President George www. Bush has been busy in Europe this past week, dodging mobs of angry people while taking his intrusive Missile Defense door to door on behalf of his sponsors in the Military Industrial Complex. However, the president made time this past Thursday to take a break from all the missile defense talk and commend the US Navy's decision to pull out of the Puerto Rican island of Vieques by May 2003.

The Navy has occupied Vieques for the past 61 years, using the 26,000 of 33,000 acres it expropriated from the Viequenses as a military training playground. For the inhabitants of the vulnerable island, the US military takeover has marked yet another struggle against the circling sharks of foreign tyranny, with the notable distinction that no earlier imperialist power ever trashed the place quite like the US Navy has. Besides the forced migration of thousands of Viequenses and the collapsed economy the Navy left to those who remained, Vieques has become a junkyard for the Navy's bomb shells and debris....