A forward-based US missile system, girding the globe and enforcing American will, is already in development --and it's not National Missile Defense.

For months, the Pentagon's space warriors and the Bush Administration's newly installed, re-treaded space cadets have publicly fantasized about scrapping the world's arms control structure and hurtling forward with National Missile Defense (NMD): a costly, technically probably impossible system intended to protect the mainland United States from attack by a long- range missile threat that --with the exception of about 20 missiles in China --does not exist.

Many disarmament and peace activists have followed the noise, bracing themselves for a looming Congressional battle on National Missile Defense. The Bush Administration wants to redouble spending for NMD. It seems likely they'll get at least some of what they want.

But on a quieter, perhaps more dangerous front, deploying essentially the same technology, there's almost no noise, or oDDosition. at all. Theater Missile Defense (TMD) is the quiet sibling of NMD. In FY 2001, Pentagon funding for the two was about equally divided. The Clinton Administration already cut a deal with Russia, in 1997, to create exceptions to the ABM treaty to accommodate TMD, so research is farther along. Leading Democrats who have expressed reservations about NMD, like new Senate Foreign Relations Committee chair Joseph Biden (D-DE), want to proceed full speed ahead on TMD.

Theater Missile Defense is more politically achievable, has elements that are more technically achievable, can bust arms control agreements just as easily, and, because it is to be deployed on land, sea, air, and space around the world, much more immediately threatening to allies and potential enemies alike. When Europe, China, Russia, and the rest of the world have sent up howls about the Bush Administration's ballistic missile plans, TMD is what frightens them the most.

Defining the difference between National and Theater missile systems has been bugging military and arms control planners for years, because while the stated intent differs, technically, there isn't much difference at all. Essentially, according to military planners, while NMD is designed to protect the US mainland against long-range missile attack, TMD is designed to protect US troop deployments, bases, and allies against short and medium range missile attacks --the kind of missiles that rogue states already have and can deploy. A 1997 ABM protocol agreement between Clinton and Russian leader Boris Yeltsin defined the differences, for the purposes of arms control treaties, in two ways: by limiting a TMD system's geographic size, and by limiting the height, trajectory , and speed with which missile interceptors can travel (and hence, interceptors' distance --the farther a missile travels, the more speed with which it re-enters the atmosphere) .

Like NMD, the Pentagon plans to deploy TMD facilities from as many platforms as possible: from fixed sites, trucks, ships, submarines, planes, and satellites. But TMD is far more flexible. If the NMD, for example, is designed to counter the North Korean threat of a long-range missile, it can't respond to a similar threat from a different country, or a different threat from the same country. Even if NMD can be made to work, it's as inflexible as it is expensive; this is why, as French President Jacques Chirac recently noted, the sword always defeats the shield. Chirac, unlike Dubya, remembers the Maginot Line.

Theater Missile Defense is no more flexible. It has a number of components; together, they can be deployed in Japan to, for example, protect US bases from North Korea, or protect Japanese cities from North Korea; or, they can be deployed more provocatively in Taiwan against the same threat or a Beijing threat. Or they can encircle China with platforms in Japan, Taiwan, Southeast Asia, Australia, and at sea. But no single system can perform multiple duties.

That's why the natural evolution for TMD systems --especially if the US ignores the ABM treaty --is to bundle them. The 1997 Clinton/Yeltsin agreement prohibited this, but China, Russia, and Europe are reasoning that if the Bush-ites intend to develop NMD anyway, they could just as easily develop TMD as a global system, intended to attack the types of cheaper, more plentiful, more useful missiles that most countries rely upon. If TMD systems around the globe are managed using a shared tracking and coordination system, the Pentagon suddenly has a global system designed not just to protect the US mainland, but as a forward, much more immediate network that can impose American will anywhere on the planet.

Theater Missile Defense relies upon a number of different weapons systems, one of which is already in operation (the Patriot PAC-2, a successor to the missiles deployed with such famous inaccuracy during the Gulf War). The rest are under development. They can be divided into two types: those that target missiles in the early "boost phase" (the Airborne Laser, or ABL); and those that target missiles in later stages.

The later-stage systems also have two types of components, lower-tier and upper-tier. They are meant to be a layered approach to defend in the lower or upper atmosphere, and vary in their trajectory, speed, and potential distance. Lower-tier TMD systems include the truck-mounted, short-range (600 km) Patriot PAC-2; the PAC-3, with a longer range (1 ,500 km) and wider area under its "shield" (40-50 km); the MEADS (Medium-range Extended Air Defense System); and the Navy Area Defense, a chance for another service to get in on the funding with a short-range (600 km) ship-based system capable of shielding 50-100 km .

Then there are the upper-tier, high-altitude TMD systems. THAAD (Theater High Altitude Area Defense), whose spectacular test failures predated those of NMD last year, is ground-based but transportable by aircraft. It includes short and medium-range missiles with a range of up to 3,500 km, and an umbrella of a few hundred km. The ship- based equivalent, with a similar range but larger shield, is the Navy Theater Wide; it can only intercept very high missiles, at an altitude above 80-100 km. A second generation, Navy Theater Wide Block II, is plan[led for after 2010. Each upper-tier system would have a larger defended area if a satellite-based missile tracking system now being developed (the SBIBS-Iow) were deployed. Unlike THAAD, which was exempted in the Clinton/Yeltsin agreement, Navy Theater Wide is being developed in violation of the 1972 ABM treaty.

All of these systems propose to use technology similar to NMD. But TMD, with its more immediate global reach, gets the Pentagon closer to where it really wants to go: space.

The US Space Command's Vision for 2020 pulls no punches about the intent or purpose of what the US is developing: "Dominating the space dimension of military operations to protect US interests and investment." The Airborne Laser (ABL) system, a component of TMD, is envisioned as a hiqh-altitude laser. Its technology dovetails with another project approved last December by the Department of Defense: the Space-Based Laser. Both will, eventually, be able to not only intercept missiles, but also attack fixed targets, anywhere. A second space- based laser, the Alpha High-Energy Laser, is already under development and in testing. These are the highest expressions of Theater Missile Defense.

The Pentagon's focus is not on the public NMD vision of protecting the mainland US from attack by weapons that don't exist, from dictators who won't live long enough or ever have enough money to develop them. Instead, its vision is to enforce American preferences and provide military protection for the economic regime conceived of under what is euphemistically termed globalization. (I.e., to "protect US interests and investment.") Institutions like the World Trade Organization, IMF, and World Bank, and pacts like NAFTA and FTAA are intended to enforce transnational corporate desires for economic and political policies; the Pentagon is planning to ensure that nobody anywhere, steps out of line.

It is this vision of global US military hegemony that has the rest of the world united in its opposition to the abolition of the world's arms control structure. Beyond the ABM treaty, the US plans, with much less domestic controversy, to run roughshod over another, even more basic pact: the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, the fundamental international agreement on the use of space. On Nov. 20, 2000, the U.N. General Assembly, in a resolution entitled "Prevention of an Arms Race in Outer Space," reiterated that 1967 pact; 163 countries supported the resolution, and only three --the US, Israel, and Micronesia --abstained.

Bruce Gagnon, one of the country's most visible anti-space weapons activists, is Coordinator of the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space. According to Gagnon, "Developing NMD is a Trojan horse for the real Star Wars that's coming down the road."

At the conclusion of George W. Bush's tense trip to Europe in June, the US was handed a completely predictable threat from Russian President Vladimir Putin: If the US persisted in planning to violate international ballistic missile agreements, so would Russia. One of the biggest criticisms leveled at NMD is that it will trigger a new, global arms race. That criticism has had an impact on Congressional consideration of NMD, as has the price tag, as has the succession of favorably rigged but still disastrous tests of early components. Yet none of those problems seem to be slowing down the funding for research, development, and deployment of Theater Missile Defense. In an interview after Bush's Europe trip, Biden was explicit on this point: "No one is saying don't spend the money on the research. No one is saying don't continue down this road."

Would any of it work? Who knows? TMD might not intercept missiles very well, but it will unquestionably succeed in enraging the world and enriching military contractors. The smoke you smell is a combination of our tax dollars being burned, and the torches of six billion angry people marching up the hill towards our castle.

--Geov Parrish.

For more information on Theater Missile Defense, check the Global Network Against Weapons and Nuclear Power in Space, at www.space4peace.org; the Union of Concerned Scientists, at www.ucsusa.org; the Council for a Livable World, at www.clw.org; and the Center for Defense Information, at www.cdi.org. War Resisters League, in conjunction with the Global Network, is planning a national day of action on weapons in space on October 13, 2001. For more info, call WRL at (212) 228-0450,. the Global Network at (352) 337-9274; or, in Seattle, NACC at (206) 547-0952, or the Northwest Disarmament Coalition (of which NACC is a member) at (206) 547-2630.

Slowly but surely, NACC is getting back in the habit of producing a regular newsletter, so that we can keep you, our loyal supporters, up to date on what we're up to and on issues we care about. Here's the latest installment. We've just finished the exciting job of our first annual big granting cycle, in which we gave away $6,000 to five great groups (see p. 5). Among the issues we've been working on, two more are also described here, weapons in space and the follow-up to police abuses in 1999's WTO protests.

We'd very much like to have current information more readily available on a web site, too. We've had one for years, organized through the Nonviolence Web, but for a variety of reasons we haven't been able to access it in quite some time, and the NV Web's creator, Martin Kelley, after years of yeoperson's work, has moved on to other projects. NACC's office folks share many things, and one of them is a complete inability to design a web page. But if any of y'all reading this would like to help us put together a simple one, so that we could post NACC news and articles like these and others of concern to NACC supporters and other peace and social justice activists, please contact the office --let's talk!!

Finally, two brief plugs. First is that I've been enjoying some remarkable personal success recently in bringing my overtly pacifist, humanist political views to wide audiences. For the last several years, I've been writing weekly political columns in local Seattle newspapers (for the last three years, the Village Voice-owned Seattle Weekly, available. at www.seattleweekly.com.) I'm still writing for SW, but additionally, I've started reporting regularly for the national magazine In These Times (www.inthesetimes.com), and writing a daily political column for Working Assets' web site, www.workingforchange.com. The daily column in particular has been a remarkable platform for getting out news and viewpoints on a wide variety of issues either rarely covered from "our" angle in general circulation media, or rarely covered at all. I'm thrilled to have the opportunity!

The second plug is, of course, financial. NACC folks agreed that our initial grant cycle this year was a phenomenal success. We're looking forward to doing it again. We were all struck by the tremendous need for grant-making of the type we are doing: how there are so many great groups, locally and around the continent, doing phenomenal work that's radical, nonviolent, effective, and not really easily fundable by "traditional" grantmaking outlets. We need more grantors in our movement, and we'd like to have more money available to hand out. That requires us to have more money ourselves. Anything you, our readers, can do to help, either by opening or adding to an escrow account, subscribing, or sending a donation to NACC, will help us help others --along with doing our own vital work --that much more effectively. Many thanks!

Have a happy,

summer,

peaceful, and resistant

Geov Parrish, Coordinator

The core members of NACC have been spending a lot of time together lately. During the past few months, we developed and implemented our first large-scale granting process. On June 1, we awarded $6,000 to five organizations, completing a first round of annual escrow account grants.

First, some background. Since the early 1980s, the Conscience and Military Tax Campaign Escrow Account has held between $250,000 and $300,000 in resisted war taxes. The money has been deposited by war tax resistance (WTR) practitioners, and until this year, NACC primarily used interest generated to support our WTR and activist organizing. The CMTC Escrow Account is an alternative tax fund like many others around the country, but has been somewhat unique in that our depositor base is national, not local, and our interest has been used to support our own political work. Most alternative tax funds grant or loan interest (and sometimes principal), and haven't funded their own activist work as part of their basic function. The CMTC account has, for most of its existence, been the largest WTR Escrow Account in the country .

Self-funding has allowed NACC to maintain an office and part-time staff, produce Conscience (now Nonviolent Action), write and distribute WTR resources, and provide WTR counseling. In the past five years, NACC has also initiated and participated in local organizing with an anti-militarist, social justice, and nonviolence focus.

After the WTO protests in the fall of 1999 in Seattle, the NACC core group realized that personal interests and energy were leading people to new work outside NACC. At a retreat last summer, we decided to restructure ourselves to be more like a traditional alternative fund. We decided to keep our office open with limited staff hours, to administer the Escrow Account, provide resources and counseling to resisters, and to publish Nonviolent Action. And, we decided to grant the remaining escrow account interest --over half --to outside organizations, with an emphasis on radical nonviolent projects not easily funded through traditional sources.

Last fall, we began the work of developing grant-making procedures and advertising for grant proposals. After sending out a middling number of notices via e-mail and paper, we were amazed to receive over 100 requests for grant applications. It made us realize that people were reading and talking about our information, and we mused about how giving away money generated lots more response than recent announcements for trainings or demonstrations. By the April 16 deadline, we received forty grant applications, and began our intensive evaluation process. Every step along the way was a learning process for us, and we tried our very best to make this initial cycle as fair as possible. We learned a lot that will improve next year's granting cycle. For example, we found that we asked some questions that we didn't really need to ask, and overlooked topics that we would have liked to know about. It was incredibly hard to choose among areas of work; what's more important, anti-death penalty work or ending sanctions in Iraq? Obviously, it's not an either-or proposition, but we had to make choices nonetheless. And what's the best way to divide $6,000? This time, we gave $1,000 or $1 ,500 to five groups, but it wasn't easy to decide that allocation.

Here are our 2001 grantees:

• Project YANO (Project on Youth and Non- military Options), San Diego CA: $1,000.
  
• Colmena Collective, multi-issue community resource and activist center, Bellingham WA: $1,000.
  
• GRIP, a Quixote Center project investigating death row cases for evidence of innocence, Hyattsville MD: $1,000
  
• EPIC, working to end US-Ied economic sanctions against Iraq, Washington DC: $1,500.
  
• Community Action Network, multi-issue community resource and activist center, Seattle WA: $1,500.

There's so much great work going on around the country , and we felt privileged to find out about it by reading the grant applications. We look forward to future granting cycles, next year and beyond, sharing the income from resisted war taxes with the broader activist community. If you'd like to offer us feedback on our new granting process, we'd welcome your comments: nacc@drizzle.com; (206) 547-0952; NACC, 4554 12th Ave. NE, Seattle WA 98145. --Carolyn Stevens

The movement against corporate globalization sprung alive during the WTO ministerial in Seattle in 1999. In reaction, the police pulled out all their "nonlethal" weapons, spraying gas and rubber bullets for 36 hours. The city jumped in with a state of emergency that created a "no protest zone," ignoring the Constitution for the right of corporations and their government agents to continue their work.

The city faced massive, sustained criticism for their actions. Legal efforts have been one avenue for seeking redress and accountability. Although some quite significant settlements have been won, there is no indication that the city has learned anything from its mistakes.

There are at least three significant legal efforts putting pressure on the city to be accountable for trampling people's rights during the WTO protests. There is a class action lawsuit, which would address the rights violation of the protestors arrested when people challenged the "no protest zone" (NPZ) that the city imposed. In a similar vein is an ACLU lawsuit, which chose several prime examples of people who were subject to blatant rights violations for First Amendment activity in the NPZ. There are also individual lawsuits, which are starting to be settled. And finally, in an effort to create another strand in pressuring the city, a Mass Claims coalition organized 200 people to file claims with the city in recent months for various injuries inflicted by police during the WTO.

The Trial Lawyers for Public Justice, a national lawyers' group that addresses broad legal problems, began looking at Seattle's police and city actions shortly after WTO. They decided that the class of arrestees looked most promising for a mass lawsuit to hold the city accountable. Their lawsuit seeks an explicit determination that the "no protest zone" was Unconstitutional, and hence that the entire group of people arrested based on violating the NPZ should be paid compensation for having had their rights violated. This includes the vast majority of the 600 people arrested during the WTO protests.

Class actions are complex, and this case may take several more years before a final decision is reached. A case of clear relevance to this lawsuit is the 1996 finding by the 9th Circuit Court (one step below the Supreme Court) that San Francisco imposed an illegal curfew after the Rodney King protests; San Francisco paid $1 million to 425 people arrested for violating the curfew. The obvious question is why, three years after this case, Seattle thought it could get away with an even more blatant infringement of people's rights?

The American Civil Liberties Union's lawsuit is based upon affidavits it helped gather from citizens about police abuse. From these accounts and their research, they filed a lawsuit (well before the class action was filed) that picked seven strong instances of outrageous, unconstitutional behavior resulting from the NPZ. Two of the ACLU's plaintiffs were arrested, and the other five were threatened and had materials confiscated based solely on their political content. Several of these plaintiffs have accepted settlement offers from the city ($10,000 for arrestees and $5,000 for harassed individuals). The others are going to trial in an effort to have the case legally decided, hoping to win and show that the curfew zone was in fact made into an unconstitutional criticism-free lone, in complete disregard of the First Amendment. This suit, then, would extend a finding of illegal police behavior to people who had signs, buttons or flyers taken but were not arrested. A number of individuals have also sued the city for what was done to them by police during WTO. The most infamous is the case of a King County sheriffs deputy, John Vanderwalker, who came over to a legally parked car where two women were videotaping typically excessive crowd control measures. The officer told the driver to roll down her window, and when she complied, he said, "Tape this, bitch!" and sprayed both women with pepper spray (all caught on video). For this, King County paid the two women $100,000 in settlement. Vanderwalker was dismissed for the combination of this incident, another in which he kicked a kneeling woman, and allegedly lying about these incidents to investigators. However, in late May, 2001 an arbitrator reinstated him by finding that, among other things, Vanderwalker acted with "reasonable force."

Three other cases also recently settled with the city for a total of almost $100,000. Longtime NACC friend Dana Schuerholz won $32,500 for being singled out of a line of credentialed photographers (she is caught on video showing her press pass to officers). She also won an order that the arresting officer was to be given a copy of the city ordinance that says that press people do not have to disperse when police give an order to do so. Another working press photographer and NACC ally, George Hickey, settled for $32,500 for his arrest for "trespassing."

In another suit, Jonathan Moore settled for $30,000, plus $1 ,400 in medical expenses, after he was put in a pain-compliance hold and had his arm broken when he did not comply with orders to leave the holding bus after arrest. Moore settled only reluctantly, since the city and the Seattle Police Department apparently never investigated the assault against him, hasn't identified the officers involved, hasn't even admitted that he was removed from the bus by Seattle Police, and hasn't identified what agency did remove him from the bus. Readers may also remember that numerous post-WTO news reports, drawing their information from police, claimed that no protesters were injured during the week.

The most creative post-WTO response to the need for city accountability, however, has attempted to involve not just people who were arrested or seriously injured, but the large number of people who were also illegally treated (i.e., tear gassed, shot, hit, denied various rights, etc.). An organized coalition effort, pulled together largely by Erica Kay of the Community Action Network and NACC, filed claims en masse seeking damages from the city. The process is straightforward, and after organizing around the issue, almost 200 claims were filed with the city on December l' 2000, a year after the WTO protests.

The city was swamped by this number of suits, and the adjusting firm that handles investigating and settling such claims took two months just to catalog and prepare to investigate each claim. Thus far no settlement offers have been made; it seems clear that the city has decided to sit on them, hoping that we won't take the next step of filing a lawsuit. The coalition is hoping it will be possible to use Small Claims court to pursue obtaining damages for these injuries, but the next steps are still not decided.

Of the many substantive recommendations made after WTO by community groups calling for improved police crowd control policies, absolutely none have been implemented. The police again made mass arrests during Nov. 30, 2000 anniversary protests, corralling dispersing protestors. They have used tear gas more readily several times for crowd control. The city council unanimously approved large purchases of "nonlethal" but unproven weapons (tasars and bean bag shotguns) for police use, apparently in the preposterous belief that WTO protesters were successful because the police weren't well-enough armed. And two of the city's biggest villains during WTO, Mayor Paul Schell and City Attorney Mark Sidran, are two of the three leading candidates in this fall's mayoral race.

We face an increasingly militarized police force, and an eroding civil rights environment. As we become more effective in challenging the corporate control and militarism of the state, we will see more use of force. As adherents of nonviolence, we face major challenges: facing this risk prepared, creatively turning it to our advantage, getting our message out, and breaking through to a public numbed to violence. If we are able to prove the no protest zone was illegal, and combine that with fairly substantial settlement amounts, we may yet pressure the city to rein in the police and their own perception of their powers.

--Scott McClay

We need depositors! Your money helps us continue this vital work, and it's returnable to you at any time. For more information on opening a CMTC Escrow Account, contact the NACC office: Nonviolent Action Community of Cascadia, 4554 12th Ave. NE, Seattle WA 98145; (206) 547-0952; nacc@drizzle.com.