Demilitarization and Space

[Ed Jewett]

I attended an all-day conference on Saturday, June 18th, 2011.

[ http://www.space4peace.org/actions/2011%...20Prog.pdf ]

http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-Abx7KZ-Ws9g/Tf...C00029.JPG

The night before, an "action" had been staged outside the Raytheon plant in nearby Andover; there is also a related facility a little farther down the road in Tewksbury.

I was one of the first to arrive other than the conference staff. I was pleased to see someone handing around a copy of "JFK and the Unspeakable". After registering and introducing myself to Bruce Gagnon, the conference coordinator, I noted a large map of the world that had been placed on the back wall which was tagged with sticky dots to represent all known US military bases, surveillance facilities, submarine bases and the like. I doubt it was up-to-date or included many (if any) of the covert secret prison complexes.



Attendance was light, mostly populated by local activists as well as a number of people who had driven "up East" from Maine. Speakers arrived from around the globe (Colorado, Oregon, New York, Germany, Nova Scotia, Scandinavia, and Japan).

The event was the 19th Annual Organizing Conference for http://www.space4peace.org/ or, in long form, the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space. That link itself is loaded with resources, videos, contacts, etc. Directors and advisors are listed here: http://www.space4peace.org/board.htm

In the packet of information collected, given or circulated, we find the proposed Global Network's Joint Declaration [ I did not attend the meeting of the Board on Sunday to see if it passed] which states in part: "Trends in warfare in 2011 make it clear why Global Network has chosen Raytheon Corporation this year as representative of the large military-industrial giants we oppose. Raytheon is critical in the development of the PAC-3 and SM-3, it produces elements of land-and space-based missile defense such as the Exoatmospheric Kill Vehicle, and it outsources much intelligence processing from the National Reconnaissance Office and the National Security Agency. As the Pentagon turns to space for global strike purposes, Raytheon is on the front line."

Bruce is an energetic and committed fellow. In his "Annual Coordinator's Report", he raised the issue that was palpably obvious at the conference: " The peace movement has also lagged in energy as the non-stop assault with countries with, or near, fossil fuels continues by the US and its proxy war machineNATO. One peace worker from Northern California best sums up the present situation in the US. Susan Lamont, coordinator of the Peace and Justice Center of Sonoma County, recently wrote, "While I do not underestimate the power of the media to squelch information and coverage of the peace movement (they've done a very good job of vanishing us since April 2003), I have found myself at my wits end about those formerly in the movement who won't buck Obama. I am the staff at the Peace and Justice Center of Sonoma County and I have watched the protest movement shrivel and die here because people refuse to turn out against Obama. We have lost longtime members, because we are opposing Obama's actions."

Bruce's annual report notes his eight-day visits to Jeju Island "where they are fighting against the construction of the Navy base that will be a port for US Aegis destroyers outfitted with SM3 interceptor missiles. The strategic location of Jeju Island should not be underestimated, as it is a prime location for participation in the Pentagon's plan to occupy China's oil shipping lanes for possible interdiction and ultimate control of their economy. Obviously these moves on the Grand Chessboard are driving China to accelerate its own military buildup, in particularly the Red Army's space technology capability."

He noted his own organization of frequent peace vigils at Bath Iron Works [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bath_Iron_Works ], and his own organization of a Maine Veterans for Peace walk for peace, human needs, and veterans care event last November.

He noted his participation locally in several campaigns in Northampton and Amherst Massachusetts as well as Hartford Connecticut in bringing our war dollars home resolutions. [ http://www.bringourwardollarshome.org/ ]

He called attention to the need to circulate or distribute "Pax Americana and the Weaponization of Space".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pax_America...n_of_Space [wikipedia]

http://www.ovguide.com/movies_tv/pax_ame..._space.htm [watch]

http://www.filestube.com/cXNrmlAMNqIeR30...09%5D.html [download]

His annual report also notes "Just last month, the Obama administration announced that Deveselu Air Base near Caracal, Romania, will host a ground-based "missile defense" system using the SM-3 interceptor ( also referred to as the "Aegis Ashore System"). The deployment to Romania is anticipated to happen in 2015 as part of the second phase of the European Phased Adoptive Approach. This follows the previous announcements by Obama in 2009 that Poland would host a US PAC-3 base, just 35 miles from the Russian border. Obama has kept his promise to accelerate that the appointments of theseMD programs and, while claiming they are to protect from (non-existent) Iranian nuclear weapons, though one can hide the fact that Russia is being militarily surrounded. Russia has responded, as expected, by announcing that it will develop new MD invading nuclear missiles; so the arms race rages on despite Obama's claim that he wants to rid the world of nuclear weapons. Thus missile offense deployments, essentially encircling Russia and China, remain a key element in the overall offense of military strategy employed by the Obama administration. PAC-3 Deployments by the US are also accelerating in Japan and South Korea and I have made sure that, when possible, we show support for activists opposing those systems."

He noted "his growing frustration with the media, conventional party politics, and endless war [which] have long led me to feel that peace walks allow direct personal contact with people and churches (where we were fed and often slept on their floors) and are a key way to transmit our concerns to those we normally cannot reach."

He noted his own blog: http://space4peace.blogspot.com/ which already links to photos

https://picasaweb.google.com/10316744579...eat=email#

https://picasaweb.google.com/mkgstanton/...eat=email#


*** ****

Also in the conference packet with the following four items:

"Missile Defense Deployment in Asia: provocative strategy and a new arms race", the text of the presentation at the conference by J. Narayana Rao, General Secretary,All India Peace and Solidarity Organization, Maharashtrs State, Nagpur, India;

"25 Years After Chernobyl", by Randy Kehler and Patricia Hynes. [Patricia Hynes chairs the Traprock Center for Peace and Justice [ http://traprock.info/index.shtml ]. Randy Kehler is the tri-state coordinator of http://www.safeandgreencampaign.org/ ];

"Disaster of Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant #1 and "Missile Offense", by Atsushi Fujioka of Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto;

"Tax Break Lobbyists",
http://www.goodjobsfirst.org/corporate-s...-lobbyists

*** ****

Fueled with an occasional 60's-style guitar/chorus interaction [on a living planet circling a living star, we can change the universe just by being who we are'], we heard about JSOW, or Joint StandOff Weapon, Active Denial System and the HTV-3X:



dailymotion.com video of news coverage of NASA-blackswift-hypersonic-scramjet

They've got the world in their pockets, they're up there in control, but the system has no soul and their pockets have a hole.'

We heard about the Air Force Space Command at Peterson AFB. We heard about Schriever AFB, home to the 50th Space Wing and named after named in honor of General Bernard Adolph Schriever, who pioneered the development of the nation's ballistic missile programs. [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Adolph_Schriever ] He was already in uniform when the Paperclip squad arrived.] It also houses the Space Innovation and Development Center, and the 527th Space Aggressor Squadron. We heard about Fort Carson [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Carson ]. We heard about the need to de-mystify the detail and the scientific language used when talking about acts of war in space and cyberspace. We heard about PAROS [ http://www.reachingcriticalwill.org/lega...group.html ] whose web site is loaded with links to treaties and other key legal instruments, fact sheets, recent development-related links and documents, and more.

The Global Network web site has a link to information about the NASA Moon Base [ http://www.space4peace.org/articles/nasa_moon_base.htm ].

We heard about CRIME (the Congressional Religious Intelligence Military Educational consortium) and the mega-machine.

We heard of cyberwar and robotic warfare, of Future Combat Systems, of C4ISR, and network-centric warfare, and the foyer to Cascia Hall spoke to St. Rita of Cascia, the patron saint of the impossible [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rita_of_Cascia ].


And Dave Webb told us that resistance is fertile.

***

On the tables throughout the conference, one could find "A Walker's Guide to Flyingdales" produced by the Yorkshire CND [ http://www.yorkshirecnd.org.uk/ ], a brochure for and newsletter of the CAAB, the Campaign for the Accountability of American Bases [ http://www.caab.org.uk/ ], a newsletter for http://www.MassPeaceAction.org, another for http://www.nevadadesertexperience.org/, a pamphlet for the War Resisters League [ http://www.warresisters.org ], and literature for a wide range of organizations [see list below, with recommended reading] with the following quote:

Alice Stewart, M.D.,born in Great Britain in 1906, did groundbreaking work investigating the dangers of exposure to low-level radiation.

"Cancer is not the worst of it, Alice Stuart Warren warns. Even more danger than cancer is the threat to future generations. That's what you really need to be afraid of. It's the genetic damage, the possibility of selling bad seeds into the gene pool from which future generations are drawn. There will be a build up of defective genes into the population. It won't be noticed until it is too late. Then, we'll never rooted out, never get rid of it. It will be totally your revocable."

From Gale Greene's 1999 book, the woman who knew too much.

Organizations:

http://www.beyondnuclear.org

Nuclear Information Resource Service http://www.nirs.org

Institute for Energy and Environmental Research http://www.ieer.org

Citizens Awareness Network http://www.nukebusters.org

http://www.fairewinds.com

***

Curve

Using the language of science
she showed us the steep curve
mysterious on the graph
pointing to casualties of a certain kind.
Only over time
did the idea come to her, hidden
under this curve early deaths
of another sort produced a different but
invisible curve
making it
one long slope of dying.
All this proceeded
in an now to be calculated way
after the first explosion
again the chain of events
diminishment, loss
collapse, cancer
the disappearance of family, friends…
consequences
grim as they are
sterling clear.
There to see in the numbers,
one might easily infer
the stories, the telling blank spaces.

Susan Griffin (for Alice Stewart)

***

Recommended reading:

The Woman Who Knew Too Much: Alice Stewart and the secrets of radiation, by Gail Green, forward by Helen Caldicott, 1990, University of Michigan Press;

An Irreverent, Illustrated view of Nuclear Power, by John W Goffman, 1979, Committee for Nuclear Responsibility;

The Solar Economy,: renewable energy for sustainable global future, by Hermann Scheer, 2004, Earthscan;

Energy Autonomy: the economic, social and technological case for renewable energy, by Hermann Scheer, 2007, Earthscan;

Chernobyl: consequences of the catastrophe for the people and the environment, by Yablokov, Nesterenko and Nesterenko, 2009, New York Academy of Sciences;

The nuclear power deception; US nuclear mythology from electricity "too cheap to meter" to "inherently safe" reactors, by Arjun Makhijani and Scott Seleska, 1999, Institute for energy and environmental research\the Apex press, New York;

No Immediate Danger: proposals for a radioactive earth, by Rosalie Bertell, 1985, The Book Publishing Company, Summertown, Tennessee;

Nuclear Power is not the Answer, by Helen Caldicott, The New Press, New York, 2006.

****

Widely available were the fold-out campaign brochures from the AFSC [ http://www.oneminuteforpeace.org/ ], a visual depiction of the national priorities expressed by budgetary means and which forms the banner for the web site.

On the table where we picked up our lunch were copies of "Star Wars: US Tools of Space Supremacy" by Loring Wirbel,one of the board members and presenters. [ http://www.amazon.com/Star-Wars-Tools-Sp...0745321143 ] as well as "Come Together Right Now" by Bruce Gagnon [ http://www.amazon.com/Come-Together-Righ...0976653354 ].

**** ****

In the workshop I attended on Cyberwarfare, I heard Loring Wirbel speak; alas, I could not stay long enough for much of Dave Meieran or Matthew Hoey [ http://www.spacetransparency.org/Space_T.../Home.html ], but at least I'd seen their plenary presentations.

See Hoey's database of links here: http://www.spacetransparency.org/Space_T...Links.html .

Here's is Dave Meieran's Democracy Now appearance: http://www.democracynow.org/2004/11/19/c...e_pentagon

Loring Wirbel "has been involved in military conversion & peace work for 25 years. He is currently editorial director for communications initiatives at CMP Media LLC, headquartered in New York & London. Wirbel worked with Mobilization for Survival in the American southwest on campaigns to end the mobile basing strategy for the MX missile, & to phase out Rocky Flats as a plutonium factory. His cover story on the National Security Agency for The Progressive magazine took a top Project Censored award in the early 1980s. A series on Reagan's Star Wars programs won a Scripps-Howard award."




Wirbel's opening slides said "Technology dies not make war safer or more sanitized -- just more likely."

In answer to a question, he said the Hellfire missiles fired by Barack's Predators cost six figures each, and that the actions of the "US Chair Force" was remote and sanitized death, that cyberwars generated victims through the degradation of systems, that in the umbrella world of space wars, added layers don't eliminate the lower layers: the tanks and submarines and soldiers are still there.

Drones seem precise, but are not. He spoke of the book by Stephen Rockel [ http://www.amazon.com/Inventing-Collater...1897071124 ]which showed that collateral damage actually increases with drone warfare. "Emerging from a major international conference on the subject, Inventing Collateral Damage is a collection of excellent and varied studies of civilian casualty through history: in early modern Europe, 18th- and 19th-century North America, colonial and post-colonial conflicts, the world wars of the 20th century, and the present day."

Wirbel noted the development at MIT of a submarine drone submarine, and spoke of micro-UAV's [see the news item from Cryptogon below].

Wirbel spoke of Prompt Global Strike [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prompt_Global_Strike ] but probably assumed that his audience already appreciated that the use of conventional warhead ICBM's and SLBM's actually increased the chances of a retaliatory nuclear strike.

Wirbel [or was it Meieran?!] spoke of the need to define the term violence in an age of cyberwarfare. He spoke of the fact that some people often joked about the use of LSD in biochemical warfare (and probably didn't appreciate that at least one person in the audience had already read Albarelli's "A Terrible Mistake").

He did note that eventually all technologies like the micro-UAV's will trickle down to the smaller user at some point and be turned against the Empire.

He spoke of cyberwarfare and the moral choices which must be made by its practitioners, even those who use it against the Empire. If, he said, you as a citizen aid and abet an aggressive assault using means short of war', you are still a de facto warrior.

"The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies. ... In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgment or of the moral sense; but they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones; and wooden men can perhaps be manufactured that will serve the purpose as well. Such command no more respect than men of straw or a lump of dirt. They have the same sort of worth only as horses and dogs. Yet such as these even are commonly esteemed good citizens. Others, as most legislators, politicians, lawyers, ministers, and office-holders, serve the state chiefly with their heads; and, as they rarely make any moral distinctions, they are as likely to serve the devil, without intending it, as God. A very few, as heroes, patriots, martyrs, reformers in the great sense, and men, serve the state with their consciences also, and so necessarily resist it for the*most part; and they are commonly treated as enemies by it."

*** ****

"We live in a dystopic society in a state of perpetual war driven by hubris."

*** *** ***

Hiding Surveillance and Killer Drones in Plain Sight
June 20th, 2011

Via: New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/20/world/....html?_r=2

Two miles from the cow pasture where the Wright Brothers learned to fly the first airplanes, military researchers are at work on another revolution in the air: shrinking unmanned drones, the kind that fire missiles into Pakistan and spy on insurgents in Afghanistan, to the size of insects and birds.

The base's indoor flight lab is called the "microaviary," and for good reason. The drones in development here are designed to replicate the flight mechanics of moths, hawks and other inhabitants of the natural world. "We're looking at how you hide in plain sight," said Greg Parker, an aerospace engineer, as he held up a prototype of a mechanical hawk that in the future might carry out espionage or kill.

Related: Festo's Smart Bird http://cryptogon.com/?p=21437

Posted in Assassination, Rise of the Machines, Surveillance, Technology, War

http://cryptogon.com/?p=23117



Largest Ever Marine Corps Drill on U.S. East Coast
June 20th, 2011

[???]
Via: CNN: http://edition.cnn.com/2011/US/06/17/mar...&hpt=hp_c2

It's mid-June, a perfect time to visit the beach to watch porpoises play in the surf or seagulls strut the sand or you could watch a formation of Marine Corps warplanes darting over the shore at hundreds of miles per hour.

But don't worry the United States hasn't declared war on your family's beach house. It's just part of a major Marine Corps exercise called Exercise Mailed Fist (translation: armored fist).

The exercise is designed to test the capability of every type of Marine Corps aircraft, including MV-22 Ospreys and F/A 18 Hornets, as well as some Navy ships and Air Force planes.

The drill will stretch from Quantico Marine Base in northern Virginia to the Navy's Pinecastle Bombing Range in Florida.

With thousands of Marines and other service members involved, it's the biggest such drill ever on the U.S. East Coast.


http://cryptogon.com/?p=23110