Howard and defence chiefs plead ignorance

Bob Briton

The most peculiar things appear to be happening in Canberra 
lately. While one would think that John Howard, his ministers and 
the heads of government departments would have the best access in 
the country to important and sensitive information, it seems that 
nowadays they are the only ones being left out of the loop!

Take Attorney General Philip Ruddock, for example. It was not 
until last week that he was brought up to speed about a couple of 
significant phone calls to the Australian Federal Police and 
ASIO, reportedly offering credible information of terror threats 
against Australian targets.

The first was to the AFP's post in Singapore in 2000. Mr Ruddock 
was only told about a note recording the call the Monday before 
last, and only then following a question in Parliament arising 
from a media report. The caller, who identified himself as 
Ibrahim Fraser, wanted to warn authorities about a plot to blow 
up the Australian Embassy in Singapore.

Then there was the call to ASIO in 2000 by Jack Roche — the 
Perth man sentenced to nine years jail for his part in an 
abandoned plot to bomb the Israeli Embassy in Canberra. Mr Roche 
apparently rang the spook outfit offering information about 
Hambali, the alleged mastermind of the Bali bombing currently 
detained in the US. It seems that nobody got back to Mr Roche 
until it was much too late.

Mr Ruddock — and Mr Howard — are apparently as mad as hell 
about this and are rushing to put "systems" [notepads?] in place 
to ensure that people pass on their phone messages.

Who knew what, when?

Of course, the most famous of these lapses involves the question 
of who knew what and when about the torture and abuse of Iraqi 
prisoners in the notorious Abu Ghraib prison. Senator Hill told 
Parliament on May 11 that he only found out about it in February 
— the month after US news channel CNN broadcast details of the 
Red Cross report into the matter.

Australia's Chief of the Defence Forces, Peter Cosgrove, and the 
secretary of the Department of Defence, Ric Smith were sticking 
to the same story. They claim to be as shocked as the rest of us 
when the disgusting photographic evidence was made public by the 
media.

Outrageous abuse

Still, something does not seem quite right about the claims of 
the defence big wigs when they appeared before a Senate estimates 
committee last week. It turns out that an Australian military 
lawyer, Major George O'Kane, had been dealing with the Red Cross 
complaints about the abuse at Abu Ghraib as early as October last 
year.

What is more, Major O'Keane's reports contained references to the 
sexual abuse that have since become common knowledge. Mr Hill and 
the PM both claim that, until the media opened their eyes, the 
mistreatment noted by the Red Cross "only" extended to poor food, 
inadequate contact, humiliation, forced nudity and keeping 
prisoners in cells without light for days on end. 

Such complaints seem to hardly raise a senior bureaucrat's 
eyebrows in these days of the "war on terror".

Unfortunately for the cause of truth, Major O'Kane was not 
allowed to appear before the estimates committee last week. It 
seems the Major is caught in an unusual kind of limbo. He is 
competent enough and old enough to be a legal adviser to the 
Coalition's military commander in Iraq and to report back to 
Australia's Joint Operations Command but NOT to appear before a 
Senate estimates committee.

At his last press conference before heading off to the US, the PM 
was again trying to pass off the "I wasn't informed" story. He 
made heavy going of a question from Michelle Gratton of The Age. 
She asked why he had not been aware of the Iraqi prisoner abuse 
scandal while Labor senators down the corridor had managed to 
stay up-to-date.

"I'm sorry, Michelle, but it is simply not possible for someone 
in my position to talk to every single person", was the lame 
reply. It was doubly ineffective given that he had just spent the 
previous several minutes namedropping about who he WILL be 
speaking to overseas — President Bush, Vice-President Cheney, 
California Governor Schwarzeneger, Chairman of the Federal 
Reserve Greenspan, etc.

It's all probably just another case of lying. If not lying then 
it must be sheer incompetence.