FROM OUR SPECIAL CORRESPONDENT
Two Northern Territory residents have been found guilty of failing to cease loitering while blocking the main access road to the Australian-US Pine Gap military surveillance base in Central Australia on 27 November 2023.
The two defendants, Carmen Escobar Robinson and Tommy Walker, were participating in a peaceful action with around 50 local community members to prevent workers from getting to the base, a month after Israel’s brutal, escalating assault on Gaza following the 7 October Hamas attack.
They were both charged with loitering and obstruction after they locked themselves onto either side of a concrete-filled 44-gallon barrel in the middle of Hatt Road off Stuart Highway, obstructing employee access to the base through the main gate for several hours.
Appearing in Alice Springs Local Court on 23 September 2025, the pair, after pleading ‘not guilty’, argued that they had obstructed the road to the Pine Gap base to prevent “the offence of genocide in Palestine”.
Evidence of Pine Gap’s involvement in providing battlefield intelligence for the Israeli strikes on Gaza was first brought to public attention in an interview with a former Pine Gap employee published by Declassified Australia on 3 November 2023.
Judge John McBride ruled the defendants were guilty of loitering after the prosecution had dropped the obstruction charges late last year.
The judge stopped short of convicting the duo, whom he described as being “exemplary citizens” committed to their cause.
“I conclude that the conduct of both defendants, deliberate as it was, cannot be accepted by this court as reasonable in justifying their intended commission of a criminal offence.”Judge McBride said.
While the judge didn’t accept the defence that their actions were justified in preventing “actions taken in Gaza which constituted an offence of genocide”, he did not record any prosecutions against them.
Instead, they were each handed a good behaviour bond of six months and required to pay a court levy of $150.
‘Moving to prevent genocide’
The defence lawyer John Lawrence’s argument relied on a section of the NT’s Criminal Code Act under which use of force is justified under certain circumstances – including where the person is acting to “prevent the commission of an offence”.
“The elements of the offence were clearly committed, and they were committed deliberately and with intention, and the defence relies on the fact that what we did in those circumstances were justified,” Lawrence said.
“My clients did what they did deliberately because it was their view, their belief, their understanding that what was going on in Pine Gap was an offence.
“We’re saying that the Crown can’t prove beyond reasonable doubt that we weren’t moving in order to prevent genocide.”
In his opening statement, Lawrence outlined that he would be calling on his expert witness Professor Richard Tanter, from the global security and surveillance think tank Nautilus Institute, to attest to Pine Gap’s “complicity in genocide” in Palestine.
The Crown prosecutor Machiko Raheem made clear to the court she would be challenging the admissibility of Professor Tanter’s evidence.
Prosecutor flags genocide in Palestine
Crown prosecutor Raheem argued Professor Tanter giving evidence in court was not relevant to whether the defence of applying force – through a blockade – to prevent a genocide was available to the defendants.
Ms Raheem then addressed the court with an honest admission:
“A blind person can see that since the Balfour Declaration of 1917 and the UN Partition Plan in 1947 there has been a systematic annihilation of the Palestinian people.
“It’s only recently that the international stage has labelled that the genocide – which is consistent with human history as a whole. That’s not the issue in these proceedings.” [our emphasis]
This may be the first time both parties in such a case in an Australian court have asserted that a genocide is taking place in Palestine.
Ms Raheem accepted that Prof Tanter was “obviously highly educated” and “has done much research and is an expert with respect to some, if not many, things.
“But the fact of the matter is… he’s never been employed at the base…he has no real actual knowledge of what communications or information gathered by the base is used for, which is what a significant amount of reliance is being placed on,” she said.
“That knowledge is reserved for people with some of the highest security clearance in the world and anyone with actual knowledge… [such as Edward Snowden] of those goings-on could face up to 25 years in prison for discussing such information.”
During a days-long debate, Ms Raheem also pointed out that a detailed report by Prof Tanter tendered as evidence was dated March 2024 – after the defendants were charged at the time of the incident in November.
Forcing the closure of Pine Gap
Following the Crown case, both defendants were called to the stand and questioned by their lawyer on their actions on the day of the offence.
“We were there to force the closure of Pine Gap because we believed that it was an intervention that would stop Pine Gap workers from colluding in and participating in genocide,” Ms Robinson told the court.
“This has been called a genocide and war crimes for decades and decades.”
“I was becoming sick of seeing on social media horrible images of children [and vulnerable people] being massacred over there,” the other defendant Mx Walker said.
“I thought 20 kilometres down the road, if this is an American base that’s sending vital intelligence over to Israel to pinpoint targets, then I wanted to stop workers from going into the base.”
The defendants mentioned a number of sources that informed their beliefs, including Alice Springs’ journalist Kieran Finnane’s 2020 book Peace Crimes, and Peter Cronau’s 2023 Declassified Australia investigation in which a former employee at the surveillance base confirmed the facility’s targeting of the Gaza strip.
“Pine Gap facility is monitoring the Gaza Strip and surrounding areas with all its resources, and gathering intelligence assessed to be useful to Israel,” said the former Pine Gap employee in the 3 November 2023 story.
“I first became aware of the detail of what happens through a documentary about Edward Snowden, which I think I saw in about 2014,” Mx Robinson said.
The defendants stated that they had been long aware of Prof Tanter’s years of research with Prof Des Ball and Bill Robinson on the capabilities of the Pine Gap base.
This is not the first criminal court case around civilians seeking to force the closure of Pine Gap due to its links to alleged war crimes.
In 2005, four peace activists from a Christian affinity group were charged for entering the joint defence base in protest of its involvement in the war in Iraq.
Covered in Finnane’s book Peace Crimes, the Peace Pilgrim case of 2017 also involved another group of anti-war protestors who faced trial in Alice Springs for trespassing on the grounds of the military facility.
In the same year, National Security Agency (NSA) documents exclusively obtained in an ABC documentary by Peter Cronau revealed that intelligence data collected by the facility was being sent to the NSA for the US military to locate targets for lethal drone operations in the Middle East and other countries.
Pine Gap aiding in targeting civilians in Gaza
After a lengthy back-and-forth, the judge deemed Prof Tanter’s evidence irrelevant to the case, but then conceded to hear it after Mr Lawrence argued it was central to their defence.
Prof Tanter told the court of his extensive research into Pine Gap and its operations, including his collaboration with Des Ball, “a world renowned expert on intelligence organisations”.
“Pine Gap is a critical part of surveillance for operations which supplies intelligence to the United States, and we now know, to Israel.
“The base forms the basis for a military strategy and military tactics in particular cases …of course civilians are part of the targeting.”
He told the court that Pine Gap – or more specifically the US National Security Agency – controls three “very large” satellites that are used to gather and share surveillance data on the Middle East.
“They are, if you like, often called in US intelligence circles, the jewels in the crown of the National Security Agency,” he said.
“In November 2023, especially following the Hamas attack … Pine Gap would have been conducting its normal signals intelligence operations, but in an elevated form.
“By signals intelligence, I mean the inception in two different ways of a wide variety of electronic transmissions and communications [both] military [and] civilians.”
He said sources informing his research determining Pine Gap’s involvement in the genocide in Gaza were three-fold — “technical analysis” of satellites, historical evidence of material being provided to Israel, and agreements through official sources leaked through the Snowden documents.
“The sources vary from paper to paper, but they are all on the basis of public information,” he said.
“A series of documents released by Snowden were very consistent with what we’ve previously known from academic sources about the US-Israel intelligence exchange relationship.
“Given the controversy always around whistleblowers, what is very important and interesting about this is that there has been no challenge on these particular documents.”
Disruption to the base
Earlier, the Crown had called three witnesses – two Australian Federal Police officers, and a Northern Territory Police officer, all present for various parts of the blockade in November 2023.
Kenneth Napier, an Australian Federal Police inspector who has worked in protecting the base for 32 years, said he estimated more than a 100 Pine Gap workers and contractors were “disrupted due to the action”.
“Arriving around 5:45am, I observed facility and contracted vehicles stopped at the intersection of that road and the south Stuart Highway,” he said.
Greg Winter, team leader for the Australian Federal Police at the facility, said vehicles were parked on the side of the road preventing “the ability to drive around them”.
“There was about 20 people in high vis vests, some with face masks, displaying pro-Palestine and anti-Pine Gap signs and banners.”
“I recognised some of them from the previous roadblock incident the month before in October 2023.”
Detective acting superintendent of regional crime in Alice Springs, Deanne Ward, said “most people moved off the road” once she announced they had to leave the road or risk arrest.
“The two people remained on the road with their barrel, so the arm in the barrel, and did not move,” she said.
“A few protesters standing behind them asked acting Sergeant Sam Harding if they could stand there until the fire brigade removed the barrel, and he allowed them to do so.
“The protest also involved a response from several police members for about five to six hours.”
The conclusion of the years-long court case in September brought the joint Australian-US military base – tucked away in the desert 20 kilometres out of Alice Springs – under scrutiny once again for its facilitation of the genocide in Gaza.
It was followed last week by a similar action to block off the main access road to Pine Gap, with two other Alice Springs residents arrested after locking themselves onto a 44-gallon barrel filled with concrete. The pair are charged with loitering and will face court in November.
The latest blockade, involving around 30 people, was calling for the Australian Government to enact immediate sanctions against Israel, for the Australian attorney-general to prosecute Pine Gap’s active involvement in the genocide, and for the closure of the surveillance facility and return of stolen lands to Arrernte people.
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