Will "Better To Be Safe Than Sorry" Be The Liberals Election Campaign Mantra?

The only line about the Dr Mohamed Haneef fiasco dumber than John Howard's "better to be safe than sorry" dismisser, was Alexander Downer's pathetically sooky "Get real" whine.

But was Howard actually giving the Liberals federal election campaign slogan a bit of an early airing?

Howard claimed that when it comes to terror, "It's better to be safe than sorry". A line that, if it actually held water, could be used for virtually any injustice, false detention or personal smear campaign by the Howard government that had even the barest of linkages to the 'War on Terror' or national security. It's a disturbing precedent.

Some Muslim bloke gets shot dead for wearing a backpack that looks a bit suspicious?

Better to be safe than sorry.

An innocent man gets detained and held without charge for a few weeks or a few months, or in the case of David Hicks, a few years?

Better to be safe than sorry.

Billions of taxpayers' money pulled out of education and health and re-directed to unjustified foreign wars and completely invasive homeland security?

Better to be safe than sorry.


Michelle Grattan lays out the facts of John Howard's involvement in the Dr Haneef fiasco, under a headline that asks if the 'War on Terror' really does mean that anything goes now :

By yesterday, however, Howard was circling the wagons, as was Alexander Downer, who bluntly told sceptics to "get real". Howard said there'd be no apology, and mistakes happen.

The message is, if you are dealing with allegations to do with terrorism, forget highfalutin notions of accountability.

Here's the embarrassing Alexander Downer sookfest quotes in full, after being asked if Dr Haneef was owed an apology from the Australian Federal Police or ministers in the Howard government :

A request for an apology seemed to offend Foreign Minister Alexander Downer.

"What do you expect them to do, fall on the ground and grovel - eat dirt - I mean, get real. This is a quite common situation," he said.

Mr Downer shrugged off the critics of the bungled case as political operatives with an axe to grind.

"[It is] an attempt here by Howard-haters to try to paint the Government as having conducted the investigations unsuccessfully and this was all some political stunt - I think that's pretty reprehensible," he said.

What's wrong with Downer? Is he mentally or emotionally unstable? Why does he get so easily wound up and unfurl such patently ridiculous answers to simple questions from reporters? It's clear Downer is losing it. He should be drip-fed valium during the APEC summit in September so he doesn't embarrass himself, and the country, in front of world leaders.

The only thing more laughable than Downer's whining is his government's repeated use of the Andrew Bolt line that anybody who dares to question the motives of the prime minister is automatically a "Howard hater".

That Downer has been reduced to viewing any criticism or finding of faults in the actions of the Howard government as being part of some broad conspiracy, or proof of hatred, is another sign of the crippling paranoia infecting the government right now. They are beset with The Fear, and it shows every time someone like Downer has a hissy-fit.

What Downer is actually saying when he calls millions of Australians "Howard Haters" is that he thinks the government should not be held to account, and should not have to tolerate genuine, and well deserved, criticism.

Absolutely pathetic.

The Howard government could try and cling to its hold on power with a $100 million advertising blitz in the weeks before election day ringing out its "Vote Liberal. Better To Be Safe Than Sorry" message.

But the polls clearly show, in the huge numbers of former Howard voters now backing Rudd, that plenty of Australians are already sorry about the choice they made back in 2004.

It's unlikely Howard can say, or do, much now to win them back.

And trying to fear up the electorate, when more than half already clearly trust Kevin Rudd, is not going to work.

If Howard & Friends go for The Fear this time, it will show just how far out of touch they really are with the Australian people.

Dr Haneef Back Home In India

Keelty : The Brits Blew It

Claim : $200,000 For Haneef's First Interview

UPDATE : Contrary to earlier reports, presumably leaked by the police involved, and that we based the last lines in the below story on, Dr Haneef said in his first public statement that he was victimised by the authorities during his time in their custody.


Dr Mohamed Haneef has arrived back in India after three weeks in Australian custody, leaving behind a storm of controversy assaulting the Howard government and the Australian Federal Police.

Howard sent Tony "The Cleaner" Abbott and Malcolm "Mr Nice Guy" Turnbull onto Sunday morning talk shows to try and undo some of the political damage the Haneef fiasco has caused. Abbott and Turnbull's main line of parry and defence was to claim the Rudd opposition supported the government over what happened to Dr Haneef. Disingenuous at best.

Australian Federal Police Commissioner, Mick Keelty, is pushing the main blame for the Haneef fiasco back onto the British authorities, who he claims first told them that a SIM card once owned by Dr Haneef was found in the burning vehicle that crashed into glass doors at an airport in Scotland earlier this month. It was later revealed the SIM card was found hundreds of miles away.

Stories this morning claim that Dr Haneef was paid between $100,000 and $200,000 for an exclusive interview with the 60 Minutes television program.

The interview was said to have been conducted in the hours at the airport before Dr Haneef boarded the plane that took him back home, and back to his family.

Here's the Mick Keelty 'Blames The Brits' story from the Sydney Morning Herald:

Mr Keelty said British police initially told AFP investigators that Dr Haneef's mobile phone SIM card had been found inside a Jeep allegedly used by his second cousin, Kafeel Ahmed, in a failed car bombing in Glasgow on June30.

Instead, the SIM card had been found in the home of Kafeel's brother, Sabeel, in Liverpool...

But Mr Keelty said: "Whatever else you may think of Haneef, the fact remains his SIM card was found in the possession of the person labelled as a [suspect]" in the failed Glasgow attack.

Mr Keelty said the case had been "poorly handled by some sections of the media".

"There is a lot of confusion at the beginning of any complex investigation...errors in the investigation came to us from the UK...we're all under time pressures," he said.

On (Immigration Minister Kevin) Andrews's intervention in the case, Mr Keelty said: "You can't blame Andrews. He acted on our information."

A report here claims that one of the conditions of Dr Haneef's immediate release from 'home detention' yesterday was that he would not give a media conference at the airport before flying back to India :

Immigration authorities had also made it a condition of Dr Haneef's return to India that he did not speak to the media or allow his picture to be taken.

Mr Russo said he had tried to organise for Dr Haneef to speak to the media before his departure but was not able to.

Mr Russo said Dr Haneef could speak about his ordeal once he left Australia but he would rather he did not speak publicly before his visa appeal on August 8.

Mr Russo said Dr Haneef's legal team was disappointed that he was prevented from publicly thanking Australians who supported him during his detention.

"This has been a severely traumatic time for him, made worse by the fact that his wife has just had their first child, a baby Dr Haneef has not even seen yet. His mother is also ill and he wants to be there with her."

Dr Haneef's wife is obviously very happy that she is getting her husband back, after three weeks of intense pressure and damaging media speculation.

The Indian Government wants Australia to restore Dr Haneef's visa, but Immigration Minister Kevin Andrews says, for now, that is not going to happen.

This editorial from Arab News is a good example of the slamming tone much international media, particularly in Arab and Muslim states, and across India, are now taking on "the appalling treatment metted out to the doctor."

Dr Haneef is widely portrayed as a victim of a vindictive and racist Australian government, who went after Dr Haneef for being a Muslim first and above all, with his family connection to a British terror suspect as merely a grounds for suspicion.

The line taken by Howard government ministers that this fiasco has not damaged Australia's international reputation, or the credibility of its fight against terror, is laughable.

If there is any good news from this fiasco, it is that Dr Haneef appears to have been sympathetic to the police during their interrogations of him, understanding the pressure they were under, and that he was treated with a certain level of decency by those who detained him. In short, he wasn't tortured, unlike terror suspects detained in the United States, Afghanistan, Iraq and across the Middle East.

The Haneef Fiasco : An International Embarrassment

Haneef's Wife Thanks Supporters

Haneef Free But Fallout Rages

Immigration Still "Suspicious" Of Haneef As He Flies Home

Farewell From The Land Of The "Fair Go"

"Disgraceful Treatment" Of Mohamed Haneef Part Of Howard's Political Games

An International Embarrassment

Weak 'Terror' Charges Against Dr Haneef Dropped

Dr Haneef Set Free


You can have your shoes back now, Dr Haneef. Sorry about the whole 'terrorist' mix-up

UPDATE : Dr Haneef will be given back his passport and allowed to stay in Australia.

So, no great surprise here :

The Commonwealth Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) has dropped the terror charge against Indian doctor Mohamed Haneef.

Commonwealth prosecutors withdrew the charge of supporting a terrorist organisation in Brisbane Magistrates Court this afternoon, following a review of the case by DPP Damian Bugg...

The 'terror charges' being that Dr Haneef had "recklessly supported a terrorist group" because he gave a SIM card to a relative back in England who then allegedly went on to try and launch terror attacks in England.

Of course, the British authorities haven't charged Haneef's cousin with being a part of a terrorist group. So how can Haneef be charged with supporting a terror group that doesn't, at this point, officially exist?

Hence, the dropping of the charges.

A statement from the Director Of Public Prosecutions :

"On my view of this matter a mistake has been made ..."

Understatement of the year. The DPP accepts some responsibility for the "mistake", the Australian Federal Police says it did nothing wrong, and prime minister John Howard still backs the Immigration Minister's very public, and legally damaging statement, that Dr Haneef was "of bad character" and so had to have his visa cancelled.

The blame gaming has now officially begun.


EXCLUSIVE : First Draft Of Joint Australian Federal Police/Howard Government Statement Of Apology To Dr Haneef :

Umm, sorry about the whole "You're probably a scumbag terrorist" thing, Dr Haneef.

We realise now that you were telling the truth all along and that you didn't try to make a bomb-detonating call to those supposed car bombs in London, and that you didn't plot to blow up buildings in Queensland and that you don't want to destroy the West and that you don't worship Osama Bin Laden.

But, you know, them's the breaks in the 'War on Terror', mate.

And after all, you are a Muslim. And all terror attacks are done by Muslims....well, except those done by the ETA, and the ones carried out by black ops forces on enemy infrastructure, and the occasional bombings by Mossad and MI5, and the governments of Pakistan, India, Russia, China, the United States and all those trying to fight the War On Terror by using state terror for...look, none of that really matters to you, right?

So, thanks for coming to Australia and helping to fill the shocking doctor shortage. And thanks for being such a good sport about us holding you in custody without charge for, what, it was only 12 days or so, wasn't it?

And thanks for letting us 'interview' you for 12 hour long sessions, and parade you in front of the media dressed like a convicted criminal, with no shoes.

You'll probably want to sue us now, right? Okay. Well, here's the deal : Fuck off back to India, we'll see you in court. And don't forget we'll spend five million of taxpayers money to avoid having to pay you even $100,000 in damages.

By the way, Dr Haneef. Could you pass the word around back home that we're still looking for more doctors? We've still got a pretty bad shortage of them here.

Of course, a lot of Australians are paranoid about Indian or...well, let's face, any dark-skinned doctors now, what with all that 'Those Who Will Heal You, Will Kill You' black propaganda stuff.

Again, sorry about the mix-up.

Thank you, come again. (just a little joke there to show the Aussie sense of humour)

BTW : Even though the charges against you have been dropped, the Immigration Minister still thinks you are "of bad character". Which probably says more about him than it does about you.

I'm not sure the above letter is the real deal. It seems a bit restrained to me.

Naturally, Howard government spin master Tony Abbott got in early this morning, clearly aware that the charge against Dr Haneef would be dropped today :

"If he's a good guy who has done nothing wrong, I suppose, he should be treated like other good guys who've done nothing wrong."

Tony Abbott only supposes Dr Haneef should be treated like someone who has done nothing wrong even though it was abundantly clear he had done nothing wrong. Continues Abbott :

"But whether he is a good guy who has done nothing wrong is the sort of thing that Kevin Andrews, quite rightly, will be seeking expert advice on

Immigration Minister Kevin Andrews hasn't changed his mind :

"I believe that Dr Haneef fails the character test and for that reason I cancelled his visa," Mr Andrews told ABC radio today.

"Nothing that has been revealed to me in the last 24 or 48 hours would lead me to believe that information was inappropriate or incorrect."

Of course not, Dr Haneef is still a Muslim.


Here's but one example of the Murdoch media' s terror scaremongering around Dr Haneef, before even the most basic facts were known or even taken into consideration. Naturally this example comes from the Daily Telegraph's blockhead-in-chief Piers Akerman :

The detention of a Gold Coast doctor shows the alleged sweeping extent of the global links of international terrorism.

The liberal use of "alleged", "seems" and "probably" in the Akerman column of July 4 will presumably protect News Limited and the Daily Telegraph from having to fork over another six figure sum in damages for Akerman's inability to restrain himself from writing such garbage, and trying to smear people long before they are even charged, or not charged, with terrorism-related crimes.

You can only hope that this appalling fiasco does not make Australians less alert to the threat of terrorism, from whichever groups or extreme religious true believers who think they can change the direction of politics or international policy through the killing of innocent people.

But the more often incidents like the Dr Hannef fiasco occur, the more often that terror attack warnings are issued for reasons other than the safety of the public, the more people will tend to believe that the threat of terrorism is overwrought, and that fear campaigns are being used against the public for strictly political reasons.

The terrible irony is that in the case of Dr Haneef the only people who ended up being terrorised was him, and his family.

An Earlier Story From The Orstrahyun on the Dr Haneef Scandal

Howard Tries To Distance Himself From The Collapse Of The 'Terror' Case Against Dr Haneef - Good Luck With That PM

Haneef Will Be Released


MORE ON THIS STORY COMING...

Haneef Contacts Lawyer To Free Police Of Allegation They Wrote 'Incriminating' Names In His Diary

UPDATE : AFP Commissioner Mick Keelty now claims police did not write anything in Dr Mohamed Haneef's diary. It was a duplicate diary, or something...wait, it now appears that Dr Haneef himself contacted his lawyer to tell him that the story of the police writing names in his diary was not true. The police wrote names on a piece of paper and showed them to him, according to this story.

Keelty says, wait for the case to go before the courts. And then what? Find out the entire case against Haneef was worthless? The most likely scenario now appears to be that the charge of "supporting a terrorist group", a group that doesn't appear to actually exist in the UK, will be dropped and he'll be deported. Or he willingly flee Australia.

The Haneef fiasco is receiving blanket media coverage in India, soaking up front pages, editorials and letters to the editor. A friend writes from India that Australia, its police and the Howard government are disparaged nightly on the news and current affairs shows. The Greens, apparently, are being seen as the action makers in trying to get Haneef released.

An international 'Free Haneef' campaign also appears to be gathering steam.

All in all a very poor outing for first major use of the updated 2004 anti-terror laws. While talk back radio and online public comment has a few "deport the terrorist" types, the vast majority of Australians contributing their opinions to the public debate seem pretty annoyed, disgusted and ashamed at how Dr Haneef has been treated, how the AFP have conducted their investigation and how some in the media have frenzied in their coverage.

PREVIOUSLY : Is the case against Dr Haneef really so pissweak that federal police officers have to try and fake evidence?

...investigating AFP officers wrote the names of overseas terror suspects in Dr Haneef's personal diary, only to later grill him during an interrogation over whether he had written the potentially incriminating notes.

Apparently, it was all just "a mistake".

Thank God for that. Otherwise you might be led to believe that something absolutely dodgy has been going on, what with all the 'leaks' claiming that Haneef was more evil than previously speculated and was somehow, once more allegedly, involved in plotting terror attacks in Queensland.

The Courier Mail reported on Sunday :

Police are investigating whether detained doctor Mohamed Haneef was part of a planned terrorist attack on a landmark building at the Gold Coast.

Australian Federal Police are examining images of the building and its foundations found among documents and photographs seized in a police raid on the doctor's Southport unit three weeks ago.

The AFP inquiry is looking at documents referring to destroying structures discovered in the raid, law enforcement sources said.

Within hours the story had been exposed as complete twaddle, by none other than the head of the Australian Federal Police, Mick Keelty.

Still no word yet on where the Courier Mail got its information, or even if the source was valid, and the editor has published no apology for being involved in yet another smear campaign against Haneef.

Presumably the bullshit story came from the police, otherwise why would Mick Keelty decide he needed to all but apologise to Haneef's lawyers for such an allegation becoming public?

...Mr Keelty issued a statement describing as "inaccurate" reports police were investigating a local terror plot after discovering images of the Q1 building in Dr Haneef's Gold Coast unit.

"We will be taking the extraordinary step of contacting Dr Haneef's lawyer to correct the record," Mr Keelty said.

David Marr :

Crooks are not caught by backyard gossip and idiotic speculation but by bringing logic to bear on facts.

Was that tiny weapon of mass destruction - Haneef's SIM card - found at the scene of the crime in Glasgow? No. Perhaps the overcoat he left also with his cousin turned up in the blazing Jeep Cherokee driven into the airport terminal? Apparently not. Was he roaming Surfers Paradise looking for a target to destroy? Not according to the police.

It seems we're just where we were last Friday: the public case against Haneef has entirely collapsed.

Mick Keelty back on July 3, when talk radio and online news page comments were busy spreading the myth that Haneef may have tried to detonate the London car bombs by mobile phone calls from Queensland :

...we should be cautious here that Dr Haneef may have done nothing wrong and may, at the end of the day, be free to go.

Keelty was insisting on July 20 that the police case against Dr Haneef had not been damaged by the near endless stream of controversies, foul-ups, leaks and mismanagement of the investigations.

After another weekend of false stories and allegations being leaked to the media, by "law enforcement sources", and yet more mopping up by Mick Keelty, you have to wonder whether he still believes there is still a case worth pursuing against Dr Haneef at all.

British police still haven't named or even confirmed the existence of "the terrorist group" that Haneef is being accused of supporting.

The Haneef tale has become a major story across the world, particularly in India, the UK and across South East Asia, but not because of the charges against Haneef, but for the endless series of screw-ups and controversies surrounding the federal prosecution's increasingly hole-ridden case.

As the Calcutta Telegraph writes in this lead :

Critical information used to brand Mohammed Haneef a terrorist and condemn him to solitary confinement might not be true...

Somewhere in Pakistan, the leaders of Al Qaeda are laughing themselves stupid. They barely have to even try anymore to send a nation and its federal law enforcement officers into a state of confusion, panic and chaos. We are quite capable of doing all that to ourselves.

Lawyer : Government Is Trying Haneef By Media

Prosecution May Have Misled Court

No Comment From Ruddock On Haneef 'Plot'

Australian Federal Police Under Fire As Haneef Case Unravels

Australian Authorities Flayed For 'Sloppy' Investigations