OFF TO NEW YORK CITY FOR STAR WARS TALKS

I take the train to New York City in the morning for several days of talks in Manhattan, Great Neck, and Staten Island. While there I will also be interviewed on WBAI (Pacifica) radio. Should be an exciting trip.

One of the key issues I'll be talking about is Bush's extremely controversial plan to deploy Star Wars radars and interceptors in Europe. First it was Poland and the Czech Republic. Now they are pressing Britain to come onside. Who will be next?

Angry members of the British parliament (MPs) are pressuring the new Prime Minister Gordon Brown to uphold his promise that the Parliament will be involved in these kinds of major decisions. But Brown just met with Bush, got his marching orders, and returned to the UK to show that he, like Tony Blair before him, will be a lapdog (poodle) for the U.S. administration.

Plans are underway in Britain to upgrade the U.S. spy base Menwith Hill in Yorkshire so that it can become a key link in the Star Wars gambit. The facility would help direct warfare in space by having new radomes come online that would be directly connected to new military satellites.

There is also a proposal floating around that would have Menwith Hill become a deployment site for "missile defense" interceptors.

By now you'd think the U.S. would figure out that plunking down these systems in Europe will drive a massive new peace movement throughout the continent. But the U.S. is desperate to get these deployments going before the 2008 elections so they will be hard to remove by either party.

Probably as important is the issue of cost. These space technology systems are so expensive that even the U.S. can't afford them - that's right, even after they drain the social programs they still won't have enough money to pay for them. So they need to drag the allies into the plan in order to get them to help put up the funds to pay for this new space warfare technology program.

So look for cuts in national health service in the UK, Canada, Australia, Japan and other countries as we drag them into this deadly game.

The timing could not have been more perfect as the British Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) is planning to hold an international conference on September 1 called US Missile Defence- towards a new Cold War? I will be traveling to London to speak at the event and will also do a nine-city speaking tour around England, Wales and Scotland.

The September 1 conference follows on from the 150-strong Prague Conference in May which saw delegates from 14 organisations spanning 9 European countries come together to formulate strategies and joint campaigns to oppose US plans for National Missile Defence, or so-called ‘Son of Star Wars’, bases in Europe.