[[Next May/June will see Australia host the largest military exercises we've ever had in peacetime.

Talisman Sabre 07.

Twelve thousand Australian soldiers and nearly l4,000 US troops and sailors will take place in bombarding our shores and fragile landscape, storming our beaches, gunning down 'terrorists' in the newly built urban guerilla warfare training centre, testing their latest laser guided missiles and 'smart' bombs in some of the most pristine wilderness I've ever seen on this planet - and in 30 years of making films, I've seen a lot of this planet.

Idyllic Shoalwater Bay near Rockhampton will cop it all - live aerial bombing, ship to shore naval firings, underwater depth charges exploded in areas where turtles and dugong breed, nuclear subs using high level sonar frequency which zaps the hearing of sea life and mammals, nuclear aircraft carriers inside the so-called Great Barrier Reef marine national park (!), land based artillery firings blasting the hell out of areas where the most amazing biodiversity in Australia is to be found. (Shoalwater Bay covers 740,000 hectacres and is almost unique in our climatic landscape because it is a cross over point for tropical, sub tropical and temperate zones giving rise to an amazing variety of many species of flora and wildlife, birds,sea creatures etc).

Anyone who has seen Al Gore's film, An Inconvenient Truth has to ask why are we allowing such madness to take place and wanton misuse of resources to further add to the huge level of CO2 put up into the atmosphere in exercises such as these at a time when we all should be combining forces in the War for Our Survival.

These live munitions actions at Shoalwater Bay will run simultaneously with US bombing runs by Stealth, B1 and B52 bombers (just one B52 bomber carries 30 tonnes of bombs -needs three semi trailers to load it up with its bombload...) from Guam to drop their live payload from 5 kilometres high on Delamare bombing range near Katherine NT and live fire exercises involving many Abrams tanks rumbling across the landscape at Bradshaw tank range (surrounded by Bradshaw national park south of Darwin, target practising on country against the wishes of the senior Aboriginal elders, custodians of that country...).

These military exercises and their coordination in both states will be beamed live via satellite from tiny cameras on the tanks, bombers, landing craft, army commanders's lapels etc to the coordinating War Room at Newcastle where the US and Australian generals will call the shots of what is fired next. Son of Star Wars has arrived in Australia!

We are now about to pollute our own most pristine areas, far away from the centres of population by letting the US military test their latest weapons here. There are big plans by British Aerospace and the other arms manufacturers to quietly turn the depressed Rockhampton area into a big arms manufacturing industrial estate. So not only will we export our soldiers who are the best there is to adventurist wars overseas, we are about to see an explosion in Australia manufacturing and exporting weapons of war.

With a view to oppose these exercises, a group of people from around Australia with peace activist credentials had a phone link up yesterday and spoke for an hour about our willingness to combine forces and oppose these exercises. We will link with activist residents of Shoalwater Bay (Yeppoon and Byfield) that we made contact with last year during Talisman Sabre 2005.

continued: next post

Many military bases in Latin America—like those in the United States and elsewhere—are leaving a devastating environmental legacy. In Vieques, studies have found high rates of cadmium, lead, mercury, uranium, and other contaminants in the soil, food chain, and human bodies of the island’s inhabitants. These toxins have lead to elevated rates of disease among Vieques residents, who have a 26.9 percent higher incidence of cancer than other Puerto Ricans. Despite Superfund designation, Vieques remains a very contaminated island. In Panama, the military left behind more than 100,000 rounds of unexploded ordnance on firing ranges in the canal area, despite a Canal Treaty provision for removing such dangers. Nearby construction of a new bridge and road will bring an influx of workers and occupants, who will be exposed to these hazards.

Yet U.S. bases abroad present special problems for environmental cleanup, because sovereignty is always at issue. Once the Pentagon is gone, the United States abandons jurisdiction, thereby shirking responsibility for the contamination its military has caused.