Pine Gap as Seen by a Yank in Kangaroo’s Clothing
Edward Cranswick
Revised 12 August 2007
(08 August 2007)
My parents and their families are Australians, I was born in London but grew up and lived in the US for 50 years and spent the last 22 years of that time investigating earthquakes for the US government. In 2002, attempting to escape the post-9/11, increasingly militarist US nightmare, I quit my job and moved to Australia to spend time with my aged mother. My then 96-year-old uncle told me that when he was a boy growing up on his father’s property in the Outback, the shearers would ride from station to station on bicycles. Accordingly, in search of my Australian roots, I rode a bicycle from Adelaide to Alice Springs where I discovered instead the Joint Defence Facility Pine Gap, the largest US military intelligence/CIA satellite base outside the USA, and I participated in the October 2002 protest against Pine Gap (at which I met Jim Dowling). This experience inspired me to go to Iraq in February 2003 to protest the impending US attack (where I met Donna Mulhearn). In October 2006, largely motivated by the presence of Jim and Donna among the defendants, I returned to Alice Springs to support members of the Pine Gap 4 during their trial <http://pinegapontrial.blogspot.com> for breaking into Pine Gap in December 2005 <http://www.pinegap6.org/info.html>. Their trial was postponed, but I was arrested at a Pine Gap protest then, and I returned again to Alice Springs for my trial in February 2007. I returned once more in May/June 2007 for the postponed Pine Gap 4 trial, and I was arrested a second time at another Pine Gap protest but released without charge. The following are some observations of Pine Gap from the perspective of my Anglo/American/Australian background.
German backpackers, having come to Alice Springs to discover the cosmic truths of Aboriginal Dreaming, walk down one side of the Todd Street Mall; Aboriginal people, going the opposite direction, walk down the other side: they do not meet; the Mall is lined with Aboriginal art galleries and tourist shops run by white Australian business people; from the surrounding streets comes the growl of monstrous 4WDs and camping trailers driven by white Australian tourists on their way to and from bashing the bush – lurking behind this cultural schizophrenia are the Americans of Pine Gap where much of the war in Iraq is being fought.
Back in the late 1960’s, when Pine Gap was established and we were altogether on the same side in the Cold War competition with the Soviets, all the town of Alice knew about the Americans at the “Space Base”, presumably working on things related to NASA and the race to the moon, etc. According to former CIA agent, Victor Marchetti <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victor_Marchetti>, the military of the countries which were the focus of its attention knew about the real role of Pine Gap, but the Australian public did not: the main reason for the secrecy policy about the Base was to conceal its espionage and war activities from Australians. The hi-tech satellite/computer link between the blood and guts of the men, woman, and children splattered against crumpled concrete by US bombs in Baghdad and the air-conditioned bunkers below Pine Gap where US nerds play computer games with real-life targets is obscured by Hollywood fantasies. In 2002, when I asked an American woman working in an Alice Springs shop about her husband’s job at Pine Gap, she replied with a line from the movie Men in Black <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men_in_Black_%28film%29>, “Someone’s got to protect us from the Aliens”.
In Australia the natives are friendly – compared to Iraq, for example – and Americans can treat Australians the way that some white Australians treat black Australians. The first priority of the police in Alice Springs is to protect the Americans; their second is to keep the Aborigines under control – Pine Gap itself is sited on land taken from the Aboriginal people. The War in Iraq is a war on the Iraqi people to occupy their land, to kill as many of them as possible, and to destroy their culture as a means of gaining control of their mineral wealth, their oil. Similarly, the Commonwealth and State/Territory governments are waging a war on Aboriginal people to occupy their land, to kill many of them as possible by neglect, and to destroy their culture as a means of gaining control of their mineral wealth, the uranium, copper, gold, silver, lead, titanium, coal, etc.
In addition to being similarly arid, sparsely populated, red landscapes that are the homes of dispossessed indigenous peoples, the parallels between the Southwestern US (New Mexico, Arizona, Nevada) and the Red Centre of Australia are striking: both have nuclear bomb test sites, rocket testing, secret weapons labs/towns, uranium mining, and proposed nuclear waste dumps. In particular, Alice Springs/Pine Gap reminds me of Santa Fe/Los Alamos, New Mexico, where the nuclear bomb was developed, because both towns dance around the dialectic of sex/death – both have vibrant art communities fervidly flowing from the indigenous tradition and which flourish in economic hot houses supported by the US war machine – there is a sense in these red “Hearts of Darkness” that all is permitted, the promiscuous and the genocidal.
During the trial of the Pine Gap 4 in May/June 2007, I met a man in an Alice Springs bike shop and his American accent triggered my paranoia. I asked him if he were a tourist – No, he said, his wife worked at Pine Gap, and he thought her job was a bunch of bullshit because the US is in Iraq because of oil. A cargo cult mentality has developed in Alice Springs around Pine Gap, and the American employees and their families and high salaries constitute the great white missionaries of the American God of Production/Consumption whose way of life – including white goods like washing machines – is flown in from America on US air-cargo jets to the Alice Springs airport several times a week. The American way of life was invented in the US about a century ago to provide a market for the combination of the rich natural resources of North America – particularly the vast quantities of oil discovered there, primarily in Texas – and the great US industrial productivity, and it was advertised and marketed to the world by Hollywood and the US war machine. The problem that has increasingly developed in America since the 1960’s is how to feed these wealthy habits now that the natural wealth has been largely consumed.
Suppression of information was what the trial was all about. Wanting to expose the role of Pine Gap in the increasingly bloodthirsty efforts of the American Empire to maintain its grip upon the Earth, the Pine Gap 4 had broken into the “Prohibited Area”. One of the defendants, Donna Mulhearn, had experienced the brutal reality of US policy whilst staying in Iraq during the 2003 US invasion, and she subsequently returned to Iraq for several months and witnessed the US attack on Fallujah in April 2004. At the trial, Donna summarized the legal devices used by the court to suppress information: “the public interest immunity ruling restricting critical evidence being presented; … the ruling on Parliamentary Privilege also restricting evidence; the restriction of expert witnesses”.
Tellingly, the original purpose of Pine Gap was to obtain information – it was primarily dedicated to monitoring the development of Soviet missiles. That information was essential to maintaining a balance of understanding about the balance of terror that the arms race of the Cold War had produced. Keeping both sides informed about their mutual destructive capabilities cautioned them against committing acts that would assure their mutual destruction. However, with the collapse of the USSR, Pine Gap metamorphosed into a real-time killer that selects targets and issues the command to destroy them. “Shoot first, ask questions later” – this is the John Wayne myth of how the West was won, and it is the mantra of “Bring It On” George Bush with his policy of pre-emptive war ... and that, of course, of his deputy, John Howard …
Ironically, it is the former drunk and coke-user George Bush who has made the most cogent statement about the world situation, “America is addicted to oil”. It may seem like one can fight Peak Oil with the military – “Kick their ass and take their gas” as inscribed on a US tank advancing into Baghdad – but nothing consumes oil faster than war, and you can’t fight global warming or environmental destruction with the war machine, hence, “we have met the enemy and he is us” <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pogo>. So perhaps the White House policy of suppressing information – about Iraq, global warming, peak oil – is not so much directed at the public but rather at the Emperor who has no clothes, a.k.a, George, the Denier in Chief. Information from the “reality-based community” <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality-based_community> threatens his faith-based community that lives in denial of the empirical facts about the Earth like a cartoon character that mindlessly walks off the edge of the cliff and floats unsupported in the warming air until it looks down and falls. Of course, there are catastrophes heading our way that will have devastating effects upon us regardless of what we believe about them.
One day a few days into the trial, I, the token American present, sensed a feeling of solidarity of the whole court – prosecution, judge, defendants, jury, officers, audience: it seemed that they had all suddenly realized they were playing a game, that they were all Australians and the puppeteer was absent, that they were doing this absurd performance for the benefit of the silly American bosses who were watching in their secret, pervy, ways. But so many Australians have been addicted to the American way of life ever since they decided that General Douglas MacArthur had saved them from the Japanese during WWII, and for this, they must pay the dealer. And they realized during the next American War, the War in Viet Nam, that they’d made a deal with the devil – the US government is "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today" as Martin Luther King said in a 1967 speech in which he compared the US military oppression of the Vietnamese people to the racial oppression of Black Americans in the US <http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0115-13.htm>. This was the same year that Australia passed the referendum that gave Aboriginal people the full and equal rights of citizens – when they became “real Australians”.
Most non-Aboriginal people in Alice Springs, for example, members of the jury of the trial, probably suspect that their way of life is unsustainable – like that in Las Vegas where open courtyards in the middle of the desert are air-conditioned – but they don’t want to be reminded of it. Their faith in the cargo cult whose ultimate promise of salvation is the continuing supply of petrol and other mod-cons that distinguish them from the Aborigines requires that they implicitly support Pine Gap and an Australian government that licks George Bush’s ass (to paraphrase Mark Latham). However, Pine Gap is part of the CIA scam to stack the cards, load the dice, for the global crapshoot at the Star Wars Casino. The whole world takes the risk, America skims the profits off the top, and the Australians at Alice Springs get to clean the toilets and dump the ashtrays – which may soon be filled with nuclear ash. It is easy for the soul to lose itself in the hi-tech digital wilderness. But in the midst of the satellites, computers, radio domes, infrared sensors, lasers, ICBMs & ABMs, and nuclear weapons, it is even more important to make a moral choice. In America, they say, “In God we trust” – the question for Australians is, “Can you afford to trust the American God?”
Alice Springs is sustained unsustainably by water from an aquifer, a natural underground reservoir, and Alice’s water consumption is profligate – without any water restrictions and, hence, the second highest water usage per household of cities in Australia. The tourists come to experience Aboriginal culture, the Americans hide behind the tourists, both living in modern houses and motels with spas and well-manicured gardens in the middle of the bush – meanwhile the water table in the aquifer drops more than a meter each year – but life here for both of them is a trip, it’s temporary, only a visit. Conversely, as I discovered on my bike ride through the desert to Alice Springs five years ago, if you don’t bathe and you don’t flush the toilet every time you piss or shit, you can get by on only a few liters of water each day, in fact, you have no choice – that’s all that is available. This is one of the fundamental cosmic truths of the Aboriginal people, and it has allowed a few thousand of them to live sustainably in Alice Springs for tens of thousands of years.