Close Pine Gap

PINE GAP IS A PLACE OF AGGRESSION

On December 1, 2023, two months into Israel’s escalating genocide in Palestine, Colombian president Gustavo Petro linked the unwillingness of wealthy global North countries to deal with capital-induced climate change to the management of global South populations deemed disposable because they were forced to migrate as a consequence of that unwillingness. Speaking at the UN climate conference, Petro warned that what is happening in Gaza is a blueprint for fascism globally in dealing with surplus populations:

I invite all of you to imagine a combination of facts — the projection of the climate crisis in five or ten years and the current genocide of the Palestinian people. Are these facts disconnected? Or can we look at Gaza as a mirror of the immediate future? The unleashing of genocide and barbarism on the Palestinian people is what awaits the exodus of the peoples of the South unleashed by the climate crisis.

What we are seeing in Gaza is a rehearsal of the future.

That future is already here. Researcher of settler colonial technologies of repression, Alex Avina, perhaps describes the present monstrous state of affairs even more aptly. Avina writes:

We live in an era of global disposability; that is, in an era marked by the power and ability of states to mark entire communities and peoples as disposable surplus populations. We watch in real time as Israel commits genocide in Gaza. We watch weaponised land and seascapes along with border police and border technologies like “smart” fences and drones killing migrants by the thousands. We watch how economic sanctions starve entire countries.

Climate change, imperial wars, and the US fondness for collective punishment in the form of sanctions continue to generate more and more mass refugee displacement. Global north nations have responded by betting on more Apartheid walls, more border police, more surveillance, more genocide. A rather stark, uncomplicated choice thus emerges: do we side with the wall-builders and their Apartheid counterinsurgent technology that kills refugees in places like the Sonoran desert or the Mediterranean sea, or those who yearn to storm and smash walls with their dreams of a more just, free future for all?

We’re gathered here today at Kuyunba, about 500 metres away from the gates to the Pine Gap targeting facility. I say targeting facility and not spy base, because National Security Agency (NSA) documents and the Edward Snowden leaks prove that Pine Gap provides targeting data for US drone and missile strikes in places such as Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran, Gaza, Yemen and Somalia, to name just a few. Pine Gap is a place of aggression, a place of counterinsurgency. Pine Gap is a place where people are made disposable in the most literal sense. Pine Gap is integral to the global US war machine. As a former US National Security Agency employee put it, drones are “like the tip of the spear but the rest of the spear is actually the global communications surveillance system” of which Pine Gap is one of the most important parts.

“The repressors”, says Alex Avina, “the torturers, the killers, exchange knowledge, weapons and technology between themselves. They circulate best practices on how to manage, render disposable, and dispose of entire populations. It’s a lucrative business”. Some of these killers work here. It’s not a secret, we can name them – Raytheon, Boeing, Northrop Grumman and General Dynamics, IBM and Hewlett-Packard, Amentum. They all work out of this facility.

We have committed to gathering here fortnightly to resist the violence of this installation and demand its closure. We resist the colonial violence of its imposition on Central Arrernte country. We resist the militarised and racialised surveillance in the Northern Territory, the incarceration of Indigenous youths across this continent, and the narrative warfare in our mainstream media and political offices against First Nations people that combined reproduce the conditions of colonial dominion that enable US military installations to be sited on this continent. It goes without saying that no permission was sought from traditional custodians, nor was permission granted, for the alienation of this land and the construction of a military base on it.

We gather to resist the imperial violence that this base perpetrates abroad. In the 59 years that Pine Gap has occupied Arrernte country, the US has violently intervened in at least 80 countries. The base has provided targeting information and signals intelligence, facilitating illegal military aggressions from Vietnam and Cambodia to Yemen and Iran. There are no less than seven intelligence-sharing agreements between the US National Security Agency, which operates out of Pine Gap, and the Israeli Signals Directorate. Pine Gap provides intelligence to the Israeli military, which is committing the holocaust of our times in Gaza.

We gather to resist the US and Australian military build-up across northern Australia. For the fiscal year 2024/2025, northern Australia is “the top overseas location for U.S. Air Force and Navy construction spending, with more than $300 million set aside under the U.S. congressional defence authorisations for those years”, Reuters reports. Over the next decade, the Australian government will spend $30 billion on “hardening and upgrading” northern military bases, “partly to meet US requirements and partly paid for by the United States”.

As we are gathered here today to struggle against militarism, colonialism and imperialism, the Talisman Sabre war games – a giant exercise in sabre-rattling – are taking place across northern Australia, Christmas Island, and Papua New Guinea. The games involve over 20,000 US troops and 10,000 Australian troops and have been described as “the most expansive and complex warfighting exercise ever conducted in Australia”. They pose a serious threat to the environmentally sensitive areas where they are taking place. The climate footprint of the exercises is likely to be enormous. There are at least 20 major warships transported to Australia for the war games, and dozens of military cargo aircraft deployed. The US military, the biggest player in these war games, is the largest institutional emitter of greenhouse gases on Earth and one of the world’s biggest industrial polluters.

These war games are a significant health risk to nearby communities, many of which are Indigenous. A 2020 study of military training exercises in Puerto Rico found that “the sudden end of bombing practices is associated with a 56–79% decrease in the incidence of congenital anomalies of nearby populations”.

One area where these war games are taking place is the Bradshaw field, in the Kimberlies, just outside of the majority-Indigenous community of Timber Creek. The Bradshaw Field occupies 871,000ha of rainforest, woodlands and grass plains on the lands of the Ngaliwurru, Jaminjung, and Nungali peoples.

The story of the Bradshaw field shows how colonialism on this continent enables imperialism abroad. The Australian Strategic Policy Institute likes to boast that the “wide open space” of the Bradshaw field, one of the biggest military training areas in the world, is a key means of servicing Australia’s military alliance with the US and other so-called regional allies. The reinscription of northern Australia as a “terra nullius” available for violent and extractive uses is a precondition for these multi-national military exercises.

The field was recently upgraded with “significant US investment” to enable training exercises like the Talisman Sabre war games, making it something of a hybrid training field and potential military base in the event of war fighting.

Just last week we learnt that on at least two occasions this year, F-35 fighter jet parts have been sent from the RAAF base Tindal, just outside of Katherine, to Tel Aviv, Israel, to meet parts shortages there and allow Israeli F-35 jets to continue to carry out their sociopathic bombing campaigns on Gaza, southern Lebanon, Yemen, and Syria, to name just the places the Israeli military is currently bombing.

Lockheed Martin’s F-35 fighter jet features heavily in UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese’s most recent report on corporate actors profiting from the genocide in Palestine.

“Post-October 2023, F-35s have been integral to equipping Israel with the unprecedented aerial power to drop an estimated 85,000 tons of bombs, much of it unguided, to kill and injure more than 179,411 Palestinians and obliterate Gaza”, – she writes. Apartment blocks, hospitals, universities, schools, bread lines, mosques and churches.

The news of the F-35 components transported from Tindal to Tel Aviv ought to put to an end the Australian government’s shameful efforts to mislead us all and deny that it is transporting weapons to Israel. The Australian government should’ve ended its two-way weapons trade with Israel long ago. The Australian government should’ve ended intelligence-sharing from this facility long ago. The Australian government should’ve implemented an energy embargo long ago. The Australian government should’ve sanctioned Israel long ago.

Across the globe, people are rising up against the genocide of Palestinians, against fascist governments and against militarism. As we gather here, anti-genocide and anti-war Palestine solidarity activists are gathered in Canberra for the first of a three-day event marking the opening of the 48th Australian parliament. They are gathered to demand that the Australian government end the two-way arms trade with Israel, end intelligence-sharing from this facility, end coal shipments to Israel, and sanction Israel now. We stand in solidarity, love and rage with them. To borrow the words of Taylor Miller – if Australian governments are so set on investing in war, in genocide, then our foremost task is to upend the reality that makes this horror permissible, and we must lock arms not only while envisioning an end to this genocidal economy—but across this desert, against these walls; towards liberation and return.

Peace Crimes: The Peace Pilgrims

Book: Peace Crimes: Pine Gap, National Security and Dissent by Kieran Finnane

Peace Crimes (available at the University of Queensland Press) tells the story of anti-war resistance and direct action against Pine Gap, a Military Base in Alice Spring, Australia.

In 2016, six Peace Pilgrims, Andy Paine, Margaret Pestorius, Franz Dowling, Tim Webb, Pauli Christie and Jim Dowling organised a direct action and headed to the Pine Gap Military Base to pray and play music. 2016 was the 50th anniversary of the establishment of the military base, and the pilgrims felt compelled to intervene to lament the continued operation of the base and its involvement in drone strikes against people and villages in distant wars. They could no longer tolerate the collusion of their government in military operations which cause suffering and destruction.

The Peace Pilgrims were arrested for trespassing and faced 7 years in prison. They conducted their own court case which involved retelling the story of what they did and why, over several days, to a jury of 12 ‘peers’ in Alice Springs. The Pilgrims put Australian and US militarism on trial.

Kieran Finnane’s book Peace Crimes tells the story of this court case for the very first time, and traces its lineage in the activist group Pine Gap 4 and many other brave people who resisted the nuclear and war fighting capability in the years before. They all stand for the same cause: #ClosePineGap!

Peace Crimes – opening up Pine Gap

Peace Crimes Brisbane launch

Russell Goldflam

For five decades, the rallying cry of the protest movement against the space base, as it’s locally known, has been “Close Pine Gap”. Somewhat paradoxically, though, one of the key objectives of that movement has been to open Pine Gap, to shed light on what it actually does. And at its shining heart, that’s the achievement of Kieran Finnane’s book, “Peace Crimes: Pine Gap, National Security and Dissent”. It sheds light.

This should be no surprise. After all, as a journalist, that’s Finnane’s job: to observe, to inquire, to dig down into dark places, and to illuminate them. And there’s no darker, deeper place around here than Pine Gap.

Finnane could have written a whole book just about that darkness, the dark business of what Pine Gap does and how it does it: about shadowy networks of hovering geostationary satellites; about covert committees meeting in closed rooms to decide where to focus antennae so as to suck up all manner of electronic data and eavesdrop on whoever, wherever they choose; about Pine Gaps’ key role in carrying out extrajudicial terminations – or to use plainer language, murders – by targeting drone strikes in places we’ve never heard of, assassinating people whose names we’ll never hear.

About how thanks to the embarrassingly supine compliance and complicity of successive Australian governments with the United States military apparatus, Pine Gap has entangled us all in a radically dangerous geopolitical game, dicing with arbitrary death and mass destruction. Finnane has indeed documented all these things here, and she does so with admirable clarity, concision and precision, but peering into the darkness through the cracks in the formidable edifice of secrecy that conceals Pine Gap isn’t what this book is really about. If it were, a better title might have been “War Crimes”, not “Peace Crimes”.

No, what grips Finnane and what she comes to grips with after penetrating that dark matter, is the most gripping part of this book, the bright bit, the bit where the light gets into the crack that is in everything, the Leonard Cohen line quoted in the closing address to an Alice Springs jury sitting in that overweening, gleaming space capsule of a courthouse, near the end of the Supreme Court trials of the Peace Pilgrims, the perpetrators of the “peace crimes” this book is named for.

Finnane carefully and methodically describes how on 28 September 2016, five of the Peace Pilgrims walked into the Pine Gap prohibited area. She also describes how on the same night, a drone strike authorised by President Obama killed fifteen people in the village of Shadal in the Achin district of Nangahar province, Afghanistan. According to the United Nations mission in Afghanistan, most and perhaps all of the victims were civilians. According to Washington, they were all terrorists. As they explained to the jury in their trial a little over a year later, the Peace Pilgrims entered Pine Gap to disrupt the operations of the base in order to stop civilians being murdered by drone strikes like the one on the village of Shadal that night. The Peace Pilgrims said that they did what they did for a simple, fundamental reason. It was necessary.

I dare say that most people, whether they support or oppose Pine Gap, assume that the Peace Pilgrims are fruitcakes and even nutjobs, casually dismissing them as “weirdos”. That indeed is what I thought when I first heard about them. Finnane conscientiously and compellingly dismantles that prejudiced and prejudicial caricature, and draws us in to the quiet, committed, rigorous, loving world of Margaret, Jim, Franz, Andy, Tim and Paul. Over a period spanning 12 years, I got to know them and their fellow Christian activists, the Pine Gap Four, who had undertaken a similar action in 2005, in my capacity as their intermittent solicitor, and in that capacity I discovered that actually, they are the very opposite of weird. There’s nothing at all uncanny about them. Indeed, as courtroom tacticians, they were very canny indeed. Finnane deftly describes, with thinly disguised delight, how they made the QCs who’d been flown in from interstate at taxpayer expense to prosecute them flounder and squirm.

The Pine Gap Four eventually had their convictions overturned thanks to some even cleverer QCs who flew in from interstate (at their own expense) to help out. In 2017, the Peace Pilgrims couldn’t and didn’t avoid conviction (because in the interim, the Commonwealth Parliament had amended the law to plug the gap the cleverer QCs had exposed). I say “couldn’t avoid conviction” because unlike juries in England, the United States and New Zealand, no Australian jury has ever been defiant and independent enough to ignore a judge’s directions and acquit after being instructed that no legally available defence has been raised by the accused in a civil disobedience case like this. The Australian citizenry is unusually compliant.

But the Peace Pilgrims, without a lawyer to represent them in their trial, did something that had never been done before, not even by the Pine Gap Four: they opened Pine Gap, by persuading the trial judge to allow the jury to hear evidence from experts about what Pine Gap actually does, including an extraordinary interview with the late Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser in which he explained why the base needs to be shut down. Finnane documents, day by day, how the Peace Pilgrims found a crack, and, millimetre by millimetre, prised it open, just enough to allow the light to trickle in.

That isn’t weird. It’s wonderful. It is also extremely rare. Governments go to a great deal of trouble to try to ensure that the legal system does not allow civilly disobedient citizens to prise open cracks in this way. Who knows where this sort of thing might lead?

This is a remarkable story that needs telling. And we are fortunate that such a remarkably clear-eyed, sharp-eyed, unflinchingly far-sighted member of our community has taken the trouble to tell it for us. Thank you, Kieran.

Russell Goldflam
Alice Springs

Peace Crimes: Spooky silence around Pine Gap

I acknowledge Mr Stephens and Mr Wallace, and all Arrernte elders of the past and future. I thank you for the privilege of meeting here in magnificent Arrernte country.

I acknowledge that this country was never ceded by Arrernte people – not the town and the hill we stand on today, nor the land where Pine Gap base has been built.

Kieran Finnane’s book Peace Crimes is an enormous achievement. A spooky silence often prevails around Pine Gap. Kieran’s book stands in contradiction to that silence. She takes the intellectual and political position that the functioning of the military facility at Pine Gap, and agreements between Australian and US governments, should be out in the open.

She has analysed swathes of technical information about the Base’s role in facilitating high-tech warfare. She confronts the part it plays in lethal, illegal drone strikes against citizens of countries with whom Australia is not at war, and the human consequences of this lawlessness.

She explores the motivations and methods of the Peace Pilgrims – what led to their actions at Pine Gap, and to their trial for trespass, under the Defence (Special Undertakings) Act. With care and clarity she unpacks the trial. We see how the law is applied in this instance of what she wryly calls ‘a reckless act of prayer’.

She does this without preaching, or shying away from difficult material. Her approach is connected, clear, inclusive, and above all, compassionate. Her extraordinary commitment to writing this book stands to benefit us all, by amplifying the pilgrims’ message and carrying it further.

This is a book on a mission. It invites you to engage with the stories of the pilgrim’s lives and actions. You find you want to know: ‘Who are these people? What do they have to say to me? Seeing how they live, how might I live my life?’

How does this book do so much, weave all these strands together? The book’s content, the way it is organised, and its purpose are skilfully braided. Strands of experience, analysis, and reflection are woven together into a new, more complete story about violence, and lives dedicated to peaceful resistance to violence.

Here are some of the strands:

The multicoloured threads of the pilgrims’ lives, their faith and principles, their activist predecessors, their music, imagery and language, their grief, courage and determination
The philosophy and practice of non-violent direct action
Kieran’s own family and community ties, her deep reflections.
The continuum of destruction of Aboriginal lives, livelihoods, language and culture from Frontier Wars through to today.
The wars in which Pine Gap has played a part, from Vietnam onwards.

Readers will find many different places to land – many points of connection relating to their own stories. For me the book prompted memories of the environmental actions of the 1980’s: Terania Creek; Franklin Dam; the Daintree road. Also of the womens’ collectives helping women prepare for NVDA at Roxby Downs, the Women for Survival Peace Camp at Pine Gap in 1983, Lucas Heights, Cockburn Sound, Jabiluka, Anzac Day protests and other actions.

The pilgrims’ stories reminded me how with NVDA, activists choose to be exposed to harm, to be vulnerable, to experience in their own bodies the power of the small and ordinary, the power of standing together, of care and nurture, and the power to refuse violence.

In a Women for Survival newsletter from 1983 I found these favourite lines from Judy Grahn:

‘the common woman is as common as the best of bread and will rise’.

Words echoed by Peace Pilgrim Margaret Pestorius as she insists she does

‘all those ordinary things that ordinary people do’ – ‘putting my ordinary little body on the line’.

‘… being a non-violent activist is about disruption, stopping harms, facing up, witnessing, speaking truth to power’.

This book will have done its work when ordinary people who read it find their own ways to take action on the issues that move them most, whether that means anti-racism work, climate action, protecting country, strengthening culture and community, working for food and water security, standing for office, making music, lamenting our losses, or creating images or texts that, like this one, acclaim life and inspire change.

Jennifer Taylor

Pine Gap: A tiny crack, but enough to let some light in

Peace Crimes by Kieran Finnane tells the story of activism at the secret US spy base near Alice Springs. Six Peace Pilgrims trespassed on the grounds of Pine Gap in 2016, leading to a court case in 2017 where the activists were charged under terrorism laws and faced up to 7 years jail. Their quest was to save lives by stopping the function of Pine Gap for even a day, and to expose the horrors of Pine Gap’s role in illegal US wars, characterised by drone strikes and killing of civilians.

Pine Gap: A tiny crack, but enough to let some light in

Close Pine Gap

Peace Crimes Brisbane launch

Jennifer Taylor

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