There’s a new peace group in Cairns.

A bunch of us has met twice now, and we’ve talked about how to stop US warships from visiting Cairns.

Margaret, Steve, Rob, Mike, Paul, and I have made decisions about the what, how and who of taking effective action.   Trish, Sarah, Polly, Carla, Jonathon and Stu will join in the training, and the support/action.  We are going to make the US Navy’s job a lot harder every time they come to Cairns.

We’re meeting again on 3 March to move the costumes forward (penguin/stinger suits), and decide on a training program and public launch.

We have three swimmers, a media guru, a techno-geek, a community artist, and a bunch of otherwise ordinary folk willing to witness, support and organise.  We’ll take dramatic and effective NVDA every time a US warship arrives.  We’ll use that NVDA to spread the word and build the movement.

Our action will be to swim out in front of arriving US warships – to make them stop and wait while Queensland water Police clear us out of the way.  With three swimmers, all of whom will non-cooperate (and two of whom will be fit), it ought take Police an hour or more to do that job.  For that hour, the US Navy ship will be vulnerable.  Under tow in a foreign civilian port.

A big and important warship – like the USS Blue Ridge – might be kept vulnerable for several hours.

If we can achieve these modest goals the US Navy will stop coming to Cairns.

Good!

» Read more: Penguins for Peace

Beating Swords into Ploughshares

Last Saturday I went to Brisbane for gathering of Catholic Workers and friends.  The guest of honour was a 69 year old Dominican friar, Fr Peter Murnane.  Peter was born in Cobden, western Victoria.  He’s spent the last eighteen years living in Aotearoa New Zealand.

In April 2008 Peter was one of three Catholic Worker activists who, calling themselves ANZAC Ploughshares, broke into the US run Waihopai spy base outside Blenheim in the South Island of Aotearoa New Zealand. After they broke in they deflated a radome, exposing the satellite dish within. Waihopai is a ground receiving station for space-based signals and electronic “intelligence”, which is then fed into the US “Defence” (war-fighting) system.  The other Catholic Workers are young organic farmers, Sam land and Adi Leason.

Peter Murnane says the information collected at Waihopai is also used to identify people for the US “extraordinary rendition” program where suspected “terrorists” are kidnapped and tortured in CIA black ops.  Waihopai is part of the Echelon eavesdropping program of US intelligence.

When the ANZAC Ploughshares deflated the Waihopai dome, they not only exposed the role of that spy base in waging global war – they also showed how it’s possible for human beings to act directly and effectively against war.

Exercise Talisman Sabre is 22,000 Australian and US troops studying and practicing war.  Practicing to invade someone else’s country. 

My 2009 was an experiment in faith-based affinity groups carrying out interventionary NVDA.  Small groups of Christian and/or Gandhian activists started arriving in Yeppoon on July 1 to carry out acts of  resistance against the war games, and against the wars Australia is now engaged in.  As a support base we created the Martin Luther King Jr House of Christian Nonviolence at Yeppoon (try saying that quickly with a mouthfull of wheatbix).   

During July 2009 there were two other major components of a “Peace Convergence” that mobilised both broad opposition to the war-games and community support for implementing a culture of peace.  They were the Committed to Change Festival (C2C) at Byfield (July 4-6), and the Peace Convergence held in Rockhampton and Yeppoon (July 10-12). 

There were support and solidarity actions in most capital cities in Australia. 

This article is an attempt to analyse the strengths and weaknesses of what happened around Exercise Talisman Sabre in July 2009, and speculate upon how our actions might be made better in the future

» Read more: Talisman Sabre 2009 – the Resistance, in context with the Convergence and the Celebration.