PRAGUE CONFERENCE OPPOSES U.S. RADAR BASE

I leave this morning for Prague in the Czech Republic to participate in an international conference opposing U.S. deployment of a Star Wars radar base in their country.

I would venture to guess that activists from Poland will also be in attendance as they are protesting U.S. plans to plunk down 10 "missile defense" interceptors in their country as well. (Much to our delight we just learned that they held a protest on Oct 13 in Warsaw as part of our Keep Space for Peace Week.)

As has been stated in this blog several times lately the Russian government sees these deployments in their backyard as intended for them and not Iran as the Bush pirate team claims. While returning on the plane from Iowa the other day I picked up a local paper and found a good article about all of this that reported top U.S. physicists have concluded that Bush's Missile Defense Agency (MDA) used "inaccurate claims to reassure NATO allies about missile defense plans in Eastern Europe."

The Associated Press story went on to quote MIT professor Ted Postol saying, "The claim [that the interceptors and radar would be used against Iran] by the MDA is not correct. And it is hard to understand how they could get something so basic wrong."

The physicists say the MDA's presentations were misleading and inconsistent on key points.

The MDA has maintained that "The reason we selected Poland and the Czech Republic for the potential positions of these assets is because it was optimum for the Iranian threat. They are not positioned to where we can even catch the Russian missiles with these interceptors."

The AP story reported that, "The dissenting scientists say both claims are incorrect: the interceptors could catch Russian ICBMs."

So there we have it - pure and simple. The Bush team is indeed moving to surround Russia, likely because they are the world's largest producer of natural gas. They also have a lot of oil and have been opposing U.S. plans to put pipelines along the Caspian Sea to move oil to western markets.

The resistance to these U.S. moves is growing daily throughout Europe because they are spurring a deadly new arms race.

We in the U.S. must now stand strongly in support of the European peace movement to resist these efforts. And we must call on both parties in the U.S. to end their support for these deployments.

I just want to remind readers that Rep. Ellen Tauscher (D-CA) very recently took a trip to Poland and the Czech Republic to meet with their leaders. While there she told them, "We have bipartisan support for these deployments in the U.S. Congress." Tauscher serves on the powerful Armed Services Committee in the House of Representatives.

The Democrats do support the empire.