Re: And Democrats said it wouldn't work.

"stork" <Todd.Bandrowsky@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1177687121.510219.87940@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
The USA successfully tests, again, a defense system against missiles.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,268901,00.html

Had Liberals had their way, warships would be sitting ducks for
inbound missiles, as would be American cities.

The rigged missile defense test
The target destroyed in the "successful" defense shield test contained a
global positioning satellite beacon that made it easier to detect. Why has
the media mostly ignored the story?
By Joe Conason

July 31, 2001 | The Pentagon and the Bush administration are determined to
sell the American people a national missile defense system that will
probably increase tensions with allies and adversaries and will surely cost
more than $100 billion. Their latest marketing exercise took place on the
evening of July 14, when a "kill vehicle" launched from the Kwajalein Atoll
in the Pacific smashed into a rocket sent up from Vandenberg Air Force Base
in California.

Precisely according to plan, the target was instantly vaporized on impact --
and along with it, or so the Pentagon's uniformed salesmen hoped, the
perennial concern that missile defense won't work. With the cooperation of
major news organizations and conservative pundits, that test provided an
enormous propaganda boost to the Bush proposal, which conveniently enough
had been brought up to Capitol Hill by Defense Department officials just two
days earlier.

There was only one thing that all the happy salesmen forgot to mention about
their latest test drive. The rocket fired from Vandenberg was carrying a
global positioning satellite beacon that guided the kill vehicle toward it.
In other words, it would be fair to say that the $100 million test was
rigged.

No wonder, then, that Lt. Gen. Ronald Kadish, the Air Force officer who
oversees the NMD program, told the Washington Post on the eve of the test
that he was "quietly confident" about the outcome. The general knew about
the GPS beacon, while the reporters didn't.

This rather significant aspect of the July 14 mission remained hidden in the
fine print until a few days ago, when the Pentagon confirmed the role of the
GPS device to a reporter for Defense Week magazine. But of course most
Americans still don't know why the test functioned so smoothly, because the
Defense Week scoop was either buried or ignored by the mainstream media,
which had so obediently celebrated the technological breakthrough two weeks
earlier.

And as Kadish later acknowledged, each of the previous three tests -- two of
which failed anyway -- had also involved the use of a guidance beacon. (To
longtime observers of the missile-defense effort, this latest news recalled
the notorious "Star Wars" scandal, when investigators discovered that a
target had been secretly heated to ensure that it would be picked up by the
interceptor's infrared sensor.)

Reuters was among the few news organizations that bothered to cover the
Defense Week story. The wire service quoted a Pentagon official who
"conceded that real warheads in an attack would not carry such helpful
beacons." Probably not, although we can always hope that the Iranians or the
North Koreans or the Chinese will attach to each incoming nuke a loudspeaker
that screams "come and get me!"

Unfortunately, weapons experts agree that even the most primitive enemy
missiles are more likely to carry a very different kind of accessory,
namely, decoys designed to fool the computerized sensors aboard the kill
vehicle.

While the missile launched from Vandenberg on July 14 did spit out a single
Mylar balloon as a symbolic decoy, that scarcely challenged the kill
vehicle's capacity to select the correct target -- particularly because
there was no GPS beacon on that shiny balloon. In real warfare, an incoming
missile is expected to deploy multiple decoys of varying shapes and sizes to
lure the kill vehicle astray. Past tests have indicated that these simple
fakes work far more reliably than the complex technology designed to detect
them.

Eventually, the truth about the inherent problems of national missile
defense may emerge in congressional hearings. But meanwhile, the Pentagon
and the Bush White House mean to stifle any dissent about the capabilities
of their favorite toy. They have repeatedly sought to reclassify documents
that show that the system doesn't function as advertised. And within the
past few weeks, they have blatantly attempted to intimidate Theodore Postol,
a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology who is the country's
leading critic of missile defense.

In early July, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education, Defense
Department officials asked MIT to confiscate the reclassified report from
Postol and to "investigate [his] actions." At first MIT president Charles
Vest, no doubt worried about millions of dollars in defense research grants
to his university, moved to comply with that request. Only when Postol
protested publicly did MIT back down.

Bogus tests and bullied critics are the hallmarks of a defense establishment
that fears facts. With billions in contracts at stake and bellicose
ideologues in power, the salesmen for national missile defense must conceal
the many defects in their dangerous product. And the press corps, reverting
to the bad habits of the Cold War, has done little so far to penetrate the
Pentagon's propaganda.

So when the next "successful" missile-defense test is announced with fanfare
and fireworks, don't necessarily believe what you hear. You are the buyers
targeted by this massive sales effort -- and you should most certainly
beware.

http://archive.salon.com/news/col/cona/2001/07/31/test/


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