Peace Researcher 36 – August 2008
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The spectacular action, by Adrian Leason,
The Domebusters were only too happy to tell the
world exactly how they did what they did. It was a triumph of low tech
non-violent direct action (the only things damaged were the dome itself and
some fences cut to get at it). The Catholic Worker group (with whom Anti-Bases
Campaign has had a long working relationship in the campaign to close Waihopai)
held a 24 hour prayer vigil outside the base during the Anzac Day long weekend.
That was duly ignored by the media and the spies themselves. But they certainly
sat up and took notice just a few days later when three of that group, operating
as the Waihopai Anzac Ploughshares, swung into action early in the morning.
Plan A was to use the truck, not as any sort of a battering ram, but equipped
with a hydraulic hoist to lift the Domebusters over the electrified inner fence
without having to cut it or set off any alarms (way back in the 1980s’ early
days of wild and woolly protests, a vehicle was used as a battering ram by
women to smash through the construction site gate and they then occupied the
guard house, using its phone to ring the Prime Minister, David Lange, to tell
him in person to shut the base). But the truck got bogged and had to be
abandoned well short of its objective (it’s currently on loan to a local
vintage machinery club, whose officeholders especially visited the Domebusters
in their Blenheim Police Station cells to ask if they could borrow it until the
legal system resolves the future ownership of this “vehicle used in the
commission of a crime”).
Plan
B: If You Can’t Go Over It, Go Through It
So Plan B swung into action and that was
spectacularly straightforward. They cut through the necessary fences, including
the supposedly electrified high security outer one around the base (each of the
two domes has its own individual fence). Apparently something was radically
wrong with the electronics; no alarms went off, no floodlights came on, no
spies were interrupted from their slumbers. In a later attempt to cover its
embarrassment, the NZ Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB, NZ’s
biggest intelligence agency) said that the base’s security systems had been
thwarted by these sneaky buggers taking fortuitous advantage of a “peasouper
fog”. That story only lasted the few days until the Domebusters were released
on bail, when they revealed that there was no fog (except in the spies’
imaginations) but, on the contrary, it was a lovely clear moonlit morning. Oh
dear.
Having got in unobstructed and undetected, the
three of them set to work with the simplest of garden tools – sickles. It’s a
good thing that they didn’t use hammers as well because the political
connotations of hammers and sickles would have been too much for some of the
more feverish members of the media. We’d often wondered just what the domes
were made of, assuming it to be kevlar (the stuff that bulletproof vests are
made of). In one of ABC’s early actions we had a bullshit throwing contest (won
by a strong armed man of God who is now a clergyman in a very upmarket part of
Christchurch) and the dome had made a most satisfying dull boom as each plastic
bag of freely available and 100% organic bullshit hit it. The GCSB said that
the domes are made of rubberised material similar to that used in inflatable
boats. Whatever they’re made of, the dome proved no match for a sickle. It
didn’t explode like a burst balloon but let out a noisy whoosh of air and then
slowly but surely began to deflate. The domes are kept up by air being
continuously pumped from the inside (in contrast to the much more numerous
domes at the
Only when the dome began to deflate did the
security guards discover something was amiss. Meanwhile the Domebusters went
about their work of erecting a shrine and praying over it for the innocents
killed in the American wars in
Symbolic
Base Closure Textbook Example Of Non-Violent Direct Action
And let’s be very clear about what they have,
and have not, done. They demolished one of the two domes (there is a third,
very recent satellite dish, which has never been covered with a dome). In the
immediate aftermath, Bruce Ferguson, the GCSB Director, had some success in
peddling the nonsense that the function of the domes is to keep the dishes
weatherproof. After a few days of this the media obviously thought: “Wait a
minute, our TV network has got a bloody great satellite dish on the roof of our
Auckland HQ and it doesn’t need a dome over it to stop it going rusty. And,
come to think of it, what about the hundreds of thousands of Sky TV dishes on
houses throughout the country. None of them seem to require little white domes
to enable them to function properly”. The function of the domes is one of the
things that instantly identifies Waihopai as a spybase (the Government has
never attempted a cover story for it). They are there purely and simply to
conceal from public and media view the direction in which the dish is pointing,
from which can be deduced which satellites are being spied upon.
So, by destroying one dome (they thought about doing
the second one as well but decided not to push their luck) they committed a
purely symbolic act. Those domes are the most identifiable things about
Waihopai, dominating the valley and big enough to be seen from passing
aircraft. They are the very symbol of Waihopai. But that’s all they are,
they’re not one of the integral parts of the spybase’s function. Those are the
dishes themselves, and the computers inside the buildings. The Domebusters made
no attempt to touch those - and they could have done serious damage to the dish
they exposed. They had more than 30 minutes undetected at the dish and they had
the tools to inflict damage upon it if they’d so wanted. But they didn’t and
that is probably one of the reasons why the Police backed away from the threat
to charge them with the very serious offence of sabotage. This was the very
opposite of a terrorist act – nobody was hurt, nothing was bombed, set on fire
or even seriously damaged. The “terrorists” were unarmed (to a comical degree)
and went out of their way to be caught. It was a brilliant piece of political
theatre, a perfect example of non-violent direct action affecting only
property. And a most bloodstained, obnoxious bit of property at that.
So why did they do it? That doesn’t require any
explanation for readers of Peace
Researcher. Waihopai is NZ’s single most important contribution to each and
any American war (be it in Iraq,
Afghanistan or “on Terror”) with intelligence gathering having been
elevated to critical importance by that war machine. It fatally compromises our
supposed nuclear free and independent foreign policy. They did it for all the
reasons that ABC has presented why Waihopai should be closed down forthwith, in
the 21 years that we’ve been campaigning about this spybase. In everything
except name it is an outpost of US Intelligence operating with impunity on NZ
soil and, to add insult to injury, we pay for it, to the tune of tens of
millions per year.
Waihopai
Is A
Another piece of bullshit peddled by the GCSB
and some wilfully ignorant “experts” in the immediate aftermath was that
Waihopai is a purely NZ operation, fully under “our” control and only working
to gather intelligence of use to NZ. That is complete nonsense – Waihopai is
but one of a global chain of such spybases operated by the Intelligence
agencies of the five members of the top secret UKUSA Agreement – the US, UK,
Canada, Australia and NZ. All of them (bases and agencies) operate at the
behest of, and in the interests of, the US National Security Agency (NSA), the
world’s biggest spy agency. Bruce Ferguson immediately undercut his own
assertion of Waihopai’s “100% stand alone Kiwi owned and operated” status by
revealing that as soon as he learned of the attack, he immediately contacted the
GCSB’s Bigger Brothers to alert them of possible internationally coordinated
Ploughshares attacks on their spybases. Why would he bother to do that if
Waihopai was truly independent? Nicky Hager wrote “Secret Power” (1996) the
definitive book on Waihopai, the GCSB and their role in the international spy
network. He has long since moved onto other subjects but is still an
unparalleled expert on this. In the Sunday
Star Times (11/5/08; “Waihopai: our role in international spying”) he set
the record straight:
“…Waihopai is entirely a
“All of this makes it clear that, whatever you think of the Christian
protest at Waihopai, they were correct when they described it as an important
part of the Bush Adminstration's War on Terror. But the GCSB is generally so
secret that it's easy for people to sound off in uninformed ways.
“Incorrect. The Waihopai station, like the GCSB itself, is staffed and
funded by New Zealanders. It is not a
“This US intelligence system, codenamed ‘Echelon’ in the 1990s, was the
subject of a 2000-2001 European Parliament inquiry that confirmed and added
extra detail to the descriptions of Echelon provided by GCSB staff for my 1996
book about the agency. It uses computers codenamed Dictionaries to sift
intelligence from the millions of satellite communications intercepted at the
various facilities. The key to the system is that each station does not just
collect intelligence for the home nation. Waihopai, like the others, has
separate US, British and Australian search lists (keywords, email addresses
etc) that are used to identify and collect intelligence for the
“The intercepted messages collected for the
“The GCSB's role in the US-led network is well known to its own staff.
When they arrive at headquarters each day, they walk along corridors displaying
framed pictures of the signals intelligence bases that are the foundation of
their work: photos of Waihopai and its US and allied sister stations dotted
around the globe. There is no good reason why other New Zealanders should not
also be allowed to know the basic facts of these intelligence ties, and whose
foreign policies they are supporting”
Who Are These Domebusters?
Their profiles can be found on the Ploughshares Website (www.ploughshares.org.nz).
We’re proud to say that all three of them are ABC members (although one didn’t
join until after the action) and all three, plus a swag of their relatives,
kids and fellow Catholic Workers, were at ABC’s latest Waihopai protest, in
January 2008. Indeed that group, complete with truck (not the same one used in
the attack) made up a significant proportion of our numbers at that protest. Of
the three, Hokianga farmer Sam Land is the one best known to us. He has been to
more than one previous Waihopai protest; when he was living in one of Catholic
Worker’s Christchurch houses throughout the winter of 2007 he was a regular
participant at ABC’s fortnightly committee meetings and other activities; after
they were bailed from the Blenheim Police Station in May 08, Sam came back to
Christchurch for several weeks and resumed attending our committee meetings
(he’s now back home, where the winters are rather warmer). Sam’s anti-bases
activism is not confined to Waihopai or indeed to
ABC has had an excellent working relationship with
both Catholic Worker and Ploughshares for the two decades of our existence, not
only in the campaign to close Waihopai but also that to demilitarise Harewood
(the US Air Force base at
Saturation Media
Coverage
As already mentioned, this one single action succeeded
in getting more saturation media coverage of the Waihopai spybase than anything
else in the 21 years since it was first announced. It was all over the papers,
TV and radio, not only in NZ but overseas as well. And why not – spectacularly deflating
a spy satellite dome is not an everyday occurrence anywhere. This is the area
where the Ploughshares action was most a victim of its own wonderful
amateurism. They had a media spokesperson on the day who duly announced the
deflation and by whom and the why of it to a startled world. He also candidly
stated that they had never really expected to succeed. He wasn’t one of the
Domebusters so he was only held a short time by the Police and then released.
He then, for whatever reason, became uncontactable by the media.
That set the baying hounds onto me and my phone went
crazy for the next couple of days. Let’s clarify one thing here – this was not
an ABC action, we knew nothing about it until the rest of the world learned of
it. However that fine distinction was lost on the media and so ABC was suddenly
being pressed for comment on all sides (by journalists who in some cases stated
that they’d never previously heard of Waihopai and asked questions like “isn’t
it there to protect us from terrorists? What’s wrong with that?”). Not only was
I asked to comment about the base itself and what I thought about the action
but to also explain the religious philosophy of Ploughshares (I declined that
invitation, from Radio New Zealand’s Morning
Report, for obvious reasons). I had a TV crew come to the house while I was
in the middle of a major mailout (the interview never screened); I was deemed
unsuitable for another TV interview when I didn’t meet their criteria of ever
having “penetrated” Waihopai; I did one pre-dawn live studio national TV
interview where I was asked if I thought Ploughshares are “religious
extremists” (“no” was my answer, call them “militant activists” instead). I
ended up doing one radio interview because the journalist couldn’t get hold of
Nicky Hager (who told me later that he was oblivious to the whole thing, being
in
ABC put out our own press release congratulating the
Domebusters for their brilliant and courageous action; we had no hesitation in
declaring our support. All up, it was the most intensely sustained period of
media work that ABC has ever had, suffused with the ignorance and prejudice
that the media demonstrate when covering a major “outrage” story like this and
it was a very high pressure few days – without ABC having done anything to earn
all this attention (beyond having campaigned for the base’s closure for 21
years, of course).
The media frenzy continued when the Domebusters were
bailed after several days in the Blenheim Police Station and emerged blinking
into the spotlight (minus items such as their footwear, which was kept for
forensic evidence). All three proved extremely articulate spokespeople for why
they had done what they had done. They have been charged with causing
intentional damage and entering a building with intent to commit a crime (that’s
an interesting one, as I’m not sure that a fenced enclosure containing a dish
and dome meets the definition of a building). Initially their bail conditions
were absurdly restrictive – having to report to the Police several times a
week, being barred from any contact with each other, prohibited from entering
the
Shut It Down Now
Will this have an effect on ABC’s Waihopai campaign?
Of course, it already has. For years, we have been granted permission by the
base to bring various foreign anti-bases visitors up to its inner gate. But we
were denied permission to do likewise with
If you want to help the Domebusters, donations
can be made to:
Bank transfer: Westpac, Account Name: TE
WAIRUA MARANGA TRUST, Account Number: 03-1703-0036346-04 - donations are not
tax-deductible.
If you do not have Internet banking, please send your cheque payable to Peace
Movement Aotearoa - Special Projects, with a note saying it is for Ploughshares
Aotearoa, and your name and address (if you'd like a receipt) to Peace Movement
Aotearoa, PO Box 9314, Wellington 6141.
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