Here’s a report from Natalie O’Brien of News Limited that you might have missed:
HOLES have emerged in the evidence Australian intelligence agencies have relied on to paint former Guantanamo Bay detainee Mamdouh Habib as a national security threat.
Authorities have used phone calls made by a US terrorist to Mr Habib’s Sydney home in 1993 to bolster their case against him.
But The Australian has learned the terrorist could not have made the calls, which phone records reveal were made after he was arrested over the 1993 bomb attack on New York’s World Trade Centre.
The two calls – from a New Jersey phone number linked to the convicted terrorist Ibrahim El-Gabrowny – were made nearly three weeks after he had been arrested…
A spokeswoman for the federal Attorney-General Philip Ruddock said it would be inappropriate to comment on the evidence. “It is appropriate that the allegations concerning Mr Habib are tested in proper proceedings in the context of all relevant material,” she said.
Pity Phil didn’t think of that a few years ago.
You don’t bloody say! Anybody on the far left remotely familiar with the Habib case knew he’d been wrongly arrested, tortured, imprisoned et.,months and months and months before the recent expose on Four Corners. The guy is telling the truth; its just that the truth he’s telling is not one JWH wants us to hear.
The performance of Australian intelligence agencies in regards to counter terrorism is worrying. The politicization undermines public confidence as well as impedes the agencies ability to do what they need to do. Not what the pollies want them to do.
If there is a terrorist attack on Australian soil, it will come about not through not being “tough” on terror, nor restricting civil liberties. It will arise through deficiencies in the operations of the intelligence agencies.
Four quick points, Paul:
(1) You don’t need to be of the far left to be familiar with the Habib case.
(2) You don’t need to be of the far left to believe that he was wrongly imprisoned.
(3) Please don’t assume, because this is the first time you’ve read a post from me on this subject that I’ve only just heard about the case.
(4) Please get your spleen under control before you comment again.
The wilful incompetence really is stunning.
*facepalm*
Excuse my paranoid mindset (I blame the gummint! and the meejah!) but you could almost begin to wonder whether those involved in framing Habeeb and feeding info to Ruddock then go shop their wares at News Ltd. Hmmn???
There’s a healthy market in telling powerful people what they want to hear, as Chalabi and Curveball can attest. And lies are just as good as facts when it comes to selling newspapers.
Hi,
Gummo Trot,
I wasn’t being splenetic, but heavily ironic. My apologies if my comments seemed too heavy-handed. I agree with all the points you made and had no intention of being offensive.
It won’t happen again.
But I do remember the years when hardly anybody listened.
Oh bum! Whooshed again!
Gummo Trot,
If I was supposed to pick a fight for a bit of political fun, sorry I didn’t pick up on it. Will keep looking and see how we go. If you see other posts you’ll see I have more success with bottles of glue in paper bags.
Gummo,
I would echo you on 1 and 2 above – there are many of us on “the Right” who have been angry over the whole detention without trial thing for a long time. IMHO this is not a Left / Right thing but a freedom / oppression thing.
The whole lot has been a debacle that has merely provided oppressors the world over with an excuse to continue their oppression – and will for some time to come.
Interesting how readily the government ignores sub judice and freely makes highly prejudicial and politicaly self-serving comments on cases when they think it is going their way, but how they then invoke sub judice and legal propriety and say nothing when the evidence (or lack of it) starts turning against them.
Paul,
“whoosh” is the sound made by something that’s gone completely over my head. Like the sardonic tone of your first comment. No challenge intended in this one.
Gandhi
Give News Ltd a break – if you look at the link, it’s a News Ltd paper that broke the story. When was the last story that seriously embarrassed the government broken by a Fairfax paper? The newspaper may be edited by a nut but they have printed some stories that Howard did not like one little bit.
Credit where credit is due.
No! Dont go easy on anything Murdoch owns, whatever that paper exposes is bound to be in comparison to what it could report is very little.Murdoch and their employees have an agenda that significantly isnt about insuring injustices already done are duly compensated for…otherwise Murdoch would of been out of business years ago.They write spy manipulate and encourage and influence as a collective number of over-reaching arseholes.If that isnt a fair description,I maintain my right,perhaps not in law, to say that is the fact.Credit yourself in having the intelligence to judge character and events clearly in comparison to a major media organisation that toadies until it reaches what it wants.The Murdochs have made their money out of misrepresenting reality for a very long time,and if they werent around the Fairfaxes and others would have more guts.
zebbedies,
Is the “whoosh” contagious?
If you read my comment more closely, you will see that I fully realise that “it’s a News Ltd paper that broke the story.” That is, in fact, my point.
Credit where it’s due? Well, thanks to Rupert for nigh on ten years of Bush, Blair and Howard. Thanks for rampant corruption and a war that has killed a million Iraqis. Thanks for a bullshit “war” on an abstract fantasy enemy, concocted to keep the military-industrial coffers full.
That doesn’t mean Fairfax is better. Or Conrad Black. Or Arthur Sulzberger. Or any of the other Big Money Media Moguls who pimp the globalization ride. What it is is what it is, my friend.
Trust is easily lost, and hard to win back.
So should media ‘reform’ [not in the Coalition misuse of the word] be a major plank for social policy in Australia for the near future?
What needs to be done and how could it be managed?
Or are we to supinely tolerate the hijacking of ‘our’ [an apparently inappropriate word] media and right to be informed ['the truth, the whole truth and nothing but...etc'] so as to be able to make informed choices in ‘our’ own society?
Sure, there would be enormous difficulties facing up to the problems of confronting a powerful concentration of media ownership such as we have but there is also surely an enormous need, in the interests of democracy, to ensure radical changes occur.
Or the problem we now have will continue to stifle and direct the political and social agenda of our country.
Again, what needs to be done and how can it be done?
gandhi is right. The Murdoch empire deserves credit for setting the rabid right agenda that other media have to greater and lesser degrees followed.
This agenda is on full display in Sydney at the moment where the right to protest has morphed into the right to inflict violence on innocent police. Every media outlet, including the ABC begins any discussion of APEC with several untested assumptions, one of which is that all protesters are lunatic, probably violent fringe dwellers, who are at best misguided. Just because the facts don’t reflect this is irrelevent.
Unfortunately all major media outlets in Australia tend to hunt as a pack, with differences in style rather than substance. And the leader of the pack is undoubtedly Murdoch
adrian,
Having walked past what was probably the first of these “protests” in London years ago and seen what was happening the police are (IMHO) right to be cautious – even, to an extent, heavy-handed.
I walked past a large mob of spikies trashing a McDonalds, and the staff were trapped inside, terrified. As this was the first of these, the police response was low key, measured and totally overwhelmed. They do not want to make the same mistake twice.
I was not touched or even noticed while walking past, but, again IMHO, there can be no justification for this sort of thing – it is not protest, it is just violence.
There is, and must be, a right to protest. There is not, and must not be, a right to commit acts of violence. Peaceful protesters must be unambiguous in their renunciation of violence and this includes a firm commitment to give full co-operation and immediately hand over any perpetrators to the police.
Anything short of that makes the peaceful complicit in the violence.
It was not the Murdoch newspapers that was trashing the shops, adrian. The spikies did immeasurable harm to the cause they seemed to be trying to promote that day – the results you can see when you try to make a legitimate protest in Sydney.
Andrew, I’m not justifying violence obviously, just commenting on these untested assumptions that seem to inform the media narrative these days.
Of course some demonstrations turn violent for whatever reason, but the last demonstration I attended, against the Iraq war in Sydney was notably non-violent. This was one of the largest demonstrations held in Australia in recent years and is perhaps more relevant in framing the media narrative here in Australia than something that happened in London ‘years ago’.
Anyway, I think I was more having a go at the bland conformity of opinion that seems to infect most of the media these days. It’s an irony that in an age of such wide diversity of media sources, the mainstream product has become so homogenous.
adrian,
Demonstrations do not just turn violent for “whatever” reason – people do not just punch each other while thinking “whatever”.
The last APEC meeting had many violent demonstrations – most of them emerging from within peaceful crowds. It is not the ancient history you seem to be trying to portray it as.
I would agree the print and tv media are largely homogeneous. I would not add “become” as from my memory, it was always thus. The improvement over the lat several years has been the online world. Anything less homogeneous than Crikey, LP, Catallaxy and Troppo (and Tim Blair for that matter) would be hard to imagine.
But Gummo, unfortunately it would it appear you doneed to be on the far left to have an understanding of the role the War on Terror plays in legitimising and maintaining both US imperialism and the sub-imperialism of its Australian ally, not to mention its links to domestic repression e.g the ABCC, the demonising of Muslims and machinations of capitalism more generally.
(sigh) If only were not so!
(double sigh) If only it were not so!
Andrew, you are being overly pedantic, or deliberately misinterpreting what I am saying. What I meant by ‘whatever reason’, is a range of reasons, and not always the fault of the demonstrators.
And I don’t think it the media was always as bland as it is now. I am old enough to remember the National Times and an ABC that was not afraid to be controversial. Not to mention an SBS that was SBS!
Not always, but in the UK and here at least I would need a lot of persuading that the police would initiate violence.
Maybe you are older than me, but I always remember an ABC that at least in part bent to the wind – a little bit worried about the hand that fed it. SBS was better, but not watched by many at all.
Natalie OBrien (now of SMH) appears to be a stayer..good on her.
http://www.smh.com.au/national/howard-aides-linked-to-habib-rendition-20111015-1lq8a.html
Apols if everybody already knows about this recent report…