Secret Pine Gap, the CIA’s largest facility outside USA

Pine Gap hosts the largest CIA facility outside America,…While visiting US lawmakers are taken on tours of Pine Gap, Federal MP’s are denied entry.

Strategic US Military Intel Base in Pine Gap, Australia,  Global Research,   by Richard Neville Ground Truth: Pine Gap, Australia On the flight from Sydney to Alice Springs the desert unfolds for hours beneath the window. On descent it is possible to glimpse a space age compound on the sand backed by the MacDonnell Ranges and distinguished by a clump of enormous white pop art “golf balls”. This is Pine Gap, a US military base built on the traditional land of the indigenous Arrente people, which started life in 1966. Australians were told the facility was to be a weather station. Later the official cover was a “Space Research Centre”. Our citizens remained in the dark until 1975, when Prime Minister Whitlam revealed that Pine Gap’s boss, Richard Stallings, was an agent of the CIA.

Up till then, according to former Minister Clyde Cameron, politicians had regarded the base as “a pretty harmless sort of operation”. Whitlam demanded a list of all CIA agents in the country. This infuriated US spy masters, who put pressure on the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) to shut him up. CIA fears over the leaking of Pine Gaps’ secret activities helped to trigger the murky events that toppled the Whitlam government.

Pine Gap’s first generation of satellites was designed to monitor Soviet missile developments and for espionage in South East Asia, especially Vietnam, and later to spy on China. Since then, both its mission and capabilities have expanded dramatically. The base is believed to have provided targeting information for Israel’s 2006 bombing of Lebanon.

Pine Gap is one of largest and most sophisticated satellite ground stations in the world. Its 26 antennas suck information from the sky and distribute it to US commanders in the field, including in Iraq and Afghanistan, where it is used to co-ordinate air strikes. In the 2003 “shock and awe” invasion of Baghdad, Pine Gap’s space-based signal intercepts of phone calls made by Iraq’s Generals, led directly to the US Air Force strikes against the country’s leadership. According to defense expert Richard Tanter, “all decapitation strikes missed their nominal targets, but resulted in the deaths of large numbers of Iraqi civilians”.

There were over 50 Pine Gap directed strikes in the invasion phase. Of four investigated by Human Rights Watch, 42 civilians were killed and zero soldiers. This averages 13 casualties per strike, which, when multiplied by 50, totals 650 corpses. During this time the Australian media and star commentators were waxing lyrical about the Pentagon’s “precision bombing”………

If Australia wishes to regain its reputation as a fair minded nation, the government will need to take a closer look at this secretive installation, an integral part of the US National Missile Defense scheme, or Star Wars.

It aims to put satellite based weapons in space to shoot down any incoming missiles. New radomes (radar + dome) to accommodate the system have already been installed……

The majority of Pine Gap’s 1000 staff are Americans drawn from branches of the US military, including the National Security Agency, Army and Navy Information Operations Command, US Navy and Combined Support Group, Air Intelligence Agency, US Air Force, 704th Military Intelligence Brigade, 743rd Military Intelligence Battalion, Marine Cryptologic Support Command, etc. The base is described as a “joint facility”, although key areas are out of bounds to Australians. While visiting US lawmakers are taken on tours of Pine Gap, Federal MP’s are denied entry. (Members of Congress have collectively invested up to $US196 million in companies with Defense Department contracts, earning millions since the onset of the Iraq invasion. Until May 2007, Hillary Clinton held holdings in Honeywell, Boeing and – yes – Raytheon).

In 2000, the Howard Government rejected calls by Parliament’s Joint Committee on Treaties for a classified briefing on its operations. There is no public debate on the role of Pine Gap, despite its unbending support of all US military actions, regardless of legality or morality. As for the media, they’re asleep at the wheel.

Pine Gap hosts the largest CIA facility outside America, so it is reasonable to assume that crimes against humanity, such the kidnap of suspects and their transport to torture zones, have been aided by the capacities of Pine Gap. Day after day, its intelligence kills people. If you regard this is an exaggeration, visit the US Airforce website and click the link marked “airpower summary”, which reveals the number of daily missions conducted in Iraq and Afghanistan. Most of these involve air strikes, around a 100 a day, or 36,500 a year, which explains why Pine Gap operates around the clock.

Strategic US Military Intel Base in Pine Gap, Australia

October 12, 2010 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | Northern Territory, secrets and lies | antinuclear, Australia, nuclear, nuclear weapons, secrets and lies