The Sprit of Apollo-Soyuz Is Alive… With the Russia/China Space Alliance

Matthew Ehret August 1, 2020

Forty five years ago, Cold Warriors in the Pentagon and CIA shook their fists angrily at the stars- and for good reason.

On July 17, 1975 the first international handshake was occurring in space between Russian Cosmonaut Alexei Leonov and American astronaut Thomas Stafford as the first official act kicking off the historic Apollo-Soyuz cooperative mission. Taking place during age of nuclear terror on Earth, the Apollo-Soyuz represented a great hope for humankind and was the first ever international space mission leading the way to the MIR-USA cooperation and later International Space Station. Starting on July 15 as both Russian and American capsules launched simultaneously and continuing until July 24^th, the Apollo-Soyuz cooperation saw astronauts and cosmonauts conducting joint experiments, exchanged gifts, and tree seeds later planted in each others’ nations.

As hope for a bright future of cooperation and co-discovery continued for the coming decades with mankind’s slow emergence as a space faring species, affairs on earth devolved in disturbing ways. A new era of regime change operations, Islamic terrorism and oil geopolitics took on new life in the 1980s and as globalization stripped formerly productive nations of their industrial/scientific potential, the Soviet Union collapsed by 1991. During this dark time, the consolidation of a corporatocracy under NAFTA and the European Maastricht Treaty occurred and transatlantic globalists gloated over the collapse of Russia and the rise of a utopian end-of-history, unipolar order.

In some ways, today’s world of 2020 is different from that of 1975 and in other ways it is disturbingly similar.

Today, a new generations of Cold Warriors has come to power in the Trans Atlantic Deep State who are willing to burn the earth under nuclear fire in defense of their utopian visions for world government which they see fast slipping away to the Multipolar alliance led by Russia and China. The clash of open vs closed system paradigms represented by the NATO/City of London cage on the one hand and the New Silk Road win-win paradigm of constant growth on the other has created a tension which is visceral and pregnant with potential for both good and evil.

This schism has also split American space policy between two opposing paradigms:

On the one hand a Deep State space vision for full spectrum dominance is defining Space Force (America’s newest branch of the military created in December 2019). Run out of the Pentagon and the most regressive neocon ideologues, this program calls for weaponizing space against the Russian Chinese alliance (and the rest of the world). Another, more sane vision for space is represented by leading NASA officials like Jim Bridenstine who have created NASA’s Artemis Accords calling for a framework for peaceful international cooperation in space. Bridenstine and other NASA officials have worked tirelessly to bring Russia and the USA into cooperative alliances on matters of space mining, asteroid defense and deep space exploration ever since President Trump’s 2017 directive to put mankind back on the moon for the first time since 1972 with plans to go to Mars following soon thereafter.

While U.S.-Russia space collaboration has moved at a snails pace even losing ground won in 1975, the Apollo-Soyuz spirit has expressed itself in another part of the world brilliantly, with the Russian-Chinese pact to jointly build a lunar base announced on July 23 by Roscosmos chief Dimitry Rogozin saying: “Recently, we have agreed that we will probably research the Moon and build a lunar research base together – Russia and China.”

This pact follows hot off the heals of the September 2019 agreement between both nations to jointly collaborate on Lunar activities over the coming decade which would begin with the Chang’e 7 lander and Luna 26 orbiter searching for lunar water in 2022. The Russia-China agreement also announced “creating and operating a joint Data Center for Lunar and Deep Space Research.”

On the same day that Rogozin announced the lunar research base, China’s Tianwen-1 (“Quest for Heavenly Truth”) launched on a Long March-5 carrier rocket from Hainan carrying an orbiter and rover scheduled to arrive in Mars’ orbit in February 2021. Once the rover lands on the surface of the red planet on May 2021, China will become the second nation to complete a successful soft landing after America (which has made 8 such landings since 1976, two of which are still operational). China’s orbiter will join the three American, two European and one Indian orbiters currently circling Mars.

Due to the fact that the Earth-Mars proximity is at it’s closest phase, several other important Mars launches have also occurred, with the United Arab Emirates launching the Arab world’s first interplanetary mission in history from Japan on Monday. This will be followed in short order by America’s Perseverance Mars Rover which will be launched from Cape Canaveral and will join the Curiosity rover that landed in 2012.

NASA has stated that Perseverance’s mission will involve seeking signs of microbial life, ancient life and subsurface water as well as “testing a method for producing oxygen from the Martian atmosphere, identifying other resources (such as subsurface water), improving landing techniques, and characterizing weather, dust, and other potential environmental conditions that could affect future astronauts living and working on Mars.”

What makes this Russia-China pact space pact additionally important is that it creates a potential flank in the anti-China space cooperation ban signed into law with the 2011 Wolf Act. By integrating into China’s advanced space program, Russia (which currently suffers from no similar bans to cooperation from western powers) may provide a lateral pathway for cooperation with China needed to bypass the ban. Russian-USA plans to cooperate on such programs as the Lunar Gateway station orbiting the moon still exists as well as other Soyuz-U.S. collaborative launches that have been planned through 2021 so hope on this level is not without foundation. Even though America has regained the capability to launch manned space craft with the Crew Dragon launch of this year, Bridenstine has said:

“We see a day when Russian cosmonauts can launch on American rockets, and American astronauts can launch on Russian rockets. Remember, half of the International Space Station is Russian, and if we’re going to make sure that we have continual access to it, and that they have continual access to it, then we’re going to need to be willing to launch on each other’s vehicles.”

Putin’s Strategic Open System Vision

We also know that since President Trump’s April 6, 2020 executive order making lunar and mars mining a priority of American space policy, he and President Putin have held four discussions in which space cooperation has arisen. While neocon war haws in the Pentagon and British military intelligence scream of Russian/Chinese aggression and accuse Russia of testing anti-satellite ballistic weapons, the first bilateral U.S.-Russia space security talks have restarted since 2013.

Four days after Trump’s executive order, Putin addressed American and Russian astronauts on board the ISS and said:

“We are pleased that our specialists are successfully working under the ISS program with their colleagues from the United States of America, one of the leading space powers. This is a clear example of an effective partnership between our countries in the interests of all mankind.”

Putin went on to say:

“I believe that even now, when the world is confronted with challenges, space activities will continue, including our cooperation with foreign partners, because mankind cannot stand still but will always try to move forward and join forces to advance the boundaries of knowledge… despite difficulties, people sought to make their dream of space travel come true, fearlessly entered the unknown and achieved success.”

The impending economic collapse has forced certain uncomfortable truths to the surface: 1) we will get a new global economic and security system soon, 2) that system will be of a closed system/unipolar nature or it will be an open system/multipolar character. If it is an open system then humanity will have learned that in order to successfully exist within a creative, evolving universe, we must tie our fates to becoming a self-consciously creative, evolving species locking our economic, cultural and political realities into this discoverable character of reality.

If the new system is of a closed/entropic order as certain advocates of the World Economic Forum’s Great Reset are proclaiming, then a much unhappier fate awaits our children and grandchildren which would make World War II look like a cake walk.

River to Sea Uprooted Palestinian   

The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Blog!

The Terrorists Among US8- Trump Whistle Blower & the ODNI FBI CIA DOD NATO-COE

September 26, 2019

by George Eliason special correspondent of the Saker blog in Novorussia

Let’s explore the top of the chain in the Information Operation and Intel community coup against the presidency. The same private contractors responsible for the 2014 coup in Ukraine brought it home to the US in time to get involved in the election. Losing that bid, they have been working to alter the fabric of the country forever. No one likes to lose.

Enough information has come in about the whistleblower what group is a secondary source to determine who the primary sources of information against President Donald Trump is.

At the bottom of this article you’ll find the names of people overseeing the primary sources and why they were found so easily. If you have followed parts 1-7 in this series, you’ll walk away feeling like I somehow scripted the Trump-Zelenskiy whistleblower narrative.

The bigger questions of why is all this happening right now need to be answered. If you haven’t read The Terrorists Among US – The Coup Against the Presidency I suggest you start there because it shows a blow by blow of the coup in progress up to this point.

So, what if US Intel capabilities were under the control of a few extremely rich families that served their own political goals and those of their clientele? I’m seriously suggesting and going to prove that at the agency level, the US government no longer controls its own spies.

When we look at the concept of terrorists among the US, the ultimate betrayal is from people whose families became enriched because they positioned themselves as the first line of defense protecting the American way of life.

They were able to replace the work they did leading government agencies after they left with the work they were doing in the private sector. This is because they led all the agencies out of the post 9/11 world into a digital age no one knew anything about.

They are the same group hiring over 4 million people to work in the Intel, Information Operation, hacking, boots on the ground, and media, to change the world to their liking and that of their clients.

When that reality sinks in, remember, the US already has the entire digital world in net so tight that nothing slips by. Those 4 million undertrained people are for the benefit of the contractors described below.

The people leading these companies can’t make money in a normal world where diplomacy and mutual respect are the coin of the realm. Their profits and egos only exist where chaos and uncertainty reign. Even today it’s estimated that more than 70% of Intel workers are not government employees. This is what created the problem of privatized terrorism that exists today.

In a 2007 Washington Post OpEd entitled “The Value of Private Spies”, DNI McConnell conceded there was a huge danger in using private companies for intelligence and direct action work. Because of this he claimed “Our workforce has recovered to the point that we can begin to shed some contract personnel or shift them away from core mission areas, and the CIA is leading the way in this,” the ODNI stated.”

In 2007, CBS noted Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) lawyers revealed at a conference in May that contractors make up 51 percent of the staff in DIA offices. At the CIA, the situation is similar. Between 50 and 60 percent of the workforce of the CIA’s most important directorate, the National Clandestine Service (NCS), responsible for the gathering of human intelligence, is composed of employees of for-profit corporations.

After 9/11 the U.S. government shortened the learning curve by hiring contractors in droves. According to John Pike of GlobalSecurity.org in 2007 America’s spy network would soon resemble NASA’s mission control room in Houston.

“Most people, when they see that room, think they’re looking at a bunch of NASA people,” Pike notes. “But it’s 90 percent contractors.”

As discussed in US Intelligence Poses a Threat to the World, as early as 2004, more than 50% of Intel services were manned by private contractors. By, 2007, 70 percent of the Pentagon’s Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA) unit is staffed by contractors, known as ‘green badgers.

Private Intel contractors trained the agency starting after 9/11. Soon it became the contractors that had the oversight. Managers left government service to work for private contractors and came back under lucrative corporate contracts.

Effective control, support, and management functions are in the hands of people that care more about a bottom line, politics, and a business forecast model.

The line between inherently governmental work and private contracting was smashed. While the lawman tries to bring the criminal in for justice, the bounty hunter brings back a body so he can be paid.

The New York Times headlined Private Surveillance Is a Lethal Weapon Anybody Can Buy Is it too late to rein it in? By Sharon WeinbergerJuly 19, 2019

The real 1% are Cyber

In a 2015 article at The Nation titled “How Private Contractors Have Created a Shadow NSA,” Tim Shorrock describes what he calls “the cyberintelligence ruling class.”

“Over the last 15 years, thousands of former high-ranking intelligence officials and operatives have left their government posts and taken up senior positions at military contractors, consultancies, law firms, and private-equity firms. In their new jobs, they replicate what they did in government—often for the same agencies they left. But this time, their mission is strictly for-profit,” Shorrock wrote.

Many of the principal figures come from America’s wealthiest families. Although the wealthiest have always had a lead in filling policy and cabinet positions, this time the public service aspect is missing.

 Shorrock goes on to detail how the same 1% Americans claim to be fighting is the cyberintelligence elite that controls the media.  Mathew Olsen is an example as the former National Counterterrorism Center director and current IronNet Corp. president. He joined ABC as a commentator. He goes further and shows how this is the rule and not the exception.

This is going on all across media channels. Every network has their own cyberintelligence “expert” to explain complicated topics, but their conflicts of interest almost always remain hidden.”

War and peace is no longer in the hands of governments. Until governments push back, your sons and daughters die grossly and openly for the highest paying lobbyist or business.

Michael Chertoff from 2005-2009 ran the massive Department of Homeland Security, where he was criticized for exempting the DHS from following laws on everything from the environment to religious freedom. A report issued by the Congressional Research Service said at the time that the delegation of unchecked powers to Chertoff was unprecedented. He was also known for railing against international law, warning that treaties such as the Geneva Conventions were placing undue constraints on U.S. actions abroad. As a long-time insider – in both the public and private sector – he is one of the top figures in the U.S. intelligence-security complex.

Private sector services mirror what they do for government including Intel-for-Hire, espionage, information operations, direct action, and state-sized propaganda operations. This is work that the government has stated on many occasions needs to remain with the agencies that can be held responsible to the public – and not to private companies that aren’t. .- From Mint News “How Intel for Hire Undermines US Intelligence

Intel Community Betrayal at Every Level

When we look at the Intel community as a whole and the agencies under the ODNI, how are we not betrayed? While there are real public servants in the Intelligence services, the trend is toward criminality and the leadership that deceived the public and violated their oaths of office.

As an example, DNI James Clapper’s admission the only proof he had of Russian influence on the 2016 election was Hillary Clinton (HRC) losing Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. “It stretches credulity to conclude that Russian activity didn’t swing voter decisions.”

That’s it that’s all. It would have been better if there was collusion if there was a Russian hack. Instead, it was part of an Information Operation that US Intelligence agency heads were in on.

The Information Operation (IO) detailed in the last installment is the single largest example of this known today. If you want to know what collusion is, start there.

Private contractors and political activists have taken it upon themselves to change the government in the United States of America. The private contractors are in the Intelligence field and work both for the government and the conspirators trying to overthrow the type of government the United States currently has.

How else can the existence of the IO coup be explained? The most extensive regime change operation by private contractors is going on in the US for 3 years and the ODNI, CIA, FBI, DOD, NSA, with budgets bigger than the next largest countries militaries, can’t find it or figure out what happened?

What is billed as the crime of the century is swept under the rug as far as investigations go? The DNC hack and Russian influence game tore at the fabric of the country. Is it because former FBI head Robert Mueller’s protégé started the newest dilettante mega-corporation in the spy game? Shawn Henry’s Crowdstrike just happened to be in a position to fabricate extensive and childish fables about the DNC, Podesta, and RNC hacks.

Remember, before it was Ruskies, according to Crowdstrike, it was Bernie Sanders stepping on HRC servers.

Let’s reverse the angle and expose the criminals.

If those crimes did happen under their watch Comey, Clapper and company should have been fired for incompetence because of all the information available to them at the time.

When did an actual crime occur according to ODNI agencies about the 2016 election? The crime occurred in December 2018 when the agency heads figured out their welcome was worn out with the incoming administration.

The above named were already working for the privatized 1% while still on government payrolls. They may not have gotten paid but they turned around and towed the narrative from that period forward. The wiretaps at Trump towers are ample proof of this.

Because HRC lost an election in states that had swing populations of bloc voters that hate HRC, the Russians did it, Mr. Clapper?

Reality dictates Clapper along with Comey, McCabe, Page, and company was willfully part of a conspiracy paid for by the lobbyist groups working to benefit a politician and supported by a foreign country (Ukraine) to overthrow the 2016 US elections. This started during the primaries and continued in the background throughout the election.

When this didn’t work out, the plan switched gears and became a full-court press to discredit and overthrow the presidency itself. Now keep in mind the infrastructure for the coup was put in place before Donald Trump declared his candidacy. It is a coup against the presidency.

The private Intel corporations that brought us the failed Hamilton 68 Russian catcher (courtesy of Michael Chertoff) and other media information war games are the only game in town for the likes of James Clapper, meaning there has to be some kind of lucrative life for a master spy.

The ODNI under Clapper and FBI leadership under Comey went all in for the conspiracy to overthrow the presidency after November 2016.

Why this happened and how this happened is the most dangerous game on the planet today. With the background articles 1-7 of the series in place, the explanation of why they did it became a matter of understanding process and people.

Like Joel Harding, they wanted more action but by playing the private spy game they didn’t have to color inside the lines anymore. Private Intel, IO, Espionage, and boots on the ground companies paint the lines as they go and pay for the lines to be moved as needed.

Those in the agencies or companies that went along with this because it was their job or worse, knowing they could make money lying to the press, public, and the in the PDB, must be investigated and dealt with in the harshest terms.

The reason is simple. You are the game they play. There aren’t enough bad guy countries on ten planet earths to support the game or generate the revenues consistently. That’s on September 26, 2019.

The agencies tasked with spying, IO, Infowar, Cyberwar, war, diplomacy, etc are all beyond compromised. Add in the almost complete ownership of media by stakeholders in these companies and you have a recipe for the end of everything we know.

Right now, they are keen on overthrowing the presidency. If successful, it won’t matter which party is seated in the Oval Office. Just take a position they don’t like.

Right now, they are set on controlling public opinion and political ideology. Most of the people gravitating into these fields in the private sector are politically and emotionally undeveloped. They understand the violence they are willing to bring the populace and the rush it gives them.

War and Peace

While all this is going on, at the same time, the agencies staffed with the same contractors are delivering intelligence that is supposed to be filtered. A neutral report is supposed to be written by the agency in charge before it is delivered into the presidential daily briefing (PDB). The PDB is the most important document produced because of its impact on the world daily.

From the PDB, the president of the United States decides:

•           Who is the enemy?

•           Who is friendly (or are there really any friends out there)?

•           Who is a danger and how?

•           Why are they a danger?

•           What is their motivation?

•           What steps will the US need to take to stop them, turn them in a different direction, or make peace with them?

What happens when the PDB is written by agency personnel or private contractors that want to destroy or embarrass the United States or the sitting president?

How bad does your politics have to be to be OK with starting wars for the sake of your undeveloped ego? It’s going on as we speak.

Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director at the American Civil Liberties Union, said the reported incidents of NSA employees’ violations of the law are likely “the tip of the iceberg” of lax data safeguards. The laws guiding the NSA’s spying authority in the first place are a bigger issue, he said. “If you only focus on instances in which the NSA violated those laws, you’re missing the forest for the trees,” Jaffer said. “The bigger concern is not with willful violations of the law but rather with what the law itself allows.”

The US government must bring these services back in house. The stakes are too high for the entire world not to. Americans are first on the plate for private Intel today. If you don’t think so, disagree with one of them.

Whistle Blowing Ukrainians

In what turns out to be one of the most fortuitous events in recent history, Donald Trump’s whistleblower source is in Ukraine. The whistleblower, according to a Ukrainian SBU source is Ukrainian. Lightning has struck again in the same spot for the thousandth time.

The same Ukrainian Intel and hacking groups are at it again.

According to the Hill, A whistleblower complaint released by the House Intelligence Committee on Thursday alleges that President Trump sought to enlist Ukraine’s help in the 2020 election by mounting a corruption investigation against former Vice President Joe Biden.

The declassified version of the whistleblower complaint details the government insider’s worries about Trump’s contacts with Ukraine’s leader, revelations of which on Tuesday triggered a formal impeachment inquiry against the president.

Now that we have the charge in place, the actual phone call showed…Ukraine’s Zelenskiy is about to have difficult days in Kiev with the nationalists there. US President Trump had a phone call and made no threats or conveyed anything to intimidate Zelenskiy.

September 24, 2019 MEMORANDUM OPINION FOR THE GENERAL COUNSEL OFFICE OF THE DIRECTOR OF NATIONAL INTELLIGENCE

Rather, the complaint arises out of a confidential diplomatic communication between the

President and a foreign leader that the intelligence-community complainant received secondhand…An “employee of an element of the intelligence community” (or an

intelligence-community contractor)…

The complainant describes a hearsay report that the President, who is not a member of the intelligence community, abused his authority or acted

unlawfully in connection with foreign diplomacy.

According to the New York Times– The whistle-blower who revealed that President Trump sought foreign help for his re-election and that the White House sought to cover it up is a C.I.A. officer who was detailed to work at the White House at one point, according to three people familiar with his identity.

The man has since returned to the C.I.A., the people said. Little else is known about him. His complaint made public Thursday suggested he was an analyst by training and made clear he was steeped in details of American foreign policy toward Europe, demonstrating a sophisticated understanding of Ukrainian politics and at least some knowledge of the law.

The C.I.A. officer did not work on the communications team that handles calls with foreign leaders, according to the people familiar with his identity. He learned about Mr. Trump’s conduct “in the course of official interagency business,” according to the complaint, which was dotted with footnotes about machinations in Kiev and reinforced with public comments by senior Ukrainian officials.

What seems to be the common denominators pertinent to the larger story? We have a lone gun Intel guy working on his own listening to rumors spun by whom?

It seems he was talking to Ukrainians in Kiev. There are a lot of Ukrainians in Kiev and quite a few in the Ukrainian government.

What we need to do to find the original source of the rumor is answer a couple simple questions.

Who in Kiev wants to destroy US President Donald Trump as a favor to Democratic Party allies they work with?

Who in Kiev wants to destroy newly elected president of Ukraine Zelenskiy?

Who in Kiev has the Intel capabilities and sophistication to listen in on government phone calls?

Those questions narrow the field down considerably. There is the opportunity aspect to consider with this too. How many people can listen in on a phone call with a foreign leader?

Lucky for us there is an international Information Operation (IO) going on to unseat US President Trump. This simplifies the field and cuts it down to anyone in Milestone March 1, 2014 from the Coup Against the President article.

That narrows it down to a small handful of disgruntled ultra-nationalist Ukrainians. To get to the absolute right person all that needs to happen is to extradite InformNapalm publisher Roman Burko, Deputy Information Minister Dimitri Zolotukin, and Christina Dobrovolska who supervise them. Christina left the operation 2 months ago but she has a lot of insight and likes visiting the USA.

Eliot Higgins of Bellingcat can be taken into custody as a material witness because of the vast amount of work his firm does the Ukrainian hacker Intel groups in Ukraine and Syria.

Aric Toler is in the US and will definitely provide useful insight although he’s a little timid around the most likely candidate for this, a hacker that goes by @UCA_ruhate_.

RUH8 or UCA_ruhate_  has been very vocal about his disdain for Zelenskiy and wants to hurt his presidency. These groups are familiar with how the US Congress works because they already have testimony on the Congressional record. Refer to Benchmark DNC Hacks

Alexandra Chalupa has a lot of experience with the same Intel groups. She used them to do OppoResearch for the 2016 election as shown in Milestone June 2016.

I’m sure with this caliber of help, all the information needed will come out.

The next thing to look at is who’s pushing the defense fund page for the unknown informer? It is the Ukrainian Diaspora Democratic party HRC advisor @AdamParkhomenko among other Diaspora members.

Adam worked with the Ukrainian hacker Intel groups at team Hillary and the Atlantic Council digital Sherlock program. His stint with Bellingcat and the Ukrainian hackers made memories to last a lifetime.

In the interest of justice for people of all political stripes and a return to sanity, the Intel community monster needs to be put in a glass cage isolated from society. Criminals among them have to be prosecuted.

River to Sea Uprooted Palestinian   

The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Blog!

Now for Confrontation in Space

BRIAN CLOUGHLEY | 25.03.2019 | WORLD / AMERICAS

Now for Confrontation in Space

There was much international news in mid-March, although little of it was encouraging for those who prefer peace to war, handshakes to sabre-rattling, and cooperation to confrontation.

But there was one item of good cheer which showed that friendly cooperation between the US and Russia continues, albeit unobtrusively. It concerned the International Space Station, about which it was reported on March 15 that “A Russian Soyuz rocket carrying NASA astronauts Nick Hague and Christina Koch along with Roscosmos’ Alexei Ovchinin lifted off as planned from the Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan… Their Soyuz MS-12 spacecraft reached a designated orbit about nine minutes after the launch, and the crew reported they were feeling fine and all systems on board were operating normally.”

Russia’s Soyuz spacecraft docked with the International
Space Station about 250 miles over the Pacific Ocean.

The mission was successful, technically and professionally, but did not in any way diminish Washington’s anti-Russian bias or its determination to militarize space.

A forecast for the second quarter of 2019 by the analytical think-tank STRATFOR reflects the Washington Establishment’s line that “Military competition between the United States and Russia will prevail…” but does not record that the military budget of the United States is vastly more than that of Russia, or that, as headlined in the 2018 Report by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, world defence expenditure “falls sharply in Russia, but rises in Central and Western Europe.” As is well-known, the US will spend 716 billion dollars on its military in 2019, but what is not publicised by the Western media is that Russia’s 2019 outlay is 45 billion dollars.

The word ‘competition’ (“the activity or condition of striving to gain or win something by defeating or establishing superiority over others”) is hardly appropriate when the figures involved are 716 compared to 45 whether these be dollars or coconuts, but the competition myth continues, supported energetically by Washington’s military-industrial complex — and especially by the generals, spurred on by the lure of lucrative post-retirement jobs with manufacturers of military systems. Stars and Stripes records that “major US defense contractors have hired hundreds of former high-level government officials in recent years, including at least 50 since Trump became president. The report lends new visibility to long-standing concerns about a revolving door between the government agencies that award massive contracts for military supplies and services and the businesses that profit from those contracts.”

Which leads us to General “Fighting Joe” Dunford, who at his Senate hearing for appointment as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said “my assessment today, Senator, is that Russia presents the greatest threat to our national security.” In October 2018 he reiterated that “the Russian challenge is not isolated to the plains of Europe. It is a global one” requiring the armed forces of the United States “to be able to project power to an area… and then once we’re there we’ve got to be able to freely manoeuvre across all domains… sea, air, land, space, and cyberspace.”

Naturally he didn’t mention that at the very time he uttered his confrontational challenges there was close cooperation in air, land and space between the US and Russia whose astronauts were “able to freely manoeuvre” in harmony, adding to world knowledge and engendering trust by jointly conducting research projects in the International Space Station.

This is in accord with the United Nations ‘Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space’, otherwise known as the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, which, among other things “establishes basic principles related to the peaceful use of outer space. This includes that the exploration and use of outer space shall be carried out for the benefit and in the interests of all countries…”

It is the wish of the world — or most of the world — that space should be forever free of weapons. The Treaty lays down that “States Parties to the Treaty undertake not to place in orbit around the earth any objects carrying nuclear weapons or any other kinds of weapons of mass destruction, install such weapons on celestial bodies, or station such weapons in outer space in any other manner.”

But although the United States signed and ratified the Space Treaty in 1967, it strongly objected to later attempts to refine it. In February 2008 the New York Times reported that “The Russian foreign minister, Sergey V Lavrov, presented a Russian-Chinese draft treaty banning weapons in space to the United Nations Conference on Disarmament, an idea that was quickly rejected by the United States.”

It is a difficult to imagine why there could be any objection to a treaty aimed at “prevention of the placement of weapons in outer space,” but the White House responded that it opposes any treaty that seeks “to prohibit or limit access to or use of space.” Indeed the White House said that such a treaty would be impossible to enforce because “any object orbiting or transiting through space can be a weapon if that object is intentionally placed onto a collision course with another space object. This makes treaty verification impossible.” The US continues to be resistant to any treaty forbidding deployment of weapons in space.

It was therefore unsurprising when Trump put forward his plan for militarising space in March last year, and in August tweeted “Space Force All the Way!” Then he declared on February 19 that “we’re investing in new space capabilities to project military power and safeguard our nation’s interests, especially when it comes to safety and defense” and signed a directive ordering the Pentagon to create a Space Force as the sixth branch of the military.

The result of his brainwave is that the US is going to “project military power” in space, which is directly contrary to “the basic principles related to the peaceful use of outer space” noted in the Outer Space Treaty.

The US refuses to move onwards from the original treaty, and on March 20 Newsweek summed up Washington’s policy by noting that “the United States has blamed Russia and China for militarizing space, while refusing to sign their joint proposal against placing weapons there.”

On February 19, while preparations were in full swing for launch of the joint Russia-US mission to the International Space Station three weeks later, the White House announced that “President Donald J Trump’s Space Policy Directive-4 is a bold, strategic step toward guaranteeing American space dominance” by “establishing the United States Space Force which among other tasks will “organize, train and equip our space warfighters with next-generation capabilities.”

In the words of the US Administration, “space is now a warfighting domain just like the air, land and sea” so it’s goodbye to a future of harmonious exploration and scientific research in the regions beyond our globe. It had been hoped that the Treaty would go far to assist in “maintaining international peace and security and promoting international co-operation and understanding” but Washington has no intention of agreeing to any international law that would prohibit extra-terrestrial weaponisation, and Trump’s Space Directive has now set the seal on Washington’s preparedness to confront in space as well as by land and sea and in the air. Stand by for Space War.

River to Sea Uprooted Palestinian   

The views expressed in this article are the sole responsibility of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Blog!