Law commentator and former head of the National Crime Authority Peter Faris QC has told ABC 2 News Breakfast there is no doubt his decision to step down is linked to the case.

“Absolutely. I think he’s just waited for a reasonable time after the [Haneef] inquiry before resigning.”

“My analysis of it was that he was the prime mover in it all and it went terribly terribly wrong as we all know and he should have accepted responsibility and resigned and he didn’t.”

Aside from the Haneef affair, Keelty’s time at the AFP has another very serious stain through the case of the Bali Nine. Furthermore, as noted in this post on a 4 corners story on Keelty’s tenure, there’s some evidence to suggest that Keelty’s AFP became far too focussed on terrorism at the expense of less exciting, but far more common crimes. Not to mention his very strange ideas about freedom of speech – him leaking to the press is fine, bloggers expressing our views not so great.

Good riddance.

But one of the most interesting bits of the whole program was on another issue entirely; there are indications that the refocusing of the AFP on national security issues has led to its ignoring other less glamorous but equally important issues. From the transcript:

JOHN BROOME, FORMER CHAIR NATIONAL CRIME AUTHORITY: The question I ask is whether we’ve done this at the expense of the AFP’s core budget, whether they’ve taken their eyes off major issues such as drug trafficking, financial crime, issues such as child sex tourism, these kinds of issues which the AFP saw as its main work four or five years ago and which apparently now is not its core business.

SALLY NEIGHBOUR: Former chairman of the National Crime Authority, John Broome, says the shift is reflected in a dramatic drop in the number of criminals charged by the AFP. Cases sent to the DPP for prosecution have fallen by half, from more than a thousand to around 500 a year.

Now there are any number of factors that might potentially explain such a change – perhaps marginal cases were previously reaching the DPP which were not being successfully prosecuted (though the AFP didn’t seem too worried about sending marginal cases to trial with Haneef), a decision to concentrate on fewer, but more serious charges, or a reallocation of responsibilities that saw other law enforcement agencies doing the charging where previously the AFP would have acted. But, concerning as the Haneef case was, such a statistic might well indicate much more systemic problems with the day-to-day responsibilities of the force. Part of the reason might be a problem with the AFP’s structure. The program, and the 4 Corners message board (which also includes a number of amusing comments from AFP officers expecting investigative reporting to be a cheer squad), and some information I’ve heard on my own, suggest that a significant fraction of AFP officers don’t have enough experience in the basics of running a criminal investigation.

According to 4 Corners, the federal government has been quietly looking for a replacement for Keelty for some months now. It sounds like his successor might have some work to do focusing the organization back on its core jobs.

Hang on, what trials? The only connection Dr Haneef had with the UK was that he gave his SIM Card to his cousin Sabeel Ahmed when he was about to leave the UK in 2006 to return to India. Sabeel’s brother Kafeel was involved in unsuccessful terror attacks in London and Glasgow in June last year, driving a Jeep Cherokee into the doors of Glasgow airport and setting himself alight. Kafeel later died from burns to 90% of his body, and Sabeel was charged and sentenced to 18 months imprisonment in April this year for refusing to disclose information about the Glasgow attack and another failed attack in London, and a month later deported to India.

The only ongoing trials from the attempted terror attacks are those of Bilal Abdullah and Mohammed Asha, who are charged with conspiracy to murder. Abdullah was arrested in the immediate aftermath of the Glasgow attack, reportedly jumping out of the burning Jeep to attack a police officer. Asha was arrested at a roadblock some time later. Both are scheduled for trial in October this year.

Now, I’m no lawyer, but it’s plausible that the AFP submission to the Clarke inquiry contains material that could potentially upset a judge hearing the cases against Abdullah and Asha were it to appear spread across the Daily Mail. But that assumes it would indeed be spread across the Daily Mail. Couldn’t the relevant judge in the UK order the suppression of the material coming out of the Clarke inquiry in the British media?

Furthermore, I still struggle to see why the material relating to the above cases is so closely interwined with the AFP’s submission to the Clarke Inquiry that not only can the AFP not release the entirety of the submission, it can’t even release an unclassified version with the potentially prejudicial bits blanked out. Maybe I’m missing something important, but it just reeks of political convenience. The connection would want to be pretty compelling if Keelty doesn’t want to, at some future time when it all comes out, look like a self-serving tool who abused secrecy to temporarily protect his, and his organization’s, own backside.

ASIO’s consistent advice to these meetings was that, based on available information, ASIO did not assess Dr Haneef as a threat to security and did not have grounds to issue an adverse security assessment. However, in the early days of the investigation, ASIO nevertheless considered that further investigation of Dr Haneef was warranted.

So even ASIO – who presumably had everything the AFP did – didn’t think Haneef was a threat. Given that, the hypothesis that the AFP has further damning, but classified, information on Haneef that justified the continued detention is looking extremely shaky.

But the most controversy, so far, has arisen due to the AFP’s refusal to release its submission to the inquiry – or even parts of it – publicly.

The purported reason why the AFP’s submission cannot be released relates to documents provided by the British police and prosecutors. As Justice Clarke puts it in a statement of a few days ago:

Some time after the Inquiry had embarked on its investigation we were apprised of serious objections which had been raised by the Metropolitan Police Service and Crown Prosecution Service of the United Kingdom. They objected to a significant proportion of the documents held by the Australian Federal Police, containing United Kingdom sourced and derived material, being provided to the Inquiry except under severely restricted conditions…It is clear that, without the agreement of the Metropolitan Police Service, publication of those Australian Federal Police documents that the Inquiry has been given would seriously damage the international relationship between the two countries.

Fair enough. But, as already noted, even ASIO was able to provide a public, unclassified submission to the inquiry, which may have been brief but still contains very useful (and rather damning to the AFP, by the looks) information. While those parts of the submission relating to the British information may genuinely need to remain secret, there seems no reason why the AFP can’t make the rest public. Robert McLelland seems to think so, and he’s publicly calling for the AFP to do so. However, the AFP is apparently refusing.

But hang on a minute. Who is this McLelland character again? That’s right, he’s the Federal Attorney-General. In other words, the Cabinet Minister responsible for the AFP (though it reports directly to junior minister Bob Debus). Mick Keelty works for him. And if McLelland thinks that Keelty, as head of the AFP, is failing to live up to its accountability duties by not issuing an unclassified submission to the Clarke Inquiry, he can do something about it.

Robert McLelland, you’re not in opposition any more. If Keelty’s not doing his job to your satisfaction, you can sack him. The power is yours, and if you’ve lost confidence in Keelty, it’s your duty to use it.