So I’m not completely comfortable with the outcome, but at the same time we’ll never know how much pain or deaths were avoided by the interception of the drugs and stopping of one of the major Indonesian drug traffickers (albeit shot dead during arrest).

It’s a wistful thought of mine that perhaps the audit shows how incompetent and inappropriate Keelty’s behaviour has been, and upon reading the draft he’s been told by the gov’t to shove off now with full honours, or face the boot.

Now let’s see if we can get a credible person to head the AFP and restore its reptuation.

At what price? That of knowingly sending Australians to their probable deaths.

Are you really okay with that?

Ideally there would be some way for the AFP to pass information on the basis that those charged would not face the death penalty (though life in an Indonesian jail is not going to be much of an improvement).

If they had arrested the suspects beforehand (and getting a conviction would probably be much harder) its probable that the smugglers would just have found a bunch of other drug mules that the AFP did not know about.

The Bali 9 may have been all they managed to get in the end, but from the AFP point of view they wanted more of the network than that. In terms of credit/publicity presumably the AFP would prefer to do the arrests in Australia themselves.

Can you please read the following points closely Chris?

1) There has been no suggestion anywhere, ever, by anyone that the AFP should have let the suspects complete their smuggling mission, take their cut and go free.

2) The information implicating the Bali 9 came initially from the family of one of the suspects in Australia. It was not an Indonesian investigation until the AFP decided to make it one.

3) The suspects could have been arrested in Australia before they left, or when they returned, and interrogated, charged etc under Australian law.