Peace Researcher 34 – July 2007
For many
years now Peace Researcher has written about the numerous US bases in
Australia, principally about the top secret nuclear war fighting spybase at
Pine Gap, near Alice Springs (see below for details of the most recent protest
actions there). In February 2007 the craven Howard government (George Bush has
pronounced John Howard to be his “deputy sheriff”) announced that, following
three years of secret negotiations, the US will be building a new spy satellite
ground control base at Geraldton, north of Perth, in Western Australia
(Geraldton is also the site of the Australian Defence Signals Directorate’s
satellite interception spybase which is the sister base to Waihopai in NZ. But
that network of bases spy on satellites, civilian communications one; this new
base will be controlling spying by military satellites. So there is a crucial
difference between the two Geraldton spybases).
The
official announcement said that the new Geraldton base will be the ground
station for the Mobile User Objective System and will provide a crucial link
for a new network of military satellites that will help America’s ability to
fight wars in the Middle East and Asia. It will control two of five
geostationary satellites parked over the Indian Ocean (geostationary means that
the satellite sits above the Equator and therefore maintains a fixed position
in space, not following the Earth’s rotation). It will provide front line
military units instantly with high quality encrypted intelligence information,
graphics and maps, and is aimed at significantly improving communications for
fast moving ground troops. It is being sited as far west as possible on the
Australian land mass, so that it can spy on the Persian Gulf and South Asia. It
is the first new US base to be built in Australia since Pine Gap in the 1960s.
Philip
Dorling, a Visiting Fellow at the
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