Political Corrections

with Mungo MacCallum

Ignorance is bliss

If Australia's intelligence chiefs and their political masters ever appeared on The Einstein Factor, their special subject would have to be ignorance.

Not the everyday, earnest, I'm-really-trying-but-I'm-not-very-bright type of ignorance, but a more studied, insouciant kind; the sort that says that I could probably find out if I really wanted to, but there are some things it's better not to know.

A fairly obvious example cropped up in the Senate committees last week, when expert after expert (up to and including Defence Minister Robert Hill) was asked if he could inform the public of the extent of Iraqi civilian casualties in the year or so since George Bush pronounced "Mission Accomplished." Well, no, they couldn't. Well, what about Iraqi military casualties? Sorry, no joy there either.

Did the Americans have any idea? Gosh, we don't know. Had anyone bothered to ask? Well, not in so many words, because we were pretty sure no one had bothered to keep count. But we knew how many Americans have been killed...

Unedifying and even racist. But nothing to the deliberate obfuscation which surrounds the case of Mamdouh Habib, an obfuscation that transcends mere neglect to become conscious malevolence.

Habib claims he was kidnapped in Afghanistan towards the end of 2001; oh no he wasn't, proclaim the heads of ASIO and the Australian police in triumphant unison, we know all about that. He was training with an Al Qaeda offshoot, and at a pretty high level; he was actually in the loop around September 11. We had him on a string.

But then, Habib comes across the border into Pakistan, where he is picked up by the local cops, and for all intents and purposes disappears for six months. Canberra asks for routine consular access to its citizen held without charge, and when this is denied, shrugs its shoulders, more, apparently, with relief than frustration; no news is good news.

Habib is then handed over to the Americans who whisk him away to Egypt; at least ASIO thinks this is the case. There is only one possible reason for this to happen, which is to have the Australian interrogated under torture, illegal in Australia or even in America. The Australian authorities ask the Egyptians if they have seen anything of Habib; the Egyptians neither confirm nor deny. Again, Canberra shrugs; ignorance is bliss.

Even after ASIO establishes that Habib is definitely in an Egyptian gaol, Canberra does nothing, saying that nothing really can be done unless the Egyptians admit they have him. ASIO says on the basis of absolutely no evidence, that it thinks Habib is being well treated.

A few months later he turns up in Guantanamo Bay along with fellow Australian David Hicks; as is well documented, no Australian authority could care less. While other countries, notably the United Kingdom, worry and protest about what is happening to their nationals, Australia is happy to give the Americans carte blanche; keep them as long as you like, charge them or not as you feel inclined, try them if you want to and by whatever means seem like a good idea at the time.

Don't call us and we won't call you. And incidentally, if you could hold a little inquiry every so often just to reassure us that everything in Camp X Ray is lovely, that would help on the home front.

This happy state of wilful blindness could have continued forever, except that the American Supreme Court decided that the well-constructed legal limbo in Cuba was in fact unconstitutional; at which point Washington, appalled at the prospect of prisoners like Habib and Hicks appearing in open court, changed tactics. Hicks, already charged, was a problem, but Habib, with charges only pending, could be flicked home without hesitation; which, to Australian consternation, he was.

But did our government and our spooks want to know why? Did they ask what caused the great back flip, how Habib, in spite of all the innuendo, the carefully leaked stories, the oft-stated assumption of guilt, was being returned a free man? No bloody fear they didn't. To know the truth, especially about such inconvenient matters as torture or forcible interrogations (in which Australian interviewers never, ever take part) might mean having to do something about it.

Better by far that the ignorance remains, as the church has it, invincible. As always, we know nothing and care less.

On the same theme, Immigration Minister Amanda Vanstone has once again rewritten legal principle. The great English jurist William Blackstone gave us the dictum: "It is better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer." Vanstone, on the other hand, believes in locking up suspects on sight in the hope that the dragnet might coincidentally yield a few offenders.

In the wake of the Cornelia Rau case it has come out that departmental goon squads routinely arrest and incarcerate waiters, fruit pickers, itinerants and anyone else with a foreign accent and take a few days to sift the illegal immigrants from the rest, who meanwhile spend a chunk of their holiday in the slammer. At least they get a chance to experience the real Australia of the 21st century.

I have decided that the state of the nation's politics is now so dire, so grim and so barren that the only appropriate response is frozen silence. I am therefore going to spend the next few weeks in Antarctica contemplating the advantages of a continent without governments.

I shall return in time for the Easter Bunny to deliver his chocolate eggs. Well, it's no more improbable than John Howard delivering his election promises.