US forces on Diego Garcia had advance warning of tsunami

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US had advance warning of tsunami:

Canadian professor: A Canadian expert has claimed that the US
Military and the State Department were given advance tsunami warning
and AmericaÂ’s Navy base on the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian
Ocean was notified but the information was not passed on to the
countries that bore the brunt of the disaster.
http://207.44.245.159/article7600.htm

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[excerpt]

The team contacted the US State Department, which apparently
contacted the Asian governments. The Indian government has confirmed
that no such warning was received. The Director of the Hawaii Warning
Centre stated that "they did not know" that the earthquake would
generate a deadly tidal wave until it had hit Sri Lanka, more than
one and a half hours later, at 2.30 GMT. "Not until the deadly wave
hit Sri Lanka and the scientists in Honolulu saw news reports of the
damage there did they recognise what was happening. Then we knew
there was something moving across the Indian Ocean," McCreery told
the New York Times on 27 December. "This statement is at odds with
the Timeline of the tidal wave disaster. Thailand was hit almost an
hour before Sri Lanka and the news reports were already out. Surely,
these reports out of Thailand were known to the scientists in Hawaii,
not to mention the office of Sec. Colin Powell, well before the tidal
wave reached Sri Lanka," argues the Canadian professor.

"We wanted to try to do something, but without a plan in place then,
it was not an effective way to issue a warning, or to have it acted
upon," Dr. McCreery said. "There would have still been some time -
not a lot of time, but some time - if there was something that could
be done in Madagascar, or on the coast of Africa," he added. The
Canadian academic finds the statement "inconsistent." The tidal wave,
he argues, reached the East African coastline several hours after it
reached The Maldives islands. According to news reports, Male, the
capital of the Maldives was hit three hours after the earthquake, at
approximately 4.00 GMT. By that time everybody around the world knew.

Prof. Chossudovsky writes, "It is worth noting that the US Navy was
fully aware of the deadly tidal wave, because the Navy was on the
Pacific Warning Centre's list of contacts. Moreover, America's
strategic Naval base on the island of Diego Garcia had also been
notified. Although directly in the path of the tidal wave, the Diego
Garcia military base reported 'no damage'," All that was needed was
for someone to pick up the phone and call Sri Lanka, he adds. Charles
McCreery, director of the Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre, said, "We
don't have contacts in our address book for anybody in that part of
the world." The fact is that only after the first waves hit Sri Lanka
did workers at National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's
Pacific Tsunami Warning Centre and others in Hawaii start making
phone calls to US diplomats in Madagascar and Mauritius in an attempt
to head off further disaster. "We didn't have a contact in place
where you could just pick up the phone," Dolores Clark, spokeswoman
for the International Tsunami Information Centre in Hawaii has said.
"We were starting from scratch."

Prof. Chossudovsky argues that these statements on the surface are
inconsistent, since several Indian Ocean Asian countries are in fact
members of the Tsunami Warning System. There are 26 member countries
of the International Coordination Group for the Tsunami Warning
System, including Thailand, Singapore and Indonesia. All these
countries would normally be in the address book of the PTWC, which
works in close coordination with its sister organisation the ICGTWS,
which has its offices in Honolulu at the headquarters of the National
Weather Service Pacific Region Headquarters in downtown Honolulu. The
mandate of the ICGTWS is to "assist member states in establishing
national warning systems, and makes information available on current
technologies for tsunami warning systems."

Australia and Indonesia were notified. The US Congress is to
investigate why the US government did not notify all the Indian Ocean
nations in the affected area: "Only two countries in the affected
region, Indonesia and Australia, received the warning" Although
Thailand belongs to the international tsunami-warning network, its
west coast does not have the system's wave sensors mounted on ocean
buoys. The northern tip of the earthquake fault is located near the
Andaman and Nicobar Islands, and tsunamis appear to have rushed
eastward toward the Thai resort of Phuket. "They had no tidal gauges
and they had no warning," said Waverly Person, a geophysicist at the
National Earthquake Information Centre in Golden, Colorado, which
monitors seismic activity worldwide. "There are no buoys in the
Indian Ocean and that's where this tsunami occurred