Latest News ...

In their sights

Tuesday Nov 8 2005

The sceptics have targeted the PM, but overnight raids reveal the home-grown terror threat is all too real. Paul Daley reports.

The conspiracy goes like this: John Howard, inexplicably eager to shift the focus from what is arguably the legislative highlight of his life’s political work, the new workplace laws, looks for a diversion. And so, clutching at straws, he asks for the latest intelligence on what sections of the press - thanks to all those sanctioned leaks from ASIO - have been warning us for some time is the dire home-grown jihadi terror threat.

Lo and behold, the response from ASIO (which just happens to be headed by Paul O’Sullivan whose last job just happens to have been as an adviser to the prime minister) and the Australian Federal Police, is red hot. The intelligence, in Howard’s words, is “specific” and indicates a “potential terrorist threat” on Australian soil.

On Melbourne Cup night, with much of the nation sozzled or agog over an animal called Makybe Diva, he lets Kim Beazley in on the secret. He also invites state Labor premiers - though not their territory counterparts - into the tent.

The next day, soon after Australia wakes with a Force 10 hangover to greet the parliamentary introduction of the contentious workplace legislation, Howard and Attorney-General Philip Ruddock - who continually warns us of the likelihood of a terrorist attack here - make the foreboding announcement that we are, indeed, under imminent threat. Beazley’s Labor, Howard announces, will support an amendment to the Criminal Code that will make it easier to arrest those responsible.

Forget industrial relations. Forget the talk of an imminent ministerial reshuffle. Forget the latest News poll, which shows Howard enjoys his lowest approval rating for four years - a sign that his nine year-old government is losing focus. And forget the mounting speculation that Howard is preparing to hand over the reins of government to his deputy, Peter Costello, early next year. The political landscape will be dominated by terrorism, an issue that foments public emotion with a potency unlike any except, perhaps, an imminent pandemic or paedophiles next-door to the pre-school. It’s a conspiracy all right. Howard heads it, and Beazley and the state Labor leaders, as well as the state police chiefs, are all part of it. O’Sullivan is, of course, critical. So, too, is the nation’s plain-speaking top cop, Mick Keelty. Never mind that Keelty is said to have little time for this government after they burned him for saying Iraq had made Australia a bigger target. Never mind. It’s a conspiracy.

Black helicopters are likely to be involved. Do you know the true purpose of bar-coding? It would pay to check, if you haven’t recently, if a microchip has been implanted ...

The conspiracy is, of course, nonsense. That it has gained even limited currency, albeit mostly on the margins of the left, stems from the tinderbox climate of fear in the community about the likelihood of the terror attack for which the federal government has primed us.

The atmospherics post-9/11 and especially since the invasion of Iraq, have dramatically polarised Australia’s political debate on terrorism. Just as it was legitimate to oppose the war, it seems no less reasonable today to question the government’s proposed draconian terror laws on civil liberties - or other - grounds. But the government, thanks to its national security attack dogs in federal cabinet and growing cheer squad of right-wing commentators, has successfully cast even the most moderate digressers from the status quo as much more than mere dissenters. The none-too-subliminal message is that at best they’re appeasers, at worst subversives. You’re for us or you’re against us.

As Labor’s Senate leader Chris Evans told the upper house last week: “It is despicable that senior members of the government sought to characterise calls for proper scrutiny of legislation as reflecting that members of non-government parties were soft on terrorism.”

Beazley and most of his subordinates - “tough on terror”, tough on the causes of terror - are at pains, meanwhile, to parade their masculinity. For weakness, as the Tampa showed, is political death. The unedifying result is a public discourse more closely resembling a law and order shit-fight in a Northern Territory by-election than a sophisticated national security debate.

Two notable intelligence failures - the first which led the government to claim asylum-seekers had thrown their children overboard, the second which led the coalition of the willing to invade Iraq on a false premise - give the sceptics pause. Today Howard is urging us to “trust me” on the latest intelligence, even though he won’t say precisely who is planning what. It’s a measure curiously at odds with that employed recently in the US, from which Australia so often takes its security lead, where New York mayor Michael Bloomberg warned citizens that intelligence indicated a terror attack could occur on the subway.

It seems a pity, at least politically, for Howard that he can’t - or won’t - tell us, especially as so much detail about the terror threat has since been accurately reported at who knows what cost to operational security.

“The problem remains,” says a leading Liberal Party moderate, “that although there might be a demonstrable need for these new terror laws, Howard et al have not demonstrated the need.”

For the truth is indeed compelling, frightening, and mitigates strongly in favour of tough legislation such as that proposed, to allow security services to arrest, without charge, and hold for up to 14 days (against the current 48 hours) those planning a terrorist act. The proviso should of course be the inclusion of sufficient legal safeguards to ensure that those detained are being held on grounds of reasonable suspicion, and have access to lawyers and their families.

A series of trials relating to the first bombing of New York’s World Trade Center in 1993, and other planned mass killings by Muslim extremists, led the FBI to contact Australian authorities and ask: did you know the Trade Center bombers had been in constant contact with friends and colleagues in NSW?

ASIO began watching the recipients of these calls and their associates, one of whom was Mamdouh Habib, who was later arrested in Pakistan on suspicion of terrorism, handed to the American authorities, incarcerated in Guantanamo Bay and returned to Australia (where he remains, without access to his passport) last January.

“September 11 was the big wake-up,” a security source told The Bulletin. “There were many others like [Habib] who’d been overseas and in contact with groups that weren’t [proscribed] then, but are now ... the penny dropped if you like and they were watched, some arrested and charged, some left alone and watched and watched and watched.

“Basically, you’re at a point now where most of what they are doing we know about - [through] surveillance and intercepts - and some have been dragged off the streets and interviewed. But for the most part ASIO has no one inside the groups.”

A detailed surveillance operation prompted police and ASIO officers to raid homes in Melbourne and Sydney last June.

Security sources maintain that while there was insufficient evidence to charge suspects with terrorism offences at the time, the raids led security analysts to the firm view that Australian-born radicals could be planning to bomb the Melbourne Stock Exchange.

Another major planned target was Flinders Street Station. Other targets include the Sydney Harbour Bridge, the Opera House and possibly the cross-Sydney tunnel.

The security source maintains that while ASIO and the AFP have compiled a list of 200 to 300 names of “people of interest” in Australia across most states and territories, perhaps only two or three dozen are considered to be potentially dangerous. They include people who have been charged with terrorist offences and bailed, some of whom have visited al Qaeda training camps overseas and others still who are devotees of some of Australia’s most notable radical clerics. Some of the clerics themselves are included.

There has, however, been disquiet inside the major security agencies in recent weeks over what some insiders fear could be politically motivated media leaks which have distorted the extent of Australia’s home-grown terror threat. There are strong suggestions that some of this material has been leaked to enhance the perceived threat of homeland terrorism to bolster community support for the new terror laws.

But perhaps such concerns are misdirected.

There can be little doubt that Howard and some of his senior ministers had been aware for some time - due to the ongoing surveillance operation involving ASIO and the AFP - that arrests were imminent. Last week some of the police chiefs had made it clear that it would be easier to arrest and prosecute suspects if the Criminal Code was amended to allow for arrest for “a” planned, rather than “the” planned, terror attack.

The latest "specific"’ intelligence, which highlighted to Howard the possibility of a "potential terrorist threat", underscored the urgency for the legislative change. Howard, surely aware that the security operation was coming to a head, could not have reasonably refused to make the changes. Similarly, Kim Beazley could not have reasonably opposed the changes.

The raids across Sydney and Melbourne on Tuesday morning which ended in the arrests, were the culmination of a 16-month investigation by the security services and were, indeed, made possible by the amended Criminal Code. Most of those arrested are Australian-born and some are linked to proscribed terrorist groups. At least one Islamic cleric is among those arrested.

After the arrests NSW Premier Maurice Iemma said some those arrested had been stockpiling chemicals for use in a terrorist attack.

The newly amended Criminal Code is likely to prove critical to the prosecutions. It remains to be seen if a raft of other anti-terrorist legislation, which the government is still negotiating with the state premiers, the Federal Opposition and its own back bench, will receive parliamentary passage without significant amendment.

The pending court process will determine if Australia is safer for the arrests.

All the while it’s still worth bearing in mind that Australia’s home-grown terrorists are small in number.

But as demonstrated by the atrocities of 9/11, Bali, Madrid, Jakarta and London, it takes but a few people to kill and maim a great many.