Loud & Clear continues our weekly segment dealing with the ongoing militarization of space.
As the US continues to withdraw from international arms treaties, will the weaponization and militarization of space bring the world closer to catastrophe?
Brian and John speak with Prof. Karl Grossman, author of six books and the host of a nationally-aired television program focused on environmental, energy, and space issues, and by Bruce Gagnon, coordinator of the Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space. Power in Space
For days we've been treated to Mainstream media (MSM) insinuations that President Trump may have betrayed the United States after a whistleblower lodged an 'urgent' complaint about something Trump promised another world leader - the details of which the White House has refused to share.
Then, we learned it was a phone call.
Then, we learned it was several phone calls.
Now, we learn it wasn't Russia or North Korea - it was Ukraine!
Here's the scandal; It appears that Trump, may have made promises to newly minted Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky - very likely involving an effort to convince Ukraine to reopen its investigation into Joe Biden and his son Hunter, after Biden strong armed Ukraine's prior government into firing its top prosecutor - something Trump and his attorney Rudy Giuliani have pursued for months. There are also unsupported rumors that Trump threatened to withhold $250 million in aid to help Ukraine fight [self-defense forces in eastern Ukraine].
Moreover, here's why Trump and Giuliani are going to dig their heels in; last year Biden openly bragged about threatening to hurl Ukraine into bankruptcy as Vice President if they didn't fire their top prosecutor, Viktor Shokin - who was leading a wide-ranging corruption investigation into a natural gas firm whose board Hunter Biden sat on. [Following the US orchestrated 2014 coup in Ukraine V-P Biden got his son appointed to a Ukrainian fossil fuel company board of directors.]
In his own words, with video cameras rolling, Biden described how he threatened Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko in March 2016 that the Obama administration would pull $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees, sending the former Soviet republic toward insolvency, if it didn’t immediately fire Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin. [See video above]
"I said, ‘You’re not getting the billion.’ I’m going to be leaving here in, I think it was about six hours. I looked at them and said: ‘I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money,’" bragged Biden, recalling the conversation with Poroshenko.
"Well, son of a bitch, he got fired. And they put in place someone who was solid at the time," Biden said at the Council on Foreign Relations event - while insisting that former president Obama was complicit in the threat.
In short, there's both smoke and fire here - and what's left of Biden's 2020 bid for president may be the largest casualty of the entire whistleblower scandal.
Trump can simply say he was protecting America from someone who may have used his position of power to directly benefit his own family at the expense of justice.
Congressional Democrats, meanwhile, are acting as if they've found the holy grail of taking Trump down. On Thursday, the House Intelligence Committee chaired by Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) interviewed inspector general Michael Atkinson, with whom the whistleblower lodged their complaint - however despite three hours of testimony, he repeatedly declined to discuss the content of the complaint.
Following the session, Schiff gave an angry speech - demanding that acting Director of National Intelligence Joseph Maguire share the complaint, and calling the decision to withhold it "unprecedented."
"We cannot get an answer to the question about whether the White House is also involved in preventing this information from coming to Congress," said Schiff, adding "We’re determined to do everything we can to determine what this urgent concern is to make sure that the national security is protected."
[It's interesting that suddenly the Democrats love 'whistle blowers' - would be nice to see them share some of that love for Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning.]
And so - what the MSM doesn't appear to understand is that President Trump is asking Ukraine to investigate Biden over something with legitimate underpinnings.
Which - of course, may lead to the Bidens' adventures in China, which Giuliani referred to in his CNN interview. And just like his Ukraine scandal, it involves actions which may have helped his son Hunter - who was making [money] hand over fist in both countries.
Journalist Peter Schweizer, the author of Clinton Cash and now Secret Empires discovered that in 2013, then Vice President Biden and his son Hunter flew together to China on Air Force Two and two weeks later, Hunter's firm inked a private equity deal for $1 billion with a subsidiary of the Chinese government's Bank of China, which expanded to $1.5 billion.
A group of us peaceniks attended the Student Climate Strike in Portland, Maine last Friday. Several of us arrived early and held signs and banners across the street from City Hall where the event was held. The newspaper reported that about 2,000 people turned out for the spirited event.
It was quite moving to see various schools (Middle, High school and college students) march down the street to city hall - they each got a rousing applause as they approached.
Several of us handed out over 350 of your Conversion of Bath Iron Works flyers as part of our statewide campaign to expand public consciousness about the Pentagon's contribution to climate change.
Here are a few more photos of some of us as we vigil across from city hall before the big show began. (Photos by Peter Woodruff - click on the photos for a better view.)
Lisa Savage (right) with her daughter-in-law and granddaughter
Jason Rawn (left) and Mark Roman
Peter Morgan (right) and I talking with a man who told us he already got our flyer from a neighbor. Nice to know they are getting around so well.
The US Navy has confirmed the UFO footage caught on tape by US military
members is authentic. These leaked unidentified flying object (UFO)
sightings show the flying objects skyrocketing through air space used
for Naval training in 2004 and 2015.
Two of these US military UFOs
videos were published by the New York Times and Blink 182 member Tom
Delonge's research org in 2017. Delong has long been interested in
aliens and UFO video.
In 2018, the Solomon Islands, in the South Pacific, hosted the Melanesian Arts & Cultural Festival, celebrating the country’s fortieth anniversary of independence. On neighboring island states, the struggle for freedom continues, as West Papua resists Indonesian occupation and the residents of New Caledonia still live under French rule.
In all Melanesian countries, residents face the common challenge of climate change, as rising sea levels threaten to swallow both land and tradition. In this charged context, captivating performers are using their talents to celebrate local culture and draw international attention to their islands’ plight, with the hope of spurring international solidarity and prompting collective action against the perils of a warming world.
Featuring striking footage from the South Pacific islands, WANTOKS: Dance of Resilience in Melanesia, profiles the artists and activists who are fighting for self-determination while trying to defend their homes against the rising sea.
Yours,
iara lee and the whole team
Cultures Of Resistance Network - Founder
Former US military veterans Ken Mayers (82) & Tarak Kauff (77) take a couple of hours out from their three-week walk from Shannon to Malin Head in Ireland to talk about their Shannon Airport St. Patrick's Day peace action.
Eddie Mitchell of Love Leitrim talks about the urgent need to oppose the import of US fracked gas to the Shannon Estuary.
Melting Arctic ice - dangerous American mess below!!!
The melting of Greenland’s ice cap is set to expose Camp Century, a US
military base that hid a top-secret project along with its nuclear and
other toxic waste. It was meant to be buried forever – entombed in ice.
But the rising temperatures mean that the cold war camp and its
hazardous remains could be exposed within decades. Our Chief
Correspondent Alex Thomson reports from western Greenland.
The story behind Yemen's attack on Saudi oil fields
The attack on Saudi Arabia's oil
facilities.
How was it possible that Yemen could hit Saudi oil fields with slow lumbering drones while 'mighty' US Patriot missile defense systems failed to work?
This video shares the story - something we can't find in the US media - at least up to this point.
Could it be because the Neo-cons that run Washington want to keep saying that Iran did it - using this event as justification for a full-scale war and regime change in Tehran?
A very good article on the same subject can be found here
Julian Assange's first hack was the Galileo plutonium launch in 1989
I've posted this previously on this blog but with Keep Space for Peace Week coming soon, and Julian Assange wasting away in a British prison, I thought it a good time to re-post. Bruce
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 where 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.
In 2011 my son Julian [a debate coach], 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, "Dad, 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
P.S.
More detail showing how involved Assange was during our 1989 campaign in Florida to stop the plutonium launch of Galileo space mission can be found here:
Clip:
"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 ...
... 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"...
This is War, a show about how current conflicts are made, about wars
that have ended, are in progress now, or will start soon.
In this show it is revealed that the American government buys weaponry in Eastern European countries and
hands them over to terrorist groups in Syria and Yemen.
Earlier, experts
supposed this was happening. Now, they have evidence.
Can we acknowledge that the US government is run by a criminal corporate syndicate?
