Text Fwd: PYRAMIDS TO THE HEAVENS

http://space4peace.blogspot.com/2011/04/pyramids-to-heavens.html
Monday, April 25, 2011
PYRAMIDS TO THE HEAVENS

The media is abuzz with the human interest story about Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ) who will be flying to Cape Canaveral for Friday's scheduled launch of the space shuttle Endeavour which will carry her husband, Mark Kelly, to the International Space Station (ISS).

Rep. Giffords has recovered well enough from the recent tragic shooting of her and others in Arizona to make the trip. This launch will be the second-to-last mission of the space shuttle program before it is shut down in favor of Obama's plan to privatize key portions of the space launch business.

Like so many other things in our society today, the plan to privatize space launches comes after years of taxpayer investment created the basic space technological infrastructure that will now, to a considerable extent, be turned over wealthy investors. Immediate plans call for private industry to boost "space tourism trips" where people, with too much money on their hands, take a joy ride up into the heavens. From there we'll see private space developers begin to contract with the government for launch services. Eventually private corporations will fly missions to, and make land claims on, the moon, asteroids, and other planetary bodies for the purpose of extracting precious resources from those places.

In the meantime massive government investment will continue to create space military technologies to "control and dominate space" so that when the day comes where profit can be made from mining the sky, the Space Command will be able to patrol a military highway, or create a "front gate," to determine which countries or corporations have the ability to travel to and from Earth to space.

This strategy was all clearly spelled out in the 1989 Congressional study called Military Space Forces: The Next 50 Years. Author, and congressional staffer John Collins, wrote:

Military space forces at the bottom of Earth's so-called gravity well are poorly positioned to accomplish offensive/defensive/deterrent missions, because great energy is needed to overcome gravity during launch. Forces at the top, on a space counterpart of "high ground," could initiate action and detect, identify, track, intercept, or otherwise respond more rapidly to attacks. [This would include bases on the moon, armed space stations, and other orbiting battle platforms.] Put simply, it takes less energy to drop objects down a well than to cast them out.... Armed forces might lie in wait at that location to hijack rival shipments on return.

Nuclear reactors thus remain the only known long-lived, compact source able to supply military space forces with electric power..... Larger versions could meet multi megawatt needs of space-based lasers.... Nuclear reactors must support major bases on the moon..... Safety factors, rather than technological feasibility, will remain the principal impediment to nuclear power in space, unless officials convince influential critics that risks are acceptably low.

This is all a very expensive proposition. Some years ago the industry publication, Space News, wrote an editorial admitting they had to come up with a "secure funding source" in order to pay for their industry's plans in space if the U.S. hoped to stay on top of the heap. In the editorial they notified readers that indeed they had identified such a funding source - the "entitlement programs" and were sending their lobbyists to Washington to secure them for their use.

Officially the entitlement programs are: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and what is left of the welfare program. It is these programs that today are under vicious attack by the corporate interests who wish to use those funds in part to build their pyramids to the heavens.

The spectacle of a recovering Rep. Giffords and Obama waving to her husband as he blasts off on the space shuttle will bring tears to many eyes and warm feelings in many hearts. The aerospace industry hopes that more support for "everything" space will also result.

Text Fwd: New Military Space Plane

Organizing Notes
New Military Space Planehttp://space4peace.blogspot.com/2011/03/new-military-space-plane.html
Wired has a new article about the military space plane - the successor to the shuttle at their web site. Written by Noah Shactman.
March 31, 20111


The U.S. military likes to be a little sneaky with its robotic space planes. Unlike typical spacecraft, these vehicles can shift their orbits, frustrating the global network of skywatchers who keep track of just about every man-made object rotating the planet.


But the sleuths have their tricks, too. They’ve tracked down the X-37B on its second secret mission. And the information the skywatchers are finding says quite a bit about the classified operations of this mysterious spacecraft.


It took the amateur sleuths nearly a month to hunt down the first X-37B after it launched on its inaugural mission. That’s an eternity in sky-spotting time.


The second time around was easier. The U.S. space plane was discovered just four days after it blasted into orbit, earlier this month. Cape Town, South Africa’s Greg Roberts — “a pioneer in using telescopic video cameras to track spacecraft, chalking up exceptional results over the years,” according to Space.com — spotted this second secret spacecraft, just like he found the first.


The X-37B has generated intense interest, long before it ever left the ground. Boeing originally developed the 29-foot unmanned craft — a kind of miniature Space Shuttle — for NASA. Then, the military took over in 2004, and the space plane went black. Its payloads were classified, its missions hush-hush.


Depending on who you talk to, the space plane could be a prototype commando transport, an orbiting bomber or (most likely) a spy-above-the-skies. It could launch, repair or reposition U.S. satellites in low orbit. It could sneak up and disable or steal enemy satellites. Its pickup-bed-sized payload bay is particularly enticing to observers.


And now, there are observers — plural. Ontario’s Kevin Fetterof filmed the X-37B “gliding past the binary star Eta Serpentis,” according to Space.com, which has video of the flyby. Skywatchers Brad Young, Bill Young, and Alberto Rango have all reported sightings, as well.


You can even see the space plane for yourself: The X-37B is traveling in a slightly elliptical orbit more than 200 miles up, swooping from 43 degrees north latitude to 43 degrees south. (Check the real-time map at n2yo.com.)


That orbit gives some indications about what the space plane is actually doing up there. The typical spy satellite has a polar orbit, which means “it can cover the whole earth, and it can fly over the same spot at the same sun angle each time it comes overhead,” explains Brian Weeden, a former Air Force Space Command officer, now with the Secure World Foundation.


The X-37B, on the other hand, is orbiting around the fat middle of the planet, traveling over the Middle East, Africa, and fair chunk of China. “It means they are giving up global coverage and predictable shadow lengths, but getting more frequent passes,” Weeden says. The orbit lends credence to the idea that the space plane is an orbiting spy.


So does the X-37B’s altitude. It’s flying pretty low — one of the rare orbiters traveling beneath the International Space Station. “The lower you are,” Weeden notes, “the higher resolution you can get in any imagery.”


And the easier you are to spot from the ground.

Text Fwd: Inside the brain of WikiLeak's Julian Assange

Assange speaks at a press conference on the Iraq war logs, which were leaked last year. Picture: AFP Source: AFP
_____________________________________
* Text forward from Mark Servian and Bruce K. Gagnon through GN with the below words on March 14, 2011
'Even more detail to show how involved Assange was during our 1989 campaign in Florida to stop the plutonium launch of Galileo space mission. Bruce'
______________________________________
The Australian
Inside the brain of WikiLeak's Julian Assange
March 5, 2011

JULIAN Assange has told the story of his childhood and adolescence twice - most recently to a journalist from The New Yorker, Raffi Khatchadourian, and some 15 years ago, secretly but in greater detail, to Suelette Dreyfus, the author of a fascinating book on the first generation of computer hacking, Underground, for which Assange was the primary researcher.

In what is called the "researcher's introduction", Assange begins with a cryptic quote from Oscar Wilde: "Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth."

Nothing about Assange has ever been straightforward. One of the main characters in Underground is the Melbourne hacker Mendax. Although there is no way readers at that time could have known it, Mendax is Julian Assange.

IN the late 1980s, Assange joined the underground subculture of hacking that was forming in Melbourne. By October 1989 an attack was mounted from Australia on America's NASA computer system via the introduction of what was called the WANK worm, in an attempt to sabotage the Jupiter launch of the Galileo rocket as part of an action of anti-nuclear activists.

In an article he later published in the left-wing magazine CounterPunch, Assange would claim the WANK worm attack was "the origin of hacktivism".

In a Swedish television documentary, WikiRebels, made with Assange's co-operation, there are hints he was responsible.

Mendax formed a closed group with two other hackers - Trax and Prime Suspect. They called themselves the International Subversives. Mendax wrote a program called Sycophant. It allowed the International Subversives to conduct "massive attacks on the US military". The list of the computers they could recall finding their way into "read like a who's who of the American military-industrial complex".

Eventually Mendax penetrated the computer system of the Canadian telecommunications corporation Nortel. It was here that his hacking was first discovered. The Australian Federal Police conducted a long investigation into the International Subversives, Operation Weather.

Eventually Trax lost his nerve and began to talk. He told the police that the International Subversives had been hacking on a scale never achieved before.

In October 1991 the AFP raided Prime Suspect's and Mendax's homes. They found Assange in a state of near mental collapse. His young wife had recently left him, taking their son Daniel. Assange told Dreyfus that he had been dreaming incessantly of "police raids . . . of shadows in the pre-dawn darkness, of a gun-toting police squad bursting through his back door at 5am". When the police arrived, the incriminating disks, which he usually hid inside a beehive, were scattered beside his computer.

Assange descended into a personal hell. He entered a psychiatric ward briefly. He told Dreyfus that 1992 was "the worst year in his life". His case was not finally settled until December 1996.

Although Assange had been speaking in secretive tones about the technical possibility of a massive prison sentence, in the end he received a $5000 good behaviour bond and a $2100 reparations fine.

The experience of arrest and trial nonetheless scarred his soul and helped shape his politics.

In his blog of July 17, 2006, Assange wrote: "If there is a book whose feeling captures me it is First Circle by [Alexander] Solzhenitsyn. To feel that home is the comraderie [sic] of persecuted, and in fact, prosecuted, polymaths in a Stalinist labor camp! How close the parallels to my own adventures! . . . Such prosecution in youth is a defining peak experience. To know the state for what it really is! To see through that veneer the educated swear to disbelieve in but still slavishly follow with their hearts! . . . True belief only begins with a jackboot at the door. True belief forms when lead [sic] into the dock and referred to in the third person. True belief is when a distant voice booms "the prisoner shall now rise' and no one else in the room stands."

This is a characteristically self-dramatising passage. Solzhenitsyn was incarcerated in the Gulag archipelago, harassed for years by the KGB and eventually expelled from the Soviet Union. Assange was investigated by the AFP and received a good behaviour bond and a fine.

ALTHOUGH there are tens of thousands of articles on Julian Assange in the world's newspapers and magazines, no mainstream journalist so far has grasped the critical significance of the cypherpunks movement to Assange's intellectual development and the origin of WikiLeaks.

The cypherpunks emerged from a meeting of minds in late 1992 in the Bay area of San Francisco. Its founders were Eric Hughes, a brilliant Berkeley mathematician; Timothy C. May, an already wealthy, former chief scientist at Intel who had retired at the age of 34; and John Gilmore, another already retired and wealthy computer scientist - once No 5 at Sun Microsystems - who had co-founded an organisation to advance the cause of cyberspace freedom, the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

At the core of the cypherpunk philosophy was the belief that the great question of politics in the age of the internet was whether the state would strangle individual freedom and privacy through its capacity for electronic surveillance or whether autonomous individuals would eventually undermine and even destroy the state through their deployment of electronic weapons newly at hand.

Many cypherpunks were optimistic that in the battle for the future of humankind the individual would ultimately triumph. Their optimism was based on developments in intellectual history and computer software: the invention in the mid-1970s of public-key cryptography

The American government strongly opposed the free circulation of public-key cryptography. It feared that making it available would strengthen the hands of the espionage agencies of America's enemies abroad and of terrorists, organised criminals, drug dealers and pornographers at home.

For the cypherpunks, the question of whether cryptography would be freely available would determine the outcome of the great battle of the age. Although George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four was one of the cypherpunks' foundational texts, they tended to believe that in the coming battle between Big Brother and Winston Smith, the victor might be Winston Smith.

Almost all cypherpunks were anarchists who regarded the state as the enemy. Most but not all were anarchists of the Right, or in American parlance libertarians, who supported laissez-faire capitalism.

The most authoritative political voice among the majority libertarian cypherpunks was May who, in 1994, composed a vast, truly remarkable document, Cyphernomicon.

May called his system crypto-anarchy. He thought the state to be the source of evil in history. He envisaged the future as an Ayn Rand utopia of autonomous individuals dealing with each other as they pleased.

He recognised that in his future world only elites with control over technology would prosper. No doubt "the clueless 95 per cent" - whom he described as "inner city breeders" and as "the unproductive, the halt and the lame" - "would suffer, but that is only just".

May acknowledged many cypherpunks would regard these ideas as extreme. He also acknowledged that, while the overwhelming majority of cypherpunks were, like him, anarcho-capitalist libertarians, some were straitlaced US Republicans, left-leaning liberals, wobblies or even Maoists.

Neither fact concerned him. The only thing they all shared was an understanding of the political significance of cryptography and the willingness to fight for privacy and unfettered freedom in cyberspace.

Another even more extreme cypherpunk of the libertarian Right, Jim Bell, thought history might need a push. In mid-1995 he began an essay series explaining his "revolutionary idea", which he called Assassination Politics.

Bell devised a system in which citizens could contribute towards a lottery fund for the assassination of particular government officials. The prize would go to the person who correctly predicted the date of the death. The winner would obviously be the official's murderer.

However, through the use of public-key cryptography, remailers and digital cash, no one except the murderer would be aware of their identity. Under the rubric "tax is theft" all government officials and politicians were legitimate targets of assassination. Journalists would begin to ask of politicians, "Why should you not be killed?" As prudence would eventually dictate that no one take the job, the state would simply wither away. Assange joined the cypherpunks email list in late 1995 at the time the controversy over Assassination Politics was raging. The first thing that becomes clear is the brashness. If one thing is clear from the cypherpunks list, it is that the young Assange did not suffer those he regarded as fools gladly.

From beginning to end Assange was, in short, a hard-line member of the tendency among the cypherpunks that May called the "rejectionists", an enemy of those who displayed even the slightest tendency to compromise on the question of Big Brother and the surveillance state.

On another question, however, Assange was at the opposite end of the cypherpunks spectrum from May. At no stage did Assange show sympathy for the anarcho-capitalism of the cypherpunks mainstream.

Assange was a regular contributor to the cypherpunks mailing list particularly before its decline in late 1997 following a meltdown over the question of the possible moderation of the list - censorship! - and the departure of Gilmore. The cypherpunks list clearly mattered to him deeply.

Shortly before his travels in 1998, Assange asked whether anyone could send him a complete archive of the list between 1992 and the present.

While commentators have comprehensively failed to see the significance of the cypherpunks in shaping the thought of Assange, this is something insiders to the movement understand.

In his mordant online article on WikiLeaks and Assange, influential cyberpunk novelist and author of The Hacker Crackdown Bruce Sterling wrote: "At last - at long last - the homemade nitroglycerin in the old cypherpunks blast shack has gone off."

IN a blog entry of December 31, 2006, Assange outlines finally the idea at the core of the WikiLeaks strategy: "The more secretive or unjust an organisation is, the more leaks induce fear and paranoia in the leadership and planning coterie. This must result in minimisation of efficient internal communications mechanisms (an increase in cognitive 'secrecy tax') and consequent system-wide cognitive decline resulting in decreased ability to hold on to power as the environment demands adaptation.

"Hence in a world where leaking is easy, secretive or unjust systems are nonlinearly hit relative to open, just systems. Since unjust systems by their nature induce opponents, and in many places barely have the upper hand, leaking leaves them exquisitely vulnerable to those who seek to replace them with more open forms of governance."

There is a direct link between Assange's cypherpunks period and the theory behind WikiLeaks. As we have seen, Assange joined the cypherpunks list at the time when Bell's Assassination Politics was being hotly discussed.

There is evidence Assange was fascinated by the idea. In January 1998 he had come upon an advertisement for a prize - "Scoop the Grim Reaper. Who Will Live? Who Will Die?" - which was to be awarded to the person who guessed on what dates certain Hollywood celebrities would die. Assange posted the advertisement on the cypherpunks list under the heading: "Jim . . . Bell .. . lives . . . on . . . in . . . Hollywood." The similarity between Bell's thought and Assange's are unmistakable. Like Bell, Assange was possessed by a simple revolutionary idea about how to create a better world. As with Bell, the idea emerged from reflection on the political possibilities created by untraceable anonymous communication, through the use of remailers and unbreakable public-key cryptography.

The differences are also clear. Unlike with Bell, the revolution Assange imagined would be non-violent. The agent of change would not be the assassin but the whistleblower. The method would not be the bullet but the leak.

In late 2006 Assange sought a romantic partner through the online dating service OKCupid in the name of Harry Harrison.

Under the heading, "What am I doing with my life?", he answered: "Directing a consuming, dangerous human rights project which is, as you might expect, male-dominated."

Under the heading "I spend a lot of time thinking about", he answered: "changing the world through passion, inspiration and trickery".

There was something distinctly Walter Mittyish about it all. Under the informal leadership of Assange, a group of mainly young men, without resources and linked only by computers, now began to implement their plans for a peaceful global political revolution.

WHAT do the early internal documents reveal about the charge that WikiLeaks was an anti-American outfit posing as a freedom of information organisation?

In its first public statement, WikiLeaks argued that "misleading leaks and misinformation are already well placed in the mainstream media . . . an obvious example being the lead-up to the Iraq war".

And in an email of January 2, 2007, Assange even argued that WikiLeaks could advance by several years "the total annihilation of the current US regime and any other regime that holds its authority through mendacity alone". And yet, despite these statements, the evidence surrounding WikiLeaks's foundation makes it abundantly clear that anti-Americanism was not the primary driving force.

Time and again, in its internal documents, it argued that its roots are in dissident communities and that its "primary targets are those highly oppressive regimes in China, Russia and central Eurasia". China is a special focus.

For this reason, WikiLeaks argued publicly that "a politically motivated legal attack on us would be seen as a grave error in Western administrations".

Concerning its targets, the formulation is precise. WikiLeaks has in its sights authoritarian governments, the increasingly authoritarian tendencies seen in the recent trajectory of the Western democracies and the authoritarian nature of contemporary business corporations.

What then of the charge that WikiLeaks is a revolutionary organisation pretending to be concerned merely with reformist liberal issues such as exposure of corruption, open government and freedom of information and expression?

At its foundation, Assange frequently argued that WikiLeaks' true nature did indeed need to be disguised. Because "freedom of information is a respected liberal value", Assange argued, "we may get some sympathy", but it would not last. Inevitably governments would try to crush WikiLeaks.

But if the mask of moderation were maintained, at least for some time, opposition would be "limp-wristed". A quotation from the Book of Isaiah, he believed, might be suitable "if we were to front as a Ploughshares [peace] organisation".

To Young he wrote: "We have the collective sources, personalities and learning to be, or rather appear to be, the reclusive ubermensch of the fourth estate". The emphases are mine.

He also knew that if WikiLeaks were to prosper, and also to win support from philanthropic bodies such as the Soros Foundation, the hacker-cypherpunk origin of the inner circle needed to be disguised. "We expect difficult state lashback [sic] unless WikiLeaks can be given a sanctified frame ('centre for human rights, democracy, good government and apple pie press freedom project' vs 'hackers strike again')."

The key to WikiLeaks was that its true revolutionary ambitions and its moderate liberal public face would be difficult for opponents to disentangle. Open government and freedom of information were standard liberal values.

However, as explained in the theory outlined in Conspiracy as Governance, they were the values in whose name authoritarian structures would be undermined worldwide, through the drying up of information flows and a paralysing fear of insider leaks.

BY June 2007 several members of the Left had indeed gravitated to WikiLeaks. In Assange's view, this group was thinking of publishing commentary on leaked documents in a way that allowed their political bias to show. He sent a different email to them:

"OK, you guys need to keep the Progressive Commie Socialist agendas and rhetoric to yourselves or you're going to go nowhere very, very fast."

WikiLeaks was in danger, he argued, of being positioned as a CIA front or as a same-old left-wing outfit "preaching to the choir". All partisanship would be lethal. WikiLeaks needed to keep itself open to whistleblowers of all stripes - "even conservative and religious types waking up to the fact that they've been taken for a ride".

This email is not only illuminating from the point of view of WikiLeaks's grand strategy. It is also decisive as to his true political position. Assange might have been on the left of the spectrum by anarcho-capitalist cypherpunk standards but he was by no means a standard leftist. His politics were anti-establishment but genuinely beyond Left and Right.

Between 2007 and 2010 Assange's political thinking was shaped by two key ideas. The first was that all authoritarian structures - both governments and corporations - were vulnerable to insider leaks. Fear would throttle information flows. Assange called this a "secrecy tax". Inevitably, he argued, because of this tax, governments and corporations with nothing to hide would triumph over their secretive, unjust conspiratorial competitors.

This aspect of his politics amounted to a kind of political Darwinism, a belief not in the survival of the fittest but of the most transparent and most just. As an organisation that encouraged whistleblowers and published their documents, WikiLeaks was aiding and speeding up this process. There was, however, another dimension of his politics that reflected his long association with the cypherpunks.

Assange believed that, in the era of globalisation, laws determining communication were going to be harmonised. The world would either opt for a closed system akin to Chinese political secrecy and US intellectual property laws, or an open system found to some extent in Belgium and Sweden.

Once more, Assange hoped that WikiLeaks was assisting a positive outcome to this struggle through its role as what he called a global publisher of last resort.

If WikiLeaks could survive the attacks certain to be mounted by governments and corporations, the rights of human beings to communicate freely with each other without the intervention of governments would be entrenched.

WikiLeaks was, according to this argument, the canary in the mine. Assange was taken with the famous Orwell quote, "He who controls the present controls the past and he who controls the past controls the future." The world was at a turning point. Either Big Brother would take control of the internet or an era of unprecedented freedom of communication would arrive.

Assange was by now in the habit of composing motivational emails for his volunteers. This is the message he sent them on March 12, 2008:

"Mankind has successfully adapted changes as monumental as electricity and the engine. It can also adapt to a world where state-sponsored violence against the communications of consenting adults is not only unlawful but physically impossible. As knowledge flows across nations it is time to sum the great freedoms of every nation and not subtract them. It is time for the world as an international collective of communicating peoples to arise and say 'here I am'."

This might have come straight out of a cypherpunks manifesto.

Edited extract. The full 15,000-word version of Robert Manne's essay is published in the March edition of The Monthly, available at newsagents or online at www.themonthly.com.au/node/3081. Subscription required.

Manne is professor of politics at La Trobe University in Melbourne.

Text Fwd: " 2nd US 'secret space warplane' now in orbit"

At the spaceplane-in-a-tin factory

* Text fwd by Kev Hall and Frank Cordaro

The Register, UK
Second US 'secret space warplane' now in orbit
Military minishuttle's mystery mission.......
By Lewis Page
7th March 2011 10:28 GMT

The second X-37B "secret space warplane" operated by the US military has successfully reached orbit at the beginning of a classified mission, whose intent and duration remain unknown.

The X-37B is a small unmanned space plane with a cargo bay said to be about the same size as that of a pickup truck. It is launched into space inside a fairing atop a normal launch stack, and on arrival in orbit deploys a solar array allowing a protracted mission (a Space Shuttle, which carried a crew and used fuel cells for power, could not stay up unassisted nearly as long).

The little spaceplane features a powerful engine allowing it to change orbit as desired – and the fact that it is reusable means that its operators are less constrained to save fuel in order to prolong lifespan as they would be with a normal satellite.

Having completed its mysterious mission, the X-37B furls its solar array, closes its payload bay and re-enters the atmosphere, gliding down to land autonomously on a runway just like the Shuttle, but without benefit of any human input. Like the shuttle it has delta-shaped wings which would seem to offer the same "cross-range" capability that the US military insisted upon for the bigger spaceplane: a capability intended for top-secret intelligence missions which would be extremely difficult for other nations to monitor – though in the event the Shuttle never actually flew such missions.

The initial X-37B mission lifted off in April last year and stayed in orbit for eight months before making a successful landing at the Vandenberg military space base in California.

According to a release issued by X-37B maker Boeing at the weekend, the second X-37B has now lifted off successfully from Cape Canaveral airforce station, taking off on Saturday at 5:46pm local time.

US airforce officials in charge of the project emphasise that the X-37B has many relatively humdrum uses. It furnishes a way of getting new technologies, or ones suddenly in demand, into space quickly: rather than building a custom satellite to carry, say, a new sensor, you simply slot it into an X-37B and send it up. The little spaceplane also offers a relatively inexpensive way of carrying out tests of new kit which offers some risk of not working: if the new gadget doesn't pan out, you don't need to write off a pricey satellite – and the original gear can be tweaked, rather than you having to build a whole new rig should you want to try your idea again.

But details of missions are kept secret and the X-37B is funded from the "black" classified budget. Furthermore if a reusable plug-in satellite was all that was required, it seems reasonable to suggest that it wouldn't need shuttle-style delta wings. If runway landing were preferred to capsule/parachute re-entry, a lifting body or stub wings would be more efficient.

Given all of this, then, people such as us here on the Reg aerospace desk will continue to speculate on more exciting missions for the X-37B until we hear from an authoritative source that these are not happening. ®

Kevin Hall
Senior Researcher
http://Antiwar.com
No weapons IN or war FROM space.
Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space
http://Space4Peace.org

Video Fwd: Brigadier General John Hyten on the Military Uses of Space

Global Network against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space
Brigadier General John Hyten on the Military Uses of Space
by RUSI Online

Brigadier General John Hyten on the Military Uses of Space from RUSI Online on Vimeo.

Brigadier General John Hyten appraises a RUSI audience of the military uses of space. General Hyten is Director, Space Acquisition, Office of the Under Secretary of the Air Force.

Text Fwd: Space: A competitive, hotly contested warfighting frontier for the US military

In this photo taken Jan. 28, 2011, Joint Chiefs Vice Chairman Gen. James E. Cartwright speaks at a Pentagon briefing. A new military strategy for space calls for greater cooperation with other nations on space-based programs to improve America's ability to deter enemies. Cartwright, speaking at a forum of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, said nations need to have guidelines to govern the approximately 22,000 manmade objects orbiting earth, including about 1,100 active satellites. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)

* Text fwd by Kev Hall and Frank Cordaro on Feb. 21, 2011

Google
Space: A competitive and hotly contested warfighting frontier for the
US military Military wants more global partnerships in space
by Lolita C. Baldor, Associated Press
Sun Feb 20, 10:20 am ET

WASHINGTON – The U.S. military needs to better protect its satellites
and strengthen its ability to use them as weapons as the uncharted
battlefield of space becomes increasingly crowded and dangerous,
Pentagon leaders say.

A new military strategy for space, as mapped out by the Pentagon,
calls for greater cooperation with other nations on space-based
programs to improve America's ability to deter enemies.

"It's a domain, like air land and sea," said Gen. Kevin Chilton, who
led U.S. Strategic Command until he retired late last month. "Space is
not just a convenience. It's become a critical part in every other
(battlefield) domain."

The U.S., Chilton said, needs to make sure that it protects and
maintains the battlefield capabilities it gets from space-based
assets, including global positioning data, missile warning system
information, and communications with fighters or unmanned drones that
are providing surveillance or firing missiles against the enemy.

As the U.S. and other countries depend more on their satellites for
critical data, those assets become greater targets for their enemies.

"It's prudent to anticipate that, at this point, we will not go into a
future conflict with a sophisticated adversary and not expect to be
challenged in the space domain," Chilton told The Associated Press in
an interview. "We need to be thinking about how we would go into
future conflicts and make sure that we un-level (that) battlefield in
our favor."

While the new strategy ­ the first of its kind ­ stresses the peaceful
use of space, it also underscores the importance of satellites in both
waging and deterring war.

"We need to ensure that we can continue to utilize space to navigate
with accuracy, to communicate with certainty, to strike with precision
and to see the battlefield with clarity," said William Lynn, deputy
defense secretary.

Lynn and other Pentagon leaders say space has become more congested,
competitive and contested, and the U.S. needs to keep pace on all
fronts.

Gen. James Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
said the U.S. and other nations must develop rules of the road for
space that lay out what is acceptable behavior and movement there.

At a forum put on by the Center for Strategic and International
Studies, Cartwright said nations need to have guideline that govern
the approximately 22,000 manmade objects orbiting earth, including
about 1,100 active satellites.

For example, he said, there is nothing that requires objects to pass
left to left, or that says which country should move its satellite if
two objects are on a collision course.

While avoiding crashes is an important goal, officials said nations
also need to ensure that their communications and other signals
passing through the satellites also do not conflict.

The strategy offers little detail about offensive operations in space.
But defense officials say that China, Iran and others have
demonstrated their abilities to take action in space.

In January 2007, China startled world leaders when it took out a
defunct weather satellite with a warhead launched on board a ballistic
missile.

China's actions made it the first country to destroy a satellite with
a ground-based missile. The U.S. and Russia had shot down satellites,
but the U.S. did it in 1985 with an air-launched missile and the
Soviets with a hunter satellite.

The China shoot-down alarmed officials, who said it signaled the
launch of space wars and would set off a race to militarize space.

According to James Lewis, a national security expert at the Center for
Strategic and International Affairs, an attack against U.S. satellites
can immediately degrade military performance, taking out
communications, data links and other networks needed to operate
weapons, sensors and fighters in the air.

"We need some kind of understanding among spacefaring nations about
what we can and can't do," Lewis said, adding that a key is to have
layers of defense, so there are backups if one set of signals is lost.

The new space strategy, endorsed by top Pentagon and intelligence
officials, also shows the importance of having alternatives. For
example, if a satellite signal is being jammed, officials should be
able to go to another or to an air or sea-based signal.

The U.S. also needs to make it known that even if another nation
attacks an American satellite, the U.S. military response wouldn't be
limited to a space-based action, officials said. It could turn to any
of its warfighting capabilities.


----

Online: National Space Strategy:
http://us.rd.yahoo.com/dailynews/ap/ap_on_re_us/storytext/us_military_in_space/40295813/SIG=10shupgr5/*http://tinyurl.com/4vsdopr

Text Fwd: Assange Covered Space Nukes Protest

* Text fwd by Bruce Gagnon on Feb. 12, 2011

ASSANGE COVERED SPACE NUKES PROTEST

NASA Compuers Hacked Before Galileo Plutonium Launch


The leaflet above was advertising a protest I organized at the space center in Florida in 1989. This was during the period from 1987-1997 were we held one large protest after the other against the nuclearization and weaponization of space. Sometimes there were 500 people there, frequently about 1,000 came, and our biggest ever was more than 5,000.

Just today my son Julian, who grew up attending these events during his childhood, sent me an email with a link to a book written by Suelette Dreyfus with Research by Julian Assange that was published in 1997. The book was called Underground: Front Page. You can find the book here

Julian told me, "One of the debate topics for the Harvard tournament is about WikiLeaks and I've been doing a lot of research on Julian Assange. Here's a link to a book he worked on...read the first chapter!!!"

So I dutifully clicked on the link.

Much to my surprise I found that the authors began their book with an account of the Florida Coalition for Peace & Justice's 1989 campaign to oppose NASA's launch of the Galileo plutonium-238 space probe that garnered international media coverage. This was the first of three major nukes in space campaigns that I led (the others Ulysses in 1990 and Cassini in 1997).

The authors wrote:

For weeks, the protesters had been out in force, demonstrating and seizing media attention. Things had become very heated. On Saturday, 7 October, sign-wielding activists fitted themselves out with gas masks and walked around on street corners in nearby Cape Canaveral in protest. At 8 a.m. on Monday, 9 October, NASA started the countdown for the Thursday blast-off. But as Atlantis's clock began ticking toward take-off, activists from the Florida Coalition for Peace and Justice demonstrated at the centre's tourist complex.

That these protests had already taken some of the shine off NASA's bold space mission was the least of the agency's worries. The real headache was that the Florida Coalition told the media it would `put people on the launchpad in a non-violent protest'. The coalition's director, Bruce Gagnon, put the threat in folksy terms, portraying the protesters as the little people rebelling against a big bad government agency. President Jeremy Rivkin of the Foundation on Economic Trends, another protest group, also drove a wedge between `the people' and `NASA's people'. He told UPI, `The astronauts volunteered for this mission. Those around the world who may be the victims of radiation contamination have not volunteered.'

I'll always remember the 1989 launch of Galileo because it was delayed over and over again for about a week. The international media was gathered at the Kennedy Space Center tourist area with nothing much to do so each day during that week we'd assemble as many activists as we could get and hold another vigil and news conference which helped us tremendously get the word out around the world about the deadly plutonium space launch.

In chapter 1 of this book is a whole section about a computer worm that got planted inside of NASA's computers during this very time. Was the Galileo delay due to a hacker trying to help us stop that launch? Was a hacker also trying to symbolically "sit on the launch pad"? We've got to learn more about this story. I've already pointed it out to journalist Karl Grossman who helped us break the Galileo story open in 1989.

It just goes to show that you never know who is paying attention to your efforts. Who could have known that Julian Assange, who has become such a big name due to his courageous work with Wiki Leaks, would be moved enough by our campaign to feature it in the first chapter of his book? Maybe it was because it was a classic story about out-of-control technology and the "little peoples" reaction. Any way you cut it one has to acknowledge that it has a nice twist.

One side story should be told here as well. My son Julian was nine years old in 1989 and one day I came home and he had my gas mask on. In his most serious voice he told me, "Don't worry Dad, if Galileo blows up I could wear this gas mask for the rest of my life." He was trying to make me feel better. His words cut right to my heart and my soul and virtually every day since that time I have stayed true to the cause because I believe that no child, my own or anyone else's, should ever have to think of living in a radioactive wasteland wearing a gas mask for their whole life.


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)


Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth. ~Henry David Thoreau

Text Fwd: Pax-Americana now available for sale

국문 번역 영화 소개는 여기를 클릭

__________________________________________

* Text sent from Bruce Gagnon on Nov. 28, 2010

The link above (Amazon) is to an Amazon site where you can order the award-winning documentary Pax Americana and the Weaponization of Space.

The prospect of Earth being ruled from space is no longer science-fiction. The dream of the original Dr. Strangelove, Wernher von Braun (from Nazi rocket-scientist to NASA director) has survived every US administration since WW2 and is coming to life. Today the technology exists to weaponize space, a massive American industry thrives, and nations are maneuvering for advantage

Pax Americana tackles this pivotal moment. Are war machines already orbiting Earth? Can treaties keep space weapons-free? Must the World capitulate to one super-cop on the global beat?

With startling archival footage and unprecedented access to US Air Force Space Command, this elegant, forceful documentary reveals the state of play through generals, space-policy analysts, politicians, diplomats, peace activists, and hawks.

To see the trailer from the film click here http://www.pax-americana.com/

Please help spread word about this documentary film.

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)


Thank God men cannot fly, and lay waste the sky as well as the earth. ~Henry David Thoreau

Text Fwd: [J. Narayana Rao] OBAMA’S VISIT OF INDIA 오바마의 인도 방문

* Text sent from J. Narayana Rao on Nov. 20, 2010

OBAMA’S VISIT OF INDIA

J.Narayana Rao,
General Secretary All India Peace & Solidarity Organisation, Maharashtra State Committee,Nagpur.

FNo.207, Kailashpati Apts,Kamptee Road,Nagpur-440 017.

Part-1

The address of US President Barack Obama on the 9th instant in the Indian Parliament House is a magnum opus.His eloquence is hitherto unheard. It was carpe diem. In a very intelligent way while flattering Indan leaders,culture and history he tried to drag India to US orbit and attempted to keep India on the same trajectory of US foreign policy. Indications show that India is not unwilling to follow the US in it’s foreign policy.

It is a negation of the basic values of India’s foreign policy, for India to line up beside US.The Countries which were invaded and the people were butchered and the governments were over thrown by the US empire in Latin America, Asia and Africa will not ignore the overtures of India to tail with US in the name of equal partnership. India has to take many issues of US adventures into consideration to frame it’s foreign policy.

Earlier it was the devil of communism to incite many countries and movements against USSR and other socialist Countries.After the disintegration of USSR the threat of rogue states was brought to the fore and countries like Iran, Cuba, North Korea and Iraq were listed to be attacked.When Iraq was attacked and lakhs of people were butchered and President Saddam Hussein was hanged,it is said that democracy was restored in Iraq not withstanding to the fact it is terrorism that is reigning the roost there.

While feigning peaceful co-existence with Russia and China, US is trying to encircle these countries with Ballistic Missiles and Military Bases.US is stedfastly trying to mobalise ASEAN Countries to sorround China and is now trying to enlist India into this scheme.How India can ignore the diabolical attempts of US to master and weponise space.Obama’s offer to cooperate with India in space is an attempt to drag India in it’s plan of weaponisation of space and missile defence programme.

In the 21ast Century if US wants to play a leading role it has abandon it’s addiction to wars.It has to forget that it is world policeman and shed hegemonism.Iran and N.Korea which are in the immediate hit list have to be protected and India has to show concern on this.US has to be prevented in dabbling in the internal affairs of other countires.Most of the countries in the Latin America have got them self freed from the clutches of military dictatorships supported by US and from the influence of the Multi National Corporations and embarking a road of transition from capitalism to socialism.US is not so naïve to appreciate these changes.At an appropriate time it will try to instigate and patronize the counter revolutionary forces in these countries to destabilize them.

How India can trust the democratic pretenstions of Obama. He should have been politely told that the gunboat diplomacy is not akin to the culture of India.The succsive US presidents of US indulged in wars and aggressions in the world.US aided most notorious military autocracies likeTurkey,Zaire, Chad, Pakistan, Morocco, Indonesia, Honduras,Peru,Colombo, El Salvador,Haiti,Cuba under Batista,Nucaragua under Somoza,Iran under Shah,the Phillippines under Marcos and Portugese under Salazar.Whie professing democracy US engineered destruction of democratically elected Governments in Gautemela.Gyana,the Dominican Republic,Brazil,Chile Uruguay,Syria,Indonesia under Sukarno,Greece,Argentina,Bolivia,Haiti and numerous other Countires by Capitalist Militaries which were funded and aided by he US.

How India can forget that it is the US which has initiated terrorist and fundamentalist vultlures against the Socialist and Progressive Countries.The notorious Al Qaida and Taliban were given birth and funded and trained by US.Even the Kalistan Terrorists were trained in US.In the name of fighting international terrorism US wants to attack countries at will.The expansion of NATO serves only one purpose i.e to attack other countries and threaten Russia and China.All the aggressive wars which the US is waging are from the Military bases which it has set up around the world.Can India afford to ignore this.If it does’t stand up against the US black mail it will face the same fate which Pakistan has become under US patronage.India’s foreign policy cannot be so sterile.Obama’s appeal for India to co- operate with US for Nuclear disarmament is the greatest bluff.If he is really interested in Nuclear disarmament why he is sanctioning more money for modernizing Nuclear Arsenals and approving sub-critical Nuclear tests.

Text Fwd: [Matthew Hoey & Joan Johnson-Freese] India: Militarizing Space with U.S. Help 인도: 미국의 도움으로 우주를 군사화하기

* Texts informed from Matthew Hoey on Nov. 6, 2010

Foreign Policy in Focus
India: Militarizing Space with U.S. Help
By Matthew Hoey and Joan Johnson-Freese,
November 3, 2010

U.S. President Barack Obama and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh have a meeting scheduled in Delhi on November 8. Certain to be on the agenda is the removal of the last remaining export controls on U.S. dual-use technology and military hardware to India, including technology appropriate for development of space weapons. Since President Obama pledged in 2009 to seek a ban on space weapons, the United States should not be helping other countries develop these weapons, especially in dangerous regions that have nuclear weapons on hair-trigger alert. But with the final hurdles of export control removed, Washington could be doing just that for India, with so far little or no objection.

The relationship between the United States and India has been extraordinarily close since 2001. The United States views India as a rising democracy and ally in the fight against radical Islamic fundamentalism. Ten days after 9/11, Washington began to lift sanctions in place against India since its 1998 nuclear tests. Subsequently in 2001 the number of Indian companies on the Commerce Department’s Entity List was reduced to just two from 159.

Additionally, the U.S. licensing policy with India for nuclear- and missile- related technology changed from “policy of denial” to case-by-case review. Since 2006, delegations from the U.S. defense industry, including large numbers of retired high-ranking military officers, have flocked to India to prospect the $32 billion that has been allocated for defense procurement in 2010-11, with $13 billion of that figure set aside for the acquisition of new weapons systems. These defense industry representatives and retired military officials have served as an informal lobbying firm that continues to actively encourage the U.S. government to drop remaining export restrictions on India organizations like the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) and the Defense Research and Development Organization (DRDO). In July 2010, the investment firm Deloitte estimated that India will “spend nearly US$80 billion over the next five years on defense related capital expenditure.”

READ MORE

______________________________________________________

* See also

The Economic Times
5 Nov, 2010
US defence and nuclear deals could touch $15 bn

Text Fwd: [Bruce Gagnon, Bhopal, India] TALKING WITH HIGH-TECH STUDENTS IN THE CITY OF TRAGEDY [브루스 개그논, 인디아 보팔] 비극의 도시에서 하이테크 전공 학생들과의 대화

* Bruce Gagnon blog on Oct. 12, 2010
Tuesday, October 12, 2010
TALKING WITH HIGH-TECH STUDENTS IN THE CITY OF TRAGEDY

October 12

The man in the photo above was living 7 kilometers away from the Union Carbide pesticide factory in Bhopal, India on June 3, 1984 when at midnight a leak released deadly toxic gases into the air that drifted with the winds. The immediate human death toll was around 3,000 as 36 of the 56 municipal wards of Bhopal were impacted (approximately 600,000 of the nearly 900,000 people in the city have suffered various internal injuries). Today this man's face is scared and he, like many others, suffer injuries for which that have never been adequately compensated. To date he has only received $1,000 from Union Carbide.

Retired Army Colonel N. P. Dixit who hosted us throughout this very busy day in Bhopal took us inside the now abandoned Union Carbide plant. Dixit was in charge of the Army unit that loaded thousands of dead bodies into trucks right after the accident. Col. Dixit had to get a permit in order for us to get inside the still guarded but decaying plant.

A court case against Union Carbide on behalf of the victims is still pending. After 25 years of suffering and waiting, the victims, who have organized themselves to fight for proper compensation and treatment, are frustrated and angry at Union Carbide and the U.S. government.

To date the corporation has never apologized to the people of Bhopal despite the strong evidence that the tragic accident was caused by poor maintenance of the facility by the company.

The day began when Rao and I got off the train just after 6:00 am when it arrived in Bhopal. I slept for maybe two hours during the long bumpy all-night train ride from Nagpur. We were met at the station by several students from the National Institute of Technology (NIT) and were taken to the college guesthouse where we had breakfast and a chance for a shower. Soon after we finished eating Col. Dixit appeared with a small entourage and took us on a frenzied half-hour car ride through crowded and chaotic streets to a college on the outskirts of the city. When we arrived at the Bansal College of Technology we were immediately taken to a large meeting room filled with 200 students. After the usual formalities and introductions I spoke to the students about the space work of the Global Network and answered their good questions.

After the talk a group of about ten professors and administrators from the college gathered along with our party for a half-hour discussion about the possibility of the college hosting a future Global Network space organizing conference. They were extremely interested in doing so and Rao promised to follow-up with them in the near future.

When we left we raced back to the NIT where I again spoke to over 200 students being trained in high technology. Local newspapers covered the talk and I was later told that the TV station that filmed part of my speech was from a national network. Following a very lively question session several students approached Rao and told him they wanted to help the Global Network raise consciousness about space warfare issues in their country.

This was my appeal to the students at both colleges. We need your help if we are to prevent the arms race from moving into space. How can the people in a "democratic" society like the U.S. or India participate in a debate about whether their taxes should be used to build space weapons technology if they don't have a clue about the issue? We need students, especially those at technical colleges, to help us teach the public about the space issue.

In discussions following the talk at the NIT the professors and administrators expressed interest in also hosing a future Global Network space conference at their institution (which I was told is the 2nd leading technology institute in the country.) Col. Dixit, who showed great interest and support for the idea of the Global Network conference, pushed both colleges to commit to offering their facilities. His suggestion was that over the course of a weekend, conference events could be scheduled one day at one of the colleges and then on the second day at the other. That way more students and faculty could be involved.

This busy day also included a sit-down interview with a reported at The Hindustan newspaper and then a half-hour meeting with the state cabinet minister who represents Bhopal. This meeting with the conservative (BJP) party member did not bear much fruit as he kept saying he agreed with us about the need to keep space for peace but then on the other hand maintained that if the Indian military said they needed space weapons to deal with China or Pakistan then they should have them, as well as any other military hardware the U.S. could sell them. India is not an aggressive nation he maintained, these weapons would be used to maintain the peace.

Of course that is always the sentiment of those who seek greater funding for miliarization. Since I have been in India I've heard much talk about their hopes to become a "Superpower" and some view the development of anti-satellite (ASAT) weapons as one key ingredient in the stew that would make it possible for India to join the club of mega-warrior states.

I am writing this on the train again as we continue our journey north. We boarded the train at 8:00 pm and will arrive in Agra at 4:45 am. If I am lucky I will get an hour or so of sleep. But listening to the hyperactive five year old in the bunk below me gives me little confidence I will be lucky tonight.

Yes I am just a bit grumpy…..but I will get over it soon enough.

[국문 번역]Text Fwd:[Global Network] against the first launch of Quasi-Zenith Satellite, Japan, on Sept. 11, 2010 일본의 준 천정 위성 첫번째 발사 반대 글로벌 넷워크 성명서

* Image source: same as the below link 아래의 링크와 같음
The orbit of the Japanese Quasi-Zenith Satellite 일본 준정점 위성의 궤도

*Image source 이미지 소스: Anatakara 당신 이후 '무기들은 위성에 의해 공격한다'
(Original source 원래 소스: Vandenberg Protest-Macgregor Eddy blog 밴던버그 시위-맥그리거 에디 블로그)
____________________________________________________________
엎데이트: 국문 기사_일본 위성 발사 성공 (한겨레, 2010년 9월 12일)(클릭)
____________________________________________________________
* Thanks to M.S. M.S. 에 감사합니다.
* Japanese & English 일어와 영어: Anatakara 당신 이후(Click HERE, 여기를 클릭)
____________________________________________________________
* Related Bruce Gagnon blog 관련 브루스 개그논 블로그

Friday, September 10, 2010 2010년 9월 10일
JAPAN TO LAUNCH MILITARY SAT TO HELP CONTROL CHINA [Sept. 11, 2010]
일본, 중국을 통제하는 것을 돕기 위하여 [2010 년 9월 11일] 군사 위성을 발사할 것임

'I was asked by the Japanese board members of the Global Network to send comments about the coming launch of a new military satellite by their country. The comments will be translated and shared widely throughout Japan (with activists and the media) in order to build consciousness about how the U.S. is using space technology is being used to drag Japan into the program to militarily surround and control China. The photo above is of the orbit of the Japanese satellite. Below are my comments: (Bruce K. Gagnon)'

'저는 글로벌 넷워크 보드 일본 자문단 회원들로부터 그들 국가의 새로운 군사 위성의 발사에 관하여 코멘트를 보낼 것을 부탁받았읍니다. 그 코멘트는 미국이 어떻게 중국을 봉쇄하고 통제하기 위한 프로그램에 일본을 끌어들이기 위하여 우주 기술을 이용하는지 의식을 쌓기 위해 일본 전역에 번역되어 널리 공유될 것입니다(활동가들 및 언론) . 위의 사진은 일본 위성의 궤도입니다. 아래는 저의 언급입니다: (브루스 K. 개그논)
____________________________________________________________

Global Network Statement against

the first launch of Quasi-Zenith Satellite, Japan,
on Sept. 11, 2010,

2010년 9월 11일 일본의 준 천정 위성 첫번째 발사에 반대하는
우주의 무기와 핵을 반대하는 글로벌 넷워크 성명서

by Bruce K. Gagnon
브루스 K. 개그논

Sept. 8, 2010
2010년 9월 8일

It has come to the attention of the Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space that JAXA will soon launch the Quasi-zenith satellite (QZS) to serve as a complement to existing U.S. military satellites.

일본 우주 항공 탐험국 (JAXA, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency)이 현존하는 미 군사 위성들을 보완하는 준 정점 위성(Quasi-zenith satellite (QZS))을 곧 발사할 것이라는 소식은 우주의 무기와 핵을 반대하는 글로벌 넷워크의 주의를 불러 일으켰읍니다.

While the public is told that this satellite will be for civilian "peaceful purposes" it is clear to us that these kind of satellites have "dual uses" and will largely be under the control of the military.

대중은 이 위성이 민간용 “평화적 목적” 일 거라 듣지만 이러한 종류의 위성들이 이중 사용들”을 갖고 있고 미국의 통제 하에 크게 있을 거라는 것이 자명합니다.

When one checks the planned orbit for this satellite it is obvious that it will be used to track U.S. Navy objectives in the Asian-Pacific region where the Pentagon is now doubling its military operations in order to control China's emerging economy.

이 위성을 위한 계획된 궤도를 검토하면 미 국방부가 중국의 떠오르는 경제를 통제하기 위하여 현재 군사 작전들을 두 배 증가하고 있는 아시아 태평양 지역들에서 미 해군의 목표들을 추적하기 위해 이 위성이 쓰일 거란 것이 분명합니다.

The U.S. military strategy is to expand military bases in Guam, Okinawa, and South Korea and to open up new Navy porting opportunities in places like Vietnam. At the same time the U.S. is strongly encouraging India to become a junior partner in the space militarization plan aimed at China. Thus China is to be surrounded as NATO expands into the Asian-Pacific region.
All of these new military moves must be tracked and coordinated by space technology. Thus Japan's launch of the QZS helps to give the U.S. military another "platform" and even more capability to "control and dominate" this already dangerous region.

미국 군사 작전들은 괌, 오키나와, 한국에서의 군사 기지들을 확장하고 미국 해군의 새로운 항구 기회들을 베트남에서 여는 것 입니다. 미국은 동시에 중국을 목적으로 한 우주 군사 계획에서 인도가 주니어 파트너가 되도록 인도를 강하게 격려하고 있읍니다. 그러므로 중국은 북대서양 조약 기구가 아시아 태평양 지역에서 확장됨에 따라 봉쇄됩니다. 이 모든 새로운 군사 움직임들은 우주 기술에 의해 추적되고 계획되어야 합니다. 그러므로 일본의 준 정점 위성들은 미국 군대에 또다른 “승강장”을 주는 것을 돕는 것이며 이 이미 위험한 지역에 “통제와 지배를 위한”능력을 주는 것입니다.

It is well-known that China imports a high percentage of its oil through the waters that the QZS will be monitoring. At the same time the U.S. is increasing its so-called "missile defense" presence in South Korea and Japan. It is the Pentagon's goal to be able to choke-off China's ability to import oil thus giving the U.S. the keys to the Chinese economic engine.

중국이 이 준 정점 위성이 감시할 [바다]물들을 통하여 높은 퍼센티지의 석유들을 수입하는 것은 잘 알려져 있읍니다. 동시에 미국은 남한과 일본에서 소위 “미사일 방어망”의 존재를 늘리고 있읍니다. 석유를 수입하는 중국을 옥죄을 수 있어서 미국에게 중국 경제 엔진의 열쇠를 주는 것이 미 국방부의 목표입니다.

These provocative and aggressive U.S. military moves on the grand chessboard will only make the Asian-Pacific more unstable. People in Japan should learn to recognize the "high-tech" signs of Japanese participation in U.S. imperial operations and reject collaboration with them.
All peace loving people in Japan should renounce Japan's launch of the QZS.

이 거대한 체스판의 자극적이고 공격적인 미국 군대 움직임들은 아시아-태평양 지역을 오직 더욱 불안정하게 할 뿐입니다. 일본의 민중들은 미국 제국주의적 작전들의 일본의 ‘첨단 기술’ 신호들의 참여를 깨닫도록 알아야 합니다. 평화를 사랑하는 일본의 모든 민중들은 일본의 준정점 위성 발사를 거부해야 합니다.

Bruce K. Gagnon 브루스 개그논
Coordinator 코디네이터
Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space
우주의 무기와 핵을 반대하는 글로벌 넷워크
PO Box 652
Brunswick, ME 04011
미국 메인주 브런즈윅 우편함 652
(207) 443-9502
globalnet@mindspring.com
www.space4peace.org
http://space4peace.blogspot.com/ (blog)

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* The Mitsubishi that is in charge of this will-be-launched satellite with the JAXA is the very company that has been the target of multiple protests in Korea in the sense that it was the 1st level criminal company to forcefully drag the Koreans into the enforced labor and sex during the Japanese imperialism. When the ROK government announced in January 2009 that the Korea Aerospace choose the Mitsubishi as the company for the multi-purpose satellite Arirang 3 that would be launched in 2011, victims and their families of the Japanese imperialism fiercely protested against the decision. Mitsubishi is also told to be the leading company in the arms industry including the production of the SM3 in Japan. It is clear that the peaceful citizens in Japan and Korea should watch the move of the arms corporations in both countries and make solidarity against their moves.

* 일본 우주 항공 탐험국 (JAXA, Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency) 과 함께 이 발사될 위성의 책임을 맡고 있는 미쭈비시는 일제 시대 강제 노동과 성으로 한국인들을 강제로 끌고 간 첫번째 등급 범죄 회사라는 점에서 한국인들의 무수한 항의의 대상이 되어 왔읍니다. 2009년 1월 한국 정부가 한국 항공 우주가 2011년 발사될 다목적용 위성인 아리랑 3호를 만들 회사로 미쭈비시를 선택했다는 것을 알리자 일제 시대 희생자들 및 그 가족들은 그 결정에 맹렬히 항의했읍니다. 미쭈비시는 일본에서 스탠다드 미사일(SM3)을 생산하는 것을 포함, 무기 산업을 이끄는 회사로 알려져 있읍니다. 일본과 한국의 평화를 사랑하는 시민들은 양 국가의 무기 산업의 움직임을 감시하고 그 것들의 움직임에 반대해 연대를 해야 합니다.
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* M.S. thankfully provided the below materials. Thanks very much, M.S.
* M.S. 가 아래의 자료들을 감사히 제공했읍니다. 매우 감사합니다. M.S.

'English 영문

http://www.jaxa.jp/projects/sat/qzss/index_e.html
http://www.jaxa.jp/press/2010/08/20100804_michibiki_e.html

Japanese 일어

http://globe.asahi.com/feature/100111/memo/02.html
http://www.jaxa.jp/projects/sat/qzss/index_j.html (the same with the first. but with an image
(첫번째와 같으나 이미지와 함께 )
http://www.jaxa.jp/countdown/f18/index_j.html ( the launch facility 발사 시설 )
http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%BA%96%E5%A4%A9%E9%A0%82%E8%A1%9B%E6%98%9F (its orbit 위성 궤도 )

Live broadcasting 실황 방송 (9/11 19:45 JPT for 65 mins. 9월 11일 오후 7시 45분, 65분간)
http://www.jaxa.jp/countdown/f18/live/index_j.html
(entrance when the live show begins 실제 쇼가 시작할 때 들어가는 곳→)　[ ライブ中継を視聴する（ブロードバンド400kbps) ]

*[K. S.] says this space policy of Japan is based on Kurt Campbell's report issued in July, 2003
*[K. S.] 는 일본의 이 우주 정책이 2003년 7월 이슈된 커트 캠벨의 보고서에서 논의되었었다 말합니다.
http://csis.org/files/media/csis/pubs/taskforcereport.pdf ( in English 영어)

[......]

In Dec. 2003 Koizumi introduced the US MD system, without any previous consultation within the cabinet nor Diet deliberation. It seems since around then the heads of Toyota and Canon even agressively began asserting
the revision of Article 9, for without the revision, Japan cannot participate in a possible attack by the US onto any country, even through the coordination by the space satellite network.
The endangered Article 9 still woks, thanks to the then USA which gave it to us back in 1946 (M. S.).'

2003년 12월 코이주미는 행정 수반 모임이나 의회 내 사전 협의없이 미국 미사일 방어망 시스템을 도입했읍니다. 그 때 즈음 토요타와 캐논의 수장들은 9조의 개정을 주장하는 것을 심지어 공격적으로 시작하고 있었던 것처럼 보입니다. 왜냐하면 개정없이 일본은 우주 위성 넷워크 코디네이션을 통하여도 미국의 다른 나라들에 대한 가능한 공격에 참여할 수 없기 때문입니다. 위험에 처한 9조는 아직도 작용합니다. 1946년 우리에게 그것을 돌려준 그 당시 미국 덕분에요. (M. S.)'

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* For the World Space Port 세계 우주 센터 목록,

Click HERE (Beside the United States 미국 외 지역) and HERE(United States 미국)

-->In the first link, You can see the location map of the Tanegashima Space Center, Japan, where the QZS will be lunched on Sept. 11, 2010. Scroll down the mouse.
--> 첫번째 링크에서 2010년 9월 11일 준 정점 위성이 발사될 일본 타네가시마 우주 센터의 위치 지도를 보실 수 있읍니다. 마우스를 내려가세요.

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Text Fwd:[Bruce Gagnon blog] SOME SPICY BITS FROM "TOP SECRET AMERICA"

* Bruce Gagnon blog
Tuesday, July 20, 2010
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* Update on July 22, 2010. Please see here.
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SOME SPICY BITS FROM "TOP SECRET AMERICA"

Knowing that many of you won't have time to read the long Washington Post expose on privatizing intelligence and war I thought I'd post a few interesting bits from the series.

In the end the story is not a surprise but the rich details give some insight into how the corporations have taken near total control of foreign policy and are becoming fat rich bastards to boot.

• In the Department of Defense, where more than two-thirds of the intelligence programs reside, only a handful of senior officials - called Super Users - have the ability to even know about all the department's activities. But as two of the Super Users indicated in interviews, there is simply no way they can keep up with the nation's most sensitive work.

• The result, he added, is that it's impossible to tell whether the country is safer because of all this spending and all these activities. "Because it lacks a synchronizing process, it inevitably results in message dissonance, reduced effectiveness and waste," retired Army Lt. Gen. John R. Vines said. "We consequently can't effectively assess whether it is making us more safe."

• With so many more employees, units and organizations, the lines of responsibility began to blur. To remedy this, at the recommendation of the bipartisan 9/11 Commission, the George W. Bush administration and Congress decided to create an agency in 2004 with overarching responsibilities called the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) to bring the colossal effort under control.

• "You can't find a four-star general without a security detail," said one three-star general now posted in Washington after years abroad. "Fear has caused everyone to have stuff. Then comes, 'If he has one, then I have to have one.' It's become a status symbol."

• When hired, a typical analyst knows very little about the priority countries - Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan - and is not fluent in their languages. Still, the number of intelligence reports they produce on these key countries is overwhelming, say current and former intelligence officials who try to cull them every day.

• Within the Defense Department alone, 18 commands and agencies conduct information operations, which aspire to manage foreign audiences’ perceptions of U.S. policy and military activities overseas...... And all the major intelligence agencies and at least two major military commands claim a major role in cyber-warfare, the newest and least-defined frontier.

• So great is the government's appetite for private contractors with top-secret clearances that there are now more than 300 companies, often nicknamed "body shops," that specialize in finding candidates, often for a fee that approaches $50,000 a person, according to those in the business.

• "This is a terrible confession," Robert Gates said. "I can't get a number on how many contractors work for the Office of the Secretary of Defense," referring to the department's civilian leadership.

• The privatization of national security work has been made possible by a nine-year "gusher" of money, as Gates recently described national security spending since the 9/11 attacks....
  With so much money to spend, managers do not always worry about whether they are spending it effectively....."Someone says, 'Let's do another study,' and because no one shares information, everyone does their own study," said Elena Mastors, who headed a team studying the al-Qaeda leadership for the Defense Department. "It's about how many studies you can orchestrate, how many people you can fly all over the place. Everybody's just on a spending spree. We don't need all these people doing all this stuff."

• The National Security Agency, which conducts worldwide electronic surveillance, hires private firms to come up with most of its technological innovations. The NSA used to work with a small stable of firms; now it works with at least 484 and is actively recruiting more.

• Contractors can offer more money - often twice as much - to experienced federal employees than the government is allowed to pay them. And because competition among firms for people with security clearances is so great, corporations offer such perks as BMWs and $15,000 signing bonuses, as Raytheon did in June for software developers with top-level clearances.

• Hiring contractors was supposed to save the government money. But that has not turned out to be the case. A 2008 study published by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence found that contractors made up 29 percent of the workforce in the intelligence agencies but cost the equivalent of 49 percent of their personnel budgets. Gates said that federal workers cost the government 25 percent less than contractors.

• [General Dynamics] embraced the emerging intelligence-driven style of warfare. It developed small-target identification systems and equipment that could intercept an insurgent's cellphone and laptop communications. It found ways to sort the billions of data points collected by intelligence agencies into piles of information that a single person could analyze.....It also began gobbling up smaller companies that could help it dominate the new intelligence landscape, just as its competitors were doing.....The company reported $31.9 billion in revenue in 2009, up from $10.4 billion in 2000. Its workforce has more than doubled in that time, from 43,300 to 91,700 employees, according to the company.

• Another official, a longtime conservative staffer on the Senate Armed Services Committee, described it as "a living, breathing organism" impossible to control or curtail. "How much money has been involved is just mind-boggling," he said. "We've built such a vast instrument. What are you going to do with this thing? . . . It's turned into a jobs program."

• From the road, it's impossible to tell how large the NSA has become, even though its buildings occupy 6.3 million square feet - about the size of the Pentagon - and are surrounded by 112 acres of parking spaces. As massive as that might seem, documents indicate that the NSA is only going to get bigger: 10,000 more workers over the next 15 years; $2 billion to pay for just the first phase of expansion; an overall increase in size that will bring its building space throughout the Fort Meade cluster to nearly 14 million square feet.

• Loudoun County, ranked as the wealthiest county in the country, helps supply the workforce of the nearby National Reconnaissance Office headquarters, which manages spy satellites. Fairfax County, the second-wealthiest, is home to the NRO, the CIA and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Arlington County, ranked ninth, hosts the Pentagon and major intelligence agencies. Montgomery County, ranked 10th, is home to the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. And Howard County, ranked third, is home to 8,000 NSA employees.

• The schools, indeed, are among the best, and some are adopting a curriculum this fall that will teach students as young as 10 what kind of lifestyle it takes to get a security clearance and what kind of behavior would disqualify them.

My Comments:

All this reenforces for me the whole notion that America's role under corporate globalization of the world economy will be "security export".

I am reminded of the Crown family from Chicago that have been significant owners of General Dynamics. They were early supporters of Obama's campaign for president and early on did national fundraising for him. They also opened the door to national Jewish community support for him. You could say they have an investment in Obama.

As one line above says, this is becoming a jobs program. And good paying jobs, with huge perks, for those hired. All you have to do to be hired is bury your judgement and your conscience. You have to be willing to advocate and lobby for a continuation of this massive gravy train. This puts you in league with fascist elements who are then using people's greed to help construct a global military machine whose principal purpose is to advance the interests of corporate capital.

I'd love to see the "fiscal conservatives" and Tea Baggers take a crack at this one. Instead of complaining about immigrants getting treatment at the hospital emergency room they ought to be publicly taking on the corruption, waste, fraud, and abuse that is now at unheard of levels.

More than that the conservatives and Tea Baggers should be first in line to question our "liberty and freedom" being lost as we lose our democracy to the forces of denial, secrecy, greed, and imperialism.

All being funded by working class people who won't get anything out of all this except the tax bill and fewer rights.

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* Related blogs from Bruce Gagnon's Organizing Notes

http://space4peace.blogspot.com/2010/07/top-secret-air-and-space-ops.html
Monday, July 19, 2010
TOP SECRET AIR AND SPACE OPS

'434 results for Air and satellite operations

27 government organizations/50 companies

Government Organization/HQ Location/Number of Locations/Number of Contracting Companies'

To see the Frontline trailer click below:




http://space4peace.blogspot.com/2010/07/outsourcing-intelligence-and-war.html
Monday, July 19, 2010
OUTSOURCING INTELLIGENCE AND WAR