Testimony before Congress of Dr. Carol Rosin

Dr. Carol Rosin is the President of the Institute for Cooperation in Space, a former educator, space and missile defense consultant, aerospace executive for Fairchild Industries, and spokesperson for the late Dr. Wernher "father of rocketry" von Braun. She has testified before the US Congress and numerous international leaders. Dr. Rosin is regarded to be the original political architect of the move to stop the SDI (Strategic Defense Initiative) and ASATs (Anti-satellite weapons).

The following transcript is from a Congressional testimony she gave in December, 2000. It has been fairly widely disseminated in the alternative news circles, primarily because it revealed von Braun's repeated assertion (in the early 1970's) that unnamed power-elites were determined to create space-based weapons systems despite the significant dangers, costs and fallacies involved, all based on a successive series of invented 'threats':

"He said the strategy that was being used to educate the public and decision makers was to use scare tactics That was how we identify an enemy. The strategy that Wernher Von Braun taught me was that first the Russians are going to be considered to be the enemy....Then terrorists would be identified....Then we were going to identify third-world country "crazies." We now call them Nations of Concern. But he said that would be the third enemy against whom we would build space-based weapons. The next enemy was asteroids. Now, at this point he kind of chuckled the first time he said it.

Asteroids- against asteroids we are going to build space-based weapons.

And the funniest one of all was what he called aliens, extraterrestrials. That would be the final scare. And over and over and over during the four years that I knew him and was giving speeches for him, he would bring up that last card. "And remember Carol, the last card is the alien card. We are going to have to build space-based weapons against aliens, and all of it is a lie."

What Dr. Rosin indicates in this testimony seems to become more and more prescient each day. And it reveals so many telling facets about how our society is progressing that I feel it deserves a place here in the reading room.

Testimony before Congress of Dr. Carol Rosin

"I have been tracking the space-based weapons issue for about 26 years.

I have debated Generals and Congressional Representatives. I have testified before the Congress and the Senate. I have met with people in over 100 countries. But I have not been able to identify who the people are who are making this space-based weapons system happen. I see the news. I see the administrative decisions being made. I know that they are all based on lies and greed.

But I have yet to be able to identify who the people are. That is after tracking this issue for 26 years....But I have concluded that it is based on a few people making a lot of money and gaining power. It is about ego. It is not about our essence and who we really are on this planet and loving each other and being at peace and cooperating. It isn't about using technology to solve problems and heal people in the planet. It isn't about that. It is about a few people who really are playing an old, dangerous, costly game for their own pocketbooks and power struggle. That is all it is."

[...]

"This is what our economy has been based on in this country and spreading around the world--war. People suffer as a result. It is not fair. It never has been. People have screamed: "out of swords let us build plow shares, let's have peace and hold hands around the world," but it hasn't worked because too many people are benefiting. Not only are they benefiting financially, but from what my experience is there are people who actually believe that Armageddon should happen so we have to have these wars.

So, it is going from the pocketbook, to the religious right: some people actually believe that we have to have wars for these religious reasons. There are people who just love war."