The secret signals and surveillance facility at Pine Gap in Northern Australia, officially named the Joint Defence Facility Pine Gap, is billed as a joint affair between Australia and the United States. It is nothing of the sort.
Australian officials and the general public are not privy to any of the goings-on inside Pine Gap — apparently not even the Prime Minister and cabinet.
But this secrecy does, occasionally, make its way into court. For this, we can thank plucky protestors who have, over the years, sought to expose the role of the base in aiding US military operations against targets across the globe.
Two protestors, Carmen Escobar Robinson and Tommy Walker, brought attention to the base’s activities when they blocked Hatt Road, the main access route to Pine Gap, in October 2023.
On November 27, 2023, a second effort temporarily prevented some 100 Pine Gap employees from entering the facility. Robinson and Walker were part of a group of 50 activists, which included health workers, community members and the Arrernte Traditional Owners, acting under the umbrella group Mparntwe for Falastin.
The action had been enlivened by revelations from an ex-Pine Gap employee that intelligence from the base was finding its way to Israeli sources.
The revelations, published in Declassified Australia by Peter Cronau, came from David Rosenberg, a veteran of the US National Security Agency (NSA) who performed the role of “team leader of weapon signals analysis” at Pine Gap for 18 years until 2008.
“Pine Gap facility,” Rosenberg stated, “is monitoring the Gaza Strip and surrounding areas with all its resources, and gathering intelligence assessed to be useful to Israel”.
Personnel at the base were tasked to gather such signals pertaining to Hamas’s command and control centres in Gaza. “Their aim would be to minimise casualties to non-combatants in achieving their objective of destroying Hamas,” given the proximity of such centres to civilian infrastructure such as schools and hospitals. (This claim proved, over time, to be aspirational, given the staggering civilian death toll arising from Israeli strikes.)
Cronau had previously obtained evidence of Pine Gap’s role in supplying geolocation data to the US military for targeting purposes from an August 2012 NSA document entitled “Site Profile G”. It came from the archive of former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and was first published in the Australian Broadcasting Corporation program Background Briefing in 2017.
“RAINFALL [NSA’s designation for Pine Gap] detects, collects, records, processes, analyses and reports on PROFORMA signals collected from tasked target entities.”
These signals, wrote Cronau, constitute “the communications data of radar and weapons systems collected in near-real time”. Pine Gap, “with its satellites so strategically positioned to monitor the Middle East region, along with its targeting and analysis capability” was bound to be valuable to Israel.
Robinson and Walker were subsequently charged with summary offences for the second action, comprising loitering, causing a hazard on the road and blocking the use of a public road. Last September 23, they pleaded “not guilty” to the charges, arguing that the obstruction had been staged to prevent “the offence of genocide in Palestine”.
In his ruling, Judge John McBride found the two protestors “exemplary citizens” in the dedication to their cause, despite finding them guilty of loitering. (The prosecution dropped the obstruction charges late in 2024.) “I conclude that the conduct of both defendants, deliberate as it was, cannot be accepted by this court as reasonable in justifying their intended commission of a criminal offence.”
The defence made by the duo’s lawyer John Lawrence resorted to the Northern Territory’s Criminal Code Act, which stipulates that force — in this case a blockade — can be justified in certain circumstances, one of them being to “prevent the commission of an offence”.
Robinson and Walker had committed their acts with intent “because it was their view, their belief, their understanding that what was going on in Pine Gap was an offence.” The Crown was unable to “prove beyond reasonable doubt” that the defendants “weren’t moving in order to prevent genocide”.
Professor Richard Tanter of the Nautilus Institute was called to give evidence on the facility’s role. This, argued Crown prosecutor Machiko Raheem, was not relevant to the defence of applying force to prevent genocide.
But the court did hear Raheem's rather startling confession that a genocide was taking place in Gaza. “A blind person can see that since the Balfour Declaration of 1917 and the UN Partition Plan in 1947 there has been a systematic annihilation of the Palestinian people,” she said. This annihilation had “only recently [been] labelled […] genocide – which is consistent with human history as a whole. That’s not the issue in these proceedings.”
The judge agreed with the prosecutor that “actions taken in Gaza which constituted an offence of genocide” did not excuse the duo’s conduct. Both were given good behaviour bonds lasting six months and made to pay a court levy of $150.
Robinson told Guardian Australia that in the absence of transparency to parliament or the public “is hardwired into the US military surveillance complex through Pine Gap. The Australian public should be very concerned … how many countries are we unofficially attacking? How many people is Pine Gap involved in killing in Palestine? Lebanon? Syria? Yemen? Iran?”
[Binoy Kampmark currently lectures at RMIT University.]