HEADING TO VANCOUVER

 Early on Wednesday morning I will be taking a bus to the Boston airport and then fly on to Victoria, British Columbia. During that long flight, I will have an eight-hour layover in Toronto. It will turn out to be a long day.

I'll speak in Victoria on Thursday evening and then head to Vancouver on Friday for the World Peace Forum. The Global Network has coordinated the space track of workshops at the forum and we are looking forward to seeing many old friends from around the world at the event. Thanks to a Secure World Foundation grant we were able to provide significant transportation assistance to 16 people so they could come to the event.

At this point we are still waiting on the Bush administration to announce their new national space policy. It is expected that the new policy will give the green light to operational testing, and likely deployment, of anti-satellite weapons (ASATS) that so far Congress and previous administrations have restricted.

Also under development at this moment is the military space plane that would give the U.S. the ability to rapidly launch attacks on any part of the world from orbit. The space plane would descend from orbit, drop an attack, then fly back up into orbit. The Space Command has been war gaming this kind of attack for the past several years using computer simulation. The first-strike attack has so far been directed, during the war games, on China.

So we have much to discuss at the World Peace Forum as we gather our key peace in space organizers and work to share what we know with many new interested people. You can expect that the U.S. government will have their spies on-hand to take names and listen for any organizing plans that come forward. We know they are watching us, and in fact reading this blog regularly. The ACLU just last week launched a national lawsuit on behalf of 40 peace groups in the U.S. who are seeking the up-to-this-point secret files gathered on them. The Global Network is one of the 40 organizations that the ACLU is representing in the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit.

I will try to post as often as I can while on this trip but I am not certain what kind of Internet connection I will find available.

Best wishes to all our readers.