Anand Naidoo spoke to UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese about the crisis in Gaza and the occupied West Bank.
Albanese has produced a series of reports examining the humanitarian crisis, allegations of international law violations, and questions of accountability. #Heat #Israel #Gaza #Palestine
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| Pine Gap, a key U.S.-run listening post in Australia’s Northern Territory |
Pine Gap is a garrison outpost dominated by the U.S. imperium that defiles sacred native land and aids Israel in its cleansing conflict against Palestinians
It remains a prickly reminder that Australia is an embarrassed vassal of power, annexed to the security interests of another state basking in imperial and fast diminishing splendour.
Pine Gap, known more technically as the Joint Defence Facility Pine Gap (JDFPG), is a largely U.S.-operated effort in Alice Springs, Central Australia. As the late scholar of strategic studies Desmond Ball pithily remarked in 1988, it is “an espionage operation. Euphemisms should not be allowed to obscure this essential point.”
It grew out of a desire on the part of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (C.I.A.) in 1965 to establish a remote Australian-sited ground control station intended for signals intelligence satellites. Land belonging to the Central Arrernte people was accordingly excised the following year for the site.
The decision, in typically rough fashion, was made without consultation and discussion with local residents or elders, a secret place that became what Trevor Paglen would describe as a “blank space on the map … erased from the public record.”
The facility staffs some 800 personnel from the U.S. National Security Agency (N.S.A.), C.I.A., the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office (N.R.O.) and such Australian agencies as the Australian Signals Directorate and Australian Federal Police.
Over the years, the base has become increasingly corporatised with a heavy American accent: Raytheon, Northrop Grumman and General Dynamics, IBM and Hewlett Packard. A mere 10 percent of the constituted personnel are said to be Australian government employees.
The base periodically attracts its keen and principled protesters, aghast at the base’s role in furnishing targeting data for U.S. and allied drone and missile strikes across the Middle East and Africa. This year, the Close Pine Gap-Sacred Land Back convergence three days (July 18-20) of activities, with hundreds of participants gathered in Alice Springs to demand the closure of the facility through a series of workshops, panels and woven “threads of anti-militarism and decolonial movements.”
On July 20, a rally of 300 individuals gathered close to the front of the spy base, the largest since 1987, sporting signs and flags and chanting the stock phrases: “shut it down,” “close Pine Gap,” and “always was, always will be Aboriginal land.”
New South Wales Greens Senator David Shoebridge was present, expressing his concern about a “foreign military base setup for the interests of a foreign military” in the service of “right wing politics” and disrespectful of international law.
The base was also a potential target for any adversaries the U.S. might be willing to antagonise, thereby bringing “danger into the heart of our country.”
Arrernte Apmereke-artweye traditional custodians Felicity, Wyonna and Jacquita Hayes offer sound if disturbing logic, as reported by the Australian Associated Press: Pine Gap sits on a sacred site that not only profanes tradition but acts as vehicle for the waging of foreign wars and the conduct of genocide.
“We don’t want to be feeling guilty all the time when bad things are happening overseas to little ones. We’re not the ones controlling that facility, but we feel guilty that it’s coming to our land.” The custodians wished for the facility to be closed “so the generation coming can be safe. We want to be compensated so we can get houses at Whitegate community.”
It is also with some astonishment that the residents of Whitegate, to this day, are deprived of rudimentary services, including decent housing and running water. The water has to be brought in by truck. There is no sewerage.
Richard Tanter of the Nautilus Institute, one of Pine Gap’s most astute and flawlessly detailed critics, proved ever reliable in remarking that, “Unless the Australian direct and indirect military relationship to Israeli activities in the Gaza Strip are closely reviewed … it is not possible for the Australian government to assure parliament and the Australian public that Australia is not complicit in acts of genocide.”
The good professor has been able to shed much light on the facility’s broader purposes and is dismissive of critics who fault claims that the site is being used to feed such military efforts as those of Israel. (He can point to at least three satellites having the Gaza Strip within their reach.)
In October 1973, for instance, satellite intelligence from Pine Gap was passed on to Israel during the Yom Kippur War, a contribution that aided Israel’s breakthrough of the Egyptian lines.
This is of little concern to the clubland militarists in Canberra and such think tanks as the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI).
Former intelligence officer Patrick White, writing for ASPI’s The Strategist, laments the diminished secrecy and security of the site, worrying that trends in signals technology have no longer made the base “irreplaceable.” The advent of extensive encryption means that satellite download feeds can be protected “almost anywhere. The remoteness that once hid the site from view no longer hides much at all.”
He is sentimental about the ties with Washington. “We have shared in intelligence and expertise far beyond anything our own resources could produce. We have no satellites of this kind.” Precisely why Canberra is blood-crusted in its complicity, less an authoritative host than a butler eager to please.
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| Destruction caused by Israeli bombing of Jabalia camp, Gaza Strip, October 2024. (UNRWA/Wikimedia Commons) |
Pine Gap acts, then, as a symbol of highly distilled, triple strength colonisation: a garrison outpost dominated by the U.S. imperium and its personnel (a poke in the eye of Australian sovereignty), located on native land it defiles (a poke in the eye of the First Nations peoples), and also responsible for aiding the predations of Washington’s allies – more recently the Israeli Defense Forces in its cleansing conflict against the Palestinians.
“I understand the genocide in Gaza against my people is made possible by intelligence flowing from the heart of this colony in Alice Springs directly to the Israeli occupation forces,” stated Palestinian activist Remah Naji of Justice for Palestine Magan-djin with potency.
Shoebridge agreed: “We’re letting them use our land, this key real estate, I think [to] commit some of the worst atrocities we’ve seen.”
As the AUKUS Public Inquiry continues its various hearings on that ghastly, doomed security pact between Australia, the UK and the US, the Close Pine Gap campaign should be commended as a linked, worthy extension.
The former’s proceedings have been mostly savaging the wisdom of a pact that has shown Australia to be embarrassingly disadvantaged, its politicians largely deluded, and its strategic establishment impressionable and bankrupt. (That establishment seeks to bankrupt the Australian treasury to the princely sum of AU$368 billion over promised nuclear-powered submarines that may never arrive.)
The Close Pine Gap protests, while receiving less in the way of coverage, is no less pertinent and urgent in its aims.
~ Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne.
Video journalist Bisan Owda follows children carrying heavy water containers, families waiting for water trucks, and the people working to keep one of the few desalination plants still running.
Along the way, Bisan reveals what has been destroyed, why clean water has become so hard to find, and what it now takes to provide water for millions of people in Gaza.
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This video story is direct evidence of genocide by Israel.
Today in Maine's Portland Press Herald an article appeared with this headline: Maine Jewish leaders push back on Gaza genocide accusation against Israel
Parents and grandparents could explain to the children:
In one way or the other I've heard just about all of these excuses during my time as a full-time social justice, anti-imperialist and environmental organizer - since 1978.
Most people find one or more reasons from the list above to justify spending their lives in denial of apparent reality. The techno world and capitalism have transformed many people into automatons and consumers. It's very sad but a fact of our time.
The goal would be that people would rediscover their spiritual connection to our Mother Earth and one another before it is too late.
It might be a bit romantic on my part but I often think about all those in my long family lineage who got our relations through the ice ages, droughts, famines, plagues, wars and the like.
Now during this moment on Earth some are giving up the ghost. I can't understand why anyone would surrender when our #1 job as a human being is to protect our children and Mother Nature - both are the future.
It's a broken spiritual connection that we all suffer from that keeps us locked in these prisons.
Best wishes to the future generations.
Bruce
In this episode of 51/49, James exposes how corporate profit-driven food inflation is being weaponized by Congress to quietly pass a massive new surveillance law.
This reveals how the Combating Organized Retail Crime Act gives Homeland Security and local retailers sweeping authority to collect your personal data, track your location via AI cameras, and construct a permanent digital dragnet under the guise of "stopping shoplifting".
During the tour the guide was talking about FDR's grandfather Warren Delano Jr. who made a fortune, lost it, and remade another during his life. FDR's mother inherited the fortune and used the money to help pave the way for FDR to become Governor of New York and president. She also used the family fortune to purchase Campobello. In front of the group on the tour with us I asked the guide, 'How did FDR's grandfather make his fortune'? She whispered to me 'the China opium trade'. Then she paused and repeated the same answer loud enough for everyone on the tour to hear. No one appeared to react. I really respected our guide for being honest.
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| FDR's summer 'cottage' in Campobello, Canada |
As it turns out former US Sen. John Kerry's (D-MA) maternal great-grandfather also made his Boston-based fortune via the same opium trade. The funds from this illicit drug biz funded the founding of Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Columbia universities as well as the first transcontinental railroad across the US. So it's instructive to reflect on the fact that leading American 'blue-blood' political families were drug dealers. Thus I don't have any trouble thinking of the ruling elites (including the slave traders from many of these same families) as criminals.
This of course is a little known story in our country. The opium trade was sold to the American people 'innocently' as just the 'China trade'. (Think lovely art, dishes, silk and tea.)
Britain is being run by a puppet regime whose purpose is to sell war.
One week after becoming prime minister, Andy Burnham delivered on his assigned role to ramp up Britain’s militarism and support for Ukraine in the NATO proxy war against Russia.
Burnham hosted Ukrainian so-called president, Vladimir Zelensky, at Britain’s top naval base in Portsmouth on board the aircraft carrier, HMS Queen Elizabeth.
“It’s no accident that we meet here,” Burnham told Zelensky with British and Ukrainian troops in the background. He went on to say that Britain has Ukraine’s back “one hundred per cent” and that the meeting was a signal to Russia that London was “not backing down” in its support for the Kiev regime.
In those words, “it’s no accident”, Burnham let it slip. This was indeed a calculated show of deeper British military involvement in the four-year proxy NATO war against Russia. Note that Zelensky was not received at Downing Street, which would have been strange enough. No, he was welcomed on board Britain’s flagship aircraft carrier.
Zelensky is the first foreign leader to be hosted by Burnham since he took over at 10 Downing Street on July 20. That speaks volumes about Burnham’s assigned priorities. Forget about domestic issues and dealing with the cost-of-living crisis for Britons that Burnham has appeared to be concerned about. The top priority is militarizing the British economy and sticking it to Russia.
In their meeting in Portsmouth, Burnham said he discussed increasing supplies of anti-ballistic missiles to Ukraine and scaling up Ukraine’s manufacturing capability of drones. In a provocative step, Burnham said that London was providing Ukraine with greater access to Britain’s electronic warfare system, Stone Cloak, which is aimed at intensifying drone strikes deep in Russia. British and NATO-supplied drone technology and targeting logistics have already enabled Ukraine to increase deadly strikes on Russia in recent months, with hundreds of civilians killed. Burnham is giving notice that Britain is aiming to increase the lethality of these weapons by enabling them to evade Russian air defenses.
Also on the agenda in Portsmouth was British navy training for Ukrainian troops to step up attacks in the Black Sea against Russian ships, including civilian cargo vessels carrying grain exports. Of course, this is couched in the language of “defense” and “counter-measures”.
For his part, Zelensky said that he was looking forward to setting up a “big, big factory” in Britain for manufacturing drones for Ukraine. If that goes ahead, Burnham is putting a target on Britain for Russian retaliation.
~ Finian Cunningham is a former editor and writer for major news media organizations. He has written extensively on international affairs, with articles published in several languages.
Analyst KJ Noh on the near-miss war between South and North Korea and how it's possible the real thing will happen.
The 3.6 million South Korean military is directly controlled by the U.S. which could set it off 'with a snap of its fingers.'
U.S. ramping up the militarization of South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, Guam, Philippines, Australia and New Zealand to be used as the proxies to initiate war with China.
