ABC Updates
15 September 2019
1/ Rocket lab interviewA podcast of a very recent
Plains FM
Earthwise interview with ABC's Murray Horton on this
subject is at
http://www.accessradio.org/Player.aspx?eid=1b88db6d-2830-4d93-9e39-a0afda66a1db
2/ January 2020 Waihopai Spy Base Protest and Accompanying Blenheim Meeting
Details of how to join ABC at the Waiahopai protest
are here:
http://www.converge.org.nz/abc/waihopai_files/Waihopai2020.pdf There
will also be an accompanying meeting in Blenheim (wth details yet to
be announced) but topics to be discussed will include
Rocket Lab
3/ GCSB/SIS and the CIA's torture programme
Cheyl Gwyn, the now
former Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security, conducted
an investigation into what involvment NZs spy agencies - the
Government Communicationd Security Bureau (GCSB - which operates
Waihopai) and the Security Intelligence Service (SIS) - had with the
US Central Intelligence Agency's illegal programme of rendition
(kidnappping) and torture during the 2001=09 period of the "War on
Terror".
The full (public version)
of the report can be read here:
http://www.igis.govt.nz/assets/Inquiries/CIA-Detention-Programme.pdf
The GCSB trumpeted that it
welomed the report
https://www.gcsb.govt.nz/news/gcsb-welcomes-inspector-generals-report/
And the media duly parroted
the line that "NZ Spies Not Privy To Torture"
http://www.stuff.co.nz
But some journalists dug
deeper. Such as the
New Zealand
Herald's David Fisher:
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=12264027 "Our spies fed questions to the Central
Intelligence Agency which were put to someone taken in the illegal
rendition and torture programme operated by the United States' agency,
a new inquiry has found. At the time the questions were posed, the NZ
Security Intelligence Service 'was not aware that detainee
interrogations involved torture', according to the report from the
office of the Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security. However,
it was known the person being questioned - Khalid Sheikh Mohammed -
'was being held by the CIA in an undisclosed location'. It later
emerged in a US inquiry that he had been waterboarded 183 times".
Gordon Campbell on
Scoop
put it best - the SIS & GCSB had been proven to have "tacit compliance
with torture".
And nobody has asked the
glaringly obvious question: why was an expressly
domestic
spy agency - the SIS - involved at all with an
overseas programme of kidnapping
and torture. Nor why was an
electronic
intelligence (elint) spy agency - the GCSB - involved
with an illegal and very literally hands-on
human
intelligence (humint) CIA programme.
The claim by the GCSB and
the SIS that they didn't know about the CIA using torture defies
belief. It doesn't say much, then, for their ability as "intelligence"
agencies. does it. This subject should not just be swept under thc
carpet now that this official Report has come out with the old nostrum
that this was then but things are different now.
Secretary/Organiser
Anti-Bases Campaign
Box 2258, Christchurch 8140, New Zealand
abc@chch.planet.org.nz
www.converge.org.nz/abc
www.facebook.com/AotearoaABC