The Great Navy Wreck Scam

The U.S. Navy is seeking legislation that will grant it control of more than 17,000 wrecks worldwide: from the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli. If this Act is passed, divers will no longer be able to dive on these wrecks, and anglers will no longer be allowed to fish on them. And not only shipwrecks, but ditched and crashed aircraft. Wreck-diving and wreck-fishing will then be activities of the past, when America was the land of the free and the home of the brave. The underwater America of the future will belong almost exclusively to a handful of civilian staff members who are paid for their unarmed robbery by the U.S. Navy. The purpose of this book is to alert American citizens about this wholesale annexation of public property, whose unlawful seizure is not in their best interests. The only people who will benefit by this misappropriation will be the self-appointed controllers, and those sycophants they select to help them in their ongoing program of creeping jurisdiction. By documenting the manner in which the Navy has mistreated shipwrecks and citizens in the past, the current generation will understand the kind of treatment that will be forthcoming if the Navy takes absolute control of these abandoned derelicts. By way of example, the author discovered a long lost minesweeper in 2007. He identified the wreck by means of historical research, location, and physical layout. He conducted a thorough examination of the remains, and took photographs of its most salient features. He published the results of his survey work in 2008. When the Navy learned about the discovery, it dispatched a team of Navy divers to demolish the wreck - a job that they did with spectacular relish and efficiency. They literally blew the wreck to smithereens with explosives. So much for historic preservation. So much for naval history and heritage. Now the Navy wants to "preserve" (read "control") thousands of additional shipwrecks. This book looks past the façade: the false image that the Navy has placed before the American people. It will show how the Navy has concealed and manipulated the dispersal of public information to the public. It will disclose the truth about the Navy's shipwreck shenanigans. And it will reveal the dark design that lurks inside the emperor's new clothes. Readers won't have to track down the proposed legislation or interpret its dire consequences. In order to keep readers fully informed, appendices include the text of all the Navy's wreck-controlling legislation, including the last-minute rider that was slipped into the 2005 military appropriations bill, as well as the full text of the newly proposed legislation. The legislative text is thoroughly parsed so that readers will understand how the Navy intends to prevent diving and ban fishing on all Navy-controlled wrecks, while letting those wrecks rot and rust and dissolve into nothingness, leaving future generations uninformed about their naval heritage.