CGI's Dave404: US drone strikes guided from Australian
outback
Posted By: Susoni [Send E-Mail]
Date: Sunday, 21-Jul-2013 01:14:24
US drone strikes guided from Australian
outback
“Central Australia's Pine Gap spy base played
a key role in the United States' controversial drone strikes involving the
"targeted killing" of al-Qaeda and Taliban chiefs, Fairfax Media
can reveal.
Former personnel at the Australian-American
base have described the facility's success in locating and tracking al-Qaeda and
Taliban leaders - and other insurgent activity in Afghanistan and Pakistan -
as "outstanding".
A Fairfax Media investigation has now
confirmed a primary function of the top-secret signals intelligence base near
Alice Springs is to track the precise "geolocation" of radio
signals, including those of hand-held radios and mobile phones, in the
eastern hemisphere, from the Middle East across Asia to China, North Korea
and the Russian far east.
This information has been used to identify the
location of terrorist suspects, which is then fed into the United States
drone strike program and other military operations.
The drone program, which has involved more
than 370 attacks in Pakistan since 2004, is reported to have killed between
2500 and 3500 al-Qaeda and Taliban militants, including many top commanders.
But hundreds of civilians have been also
killed, causing anti-American protests in Pakistan, diplomatic tensions
between Washington and Islamabad and accusations the "drone war"
has amounted to a program of "targeted killing" outside a
battlefield. This year, the Obama administration acknowledged four American
citizens had been killed by strikes in Pakistan and Yemen since 2009.
"The [Taliban] know we're listening but
they still have to use radios and phones to conduct their operations; they
can't avoid that," one former Pine Gap operator said. "We track
them, we combine the signals intelligence with imagery and, once we've passed
the geolocation [intelligence] on, our job is done. When drones do their job
we don't need to track that target any more."
The base's direct support of US military
operations is much greater than admitted by Defence Minister Stephen Smith
and previous Australian governments, new disclosures by former Pine Gap
personnel and little-noticed public statements by US government officials
have shown.
Australian Defence intelligence sources have
confirmed that finding targets is critically dependent on intelligence
gathered and processed through the Pine Gap facility, which has seen "a
massive, quantitative and qualitative transformation" over the past
decade, and especially the past three years.
"The US will never fight another war in
the eastern hemisphere without the direct involvement of Pine Gap," one
official said.
Last week, secret documents leaked by US whistleblower Edward Snowden
indicated Pine Gap also contributes to a broad US National Security Agency
collection program codenamed "X-Keyscore".
Pine Gap controls a set of geostationary
satellites positioned above the Indian Ocean and Indonesia. These orbit the
earth at fixed points and are able to locate the origin of radio signals to
within 10 metres. Pine Gap processes the data and can provide targeting
information to US and allied military units within minutes.
Former US National Security Agency personnel
who served at Pine Gap in the past two years have described their duties in
unguarded career summaries and employment records as including "signals
intelligence collection, geolocation … and reporting of high-priority target
signals" including "real time tracking".
US Army personnel working at Pine Gap use systems codenamed "Whami,
SSEXTANT, and other geolocation tools" to provide targeting information,
warnings about the location of radio-triggered improvised explosive devices,
and for combat and non-combat search and rescue missions.
Pine Gap's operations often involve sifting
through vast quantities of "noise" to find elusive and infrequent
signals. One former US Army signals intelligence analyst describes the
"collection and geolocation of an extremely hard to find target" as
a task that included "manually sifting through hundreds of hours of
collection".
Last month Mr Smith assured Parliament that
Pine Gap operates with the "full knowledge and concurrence" of the
government.
He provided no details other than to say the facility "delivers
information on intelligence priorities such as terrorism, the proliferation
of weapons of mass destruction, and military and weapons developments"
and "contributes to the verification of arms control and disarmament
agreements".
The government is required by a number of
agreements to consult with the US government before the public release of any
new information about Pine Gap.
The federal government maintains a
long-standing policy of not commenting on operational intelligence matters.”
Read more: http://www.watoday.com.au/national/us-drone-strikes-guided-from-outback-20130720-2qb2c.html#ixzz2Ze6RfX80
Dave404.
http://www.rumormillnews.com/cgi-bin/forum.cgi?read=282811