A BUZZFLASH READER COMMENTARY by Libby Hicks

Wouldn't you think someone in the mainstream media would develop a memory? How recently did this administration lie about the reasons for invading Iraq?

So suddenly Bush is JFK, and he has announced new plans for going to the moon and to Mars because he is an idealistic space visionary at heart?

While at least a few reporters are covering Ted Kennedy's speech about Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and the Project for a New American Century, would someone in the media please click on to PNAC's "Rebuilding America's Defenses" -- the classic in which a longing for another Pearl Harbor is expressed -- and then scroll down to the section about space? Read about their real plan for space -- as a battlefield under total military control of the US.

The authors of the report viewed it as a hindrance to their goals that the National Reconnaissance Office (which appropriates funds) did not share their vision. When Bush took office, the priorities of the NRO changed.

In an article entitled "U.S. 'Negation' policy in space raises concerns abroad" (EE Times, 5/22/03), Loring Wirbel wrote the following:

...The nation's largest intelligence agency by budget and in control of all U.S. spy satellites, NRO is talking openly with the U.S. Air Force Space Command about actively denying the use of space for intelligence purposes to any other nation at any time-not just adversaries, but even longtime allies, according to NRO director Peter Teets.

At the National Space Symposium in Colorado Springs in early April, Teets proposed that U.S. resources from military, civilian and commercial satellites be combined to provide "persistence in total situational awareness, for the benefit of this nation's war fighters." If allies don't like the new paradigm of space dominance, said Air Force secretary James Roche, they'll just have to learn to accept it. The allies, he told the symposium, will have "no veto power."

Beginning next year, NRO will be in charge of the new Offensive Counter-Space program, which will come up with plans to specifically deny the use of near-Earth space to other nations, said Teets.

The program will include two components: the Counter Communication System, designed to disrupt other nations' communication networks from space; and the Counter Surveillance Reconnaissance System, formed to prevent other countries from using advanced intelligence-gathering technology in air or space.

"Negation implies treating allies poorly," Robert Lawson, senior policy adviser for nonproliferation in the Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs, said at a Toronto conference in late March. "It implies treaty busting."

Hints of such a policy showed up in the Rumsfeld Commission report of January 2001, which warned of a "space Pearl Harbor" if the United States did not dominate low-earth, geosynchronous and polar orbital planes, as well as all launch facilities and ground stations, to exploit space for battlefield advantage...

Meanwhile, Maj. Gen. Judd Blaisdell, director of the Air Force Space Operations Office, said recently, "We are so dominant in space that I pity a country that would come up against us..."

Actually, I sort of pity us.

Libby Hicks