Okay, so I won't name names, for obvious reasons, but I will tell you that my brother works in Defence Signals Directorate, as part of the Australian arm of the ECHELON system. Mostly just bureaucratic paper shuffling. While intelligence gathering is not strictly part of his job, he is in regular contact with American CIA and NSA personal working out of Pine Gap, and they talk.

While I don't see my brother a lot- once or twice a year- when we do get together we're liable to lay into the booze, and that's when my brother talks. Talks a lot, in detail. I've heard all kinds of crazy stuff, but these recent rumours about Chinese troops in Mexico brings back one of my brother's favorite stories, so I thought I'd share what I remember.

Now, I don't know if this concerns the photos that have been going around GLP lately- my brother has never showed me a photo of these places, of course - but the way he tells it, for several years now the Chinese have had secret treaties in place with the Mexican government for the establishment of military bases in northern Mexico. Over a dozen I think he said, maybe more. Huge, sprawling bases in the desert, each one designed to accommodate an entire Chinese army of 50-60,000 men - a "group army", my brother calls them. They have barracks, command centres, airfields, repair facilities, the works, all connected by rail and highway to ports on the coasts.

But these bases? They're all empty.

That's right. My brother calls them "bare bases", manned by a skeleton crew of maintenance staff and security. Each base is stocked with a mountain of tanks and trucks and pontoon bridges and munitions and fuel, but it's all just sitting in warehouses and bunkers. Over 10,000 armoured vehicles alone, my brother says, and they have thousands of people over there whose only job is to clean the artillery and turn over the engines sometimes, and they do this all day, every day.

The American intelligence agencies know all about it, of course. They always have, they watch it all from spy satellites, and people on the ground. And the Chinese know that the Americans know, but they keep building and expanding these bases anyway. See, the idea is, if a crisis eventually erupts over Taiwan, the Chinese knows that even if they capture the island, America will still have the power to carry on the war in the air and sea, just like with Japan 70 years ago. Chinese ports will be blockaded, and Chinese industry will grind to a halt. So the strategy they came up with is a sort of massive-scale hostage exchange.

In the tense time leading up to war, which they expect following a Taiwanese declaration of independence, the Chinese army hopes to ship and fly the vast majority of their armoured and mechanized forces into these Mexican staging bases. It won't be like Desert Shield in 91, my brother says, when America took 6 months to build up enough forces to invade Iraq. No, because all their gear and supplies are ready and waiting for them, they just need to move in the half million to a million troops to man it, and, once the shooting starts over Taiwan, to make the push over the Rio Grande.

The strategy is supposed to be to roll on up these American superhighway systems in Texas and the Midwest, and capture as much territory between the Mississippi and the Rockies in as little time as possible. Just bypass the big cities and push right up to the Canadian border, if they can manage it. Then, once their momentum peters out, they consolidate the frontlines and besiege or capture all the American cities that are now in their zone of control. Tens of millions of American citizens under occupation, and all the Texan oil production secure. Then the negotiations begin, with a demand for the exchange of Taiwan, and probably a whole lot more, for the return of the occupied states.

Crazy, huh? The American spooks think so too. For this strategy to even stand a chance of success, the Chinese have to have a few weeks to get their troops across the Pacific Ocean, and the Americans reckon they can shut down the transport convoys in a heartbeat - IF the president of the day has the backbone to start the shooting first. If not, my brother says, all those Chinese armoured divisions still have to face the American airforce over open country, and he doesn't know how they expect to counter that. It'd be a massacre, he says. In the tensions leading up to war the Pentagon plans to evacuate everyone within 200km of the Mexican border, and just turn the whole area into a bombing range. The American intel guys call it "the million man deathmarch".

And if they somehow did ground the airforce, I suppose it's just the Texan National Guard, and my brother calls them "speed bumps under the Chicom tanks".

As to what the Mexicans expect to get from all of this, supposedly they have been promised the return of old lost territories, like Texas, Arizona, New Mexico. I don't know about California, my brother didn't mention it. But the real motivation is bribes. Massive Chinese bribes, from the Mexican President all the way down. Right to the local cops and the drug cartels, probably, to keep away from these bases. Like I said, the intel guys know everything. They know that the Mexican government doesn't really think a war will come of it. No one does, except the old "Cold War Warriors", as he puts it. Nobody wants a war - the Chinese are too busy getting rich and the Americans are putting huge pressure on Taiwan not to do anything stupid. It's just a big game of bluff.

But I suppose people said that before WWI and WWII, huh?

Anyway, there was more, but that's all I remember, and it's more than I thought I would. Just thought GLP might like to know what's really going on.