Trial Ends For The Pine Gap Four

(Report compiled from various sources, including news reports and their email diaries)

After a lengthy trial process the Pine Gap Four were found guilty of charges laid against them for breaking into the US spy base at Pine Gap near Alice Springs.

In the words of the Officer in Charge of the Pine Gap base, Inspector Ken Napier, AYou=d need a miracle to breach security at Pine Gap@. Yet in December 2005 the four, who describe themselves as Christian pacifists, managed, against all odds, to breach the security of the top-secret facility, scale a building, unfurl banners and take photographs. The group were conducting what they describe as a "citizen's inspection" of Pine Gap base. They believe that Australians should have right of access to the complex and to know what functions it performs. One of their objectives they claim was to alert Australians to the links between Pine Gap and the Iraq war.

The Pine Gap 4 are members of a group called Christians Against All Terrorism (CAAT). The group say they cannot distinguish between the terrorist acts of a suicide bomber in Baghdad, or of a US jet bomber in Fallujah. In both cases innocents are murdered and maimed for a political objective. One group member argued AWe needed to inspect Pine Gap for terrorist activity.@

The Pine Gap 4 are Donna Mulhearn, Jim Dowling, Adele Goldie and Bryan Law. All have a deep commitment to peace and justice and pasts which testify to that commitment. Donna Mulhearn went to Iraq in 2002 as a human shield, was taken hostage by insurgents and continues to provide material assistance to the Iraqi people after the war brought devastation to their lives. Jim Dowling is an activist who was inspired by various radical North American Catholic traditions. He, his wife and seven children live on a Catholic Worker farm outside of Brisbane. Adele Goldie is a young activist who, along with her involvement in the peace movement, has worked for the liberation of asylum seekers detained by the Australian government. Bryan Law was influenced by Ghandian thinking and claims to be a practitioner of Scott Parkin's style of passive non-violent resistance and has long been involved in the peace movement.

A huge arsenal of legislative and legal weaponry was used in the prosecution of these four peace activists. The Attorney-General Philip Ruddock directed that the four be charged under the Defence Powers (Special Undertakings) Act. This Act, passed by the Menzies government in 1952 at the height of the cold war to suppress spies and saboteurs, carries with it prison sentences of up to seven years B unprecedented for such minor offences. It was also the first airing for the Act. It had not previously been used in a prosecution.

Nevertheless, in order to try these relatively minor offences no less than nine barristers and lawyers were present at the trial to argue the Prosecution case. The Pine Gap 4 were not represented. They chose to defend themselves. The case was held in the Northern Territory Supreme Court. The presiding judge, Justice Sally Thomas even expressed reservations about the law's severity. She said that "hundreds of cases" of people have been dealt with in the lower courts for similar offences.

The Prosecution had even attempted to have the four accused confined to house arrest but were unsuccessful in that endeavour.

The so-called Joint Defence Space Research Facility Pine Gap plays a central communications role in all US military operations in the Middle East, including the targeting of Patriot missiles that have killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. Pine Gap is also central to the Star Wars missile defence shield, which is supposed to protect the US from nuclear attack by other nations, while facilitating their own ability to launch a nuclear attack. The fear of a mutually assured destruction, the condition that has been a major deterrent to nuclear wars up until now, will no longer exist, once the Star Wars system is operational.

The extent to which this really is a >joint= facility is, however, open to question. This was brought home in 1999 when the Australian parliamentary Joint Standing Committee on Treaties complained that Australian MPs are kept in the dark about information about the facility that is freely given to the US Congress. They argued that while many US Congress officials have visited Pine Gap and received classified briefings about its functions, members of the Australian parliament are not granted the same privileges. In fact, they complained that the Treaties Committee is Aentrusted with less information than can be found in a public library@.

These are issues which the Pine Gap 4 wanted to have publicly aired.

In the preliminary stages of the trial process the defence challenged the Prosecution=s use of the Defence Powers (Special Undertakings) Act claiming that the Crown had not proved that Pine Gap defends the interest of the Commonwealth against external aggression and that the defendants should therefore be acquitted of the charges. Melbourne lawyer, Rowena Orr, argued via video link that the Act limits a fundamental right of freedom and that very stringent tests must be applied to this law. This defence was not, however, accepted by the presiding Judge, Justice Sally Thomas.

A further setback for the four was to lose their challenge to a suppression order that was previously placed on them. The order even forbade any discussion of the contents of the order.

When the trial proper began the defendants endeavoured to use Sections 10.3, 10.4 and 10.5 of the Criminal Code which allows for a defence of Anecessity@. Under these sections of the code private citizens can take illegal action when there is an extraordinary emergency threatening them. They put to the Court that US military action in Iraq was "terrorism" and a humanitarian emergency that Australian citizens should deal with. Donna Mulhearn argued AWhen I prepared to do the incursion in Pine Gap, I thought it was the least I could do given the magnitude of the crime I was trying to prevent. I believe my actions were reasonable and proportionate.@ Adele Goldie cited the case of a group who had damaged a fighter plane on its way to bomb the people of East Timor in 1999 who were acquitted by a jury. She also quoted from a Lancet study about civilian deaths in the Iraq war B now estimated to be over 600,000. She said she was influenced by the Nuremberg principles to act to stop the war and unsuccessfully attempted to tender the Nuremberg charter to the court. However, the prosecution objected to this line of defence and it was ruled inadmissible by the judge because the defendants= evidence rested on facts about the base which the court had ruled they were not allowed to speak about. This decision was the result of the Commonwealth=s request for the application of Public Interest Immunity. It meant that prosecution witnesses could not be asked by the defendants to explain the full functions and operations of Pine Gap. This Catch 22 situation left the four without a defence.

Given their situation, a guilty verdict was not unexpected. However, the four had made the best possible use of their time in court. Donna Mulhearn reported on one reaction to their defence.

AWe were complimented by the Commonwealth lawyer who said we did an excellent job representing ourselves. His opinion was that no barrister would have succeeded in getting our defences up (had we been represented), but that our submissions were good and worth the effort. He said we got stories, facts, images into the courtroom about Pine Gap and the war in Iraq, that he thought not possible! That was our goal, and we achieved it. The media this afternoon are talking about Pine Gap=s connection to the war in Iraq.@

In her closing address to the jury Donna Mulhearn said

AYwhen peaceful protest doesn=t work, further action is required. History has proven this, my faith requires this and my status as a human being demands it. You see, I wrote letters to MPs and the Pine Gap satellites still gathered data like a giant vacuum cleaner. I attended demonstrations and the information was related in real time to the US military. Millions of people around the world exercised their democratic right to protest and poured onto the streets, but still, the missile co-ordinates were prepared with the help of Pine Gap and the missiles fell. And more fell, and then more. Everything that I did that was lawful didn=t work. But I went to Pine Gap for a few hours and the base was shut down and information was not relayed to Iraq and that day no missiles fellY. Now, in this court room, there is blood on my boots. Blood of a human being, that is there because of the targeting decisions made in Pine Gap.@

Before the jury retired to consider their verdict, the judge instructed them to consider only the merits of the case and to disregard any sympathies they might have for the beliefs of the defendants or their own feelings on the rights or wrongs of the war on Iraq. The jury took 5 hours to come to a decision on what appeared an open and shut case and they appeared distressed when they returned to the court room to deliver their >guilty= verdict.

The Crown prosecutor called for a prison sentence for all four. He argued AThe Crown sees no prospect for rehabilitation.@ The defendants were in agreement on the last point. After an adjournment, the Judge returned with her decision: no prison sentence for any of the defendants. In fact, all were given quite light fines plus a bill for the damage they caused.

The four were jubilant. It was a victory in defeat. Bryan Law summed up the meaning of the case for the group:

"We have still won. For me it's not about trespass, it's a moral issue.

"Our action was and is calculated to effectively intervene into the war-fighting operation of Pine Gap, under the public gaze, as part of an effective campaign to limit the damage from war in Iraq in the short term, and bring about global disarmament in the medium termY.What's moral is not always legal, and what is immoral is not always illegal. If there is a minor law that has to be broken in the pursuit of moral faith then I will break it."