Captain Watson Sets the Record Straight

It has been two months since we began operations with Operation Waltzing Matilda. Two months ago, we began with three vessels. We now have two, having lost the Ady Gil when the Japanese whaler Shonan Maru No. 2 cut it in half and sank it on January 6th, 2010.

During the last two months, the Steve Irwin has engaged the Shonan Maru No. 2 in numerous skirmishes and the Sea Shepherd ships Bob Barker and the Ady Gil engaged the main body of the whaling fleet, a day that disrupted the whaling activities and ended with the destruction of our interceptor vessel.

After the sinking of the Ady Gil, the entire Japanese whaling fleet fled West with the Bob Barker and the Steve Irwin on their tail, and for the next 10 days they did not kill whales as they tried to throw us off their tail. They fled 3,000 nautical miles to the extreme Western boundary of the whaling zone they refer to as JARPA II. The Bob Barker continued to be trailed by the Shonan Maru No. 2.

We had to stop the pursuit when the Bob Barker needed our assistance to provide them with lube oil, and the helicopter on the Steve Irwin required an emergency repair as well. To shake off the Japanese security ship tail, we arranged to meet the Bob Barker in a place where we could safely transfer supplies. The Steve Irwin then returned to Fremantle and the Bob Barker returned to hunt the Japanese fleet.

The Bob Barker lost the tail of the Shonan Maru No. 2 when the Japanese had to desist from entering the territorial waters of Australia’s Heard Island.

Now the Steve Irwin, with helicopter repaired, ship refueled, and re-provisioned after a 48 hour turnaround in Fremantle is heading back to rejoin the Bob Barker to search for and pursue the whaling fleet again.

Operation Waltzing Matilda is turning out to be a tough protracted effort but I am confident we will once again impact their kill quotas despite the new obstacles thrown at us this year by the whalers.

The first of these obstacles is the two security ships deployed to defend the fleet and to intercept us in our efforts to close in on the fleet. The Shonan Maru No. 2 and the Yushin Maru have been working as interceptors. This is an incredibly expensive effort by the Japanese government. Crewed by Japanese security forces, these ships are far more aggressive and dangerous than the whalers. The destruction of the Ady Gil was deliberate and bold, far too bold for the whalers to have dared undertake.

The second tactic of the fleet is to flee for great distances in an effort to exhaust the fuel supplies of the Sea Shepherd ships. Fortunately, the Bob Barker has a far greater range than the whaling ships and the Steve Irwin is heading back with a full load of fuel.

What this means is that we still have two ships and with two months left in the whaling season I am confident that we will engage the whalers again and we will interrupt the killing once again. We expect the whalers to be far more aggressive, but we have no intention of retreating.

As Captain John Paul Jones once said, “give me a ship to sail into harm’s way.”

We now have two ships sailing into harm’s way once again and we expect a tough fight but it is not a fight we intend to shy away from. We expect violence. We expect further collisions. We expect damage. We may lose another ship and we face the prospect of injuries to our crew but we will not back down to these killers no matter what they throw at us.

The morale onboard both ships is high and all the crew are eager to once again confront the whalers.

As we move through the ever changing marine weather systems, from the hot and humid coastline of Western Australia, to the heaving, rolling seas and howling offshore winds, and into the meteorological surprises awaiting us in the Roaring Forties and the Furious Fifties, we feel confident that once again we have whipped up a storm of political controversy further exposing Japan’s outrageously bogus “scientific” research.

Despite the efforts of the Japanese whalers to cast us as anti-Japanese and as outlaws, we are getting our point across that we are down here confronting these whalers not because they are Japanese but because they are poachers. The Institute for Cetacean Research (ICR) is nothing more than a front for blatant criminal activity. The Japanese whaling fleet is targeting protected (Minke) and endangered (Humpback and Fin) whales in an established international whale sanctuary in violation of a global moratorium on whaling and in violation of the Antarctic Treaty. They are also killing whales in contempt of an Australian Federal Court ruling that has ordered them out and prohibited their unlawful whaling activities within the territorial waters of the Australian Antarctic Territory.

This is the fifth straight year of confrontations with the Japanese whaling fleet and during these last five years we have accomplished a great deal. Not only have we cut kill quotas and caused the whaling industry to lose tens of millions of dollars we have made this issue into a global campaign.

Will we win this year? Perhaps we won’t but if not we will be back again next year and the year after that if possible. For the Japanese whalers we intend to make this a never-ending trip to the dentist. We don’t intend to see whales die without opposition and without massive economic costs to their killers. And we are costing them dearly. They lose money with every whale they fail to kill because of our interventions. They lose money with every ton of fuel they consume fleeing from us. They lose money by sending down ships and security forces to prevent us from finding their fleet. They lose money in the incredible expenses they undertake to evade Sea Shepherd’s intervention. That figure was eight million US dollars last year and it will be more this year. We are speaking the one language they fully understand and that is economics. It’s all about profit and loss, and we simply need to keep negating their profits. Our objective is to sink the Japanese whaling fleet - economically, to bankrupt them and to humiliate them.

There is nothing noble about killing a whale. It is a cowardly act and the whalers are abject cowards. They flee from us and they make their living by shooting gentle, intelligent, highly social, and sentient beings in the back with organ-shattering explosive tipped harpoons in a manner so despicably cruel that any slaughter house in the world would be closed if animals on land were slaughtered in the same fashion.

The Japanese government likes to compare whales to cows and chickens, constantly demanding to know what the difference is between eating beef and chickens and the eating of whales. They ask this question to cast us as hypocrites. The fact that our ships are vegan vessels they dismiss as evidence of fanaticism, so there is no way to turn - hypocrites if we eat meat and fanatics if we don’t.

But it is not a question of eating meat or not eating meat. It is a question of the need to kill whales. More cows, pigs, and chickens are consumed by the people of Japan than by the people of Australia. In fact, it is safe to say that beef, pork, and chicken are far more representative of the average Japanese diet than whale.

A more accurate comparison would be to the eating of foie gras, something that—due largely to the sheer cruelty of the practice—a small minority of Westerners eat just as a small minority of Japanese people eat whale meat.

No abattoir in the world would allow the killing of a cow by running after it in a field plunging a spear with an explosive tip into it’s back and than slowly electrocuting it or pumping it full of small caliber bullets until it died forty minutes later.

There can also be no comparison between whales and cows as exploitable animals. Cows are domesticated creatures, genetically modified by humans as food animals. There are over three billion cattle in the world. Humans feed them and raise them and the cow is totally dependent upon humanity for survival.

The whale is a wild, non-domestic, sentient being of far fewer numbers than cows. There is not a single whale population on this planet that exceeds a million in number. It makes no sense to compare the whale to one of the most populous animals on the planet - the cow. Nor does it make sense to compare the slaughter of cows—which is legal—to the illegal slaughter of whales.

The Japanese argue that whales consume large amounts of fish and thus are a threat to the survival of many fish species. This is an ecologically ridiculous argument, but put into proper perspective is the fact that chickens, pigs, and domestic salmon consume some 35% of the fish taken from the sea in the form of fishmeal. The pigs of the world eat more fish than all the world’s sharks. It is human greed that is destroying the fish in the sea - not the whales, the seals, the sharks, or the sea-birds.

Sea Shepherd dramatizes the issues through confrontations and these dramatics get our foot into the media door to address the facts and to explain the ecological realities of the slaughter of whales.

It’s all politics and economics mixed in with sociological and ecological realities, and thus the arguments are complex and divisive.

What is not complex is why Sea Shepherd confronts and opposes the Japanese whaling fleet. We do so simply because what the Japanese whalers are doing is illegal as defined by international conservation law and we as an organization are empowered to intervene in accordance with the principles established by the United Nations World Charter for Nature.

The proof of this is quite simple. Not once in six years of Antarctic whale defense campaigns have Sea Shepherd or any of the officers of the ships or organization been charged with a criminal offense. Not once have we been sued. Not even Japan has laid charges or initiated a lawsuit against us. Why? The last place a criminal operation wishes to go is to court.

The Sea Shepherd ships operate out of Australian ports with the full support of the Australian people. The Japanese whaling ships are prohibited by law from entering Australian territorial waters. Sea Shepherd ships refuel in Australian ports. Japanese ships are not allowed to use Australian ports for refueling, provisions, or repairs. Last year, Indonesia ordered the Japanese whaler Yushin Maru No. 2 to leave Indonesia when it sought repairs from ice damage caused during a confrontation with the Sea Shepherd ship Steve Irwin.

Despite public relations propaganda from the Japanese whaling industry, and political pressure from the Japanese government, their accusations of “eco-terrorism” against Sea Shepherd are falling on deaf ears especially from nations having to deal with real terrorist issues.

The world is waking up to and becoming increasingly more disgusted with the ICR’s claims that its cruel and illegal whaling activities are “scientific.” No one is buying that story any longer, and fewer and fewer people are buying into Japan’s so-called cultural justification for whaling.

Japanese whaling is not justified on cultural grounds. Modern pelagic whaling was established in Japan in 1912 by the Norwegians and sent to Antarctica in 1946 under orders from the American General Douglas MacArthur to provide cheap meat for post-war Japanese citizens. Young people in Japan do not eat whale meat anymore. The market for whale meat is ridiculously small and Japanese warehouses continue to store a surplus of whale meat, while much of it is made into pet food.

If not for Japanese government subsidies, whaling would not survive. But many Japanese government officials who are still very well connected and thus influential were given cushy jobs with the ICR, and the union that supplies the crew to the ships is a Yakuza controlled union. The Yakuza (Japanese mafia) have a way of getting what they want in Japan.

And thus we have a criminal activity supported by corruption in the form of influence peddling and bribery in the government, and backed by the most powerful criminal organization in Japan.

What I have found especially interesting is that not once in the years that I have accused the whaling industry of being influenced by the Yakuza has any public relations representative of the whaling industry ever denied it.

When you think about it, the opposition against Sea Shepherd is awesome. On one side we have the ICR supported by the Japanese government and the Yakuza, and on the other we have a small volunteer driven conservation organization that does not enjoy any financial support or protection from any government.

And, we operate at a distinct disadvantage. If one of use were to be killed by the whalers, the Japanese government would justify and defend the crime and we would hear very little from our own governments, all of whom seem terrified to be critical of Japan over anything. Consider the Ady Gil. It was deliberately sunk by a Japanese whaling vessel without a single critical condemnation from any nation and we do not expect any charges to be laid against the Captain of the Shonan Maru No. 2 for the simple reason that it would be harmful to trade relations. On the other hand if I were to have rammed and sunk a Japanese whaler, I would most likely now be under arrest and my actions universally condemned.

I do not know what the future holds for our next engagement. Maybe we should ram and destroy a Japanese whaler just to illustrate the blatant hypocrisy that holds the whale killers to one standard and those of us who oppose the killing of whales to another?

But of course we cannot do such a thing because Sea Shepherd has a responsibility to stay within the boundaries of the law and, in keeping with our strict policy of nonviolence, to not cause injury to those we oppose. We have an unblemished record in this regard and it is a record we intend to keep.

Let me fix the format.

at bay,

Even Green Peace disowns Watson and calls him a liar. You honestly seem to be clueless as to what Sea Shepherd is up to and voilent nature of their organization.

http://www.greenpeace.org/usa/news/paul-watson-sea-shepherd-and

Paul Watson, Sea Shepherd and Greenpeace: some facts

Paul Watson is the founder of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society and an early member of Greenpeace. Over the last few years, Paul has become extremely critical of Greenpeace in the press and at his website. The information below is provided as a service to our supporters to get a few facts out on the table about Paul's history with Greenpeace and the nature of our disagreements.

Paul Watson became active with Greenpeace in 1971 as a member of our second expedition against nuclear weapons testing in Amchitka, and went on to participate in actions against whaling and the killing of harp seals. He was an influential early member but not, as he sometimes claims, a founder.

He was expelled from the leadership of Greenpeace in 1977 by a vote of 11 to one (only Watson himself voted against it). Bob Hunter (one of Greenpeace's early leaders, after whom a Sea Shepherd vessel was named) described the event in his book, the Greenpeace Chronicles: 'No one doubted his [Watson's] courage for a moment. He was a great warrior brother. Yet in terms of the Greenpeace gestalt, he seemed possessed by too powerful a drive, too unrelenting a desire to push himself front and center, shouldering everyone else aside… He had consistently gone around to other offices, acting out the role of mutineer.

Everywhere he went, he created divisiveness… We all felt we'd got trapped in a web no one wanted to see develop, yet now that it had, there was nothing to do but bring down the axe, even if it meant bringing it down on the neck of our brother." Confusion: Greenpeace and Sea Shepherd Watson founded his own group, Sea Shepherd, in 1977.

In 1986, Sea Shepherd carried out an action against the Icelandic whaling station in Hvalfjoerdur and sank two Icelandic whaling vessels in Reykjavik harbor by opening their sea valves;[1]

in December 1992, Sea Shepherd sank the vessel Nybroena in port;[2]

Sea Shepherd claimed to have sank the Taiwanese drift net ship Jiang Hai in port in Taiwan and to have rammed and disabled four other Asian drift net ships;[3]

A Canadian court ordered Watson and his former ship, the Cleveland Armory, to pay a total of $35,000 for ramming a Cuban fishing vessel off the coast of Newfoundland in June 1993;[4]

In January 1994 the group severely damaged the whaling ship Senet in the Norwegian port of Gressvik.[5] Each of the whaling ships noted above was refloated and refitted for continued whaling.

In a 2008 article in the New Yorker, Watson claims that Sea Shepherd has sunk ten ships since its founding, but the author of the article notes, with some skepticism, that she was unable to verify that number.

Paul Watson's and Sea Shepherd's actions have sometimes been wrongly attributed to Greenpeace, often in an attempt by others to damage Greenpeace's reputation for non-violence. Greenpeace has never sunk a whaling ship.

Some anti-environmentalists try to use the fact that an extreme minority in the environmental movement resorts to force and sabotage to brand the movement as a whole as "terrorist." One such attempt has been specifically condemned by a Norwegian court. [7]

In 1991, we had an agreement with Sea Shepherd that we would refrain from public criticism of one another. Today, many of Sea Shepherd's fundraising communications and Paul Watson's public communications are filled with attacks on Greenpeace, our methods, our activists, and our supporters. They are often peppered with inaccuracies and outright untruths.

Paul Watson is still fighting a one-sided battle that was over for Greenpeace in 1977. In most cases, we simply don't respond to Paul Watson's criticism. While we don't agree with Sea Shepherd's methods, we also know that stories of divisiveness within the ranks of environmental groups distract from the real issues which unite us, and we prefer that when the media writes about whaling, they write about the real issues.

Although Paul Watson is a vehement anti-whaling activist, he regularly lends his support to attacks on Greenpeace -- some of them organized by the whalers themselves. [8]

Our committment to non-violence: why we don't cooperate

Paul Watson has made many public requests for Greenpeace to reveal the location of the whaling fleet or otherwise cooperate with Sea Shepherd in the Southern Ocean when the ships of both organizations have been there simultaneously. We passionately want to stop whaling, and will do so peacefully. That's why we won't help Sea Shepherd. Greenpeace is committed to non-violence and we'll never, ever, change that; not for anything. If we helped Sea Shepherd to find the whaling fleet we'd be responsible for anything they did having got that information, and history shows that they've used violence in the past, in the most dangerous seas on Earth. For us, non-violence is a non-negotiable, precious principle.

Greenpeace will continue to act to defend the whales, but will never attack or endanger the whalers. We differ with Paul Watson on what constitutes violence. He states that nobody has ever been harmed by a Sea Shepherd action. But the test of non-violence is the nature of your action, not whether harm results or not.

There are many acts of violence -- for example, holding a gun to someone's head -- which result in no harm. That doesn't change their nature. We believe that throwing butryic acid at the whalers, dropping cables to foul their props, and threatening to ram them in the freezing waters of the Antarctic constitutes violence because of the potential consequences.

The fact that the consequences have not been realized is irrelevant. In addition to being morally wrong, we believe the use of violence in protection of whales to be a tactical error. If there's one way to harden Japanese public opinion and ensure whaling continues, it's to use violent tactics against their fleet. It's wrong because it puts human lives at risk, and it's wrong because it makes the whalers stronger in Japan.

We work with many other groups whose methods differ from ours, and we know the power of cooperation among groups with a common objective but diverse ways of working. For decades, we have had productive working relationships with the Worldwide Fund for Nature, Friends of the Earth, International Fund for Animal Welfare, Sierra Club, Environmental Investigative Agency, and a host of other groups dedicated to whale conservation. We would only be willing to cooperate with Sea Shepherd under the condition that it would not facilitate endangering human life.

To give one example, in 2005/2006, Sea Shepherd attempted to snarl the propeller of the Nisshin Maru with a rope and cable, as reported on their own website: Two of our three zodiacs were equipped with devices we had made to foul their propeller; basically two buoys connected with steel cable and rope that we would place in front of their ship in hopes that the Maru would run it over, it would pass underneath their hull and into their propeller at the stern of their ship causing their ship to slow down dramatically or be stopped completely. The Maru was running at full speed away from the Farley. Both zodiacs deployed their devices repeatedly. None seemed to work against the goliath Nisshin Maru ship... Running out of options and having lost both of our propeller fouling devices, all hope seemed lost of slowing the Maru... Disabling a ship at sea in the Antarctic, regardless of how much one may object to its activities, is not only a callous act of disregard for human life -- it's courting an environmental disaster in one of the most fragile environments in the world.

Such tactics are not only dangerous to the whalers, they are dangerous to the cause of stopping Japanese whaling.

Our political analysis is unequivocal: if Japanese whaling is to be stopped, it will be stopped by a domestic decision within the Japanese government to do so. That's why we have invested heavily in a Greenpeace office in Japan and efforts to speak directly to the Japanese public -- 70 percent of whom are unaware that whaling takes place in the Southern Ocean at all. A majority of those who are aware of the whaling program, oppose it. Support for whaling in Japan has been steadily falling for the last decade. Consumption of whale meat is in decline, the cost of the program to taxpayers is being questioned by the business community, and the political costs of the program have created opposition in the Foreign Affairs department in Japan.

All of this progress could be undone by a nationalist backlash. By making it easy to paint anti-whaling forces as dangerous, piratical terrorists, Sea Shepherd could undermine the forces within Japan which could actually bring whaling to an end.

A few facts We've got fairly thick skins here at Greenpeace. When you challenge powerful forces, you need to be ready to put up with accusations of ulterior motives and hidden agendas. What's unfortunate is when we have to spend time countering friendly fire -- attacks by an organization that shares the same goals as we do. We don't mind robust disagreements, but we do object to falsehoods.

As the New Yorker article on Paul Watson noted, in his book "Earthforce!": Watson advises readers to make up facts and figures when they need to, and to deliver them to reporters confidently, "as Ronald Reagan did."

Paul Watson has claimed that Greenpeace goes to the Antarctic merely to film whales being killed, to wave banners and to bear witness to their deaths -- but does nothing to save them.

This is untrue. Greenpeace saves whales Greenpeace has directly saved the lives of countless whales over more than three decades by maneuvering our boats between the harpoon and the whale.

Many of us have risked our lives in those actions from Iceland to the Antarctic. But, while we consider it acceptable to risk our own lives for the whales, we don't believe in risking anyone else's.

In 2006, a harpoon was fired over one of our inflatables and the line fell on the boat, pulling one crew member into the freezing waters of the Antarctic. According to records kept by the whalers (we were too busy to keep records), we interfered with them 26 times in 2006. Shortly after sighting us, the whalers departed at high speed -- their own records show they lost nine days of hunting due to interference with their operations. The whalers rammed our ships twice, hit one of our crew members with a metal pole, and used a high-powered water cannon against us. Despite this, they came in 82 whales short of their quota. In 2008, the whalers ran from us for 14 consecutive days, days that were lost to them for hunting. Since they need to catch an average of around 9-10 whales a day to make their self-appointed quota, this action alone saved the lives of over 100 whales.

Greenpeace works to save whales around the world, all year round, and with a variety of tactics. Along with the Worldwide Fund for Nature, we were the primary advocates that created public pressure for the moratorium on commercial whaling which was agreed in 1982. That single piece of work has saved the lives of tens of thousands of whales and ended the whaling programs of the Soviet Union, Brazil, Peru, Chile, and Spain. We have undertaken political work to maintain support for the moratorium on commercial whaling and counter Japanese vote-buying schemes.

There have been years in which the conservation majority in the International Whaling Commission has hung by a thread, in one case by a single vote. By lobbying conservation-minded countries to join the International Whaling Commission and successfully pressuring countries like Denmark to change their policies toward conservation, our millions of supporters and activists have worked quietly behind the scenes to save whales. Working in Japan to stop whaling Greenpeace has had an office in Japan since 1989. As a result of hard, steady work over the years we have succeeded in making whaling a subject of domestic debate in Japan where none has existed before.

We've brought Japanese celebrities, musicians, and artists to speak out against whaling, exposed taxpayer-sponsored promotional efforts by the Japanese government -- by exposing waste and corruption in the bureaucracy that supports whaling, we've generated criticism of whaling in some of Japan's largest newspapers, and articles in the business press asking whether Japan should end its whaling program.

On May 15, 2008, Greenpeace Japan used undercover investigators and the testimony of informers to expose that large amounts of prime cut whale meat were being smuggled from the whaling ship Nisshin Maru disguised as personal baggage, labeled "cardboard" or "salted stuff" and addressed to the private homes of crewmembers. Greenpeace activists Junichi Sato and Toru Suzuki intercepted one box out of four sent to one address, discovered it contained whale meat valued at up to US$3,000, and took it to the Tokyo public prosecutor.

Their public press conference drew national attention in Japan, and a promise by the public prosecutor to "fully investigate" the charges. Instead, Junichi and Toru were arrested for stealing the box of whale meat, and the scandal investigation was dropped by the Tokyo public prosecutor's office the same day; it was clear that the two events were connected, just as it is clear that both were politically motivated. Although Junichi and Toru had provided full cooperation to the police, it took some five weeks to make the arrests, and when they did, more than 40 officers raided the Greenpeace Japan office, with the media tipped off by police beforehand.

The Greenpeace activists learned of their imminent arrest from the TV news the same day the embezzlement case was dropped. The two activists now face up to ten years imprisonment. We consider them political prisoners, and believe that powerful forces have instrumented a crackdown aimed at discrediting Greenpeace in Japanese society. This means we've hit a nerve. We intend to put all our efforts into turning the tables, and putting the whaling interests on trial in the court of public opinion in Japan. We see the reaction of whaling interests as conforming perfectly to the way the most successful Greenpeace campaigns play out: "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you. Then you win."

Greenpeace has too much money? Watson likes to paint a picture of Greenpeace as enjoying vast riches, but in fact Greenpeace accepts no money from governments or corporations, and our resources are minuscule compared to the task before us. We rely almost entirely on the donations of nearly 3 million people worldwide, and we spend those hard-earned donations in ways that win campaigns for the environment.

To put our budget in perspective, in 2007 Exxon-Mobil generated more revenue in less than six hours than Greenpeace raised worldwide from its supporters for the entire year. Our annual donations are less than the value of seven days of the global value of the illegal forest industry, or three days of the subsidies to the global fisheries industry.

The nuclear industry spends more money in advertising than Greenpeace International's entire operating budget. The full breakdown of what we raise, what we spend, and what we spend it on is released every year in our Annual Report. Most importantly, Greenpeace gets results. In the three decades since our founding, we have combined our unique brand of non-violent direct action with political lobbying, scientific research, and public mobilization to bring an end to nuclear weapons testing, stop the dumping of hazardous waste at sea, secure the moratorium on commercial whaling, and win dozens of other significant steps toward our ultimate goal of a green and peaceful future for our planet.

In conclusion Paul Watson is welcome to express his opinions about Greenpeace -- as a more progressive environmental organization, we have a wide spectrum of detractors, and we welcome fair criticism. But, we expect fair debate to be based in fact, not falsehoods.

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