The Liberal Agenda: WAIHOPAI SPY BASE PROTEST SATURDAY FEBRUARY 18th

People will be converging on the super-secret Waihopai satellite interception spy base, in Marlborough, on Saturday February 18th.

We will be at the Waihopai spy base main gate at Waihopai Valley Road from 4 p.m. There will be a peaceful protest, calling for its closure.

The base protest will follow a day long gathering at the Wesley Centre, 3 Henry Street, central Blenheim
The topic of that gathering will be THE CHANGING FACE OF SPYING

Those featured at that gathering will include:
Green MP, Teanau Tuinono;
Sonya Smith from Rocket Lab Monitor, Mahia (to talk about the campaign against NZ’s newest US military base) and;
Anti-Bases Campaign’s Warren Thomson

Since our last protest (2021) the look of the spy base has drastically changed, with the 2022 removal of the two giant domes and the satellite dishes they concealed.

They were officially deemed obsolete.

But although the domes have gone, Waihopai is still a spy base, albeit a less conspicuous one, and the spying by the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) goes on

Our campaign has always been to call for the closure of the base.

We started the campaign in 1988, when Waihopai was an empty paddock yet to be built on.

The spying goes on, so ABC’s campaign goes on.

New Zealanders are told that Waihopai/the GCSB/Five Eyes are vital to protect our national security. But they have
done absolutely nothing to protect us against biggest threat to NZ’s national security since WW2, namely the virus. The hundreds of millions of taxpayers’ dollars wasted on Waihopai and the GCSB in any given year would be much better spent on public health. Or on combating climate change, which is an even bigger threat.

New Zealanders are told that Waihopai defends NZ from terrorists. No, it doesn’t. The Royal Commission report into the March 15th, 2019 Christchurch mosques’ massacre was damning in its conclusions about NZ’s intelligence agencies The GCSB electronic spy agency totally missed the worst act of terrorism on NZ soil, one committed by a foreign terrorist with an extensive electronic presence. That is because Waihopai and the GCSB define “terrorists” as per the instructions of their Five Eyes Big Brother, the US National Security Agency (NSA). They turned a blind eye to the real terrorists already here.

Helen Clark was the Prime Minister who ordered the NZ military into Afghanistan. Her reaction to the Taliban victory in 2021 was to call it “a catastrophic failure of intelligence in Western foreign policy”.
Which begs the question – if this spy base can’t even protect us from viruses and terrorists, what useful purpose does it serve? Certainly nothing for the NZ people.

If Five Eyes is provably useless in something as major as the Afghanistan fiasco, why is New Zealand still in it? The spies are not even any good at spying.

For 35 years Waihopai has been NZ’s most significant contribution to Washington’s global effort to manipulate world business and diplomacy. And for 35 years the Anti-Bases Campaign has protested at Waihopai, calling for its closure.
Waihopai does not operate in the national interest of New Zealand. In all but name it is an American spy base on NZ soil, paid for with hundreds of millions of our tax dollars; it spies on Kiwis and foreigners; it is NZ’s key contribution to America’s global spying & war machine. It does not protect us from threats to our national security, such as viruses and terrorists. Waihopai must be closed. And NZ needs to get out of Five Eyes and have a genuinely independent defence and foreign policy.