Political Corrections

with Mungo MacCallum

Not a shredder of evidence

Remember Saddam Hussein's people shredder? I'll bet John Howard hopes you don't.

This improbable device featured in one of the pre-war speeches in which our statesmanlike Prime Minister was trying to whip up a bit of mass hysteria about the Iraqi dictator to compensate for the obvious fact that, weapons of mass destruction or not, he posed no conceivable threat to Australia.

The claim was that a gloating Saddam fed his enemies into the fiendish machine - a kind of giant paper shredder - while his family and friends looked on and applauded. Needless to say no trace of this gadget or anything remotely like it has been found, nor has there been a lot of reference to it in the aftermath of our Man of Steel's triumph.

Nonetheless, it would be interesting to learn what evidence (if any) Howard had for its existence, and who supplied it. One of the few things that has become clear about the murky intelligence process over the past few weeks is that somewhere in the chain it became hopelessly corrupted by the perceived wishes of the politicians. Anything that made good war propaganda, however unlikely, made it through to the prime minister's speeches; anything that cast doubt on the exercise, however well-founded, was dropped out somewhere along the way.

The only question is whether the filtering was done at the bureaucrat level or in Howard's own office - by his staff or by himself. Those with a background in intelligence discount the former possibility, although perhaps they shouldn't; as the children overboard affair showed all too clearly, telling Howard and his ministers only what they want to hear guarantees not only survival but promotion in the right circumstances.

However, the same example proves even more conclusively that political staff, unaccountable to parliament or the public, know no limits to the deceit they will engage in to protect their ministers - and their jobs. And of course Howard himself is not obsessively committed to the truth either. All parties had a mutual interest in the lies of commission and omission that took us to war.

But in the end it probably doesn't matter very much. Howard has said proudly that even if he had known the truth, it would have made no difference at all to "his" decision - an admission, incidentally, that it was all his own work and cabinet had nothing to do with it. And of course he's right; his decision was made at the behest of George W Bush, and everything else was window dressing. And if a few extra lies were involved, who cares? Certainly not the Australian public.

Two of the biggest lies Howard has told recently are that the Americans' "enemy combatant" David Hicks has admitted being trained by Al Qaeda, and that the Americans will give him a fair trial - the first, reversing the presumption of innocence, goes a fair way towards disproving the second.

Not that there was any need to do so; by making it clear that they will not subject any of their own nationals to the process - the American public, more possessive of its rights than the Australians, would simply not stand for it - Bush and his star chamber have signalled that the "military commission" is designed specifically to bypass the normal justice system.

Attempts have been made to justify the commission by appealing to the Nuremberg trials as a precedent but the appeal is spurious. The defendants at Nuremberg were subject to an international tribunal and charged with crimes against humanity; Hicks and his fellow detainees are to be judged by the American military for alleged crimes against America, with the president - yes, that president, the one responsible for more executions than any other state governor in modern times - having the final say on their guilt and their sentence. And the conditions under which they have been held are very different; Hermann Goering and his associates did not spend a year and a half caged in camp zero, with the prospect of more of the same even if they had been exonerated.

It has been suggested that Hicks should plead guilty to some, unspecified, charge in order to avoid the risk of the death penalty; this is sheer blackmail. And with Howard already assuming his guilt and broadcasting a false report of it to the world, the signal that the Australian government is giving Bush permission to do his homicidal worst could hardly be clearer.

Lukewarm pressure from his own ranks will probably persuade Howard to make a token protest against capital punishment, but you can bet he will give Bush a wink and a nudge while he's doing it. As far as our prime minister is concerned, David Hicks ceased to be an Australian when he became anti-American. A firing squad is probably too good for him.