggles in Guam, Okinawa, South Korea, Hawai'i, Diego Garcia and elsewhere. It was an inspiring and invigorating moment even though because of time differences I was hunched over my computer at 2 in the morning. The group found the exchange of information so interesting they decided to produce a book that would give a road map to the struggles that are happening around the world, to help us better see how we are connected. Here is the text for the short presentation that I made during last year's demilitarization network solidarity meeting.  ***************** --> I apolog

One of the first posts I ever wrote on this blog was in September of 2004 titled " Sometimes I Dream of Okinawa ." I wrote this post more than a year before the initial announcement that the Department of Defense was making plans to "transfer" 7,000 of its Marines based in Okinawa to Guam. This number of Marines was later increased to 8,000 , and expanded to include approximately 9,000 dependents and an unknown number of troops from South Korea . My post wasn't very long, but just touched lightly on the ways Okinawa and Guam are linked together through the sorts of catastrophic, invasive and everyday damages that a large military presence can bring. Mamahlao yu' didide' put este na klasin post pa'go, sa' kulang ti to'a an un kompara i tinige'-hu gi ayu na tiempo yan i tinige'-hu pa'go. But nonetheless this post is important to me because it represented one of my first public blog posts which would criticize the way the military