EricMoulds80
A Disturbance in the Force
The following is a chapter from John Lasker's "TECHNOIR: 13 Investigations from the Darkside of Technology, the US Military and UFOs ($6.95)"
The Emerging U.S. Space Weapons Arsenal
The Greatest Trojan Horse – Ever?
The Greatest Trojan Horse – Ever?
For a year, Bruce Gagnon had the same nagging feeling. That someone or some people were on the edges of his life, trying hard to look in. Were they parked around the block in their black Ford SUV with tinted windows? Or like a cyberspace shadow, could they be following every move he made on the Internet? He just knew it; something wasn't quite right. Or was he just being paranoid? Was his status as the director of one of world’s fastest growing arms-control movements getting the best of him?
Then Gagnon received an unexpected phone call. It was a lawyer from Florida’s American Civil Liberties Union. The ACLU lawyer right away told him: You and your family are being spied on by NASA, the Air Force and the Brevard County Sheriffs Department, which basically is a bunch of good ‘ole boys from near the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, where Gagnon had often protested. He would soon find out this posse of spies had conducted background checks on him and his son. The spies were also monitoring the arms-control web site he ran, and attending Kennedy Space Center protests incognito; protests he had coordinated.
Gagnon instincts, once again, had warned him right: There's a lot of people out there who don't think too highly of him or what he does. The 50-something Gagnon directs the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space from his office in Maine. The Global Network’s aim is to stop all and any weapons, along with any nuclear powered technology, from ever being deployed past Earth's atmosphere. He established the Global Network in 1992, and today it is considered one of the fastest-growing peace activist groups across the globe.
“We’re a small organization with meager resources,” said Gagnon from his Maine office during an interview for this book. “They feel threatened by us? That tells us something.” The ACLU filed a number of Freedom of Information seeking records that may reveal the entire scope of the government’s probe. “NASA states, in these documents, that they (also) have ‘confidential sources’ in Britain and Belgium monitoring Global Network activities,” said Florida ACLU attorney Kevin Aplin to this reporter.
Why would the Pentagon, home to the world’s greatest and smartest warriors, be so interested in a small bare-to-the-bones peace activist group?
“Space weapons,” says Gagnon, a veteran of the US Air Force.
Space is militarized with spy satellites, but space is not weaponized with “Battlesats”, for example, or killer satellites loaded with lasers or missile. However, putting weapons in space, or creating weapons that can destroy targets in space, is the arms race for the 21st century, say experts. An arms race that was re-ignited by the Bush administration, China, and to a lesser degree, Russia. An arms race -- under the shroud of missile defense -- that has US aerospace industry drooling for more. Building constellations of Battlesats, for example, could mean hundreds-of-billions of dollars for the industry.
It is believed they’re no weapons in space at the moment. But there are weapons on the ground that have the proven capability of taking out targets in space. Weapons that have already made aerospace giants such as Lockheed Martin and Boeing, and their executives, very, very rich.
Indeed, new markets and new territory are opening up for these mega-aerospace corporations. In November of 2010, President Obama at NATO's summit Lisbon, Portugal, triumphed European's planned missile shield which will be armed with US missile defense systems.
Under the Obama plan – dubbed by the Pentagon as the Phased Adaptive Approach for Missile Defense in Europe, and pushed hard by Secretary of Defense Robert Gates – US Navy destroyers armed with Aegis interceptors, which can obliterate space-based targets, will be stationed by 2011 in the Eastern Mediterranean, Adriatic and Baltic seas, and with possible future deployments in the North Sea. The Phased Adaptive Approach also calls for land-based interceptor batteries and radar sites, with the first systems set up in Romania by 2015 and Poland by 2018. Washington is waiting on whether Turkey will approve additional sites, as well.
Russia’s role in European missile shield is not clear, but Russian officials have said publicly Moscow would have authority over one of “the defense quadrants.”
But Moscow has said if it is not given equal responsibility it will back out of any cooperation. Bruce Gagnon, director for the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space, believes Moscow has good reason to be wary of NATO.
“Russia is not really on-board because NATO is not serious about making them full partners, and in the coming months we will likely see it break down between NATO and Russia,” he said. “Russia had no choice but to call the US-NATO bluff and say, ‘Sure we’ll play along.’”
Gagnon and other peace activist organizations such as No to NATO, which claims NATO’s early 21st century mission is based on intervention and armament, says Russia is feeling NATO closing in on them.
“Russia does view [European missile defense] as a threat because they clearly see NATO expanding eastward after being promised by the US after the fall of the Berlin Wall that NATO would not expand one centimeter eastward,” says Gagnon. “US missile bases in Romania and potential NATO bases in Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia and Georgia, give Russia the clear message that they’re being targeted with these missile defense systems despite the rhetoric about it being about Iran.”
For instance, NATO and the White House are championing the European missile defense shield partially based on intelligence allegations that North Korea secretly gave Iran 19 BM-25 ballistic missile with a range of 2,000 miles. This intelligence nugget recently went public via WikiLeaks, but since then, missile defense experts have cast doubt on the transfer, openly wondering if the intelligence is bogus so to advance a European missile defense shield.
Feared by the Pentagon, despised by space-weapons lobbyists, loathed by corrupt African governments, and stalked by UFO hoaxers. That's life for John Lasker, an investigative journalist who's originally from Buffalo, NY, and currently residing in Columbus, Ohio. Lasker has written for Wired, Christian Science Monitor, Fate magazine, Space News, Los Angeles CityPaper and many, many more.
