PEACE
RESEARCHER NOW ON LINE
- Murray Horton
We’re delighted to report that Peace Researcher can now be read on
line, as part of the ABC’s new and greatly improved Website. The address is:
To read Peace Researcher, simply click on the relevant link on the Homepage
(it’s text only, without any of the illustrations that grace the hard copy
edition).
Apart from the PR page, there’s lots more now on the ABC Website: the Waihopai spybase is explained, plus there are some splendid photos of Big Balls, the base’s two radomes thrusting into the Marlborough sky; the Harewood and Tangimoana bases are explained on the Other Bases page; there is a brief history of the Anti-Bases Campaign; a page devoted to our submissions on various Bills; a page reserved for ABC activities (most recently, it detailed Mike Frost’s national speaking tour); and a number of very useful Links to the Websites of other organisations and publications throughout New Zealand, and around the world. All in all it’s a bloody good little Website.
We explained in PR 23 that Melanie Thomson (currently in London on her Big OE) did all the hard work getting the Website set up but ran out of time to actually get it uploaded, before flying out, at the end of 2000. So it sat in limbo for six months, with none of us having the technical nous to get it going. That is until the splendid Joe Davies was good enough (mad enough?) to accept our invitation to be ABC Webmaster. We’ve never looked back since then and Joe has never had a night’s sleep either. Filling in the pages and updating them involved us all in a lot of work, and it was definitely a case of learning on the job for both Joe and us. But all the hard work is done now, the site is alive and well, and will only get better. Many thanks to Joe and to the patient techno whizzes at Plain Communications, our Internet Service Provider, who have solved the numerous cyber-hassles we’ve encountered along the way. Check it out.
THANKS, GREG
- Murray Horton
Sadly, ABC lost one of our key committee members in mid 2001. Greg Jones, a member of ours since the mid 90s and most recently the Treasurer, decided that he needed to reduce his commitments to a whole range of groups, primarily to regain some control over his life, and hopefully prolong it.
Greg came to us from Kate Dewes’ legendary Peace Studies course of the early 90s, at the University of Canterbury. Prior to that he’d had a lengthy career as a pyschopaedic nurse at Templeton (an excellent qualification for working in the peace movement). Greg was an indispensable part of all ABC activities in the latter half of the 90s, taking part in several Waihopai demos, and getting arrested at one (he was part of the Waihopai 20 in 1997, our biggest mass arrest there). Greg is a founder member of the Catholic Worker (CW) group, in Christchurch, and for several years has played a leading role in both groups. In January 2001 he drove a CW group to Wellington to vigil at the US Embassy (for the tenth anniversary of the Gulf War), then back across Cook Strait to Waihopai, where he was in charge of food at the weekend-long protest camp.
Fortunately, Greg is not lost to the movement. He remains a central figure in Catholic Worker, living at their Addington house and organising peace activities such as the September 2001 national speaking tour by Ciaron O’Reilly (see below). He and CW have been fixtures at the weekly anti-war marches in Christchurch since the US started bombing Afghanistan. Members of the Campaign Against Foreign Control of Aotearoa will be interested to learn that it is Greg who performs the vital job of transporting Foreign Control Watchdog to and from the printer and Postal Centre.
Nor has he been lost to ABC, just to our fortnightly committee meetings. He has declared himself more than happy to be an active ABC member. In October 2001 he was the Christchurch driver and tour guide for visiting Canadian ex-spy, Mike Frost (see elsewhere in this issue for ABC’s report on the Frost tour. Ed.). Indeed he spent more time with Frost than the tour organiser, Murray Horton. In December, he was actively involved in the first protest at the American base at Christchurch Airport for several years (see report elsewhere in this issue. Ed.). And he has told us that he’s happy to be actively involved next time we go to Waihopai.
As for the thankless job of ABC Treasurer, our newest committee member, Robyn Dann (who joined us as a result of coming on the January 2001 Waihopai protest) astonished us by volunteering to do it. Robyn comes with a package deal, her five year old whirling dervish, Aleks. So who says we don’t have any young people on the ABC committee?
So many thanks for your years of invaluable work, Greg and hopefully you’ll get more time now to listen to your beloved Bob Dylan collection. Not to mention indulging your other totally thankless (and losing) passion – being an Otago rugby fan in Canterbury.
CIARON O’REILLY
A Flying Visit From The Peace Warrior
- Murray Horton
In September 2001 ABC was pleased to catch up with one of our more high profile former committee members. Ciaron O’Reilly, Australian by birth, peace warrior to the world, was an active member of ours for about six months or so back in 1994 (as was his former partner in crime, Moana Cole. Both had been imprisoned in the US and deported for their symbolic Ploughshares disarming of a US Air Force bomber, inside an air base, during the 1991 Gulf War). In 1994, Ciaron and Moana were arrested for trespass, on Hiroshima Day, at the US military base at Christchurch Airport. They defended themselves, were convicted and fined several hundred dollars each. Ciaron left New Zealand shortly afterwards, without paying the fine. 2001 was his first return visit.
He was here on a national speaking tour, primarily about the anti-globalisation movement, and he attracted some high profile media coverage. Ciaron has been busy in the seven years since he was last in NZ. He’s been arrested in Brisbane (his home town) for protesting against the involvement of Australia and oil transnationals in the Indonesian genocide in East Timor; he was jailed in Darwin for protesting against uranium mining on Northern Territory Aborigine land; he was involved with the Catholic Worker group in Liverpool and arrested for protesting at British arms sales to Indonesia for use in East Timor; he was bashed by cops when he was one of the tens of thousands who protested against the World Economic Forum meeting in the Melbourne Casino (how apt) in 2000. It was great to see Ciaron again, and to catch up on what he’s been doing – remarkably he has retained both his sanity and his sense of humour (not to mention his trademark dreadlocks). He was flying to Brisbane for the scheduled protests at the Commonwealth heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM) but that meeting was postponed due to the security hysteria post-September 11. We’re sure he would have found something else to do.
As for Moana, she’s well advanced on the task of finishing her law degree at the University of Canterbury. That and being a solo mother to young Naomi takes up most of her time (her daughter has inherited a most impressive set of lungs, as anyone who tried to sleep at the January 2001 Waihopai protest camp can avouch). Moana is still a peace activist, having organised activities to mark the tenth anniversary of the 1991 Gulf War, and has plunged into the current movement against the war in Afghanistan. Nor has she ever lost her trademark equine laugh, which rivals that of Mayor Shadbolt.
ECHELON
European Parliament Committee Report
- Murray Horton
PR 22 (December 2000) highlighted the fact that, in July 2000, the European Parliament established a 36 member Temporary Committee to inquire into Echelon (the code name for the global programme run by the electronic spying agencies of the UKUSA Agreement – the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. It involves a global network of satellite interception spybases automatically searching billions of civilian telecommunications messages simultaneously and continuously for key words. In the case of the small fry, such as the NZ Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB), this raw material is collected in a fully automated process at Marlborough’s Waihopai spybase and sent undigested to Big Brother, namely the US National Security Agency (NSA), the world’s biggest Intelligence agency. PR has been running articles about Echelon for years).
The Temporary Committee was given one year to conduct its investigation. It received no assistance whatsoever from the US, which has never admitted the existence of Echelon. When Committee members went there, in May 2001, they were declined meetings with either the NSA or its better known counterpart, the Central Intelligence Agency. They also encountered similar refusals from the State Department and the Commerce Department’s Advocacy Center (an office that helps US companies win foreign contracts).
The Committee duly reported back, in
September 2001. It was a rather disappointing report – which can be directly accessed
at http://www2.europarl.eu.int/omk/OM-Europarl?PROG=REPORT&L=EN&PUBREF=-//EP//TEXT+REPORT+A5-2001-0264+0+NOT+SGML+V0//EN&LEVEL=2
It concluded that Echelon actually
exists (no kidding) and expressed disappointment that European
Parliamentarians, to the highest level, seemed unaware of that. It reassured
that the sheer volume of telecommunications makes “exhaustive, detailed
monitoring of all communications impossible in practice”. The principal focus
was on whether Echelon is used by the “Anglo-Saxon” countries (primarily the US
and Britain) for commercial espionage on European corporations. The Committee
concluded that this probably happens but that not one single European company
had complained of it happening. German Member of the European Parliament (MEP),
Gerhard Schmid, explained: “One explanation for this is that companies, when
they find they are being spied upon by the competition, don’t want to talk
about it. It’s a question of prestige, of embarrassment” (Campaign for
Accountability of American Bases newsletter, September 2001). Another German
MEP, Christian von Boetticher, put it thus: “The victims gave us evidence but
were not willing to testify. And that’s not enough for a court sentence”
(ibid). The Committee urged European Parliament institutions and public bodies
of member States to “systematically encrypt “sensitive communications “so that
encryption becomes the norm”. It called for European Union (EU) members to
negotiate a data security code of conduct with the US. And reflecting the
tension with its member, Britain (the only European country in the UKUSA
Agreement), von Boetticher said: “Our British friends, because of their EU
membership, are asked to put an end to American espionage activities and
control the ones carried out on their land. Otherwise they are contravening
European legislation” (ibid).
It was, at best, a halfhearted finding
from a Committee that was in itself not what Echelon critics had called for
(namely a fullblown inquiry). Since it reported, of course, September 11 has
been and gone and all of Europe has joined the US in war hysteria. Any
criticism of the US or its spy agencies now pits you on the side of “the
terrorists”. So, despite the singular failure of Echelon to detect, let alone
prevent, these massive terrorist attacks, it will continue to have money and
resources lavished upon it. As Mike Frost, the former Canadian spy turned
writer and speaker (see article elsewhere
in this issue on his October 2001 NZ tour. Ed.), told his New Zealand
audiences – terrorism is supposed to be the eavesdroppers’ top priority, but
terrorists of the bin Laden ilk don’t make much use of means of communications
that can be spied upon. Result – the spooks tend to concentrate on the much
easier economic spying, particularly on their “allies”. That looks set to
continue for some time yet.