Antinuclear

Wikileaks reveal Australia deceived about US missile defence

The top secret Joint Defence Facility at Pine Gap near Alice Springs is also directly involved in ballistic missile defence by controlling and receiving data from US early warning satellites….

WikiLeaks fallout | Missile defence language deceives Labor’s Left, Sydney Morning Herald, Philip Dorling and Richard BakerDecember 9, 2010 T HE federal Labor Left faction was deliberately ”deceived” by the language used in last year’s Defence White Paper to describe Australia’s position on missile defence co-operation with the United States, a secret US embassy cable reveals.

The cable, obtained by the WikiLeaks website and released to the Herald, quotes the then Defence Department deputy secretary and white paper co-ordinator, Mike Pezzullo, as telling US embassy officials how the language in the missile defence section had been ”governed by [former defence minister Joel] Fitzgibbon’s desire to avoid party divisions at the ALP’s national conference” in May last year.

The Left has long ensured the party’s national platform opposes US plans to develop a missile defence shield, arguing such a move would be ”disproportionate, technically questionable, costly and likely to be counterproductive”.

But Mr Pezzullo, once a senior adviser to the former ALP leader Kim Beazley, is reported as telling US officials the language in the white paper section on missile development had been carefully crafted to appeal to Labor’s Left ”but in reality will allow the GOA [government of Australia] to continue its missile defence research and development co-operation with the United States”……..

‘He [Pezzullo] noted that if the ALP Left perceives it has been deceived by the Defence White Paper’s MD language, it could raise a storm at the party’s annual national conference.”……………

Australia, he was reported as saying, was still keen to continue working with the US on missile defence programs such as Nimble Titan, Over The Horizon Radar and AEGIS under a 2004 memorandum of understanding signed by the previous Howard government.

Nimble Titan was a two-year multinational missile defence exercise program that was completed in April this year. AEGIS was an integrated naval missile defence system employed by the US Navy and which has been selected for placement on the Australian navy’s new air warfare destroyers.

The top secret Joint Defence Facility at Pine Gap near Alice Springs is also directly involved in ballistic missile defence by controlling and receiving data from US early warning satellites….

WikiLeaks fallout | Missile defence language deceives Labor’s Left

December 9, 2010 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | AUSTRALIA - NATIONAL, spinbuster