While the secret signals and surveillance facility at Pine Gap in Northern Australia, officially named the Joint Defence Facility Pine Gap (JDFPG) is billed as a joint affair between Australia and the United States, it is nothing of the sort. Just as offices direct the callow intern to make the coffee, Australian officials remain America’s permanent interns, helpful, certainly, but never powerful or given challenging roles. The contempt with which Australians are treated is shown by the level of secrecy that continues to enshroud one of the largest signals intelligence centres outside the United States.
It is this secrecy that does, from time to time, make its way into court. For this, we can thank those plucky protestors who have, over the years, sought to expose the role of the base in aiding US military operations against targets in any number of locations unbeknownst to the Australian parliament, and not even the Australian Prime Minister and Cabinet.
Two of those protestors, Carmen Escobar Robinson and Tommy Walker, brought attention to the base’s activities when they blocked Hatt Road, the main access route to Pine Gap in October 2023. On November 27, 2023, a second effort was made that temporarily prevented some 100 Pine Gap employees from entering the facility. Robinson and Walker were part of a group of 50 activists, an eclectic makeup of health workers, community members, and the Arrernte Traditional Owners, all steered by the social justice outfit Mparntwe for Falastin. The action had been enlivened by revelations from an ex-Pine Gap employee that intelligence from the base was finding its way to Israeli sources.
The revelations, published in Declassified Australia by Peter Cronau, came from David Rosenberg, a veteran of the US National Security Agency (NSA) who performed the role of “team leader of weapon signals analysis” at Pine Gap for 18 years till 2008. “Pine Gap facility,” he stated, “is monitoring the Gaza Strip and surrounding areas with all its resources, and gathering intelligence assessed to be useful to Israel.” Personnel at the base were tasked to gather such signals pertaining to Hamas’s command and control centres in Gaza. “Their aim would be to minimise casualties to non-combatants in achieving their objective of destroying Hamas,” given the proximity of such centres to civilian infrastructure such as schools and hospitals. (This claim proved over time to be aspirational, given the staggering civilian death toll arising from Israeli strikes.)
Cronau had previous obtained evidence of the role played by Pine Gap in supplying geolocation data to the US military for targeting purposes from an NSA document from August 2012 entitled “Site Profile G”, stemming from the archive of former NSA contractor Edward Snowden and first published in the Australian Broadcasting Corporation program Background Briefing in 2017. “RAINFALL [NSA’s designation for Pine Gap] detects, collects, records, processes, analyses and reports on PROFORMA signals collected from tasked target entities.”
These signals, writes Cronau, constitute “the communications data of radar and weapons systems collected in near-real time.” Pine Gap, “with its satellites so strategically positioned to monitor the Middle East region, along with its targeting and analysis capability” was bound to be valuable to Israel.
Robinson and Walker were subsequently charged with summary offences for the second action comprising loitering, causing a hazard on the road and blocking the use of a public road. On September 23, 2025, they pleaded “not guilty” to the charges, arguing that the obstruction had been staged to prevent “the offence of genocide in Palestine.”
In his ruling, Judge John McBride found the two protestors “exemplary citizens” in dedication to their cause despite finding them guilty of loitering. (The prosecution dropped the obstruction charges late in 2024.) “I conclude that the conduct of both defendants, deliberate as it was, cannot be accepted by this court as reasonable in justifying their intended commission of a criminal offence.”
The defence made by the duo’s lawyer John Lawrence resorted to the Northern Territory’s Criminal Code Act which stipulates that force – in this case a blockade – can be justified in certain circumstances, one of them being to “prevent the commission of an offence.” Robinson and Walker had committed their acts with intent “because it was their view, their belief, their understanding that what was going on in Pine Gap was an offence.” The Crown was unable to “prove beyond reasonable doubt” that the defendants “weren’t moving in order to prevent genocide.”
Professor Richard Tanter of the Nautilus Institute, an untiring student of Pine Gap’s cloaked activities, was called upon to give evidence on the facility’s role. This, argued the Crown prosecutor, Machiko Raheem, was not relevant to the defence of applying force to prevent genocide. But the court did hear her rather startling confession that a genocide was taking place. “A blind person can see that since the Balfour Declaration of 1917 and the UN Partition Plan in 1947 there has been a systematic annihilation of the Palestinian people.” This annihilation had “only recently [been] labelled […] genocide – which is consistent with human history as a whole. That’s not the issue in these proceedings.”
The judge agreed with the prosecutor that “actions taken in Gaza which constituted an offence of genocide” did not excuse the duo’s conduct. Both were given good behaviour bonds lasting six months and made to pay a court levy of A$150.
In remarks made to Guardian Australia, Robinson made the salient point that Australia, in the absence of transparency to parliament or the public, “is hardwired into the US military surveillance complex through Pine Gap. The Australian public should be very concerned… how many countries are we unofficially attacking? How many people is Pine Gap involved in killing in Palestine? Lebanon? Syria? Yemen? Iran?” Most Australian politicians, mutely, subserviently, persist in avoiding the matter. The errand boys and girls of the American empire remain an unquestioning bunch.
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Thank you, Binoy, for a fabulous article.
Suggestions that by not criticizing USA breaches of International Law and/or Israel for breaking International Law is somehow minding our own business are wrong.
Pine Gap, AUKUS, Labor government rhetoric, lackey-like repetition of US talking points, naval and Airforce activities in China’s backyard, embedding Australian soldiers inside US defence, proclamation of groups as terrorist groups that suit the US, trade in weaponry, participation in five-eyes intelligence network, and failure to support the ICC and ICJ in blatant interference in their function have placed Australia up to our necks in Israel and the USA’s piracy, colonialist theft and demolition of International Law and the United Nations.
But thank you for also bringing up the genocide when our gaze has been drawn elsewhere. MWM reported that on the same day Trump attacked Venezuela killing and kidnapping people, Israel dropped 152 000 kgs of explosives on Palestinians in Gaza.
https://michaelwest.com.au/in-bed-with-a-ped-the-west-report/
Israel has barely taken a breather in its depraved genocide of Palestinians since the ‘plan’ that Albanese full-throatedly supported was supposed to have begun, yet he has said nothing, zip, nilch. Israel and Trump are now moving on with the dispossession and displacement phase of the ‘plan’ without Palestinian agreement, don’t expect Albanese to say anything about this.
Coincidently it was the same day the US DoJ or Trump administration faced a deadline to remove all that redacting of the released Epstein files, or something of that kind.
Sadly, Australians have been subservient to both Britain and America for so long, we don’t know what freedom is. We live in a holding pen for cannon fodder, we can oght for and die for, but we never know why!!!
Gough was intending to make a speech in Parliament, allegedly, on the day he was sacked about what was going on at Pine Gap and look what happened to him – if those guest books for Yarralumla for those times could be located it might shine a light on America’s involvement in his removal.
Gerry
are you suggesting Australia should cop whatever the USA wants because they were possibly involved in ‘the dismissal’ of Gough Whitlam?
If so, what are these devastating actions that the CIA took that any future government should allow the USA to ride roughshod over Australia on our own soil lest they repeat the actions?
Not at all, and if you are a reader on here then you would have read the in-depth analysis of the USA’s involvement in Gough’s dismissal on the 50th anniversary last year – Australia is a ‘sovreign’ nation (not that it means much after the goings-on in Venezuela) and should absolutely stand up to America and bail out of AUKUS, amongst other agreements that bind us to the States.
I would think the upper echelons of our government, security agencies and defence will be quaking in their boots or perhaps dirtying their pants over what Trump has done and the implications for Australia, not only as a potential option for ‘correction’ (not quite as dramatic as regime change), but for the way it makes us complicit in his actions. I join with others who believe we have to severely change our relationship with the US but I find it difficult to see a way to do that without incurring the wrath of the Orange Idiot. Rather than spending billions on embedding ourselves deeper,( at huge cost to our own citizens welfare), we need to ask America to pay for the facilities we are offering.