Diego Garcia -- did US military/CIA know tsunami was in progress? : Melbourne Indymedia

Did US military/CIA know the tsunami was in progress? Based on my experience of investigating earthquakes for the US government for almost 22 years and doing research on seismological techniques to monitor underground nuclear explosions, I believe that the US military/CIA had critically useful information about the tsunami which was not transmitted to emergency response organizations.

Using seismological data alone, any tsunami expert would know that a magnitude 8+ submarine megathrust event like the 2004 Sumatra Earthquake would have a good possibility of generating a tsunami. The US has a very large military base on the island of Diego Garcia in the middle of the Indian Ocean, and they have been aware of tsunami hazard to the island due to the proximity of the southwestern Pacific archipelago. The US Navy and CIA have many sea-bottom sensors in the Indian Ocean for detecting submarines, undersea nuclear explosions, earthquakes and tsunamis. I am sure that US military/CIA knew the tsunami was in progress but they did not relay this information to the countries at risk because the info was "CLASSIFIED".

"One of the few places in the Indian Ocean that got the message of the quake was Diego Garcia, a speck of an island with a United States Navy base, because the Pacific warning center's contact list includes the Navy. Finding the appropriate people in Sri Lanka or India was harder", New York Times, 28 Dec 2004.

... so what happened to Diego Garcia? What damage did it sustain from the tsunami? Were emergency measures taken before the waves hit?

The justification for not warning the countries that have been so devastated by the tsunami is that the US authorities did not know who to call in these countries -- how do they expect to fight the "War on Terrorism" or shoot down a nuke ICBM -- are they really that incompetent? Is this the same kind of lapse that occurred on 9/11 in the two hours between the time when the first plane crashed into the World Trade Center and the time when fourth plane "crashed" in Pennsylvania?

A monumental international blame-game and cover-up exercise is developing with respect to the failure to issue tsunami warnings -- it was even suggested by the remarks of Australian Foreign Minister Downer who spends much of his time prevaricating about the situation in Iraq and the reasons for the Australian participation in that fiasco.

There is a good possibility that the US military/CIA let tens of thousands drown rather than "compromise" the sources of their "intelligence".