NP - Pentagon Fraud

David Morris fqmorris at hotmail.com
Tue Jul 31 10:52:34 CDT 2001


http://www.salon.com/news/col/cona/2001/07/31/test/index.html

The rigged missile defense test
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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.


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