Thursday 28th of November 2024
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feral police .....

feral police .....

There they go again, our very own Keystone Kops. The Australian Federal Police have bungled yet another ''anti-terrorist'' investigation. The fiasco finally came crashing down around their ears in the Victorian Supreme Court on Wednesday. To cut a long story very short, three prominent members of the Australian ethnic Tamil community - all Australian citizens - had been charged with acts of terrorism in support of the Tamil Tiger rebellion in Sri Lanka.

Over five years, the evidence against them gradually fell to pieces, and the more serious charges along with it. The operation was a mess. It sank to grim farce when one of the suspects, Arumugan Rajeevan of Sydney, was unlawfully dragged from his car at gunpoint by ''federal agents'', as they grandly style themselves these days, presumably in mimicry of the FBI. Rajeevan was clapped into handcuffs, denied a lawyer and questioned for five hours. When it gradually dawned on the plods that the evidence against him would not stick, they decided to ''unarrest'' him, a concept hitherto unknown to the law, as the Victorian judge, Paul Coghlan, pointed out with some asperity.

''The notion of unarresting people is something that I've struck here for the first time,'' he said. ''The notion that somebody can be arrested unlawfully and then just unarrested at somebody else's whim is bizarre.''

Justice Coghlan found that some AFP officers had been ''frighteningly high-handed''. They had abused Rajeevan's rights, and his interrogation by one officer, Patricia Reynolds, had been ''beyond any training a proper investigator can have''. The three pleaded guilty to a minor charge of sending money to a terrorist organisation, and each was released on a good behaviour bond of $1000. Figures given to Parliament last year show the AFP had spent well over $5 million on the pursuit.

The trouble is that when you give the police and the security services extraordinary and secret powers, as governments have done, it is London to a brick those powers will be abused. We saw that in the affair of Mohamed Haneef, the Indian doctor stitched up by the AFP and the Howard government as an Islamic terrorist. And I wonder, too, if we are seeing it in the matter of an Iranian-born Islamic cleric in Sydney, Mansour Leghaei, who faces deportation after ASIO branded him a risk to national security.

http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/they-stumble-and-bumble-as-they-walk-a-thin-blue-line-20100402-rjsq.html

same old, same old .....

Officers from the Australian Federal Police allegedly stole and concealed documents that could have helped a former pilot and businessman fight allegations he had raped a 14-year-old girl in PNG.

Fred Martens, a millionaire working in Papua New Guinea, served more than 2½ years in prison after being convicted under Australian child sex tourism laws. But after his family found some of the missing documents he earned a rare second appeal in November 2009 and had his conviction quashed.

In two multimillion-dollar compensation claims Mr Martens, 62, is now suing the Australian and PNG governments, and members of the AFP and PNG police, over their alleged misconduct. The claims allege his false prosecution led to the failure of his businesses and the loss of PNG assets - including 11 boats, six planes and dozens of construction and earth-moving vehicles.

This is the latest in a series of embarrassing cases involving the AFP, which last month settled a claim with the Indian doctor Mohamed Haneef. Former Guantanamo detainee Mamdouh Habib has also received compensation from the federal government, while actor Paul Hogan is considering suing the government over its failed prosecution of him on tax matters.

AFP allegedly stole and concealed documents

coming home to roost .....

Australian citizen Mamdouh Habib was captured and tortured in the years after September 11 in both Egypt and Guantanamo Bay.

For years, "war on terror" supporters defamed Habib and claimed he was lying about his allegations of mistreatment. However last year in just one case against the Australian Murdoch press, he won a small victory:

The courts have delivered another win to former Guantanamo Bay inmate Mamdouh Habib, declaring that he was defamed by News Ltd columnist Piers Akerman, paving the way for a hefty payout.

The New South Wales Court of Appeal overturned a 2008 judgment in favour of Mr Akerman's publisher Nationwide News and yesterday ordered them to pay Mr Habib's legal costs in the five-year-old battle.

It was the second win for Mr Habib in a month after the full court of the Federal Court upheld an appeal in his mammoth compensation case against the federal government for allegedly aiding and abetting his torture by foreign agents. 

secret police .....

Damning evidence from an Egyptian intelligence officer that names an Australian official who witnessed the torture of Sydney man Mamdouh Habib in Guantanamo Bay has been revealed as the trigger for a hushed-up government payout to Mr Habib and a high-level investigation.

The explosive 840-word statement, released exclusively to The Sun-Herald, was shown to government solicitors three days before they suddenly paid Mr Habib an undisclosed amount to drop his lawsuit claiming Australia was complicit in his CIA-engineered kidnap in 2001, transfer to Egypt and subsequent torture.

In his statement, which is yet to be tested in court, the intelligence officer says Egyptian guards routinely filmed terrorism suspects in their jails. He says there is footage and photographs of Mr Habib and an Arabic-speaking Australian called George who witnessed his degradation.

Mamdouh Habib tortured

old rattus droppings .....

A former judge, lawyers, academics, politicians and intelligence officers have joined mounting calls for a public inquiry into charges that the Australian government and its agencies were complicit in the seizure of Mamdouh Habib and his torture in Egypt.

A federal government consultant on human rights, Father Frank Brennan, warned: "This saga has been too murky to be left just to public servants reporting behind closed doors to politicians.

"The Australian public still has an interest in getting to the truth about any Australian presence, witness or involvement in the rendition and torture of Mr Habib in Egypt.

"Though the Prime Minister has now commissioned a report, that might not be enough. Only a royal commission headed by a judicial figure would have the power to compel witnesses, while striking the right balance between confidentiality on security grounds and public transparency."

Calls for answers on Habib's torture

shine the light .....

Top-secret files detailing the interrogations of more than 700 suspects at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp, including files on Australians David Hicks and Mamdouh Habib, have been obtained by the whistle-blowing website WikiLeaks.

The London Daily Telegraph claims to have been shown thousands of pages of sensitive documents relating to a decade of interviews in which extremists admit to plotting attacks.

According to the files, which were penned by officials at the controversial base, al-Qaeda terrorists have threatened to unleash a "nuclear hellstorm" if Osama bin Laden is caught or killed.

The documents detail the background to the capture of each of the 780 people who have passed through the facility, along with their medical condition and the information they have provided during interrogations.

Mr Habib's file says: "There are serious intelligence gaps regarding this detainee," and says interrogators had not worked out how his extensive travel had been funded. Nor did they establish how many times he had entered Afghanistan, Egypt and the US.

"Until this detainee is fully exploited and a detailed timeline for his international travels is established, he should be considered a high risk and of high intelligence value."

WikiLeaks reveal secret files on David Hicks and Mamdouh Habib