Citizens for Peace in Space has been involved for years in bringing into the open the true nature of this facility. Since the National Security Agency joined the Air Force in setting up a spying operation there thirty years ago the primary mission of Buckley had been top secret.

In the early nineties CPIS began a campaign to put the secret operations there involving 4,000 or so personnel on the local map, opening its mission and budget to public scrutiny. The turning point of this campaign was a June 1994 direct action at the base which scrambled the Air Force SWAT team, complete with water cannons and strong arm tactics. The latter included the arrest of a Rocky Mountain News photographer and the seizing of his camera and film. That led to an intervention of the paper's legal office and to a congressional inquiry by Congresswoman Pat Schroeder's office. The Air Force ended up backing down and the Rocky Mountain News did a major cover story on the base exposing its previously secret mission. Other Denver media followed suit and the web of secrecy was finally shattered. End of story? Not quite.

At the same time as this was happening the U.S. Space Command began to go public with its space domination and control doctrine. Five years after the end of the Cold War they decided to get the U.S public behind their new philosophy of global military domination in a unipolar world emphasizing the importance of space resources, including those at Buckley. Secrecy about details continued, but they admitted that Buckley was part of the new space warfare era.. It was no longer described as an "early warning" center but as a war fighting base. The PR department began to do limited tours of the base etc.

Down the road in Colorado Springs the Space Command began to come out with public documents spelling out the new philosophy. A Space Domination Office was opened at the Pentagon. All the Colorado Space Commas bases continued to grow. Information warfare, in which adversaries' computers are the target was added to the duties of the space command. Space weapons of various kinds became part of standard war games,planning ten, twenty and thirty years into the future. Is it any wonder then that the Denver Post story on the renaming of Buckley reports that one of the proposed names is TOTAL FORCE BASE. What a major turnaround in just one decade. One wonders whether our next protest there will bring charges of trespassing or blasphemy.

Bill Sulzman
Citizens for Peace in Space
Colorado Springs
(719) 389-0644

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