Australian Government Assisting Whalers?

Australian Government Assisting Whalers?
Sea Shepherd News
News Releases
01/06/2008

The Sea Shepherd ship Steve Irwin is now off the coast of Antarctica and in full search mode for the Japanese whaling fleet. It is a vast ocean and we are scouring the seas with radar and our helicopter in our efforts to locate the illegal whaling activities of the seven whale killing pirate ships presently stalking these remote waters intent upon the slaughter of over a thousand innocent whales.

Once again we are doing the job that governments should be doing. And the question is; where the hell is Australia? The Rudd government promised that they would intervene against illegal Japanese whaling and then they promised to send the Navy down to monitor the whalers and then they retreated and promised to send the Customs vessel Oceanic Viking down to take pictures of the whalers and they promised to send aircraft to do surveillance. They have done none of this. Supposedly they are waiting for further instructions from Tokyo before deciding what to do next.

Sea Shepherd has now been informed that the Australian government is now working in cooperation with the Japanese government to prevent Sea Shepherd and Greenpeace ships from intercepting the Japanese vessels.

Japan is also receiving assistance from the office of the U.S. Naval Intelligence Civil Maritime Analysis Department (NIMA) which according to the website of the Cetacean Research Institute of Japan is monitoring the movements of Sea Shepherd and Greenpeace ships by Satellite and relaying the coordinates to the Japanese fleet.

The link is; http://www.icrwhale.org/eng/060105Release.pdf

And it reads:

Sea Shepherd and Greenpeace's movements are being monitored by the U.S. Office of Naval Intelligence Civil Maritime Analysis Department's worldwide piracy report, which provides information on threat to and criminal action against merchant shipping worldwide. http://pollux.nss.nima.mil/onit/onit_j_main.html

The following was found on the NIMA site at http://www.nga.mil/MSISiteContent/StaticFiles/MISC/wwtts/wwtts_20070228100000.txt

And of course the whalers have the full financial, military and logistical support, including surveillance expertise, from their own government.

An unidentified contact has informed Sea Shepherd that the Australian government has been cooperating with Japan to provide information on the Sea Shepherd ship Steve Irwin and its crew. The crew list has been forwarded to the Japanese government along with information from government files on various crew-members. The Steve Irwin carries 16 Australian citizens among the crew of 34 volunteers.

"If this is true, I hope that Australians will be as upset about this as we are, the fact that the Australian government is providing information on Australian citizens to Japan to protect illegal whaling," said Captain Paul Watson. "We have no way of verifying this information other than to request that the government either confirm or deny this accusation. I suspect they will just fail to respond."

How quickly promises wither and die after the votes have been harvested. This new government has betrayed the whales and betrayed the trust of those people who voted for it under the belief that action would be taken to stop Japan's illegal whaling activities.

"If the Australian government is not going to do anything then the least they could do is provide us with the coordinates of the Japanese fleet so that we can do the job they don't seem to have the motivation to do themselves," said Captain Paul Watson.

The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society is not a protest organization. The Society operates in accordance with the principles of the U.N. World Charter for Nature that allows for non-governmental intervention to uphold international conservation law in international waters.

http://seashepherd.org/news/media_080106_1.html