Website Update for www.tonykevin.com  - 18 February 2003

 

I’m posting today two more published pieces on the AWB inquiry. Anyone who reads my three commentaries on this matter (all now on this website) will see my conclusions that the main victims are first and foremost, the needy Iraqi children who were deprived of $300 million worth of food and medicines they desperately needed; and second, Australian wheat farmers who now risk losing their vital Middle Eastern markets to North American competitors.

 

I lay the main blame for the potential loss of this market on the stupidity and recklessness of the Howard Government since 2000,  in trying to at the same time maintain Iraq as a major Australian wheat customer while treacherously preparing  with the US to invade that country,  and then in  having the stupidity and cowardice in 2005-2006 to succumb meekly to American pressure in setting up a judicial inquiry, that would inevitably uncover the whole sorry mess. .

 

What worries me now is that in the already long-running media focus on the AWB’s misdemeanours, the Howard government is as usual tiptoeing away from the mess, and may yet avoid the blame that should properly be sheeted home to itself. I take no pleasure in what AWB executives have been going through in the Cole inquiry. They were not putting graft money paid to Saddam’s officials in their own pockets – they were trying to protect a major Australian growers’ market that was being subjected to gross political interference from the actions of the Howard gang.  

 

I would. like to see Howard, Hill, Downer and Vaile up there before Commissioner Cole,  to take the investigative heat that properly should be turned on them now.  But Labor and the media are visibly running out of puff on the story. Important revelations – that the Wheat Export Authority ( a government monitoring agency) lied , that Treasury –Finance knew, that DFAT knew, that AUSAID was involved  – are now being reported as mere details by an exhausted and jaded press. Just as on SIEV X, Howard is relying on the media’s short attention cycle to get out from under this. He may yet succeed.  

 

**

 

On another matter,  here for the record is an important piece published in Crikey on the Bali Nine affair by Alex Mitchell, The Sun-Herald's State Political Editor, on 16 February, “The AFP, Bali Nine and Howard's war on terror”: ( The italics are mine)

 

“The item by Peter Faris QC, ‘In defence of the Australian Federal Police’ (yesterday, Item 4), is a disgraceful piece of dissembling. He uses legal bluff and bluster to try to convince your anxious readers that the AFP's conduct in the Bali Nine arrests and convictions is all above board. He mentions the federal court judge's rejection of the application by four of the Bali Nine to gain access to AFP documents saying: ‘This issue was unsuccessfully litigated by [Scott] Rush, Lawrence, Czugaj and Stevens in our Federal Court in January.’

 

True, but what he fails to mention is that Justice Paul Finn called for a review of the rules under which Australian police give information to their Indonesian counterparts. Clearly, the judge was deeply unhappy with the AFP's behaviour.

 

Interviews I've conducted with long-serving AFP officers reveal that an unstated protocol in force for decades was that AFP would not assist in the arrest of Australian nationals in countries that administered the death penalty. On the other hand, they worked with overseas police to conduct ‘controlled operations’ when quantities of illegal drugs were ‘green-lighted’ into Australia so that the couriers and their bosses could be tracked, identified and arrested.

 

All this change after September 11 and the first Bali bombing when Prime Minister John Howard and his national security committee made an agreement with the Indonesian government to cooperate at all levels of intelligence-gathering and policing – terrorism, Muslim fundamentalism, arms trafficking, drugs smuggling and money laundering. As an explicit show of goodwill after the successful joint investigation of the Bali and Jakarta bombings, the AFP handed over the Bali Nine to the Indonesian police, thus making them victims of the Howard Government's ‘war on terror’

 

This was made clear by AFP commissioner Mick Keelty when he said on Tuesday that his officers had ‘acted in accordance with government policy,’ adding: ‘We trust the Indonesian justice system to deal with the terrorists who were responsible for the Bali bombing. It's the same system that's dealing with narcotics trafficking.’ Precisely. And he boasted: ‘We'd do the same thing again and we're doing it each and every day’

 

Keelty is having himself on. A large number of his officers have decided they DON'T want blood on their hands and WON'T be giving Australian suspects to Indonesian, Singaporese, Malaysian or Chinese police to have them shot or hanged. The present policy is an affront to Australia's stand against capital punishment and its duty of care to its citizens and it will be altered, even if that offends the eminent Melbourne QC.”

 

**

 

Here is my follow-up letter to Crikey commenting on Mitchell’s piece, published in Crikey’s letters section,  “Comments, corrections, clarifications and c*ckups’  on 17 February:

 

 “Tony Kevin writes:

A great piece by Alex Mitchell, the Sun-Herald's State Political Editor (yesterday) – a must for the files. He omitted one important area of cooperation in his listing of areas of crime where the AFP and Indonesian Police agreed after the Bali bombing to cooperate more closely, even to the extent of setting up Australians to die in Indonesia. The area that must be added is: cooperation against people smuggling. This was formalised at the first Bali regional conference on people smuggling but was already in place by early 2002. The AFP will continue to protect whatever the Indonesian police may have done under the Australian-instigated people smuggling disruption program in Indonesia, to disable or sink asylum-seekers' boats that were bound for Australia, and the Indonesian Police will protect their Australian AFP-DIMIA paymasters's suspected associations with this illegal and probably lethal program. But let us not forget – though 353 innocent people drowned on SIEV X on 19 October 2001, our AFP continues four years later to see nothing, hear nothing, say nothing. It is hard to retain respect for such a tarnished official Australian agency. But I hope Alex is right about the decent cops in AFP who won't go along with such things. Let us hope that one day, some of them will blow the whistle on what really happened to sink SIEV X”.

 

**

I am glad that AFP Commissioner Keelty has now publicly acknowledged to a Senate Estimates Committee hearing on 17 February that “Whoever assured Scott Rush's father, Lee, that his son would be prevented from leaving Australia had acted dishonourably.” [after Lee Rush had passed on to AFP his concerns about his son’s intentions]

I hope to see in my lifetime Mr Keelty running the same measuring rod of honour over whatever actions,  or whatever failures to act, were committed by AFP officers involved in the Australian Government’s people smuggling disruption program in Indonesia in 1999-2001, that may have contributed to the deaths by drowning  of 353 innocent  people on SIEV X  on 19 October 2001.  

As Commissioner Keelty well knows, this unfinished public issue remains a major skeleton in the AFP’s cupboard. Sooner or later, there is going to have to be a proper accounting for the AFP’s role – whatever it was – in the sinking of SIEV X.  

Tony Kevin, Canberra 18 Febuary