NYT pro-space war article quotes Gagnon near end

 

Nury Vittachi (featured in this video) is a Sri Lankan journalist living in Hong Kong. 

 

On May 17 the New York Times (NYT) ran a front page story entitled:  

New Star Wars Plan: Pentagon Rushes to Counter Threats in Orbit

 

Citing rapid advances by China and Russia, the United States is building an extensive capacity to fight battles in space.

 

 

The article follows the usual mainstream corporate media script of pumping up the Russia and China threat, demanding more $$$ for the Space Force in order for the US to remain in 'control and domination' of space, and quotes various generals, aerospace industry boosters and political hacks from congressional districts (like Huntsville, Alabama) that are deeply involved in pushing a new arms race into space.

 

I was called by the NYT reporter who wrote the story and we spent at least 30 minutes discussing all the key aspects of the issue that I've been working on since 1982. 

 

Issues like the US and Israel blocking a new space weapons ban treaty at the United Nations for the past 20-some years, the Space Command planning document from 1997 called 'Vision for 2020' that lays out the whole sordid U.S. space strategy, the nuclear industry agenda to put nuclear power into space for mining the planetary bodies and to power space-based weapons, Pentagon planning of first-strike attacks on Russia and China using space weapons, the enormous cost of 'Star Wars' and much more.

 

 

 

In the end this quote by me appeared near the very end of the long article: 

 

Others contend that the United States itself is pushing too hard to turn space into a war-fighting zone.

 

“This is a quest for domination by the U.S.,” said Bruce Gagnon, a longtime peace activist from Maine who has called for a ban on all weapons in space.

 

The Pentagon is hardly deterred. It is working to coordinate its so-called counter-space efforts with major allies, including Britain, Canada and Australia, through a multinational operation called Operation Olympic Defender.

It reminds me of the media biz tale about calling someone for one or two lines that a reporter needs to fit into a story to cover the long gone concern about giving 'both sides' - what they used to name the 'fairness doctrine'. Reporters these days just call it 'dial a quote'.

 

Still it is the NYT.  

 

But that paper has been turned into a trash newspaper owned by greedy Wall Street oligarchs who ensure that 'All the news that is fit to print' has since been put through the wringer and comes out flattened and bled to death.

 

As Noam Chomsky said many years ago, 'How can you expect the American people to react to something they don't know anything about'?

 

Bingo!

 

When we first started out on this issue in the early 80's we could get some fairly regular coverage by corporate media. Even into the 90's that was still the case when the CBS-TV program 60 Minutes covered our protest and lawsuit against the launch of the Cassini plutonium probe in 1997.  But soon after that it mostly dried up and now we almost exclusively rely on alternative media outlets.

 

Journalism is not what it once was.

Bruce