Late at night on Thursday the 8th, four of us, Donna Mulhearn and Brian Law in one group and Jessica Goldie and myself in the other started the walk to the base from two different directions. We walked for five hours and three hours respectively. At 4 am Adele and I came close to the first 3meter high security fence. As we lay on the ground perhaps 500 metres from the fence security vehicles drove nearby with their floodlight panning the area. We thought they must have known of our presence and were searching for us. At least twice we thought they must have seen us and our attempt to enter the base was over. Later we realised their surveillance was routine, and they had miraculously not seen us.
After two vehicles had gone Adele and I made the last 100 meter dash through the open floodlit area to the outer security fence. As Adele hung our banner – WHAT HAVE YOU DONE? YOUR BROTHER’S BLOOD CRIES OUT TO ME FROM THE EARTH (Genesis 4:10) - on the fence, I placed Jessica’s beautiful barbed wire crucifix against the fence. Then I cut through the fence. We climbed through and I cut the second fence about ten meters away. Again we climbed through and realised all the power of the greatest empire in history could not stop two untrained, unfunded, unarmed Christian pacifists from entering one of their most important and secure bases - even after we had told them we were coming.
(Bryan's Webdiary archive, with all his pieces on the Pine Gap protest from its inception, are here [0].)
It is my sad duty to inform you that Bryan and his friends
have been found guilty of all charges and now await sentencing on
charges including trespassing in a prohibited area, damaging
Commonwealth property and taking unlawful photographs of a defence
site. The jury took five hours to reach the verdict. (Bryan set out the background to the case in Pine Gap - the Empire strikes back [0].)
As Bryan has said before, he is a practitioner of Scott Parkin's style of passive non-violent resistance. (See Julian Burnside QC on the Scott Parkin case [0] and the Webdiary Parkin archive [1].) This is not a terrorist planning to disable an important instrument of the US' Middle Eastern profit spree, but somebody who was passionately attempting to highlight something that he thought was fundamentally wrong with US relations.
This is what Bryan is reported to have said in court yesterday
[news.com.au [2] extract]
"I ask that Your Honour does not grant a suspended sentence", he said.
"That would be cruel.
"I would not be able to abide by its conditions and we would just end up in court again.
And this line, reminiscent of Breaker Morant: "Lay it on me Your Honour, and I'll serve it out."
The presiding judge, Justice Sally Thomas obviously doesn't think that the misdemeanours of the Pine Gap Four deserve the severity of treatment that Attorney General Ruddock has prescribed, saying today:
It's a big step up from a relatively minor thing dealt with in the Magistrates Court to this... They are facing serious charges carrying lengthy jail terms, while hundreds of people have been dealt with in the Magistrates Court.
Does she, also, think that the situation is politically generated? It looks that way to me. Ruddock's never used this law before [3], and this is his chance tto make sure that protesters who take their complaint to the Yanks will not be tolerated.
You wouldn't want to create a folk
hero, would you? Look how disrespectful the Irish have been. There the
fellow charged with busting into Shannon Airport to disable US fighter
on its way to Iraq, as a demonstration against such Irish assistance to
the Iraq invasion, Ciaron O'Reilly, ended leading ten thousand anti-war
marchers through the streets of Dublin. He did this on the night
before a visit by US President Bush.
Ruddock and ASIO would have none of such rebelliousness there. O'Reilly, whose bail conditions were so strenuous that he was allowed to fly to Australia, was detained by ASIO at Brisbane airport [4]for many hours. The spooks couldn't keep him out... unfortunately he's an Australian citizen.
Who's going to lead the march through Sydney when Dubya comes to town? Whoever it is could, when they hit to cordons, do well to remember (and maybe borrow) this routine:
[Extract from CNN Link no longer active]
Irish protesters used Shakespeare to blitz George W. Bush on Saturday, invoking Macbeth, a ghost and a witch to cast a spell on the U.S. president and drive him, symbolically at least, from Irish soil.
Some 500 demonstrators marched on Dromoland Castle, the 16th century turreted mansion in western Ireland where Bush met European Union leaders for a summit.
When they were stopped at a police road block, they staged their own version of Shakespeare's bloody Scottish tragedy.
First, a ghost with a whited-out face read the names of U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq. Then a woman dressed as Lady Macbeth read a list of Iraqi victims.
Finally, a woman dressed as a witch with a black pointy hat and a flowing cape cast a spell on a man wearing a Bush face mask. The man crumpled to the floor as the witch ordered him to leave Ireland and end the occupation of Iraq.
The protesters held up a banner adorned with a quote from Macbeth, Shakespeare's powerful drama of death, destruction and ambition in feudal Scotland.
"There's the smell of blood still," read the banner, on which was painted a gory hand. "All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand."
Some 50 police officers watched the drama unfold from behind their roadblock, just half a mile from the castle where Bush was staying for the EU-U.S. summit. The protest passed peacefully and the crowd dispersed after around 90 minutes.
When I think of the ghost of Banquo I think of Bryan. Having somebody who is so well-known to resistance networks (and probably ASIO) would not doubt heighten the intensity of such a media-op. However he's about to be well and truly kept away from the Bush visit.
The connection between the Irish protests and the Australian one?
There
are two brothers O'Reilly- Ciaron, who ASIO interviewed at
Brisbane airport, and his brother Sean, who was arrested for hindering
police at the Pine Gap break-in.
Ruddock and ASIO had already in 2005 shown their concern for international activists known to US authorities. They demonstrated this by surrounding, arresting and deporting US Halliburton activist Scott Parkin. I have outlined here before my hypothesis that the information ASIO were acting on in this case might be ridiculously trivial. Not only that, but it appears to have been obtained from an illegally-kept Pentagon file. The legal issues of ASIO vs Parkin are yet to be resolved, with the spooks currently appealing the Federal Court's permission for Parkin to review his files.
Around the time of the Parkin Incident Bryan was writing on Webdiary supporting the man's techniques. Many of the Webdiary pieces have been linked and reprinted on Houston Indymedia. This was the website mentioned in the Pentagon file as being monitored to track Parkin's activities. It was also the site I used as a launch pad to put a Parkin piece on Halliburton Watch. I wonder which names have been cross-referenced and sequenced. Could a US intelligence computer spit out a chain running from Hal Watch to Houston Indy to Parkin to Webdiary to Bryan to Pine Gap to Shannon Airport?
Personally I try not to laugh looking at it, but I don't think ASIO have a great sense of humour. Do we appear as highly trained crack mob of media activists? I don't know, but it wouldn't surpise me if some drongo wasn't walking around the CIA's Langley campus with such thoughts in mind. We've all watched The Falcon And The Snowman, haven't we? Now there's a fine Pine Gap movie.
The CIA have no sense of humour at all. Their President is coming to Sydney. There are people who have been thorns in the side of US (Military and Halliburton) interests within the US and Ireland. The Pine Gap Four and their supporters have displayable connections with these people. It is hypothetically possible for the champions of the Dublin ant-Bush rally to be applying Parkin's teachings to a Bush Revolt in the streets of Sydney. Come to think of it, I can see how the situation might be being taken quite seriously
Today Bryan Law's sentence will be handed down by a Judge who demonstrably believes that he does not deserve the severity of the sentence that she will be forced to implement..
To borrow from Shakespeare's Hamlet, there's something very rotten in the state of Australia.