Video Fwd: DRONES AT HOME

* Bruce Gagnon blog
Thursday, January 07, 2010
DRONES AT HOME



The drones made in Hood River, Oregon are now being used by police in Houston, Texas to spy on the public.....constitutional rights being shredded daily in the good old US of A.

Expect more local cops to get this latest new toy. As they say at the end of this piece, the police will figure out the constitutional questions later on - well after the drones are established in the "crime fighting" inventory.

Text Fwd: DRONE DEBATE CONTINUES IN OREGON

Bruce Gagnon blog
Wednesday, December 23, 2009

DRONE DEBATE CONTINUES IN OREGON

You might recall that I was recently in Hood River, Oregon to speak about drones which are being made there by a local company called Insitu (now bought up by Boeing Corp). I just learned that these drones made by Insitu have been sold to the Colombian military and are likely the ones that have been detected flying into Venezuelan airspace (probably as proxy for the US military).

The letters to the Hood River News have been raging on the drone issue since I spoke there. Here is a negative one below that trashes me.

Drones for America

I would like to thank Terri Hansen for her clear, unflinching appraisal of the “surrender monkeys” advocating the evisceration of our military infrastructure (Another Voice, Dec. 5).

It is clear to any compassionate human being that if the drones Insitu is building save just one American soldier’s life then there is no honorable position in opposition.

To me, Bruce Gagnon is simply a modern-day Jane Fonda. He and his followers deserve the same scorn from patriotic Americans as Fonda received when she returned from her infamous trip to Hanoi.

Cliff Mansfield
Odell, Oregon

The letter goes on much longer but I will spare you. If you wish to read the whole thing, and others from that paper, just click here

Text fwd: [nousbases] Activist: 'Don't dote on drones'

* Image source: Insitu

'ScanEagle'

* Image source: Insitu

'Integrtaor'

* Image source: Insitu

'Night Eagle'

From Bruce Gagnon(globalnet@mindspring.com) on Nov 22, 2009

Activist: 'Don't dote on drones'
By KIRBY NEUMANN-REA
Hood River (Oregon) News editor

Insitu is not a bad company, but it has chosen the wrong fight.

That’s the message brought to Hood River Friday by Bruce Gagnon, in a speech in opposition to the manufacture by Bingen-based Insitu, and other companies, of unmanned drone aircraft.

“Drones are a manifestation of the growing U.S. military culture,” said Gagnon, co-founder and coordinator of the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space.

Gagnon, 57, spoke to a capacity audience of about 200 people at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church. Columbia Peace Fellowship sponsored the talk, held to observe Armistice Day, as Veterans Day was known prior to World War II.

About 60 people attended a potluck at the church just before his talk, and about 40 attended a candlelight vigil, in the drizzle, at Overlook Memorial Park.

“We honor veterans by speaking out for peace,” said Linda Short of CRPF.

Gagnon has spent most of the past 20 years opposing space-based military technology and the past five years in full-time study of unmanned aircraft and its growing use by military branches in the U.S., and other nations.

He talked for nearly 10 minutes before ever mentioning Insitu, the Boeing-owned firm that designs and manufactures unmanned aircraft and their supporting technology.

Insitu now has more than 700 employees at offices in plants throughout Klickitat, Hood River and Skamania counties, and has asked Gorge public agencies to present proposals for creating an Insitu campus.

Gagnon stressed that communities can seek ways to develop jobs without relying either on military purposes for tax money or on war applications for technology, he said.

“When people say ‘drones mean jobs,’ your job is to tell them that’s not the whole story,” he told the audience.

Gagnon argued that investments in drone technology would be better directed at a fight not in the Middle East but in the greater, urgent problem of global warming.

“What do drones do to help solve the biggest threat to the planet today? As they say in New York – bupkis.

“Converting the military industrial complex to things such as sustainable technology would help solve global warming. It would be a step in the right direction.”

Gagnon said investing in military technologies is a self-perpetuating cycle that communities should avoid.

He said economists have found that $1 billion spent on drone research and manufacture results in 9,000 jobs while the same expenditure on home weatherization or mass transportation yields between 12,000 and 19,000 jobs.

The drone issue is not limited to the Gorge and the Insitu question; drones are manufactured in at least seven states. Gagnon said that in his travels he has seen many communities where the economic stimulus prospects were drawn as drones-or-nothing.

“People tell me, ‘We’d rather have (other) jobs but no one ever told us that before.’”

He said city, county and business leaders need to be challenged to seek out “an alternative economic vision” for the people they serve.

“People in America today are job-scared, and job-hungry,” Gagnon said. “We need to educate the U.S. public that it is not getting the biggest bang for its buck.”

Turning drone millions into “pure science” research that will help Americans find ways to reduce its dependence on petroleum will serve America’s national security and natural resource dilemmas, according to Gagnon.

Gagnon said his opposition to military technology does not match his upbringing in Florida. Gagnon was vice president of the Okaloosa County (Florida) Young Republican Club in the 1960s and he volunteered in Richard Nixon’s 1968 presidential campaign.

He once sat at a fish dinner next to conservative Sen. Strom Thurmond, and when Gagnon flunked his Air Force entry physical, he would not take no for an answer.

“I got a waiver to get in,” he said.

Being in the military proved the foundation of his life-long doubts about the American government’s military tendencies.

He thanked the Vietnam-era soldiers who saw the protests outside the gates of the Travis, Calif., Air Force base and openly discussed it inside.

“They created a dynamic inside the base that forever changed my life. I am grateful to them.” That was 1971.

He said that in 2009 he senses an active sense of dissent in Hood River. Columbia Fellowship for Peace has sent him newspaper clippings from the editorial page, giving him a glimpse into the regional debate over Insitu’s growing presence here.

“I read all your letters, and created my speech out of them.

“You have created a raging debate about drones,” he said, noting that a similar debate is occurring in his hometown of Bath, Maine, where some locals are protesting the rendition of an Navy air base, set for decommissioning, into a cold-weather testing facility for drone aircraft. He said it has led to a statewide campaign to oppose the plan.

“You have succeeded here in creating positive non-violent conflict,” he said.

The level of opposition to drones might be larger, but different, than many in the audience think, according to Gagnon.

“Not everyone is against drones from the peace perspective. Some people don’t like it because of what it will do to our right of privacy.

“They (manufacturers) are increasingly developing technology so they can watch us and control our lives,” Gagnon said.

But his main concern is that drones, used in hundreds of air strikes in Afghanistan and Iraq in the past three years, are an example of what he calls “an increasingly militarized culture.”

Gagnon said that “the civilian uses argument is basically a lie.

“They speak of ‘civilian use’ as a way to try to calm people down, to divert them from the fact that these are war machines.”

He claimed that machines that have killed civilians cannot be described as “clean.”

“They are dirty, and they are creating more enemies all the time.

“The more enemies the drones create, the longer the fight goes on, and the more drones you need to build.”

He said the evidence is in the steady addition of permanent bases being built in Afghanistan.

Gagnon asked if residents of the Gorge want to be a part of an industry creating these weapons.

“Do you want to live in an increasingly militarized culture? We are becoming a killer nation. There are no other manufacturing jobs so we are creating jobs by building weapons for endless war. What does it say about us when we need to build weapons to feed our families?

“It’s the ongoing militarization of our culture. This is what is happening, but fortunately particularly here in this community, thank God there are people who care.”


Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space
PO Box 652
Brunswick, ME 04011
(207) 443-9502
globalnet@mindspring.com
www.space4peace.org
http://space4peace.blogspot.com/ (blog)


* Related blogs

http://nobasestorieskorea.blogspot.com/2009/11/text-fwd-coordinator-trip-report.html
Sunday, November 15, 2009
Text Fwd: Coordinator Trip Report - Talking Drones in Oregon

http://nobasestorieskorea.blogspot.com/2009/11/video-fwd-bruce-gagnon-portland-rally.html
Saturday, November 7, 2009
Video Fwd: [Bruce Gagnon] Portland Rally

Text Fwd: Coordinator Trip Report - Talking Drones in Oregon

* Image source: same as below

* Bruce Gagnon blog

Nov. 15, 2009

REPORT ON DRONE TRIP TO OREGON

* Bruce Gagnon's speech video in Oregon can see here.

This report follows my short trip to Hood River, Oregon to speak about drones. The event was on November 13 and turned out to be much more important than anyone had expected.

The trip was hosted by the Columbia River Fellowship for Peace. Hood River is a relatively small community in a beautiful part of the state about an hour west of Portland. Surrounded by mountains the area has attracted high-tech types over the years who love to windsurf along the Columbia River. One such group of technologists created a corporation called Insitu that makes drones and was recently bought out by Boeing. Insitu has grown so much in recent years, as demand for drones in Iraq-Afghanistan-Pakistan has increased, that the company now is operating out of many different buildings in small towns on both sides of the river that separates Oregon and Washington.

Recently activists discovered an Insitu plan to build a central production facility that the company says will employ 700 people. The local media, politicians, and supporters of America’s current wars applaud the proposal but local peace activists have been organizing a campaign in the community to force debate about drones.

I was invited to come speak to help spread consciousness about Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV’s) in the community. After a frustration marked series of flights that led me to Newark and Houston, I finally made it to Oregon in time to do the talk. Local organizer Linda Short picked me up at the Portland airport and showed me a column from one of the local papers that was talking about the planned community event. Not only did the columnist call drones a “clean” way of fighting war but he also gave the wrong date for the meeting, something I am told his paper had done before.

Fortunately though the peace group had purchased three full-page advertisements in different local papers to promote the event. Linda told me she hoped 50 people would turn out. She also told me that a local activist had come forward to cover the expense of the three advertisements.

As it turned out 160 people packed the small church sanctuary where we met in Hood River. Included in the audience was the columnist who had given the wrong date for the meeting and the man who had founded Insitu but has since sold his shares in the company for a reported sum of $20 million.

I centered by talk around the large group of letters-to-the-editor that Linda had supplied me in advance of my trip. I was impressed by the positive non-violent conflict they had created in the community around the drones issue and began my talk by telling them that Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. had said that real change could only come by creating such positive social tension in our communities.

I took many excerpts from the letters and used them to make my key points: drone killings may be violating international law against summary executions; drone attacks have killed 700 innocent civilians in Pakistan since late 2008; we are making more enemies out of drone victims families; surveillance UAV’s could be used against us back here in the US as our civil liberties are destroyed; building drones waste tax dollars that should be going toward dealing with our real problem which is climate change; military production is the worst way to create jobs in our declining economy; and what does military production for endless war say about the soul of our nation.

I suggested though there was one vital issue that I did not find covered in the letters. It was the reality that our present war policy in Afghanistan-Pakistan was really driven by the desire of the oil lobby to control these two countries so that pipelines could carry Caspian Sea oil and natural gas to ports in the Arabian Sea rather than extending pipelines through Russia and China. This was all part of the larger US military program of controlling resource extraction at a time of declining supplies of fossil fuels. For evidence I quoted extensively from Zbigniew Brzezinski’s book, The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy And It's Geostrategic Imperatives, written in 1998.

In the book Brzezinski says, "The world's energy consumption is bound to vastly increase over the next two or three decades. Estimates by the U.S. Department of Energy anticipate that world demand will rise by more than 50 percent between 1993 and 2015, with the most significant increase in consumption occurring in the Far East. The momentum of Asia's economic development is already generating massive pressures for the exploration and exploitation of new sources of energy and the Central Asian region and the Caspian Sea basin are known to contain reserves of natural gas and oil that dwarf those of Kuwait, the Gulf of Mexico, or the North Sea....any successful American policy must focus on Eurasia as a whole and be guided by a Geostrategic design.

"That puts a premium on maneuver and manipulation in order to prevent the emergence of a hostile coalition that could eventually seek to challenge America's primacy.

"The most immediate task is to make certain that no state or combination of states gains the capacity to expel the United States from Eurasia or even to diminish significantly its decisive arbitration role.

"Moreover, as America becomes an increasingly multi-cultural society, it may find it more difficult to fashion a consensus on foreign policy issues, except in the circumstance of a truly massive and widely perceived direct external threat."

There were many great comments from the audience following my talk. The man who founded Insitu tried to filibuster the meeting by saying that I had made many misleading and wrong statements and he was prepared to talk extensively about the drones made by the company and their civilian uses. After a bit I asked him if it was true that the Insitu made UAV’s were being used in US wars in the Middle East and Central Asia. Yes, he replied, it was true.

At the end of my talk I suggested that it was quite apparent that many people in the region had deep concerns about drones and I recommended they might explore holding some town hall meetings so the public could be heard. I also suggested that the time had come for citizens to do more than vote, that we needed the public to become involved in democratizing production decision making so that we could begin to stop the colonization of our nation by the military industrial complex.

The next morning I woke up early for a 5:00 am ride to the Portland airport. I was driven by a local activist, and veteran, by the name of Rollean. Rollean had been the one to put the money up for the three full-page ads in the local papers. He is not a wealthy man, he is a carpenter who lives quite simply, but felt so strongly about the drones that he had to do something to help build momentum around the issue. It was quite apparent that the advertisements had in fact done just that.

As it turned out Rollean told me he remembered me from years ago in Florida. He had come to Florida in 1987 when I organized the historic protest at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station at the time of the first flight test of the Trident II nuclear missile from the space center. Just prior to the big rally, attended by well over 5,000 people, we held a Florida Peace Pilgrimage that began at the Trident nuclear submarine base in St. Mary’s, Georgia. The peace walk attracted people like Rollean who had already walked across the US in the Great Peace March and then came south for our walk. As the peace pilgrimage moved southward toward Cape Canaveral, with about 200 walkers, many of them began sneaking into the huge swampy nature preserve that surrounds the space center in a non-violent attempt to get near the Trident launch pad in order to stop the missile test. Each day for about a week activists were arrested by space center security. Then on the day of the big demonstration at the front gate of Cape Canaveral another 200 folks, led by Dr. Benjamin Spock, climbed the fence in a symbolic attempt to also get on the launch pad.

The Brevard County jails were overflowing after that action and several people refused to give their names and remained in jail for some time. Rollean was one of those who stayed in the jail for 65 days, refusing to give his real name in order to keep the debate alive in the space coast community.

It’s clear that the drone issue is “taking off” all over the country. There are presently active US military drone operations in at least seven states - and probably many more that we are not aware of. People are having strong moral and ethical reactions to the idea of robotic warfare – what the Space Command says will help “increase the kill chain.”

The use of UAV’s will dramatically surge as the Obama administration is likely to see them as a substitute for adding huge amounts of troops in Afghanistan. The killings of innocent civilians will escalate as will the creation of new enemies. Yes, we need more jobs in America but we don’t need to get them from making killer drones. Instead the peace movement needs to be calling for the conversion of the military industrial complex.

According to a recent UMASS-Amherst Economics Department study we get 8,555 jobs by building weapons like drones for every $1 billion spent by the Pentagon. But the study says, we would get 19,795 jobs for the same $1 billion if we built mass transit systems. Drones won’t help us solve for climate change. Mass transit could. Which would you rather spend your tax dollars on?

Bruce K. Gagnon
Coordinator
Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space
PO Box 652
Brunswick, ME 04011
(207) 443-9502
globalnet@mindspring.com
www.space4peace.org
http://space4peace.blogspot.com/ (blog)

1 Comments:

Loring Wirbel said...

Very nice design of the poster for your talk. Can GN re-use it? It really is beautiful.

11/15/09 4:17 PM