24/8/07:AUST.GOV TERROR FRAMEUP CASE UPDATE (24/AUG/2007)






AUSTRALIAN GOVERNMENT TERROR FRAME-UP CASE UPDATE
www.greenleft.org.au

Haneef victory over government smear campaign

Paul Benedek, Brisbane
24 August 2007


The federal government?s political campaign against Dr Mohamed Haneef took a
further blow on August 19, when Federal Court judge Jeffrey Spender ruled that
immigration minister Kevin Andrews had unlawfully cancelled Haneef?s work visa
on character grounds.

Justice Spender said the minister had interpreted the word ?association? in
the Migration Act so widely that ?completely innocent? people could be
stripped of visas simply because they had a relative, friend or even lawyer
whom police suspected of criminal conduct. Spender even stated that ?
since he has been ?associated? with criminals (in his legal work) ? then he
too could fail a character test under such a broad definition.

Andrews cancelled Haneef?s visa on July 16 in order to prevent Haneef?s
release on bail, which had been granted just hours before. The granting
of bail for ?recklessly supporting terrorism? ? which comes under the
?anti-terror? legislation where there is a presumption against bail ?
indicated the weakness of the case against Haneef. Australian Bar
Association president Stephen Estcourt condemned the government?s overrule
of the courts as a ?threat to the rule of law?.

Pressure mounted on the government and the Australian Federal Police as
the weakness of the case against Haneef was revealed, indicating a frame-up
of an innocent man. The charges against Haneef were dropped on July 27,
almost four weeks after he was taken into custody.

Haneef has been subjected to almost two weeks? detention without charge; the
spurious charge of ?reckless support for terrorism? for innocently giving the
talk time on his SIM card to a relative; the government overruling the courts
to squash his bail; and an unceasing political campaign to smear his name,
led by the federal government seeking another Tampa-style scapegoat in the
run-up to the next election.

While many, including the Greens and the Socialist Alliance, have called for
Andrews? resignation over the Haneef affair, Andrews has refused to apologise,
and has announced that the government will appeal the decision to restore
Haneef?s visa, possibly up to the High Court. Andrews continued the slurs
against Haneef, saying he was even more suspicious of Haneef now than when
he revoked the visa. Andrews stated that even if Haneef does eventually get
his visa restored, the government could simply revoke it again.

In response to the smear campaign, on August 20 Haneef?s legal team released
the transcript of the second police interview with their client. The full
transcript reveals Andrews? earlier release of selective, misleading and
mistranslated phrases from the interview to raise suspicions about Haneef?s
intentions.

The full transcript shows that, well before his arrest, Haneef had tried to
contact British police several times, and had made all his travel arrangements
and had obtained leave from his Gold Coast Hospital job. Haneef?s brother,
who Andrews implied urged Haneef to leave Australia immediately, actually
told Haneef (who had already arranged his trip) to leave his contact details
with British police before leaving Australia.

The transcript also raises concerns about police translation, with Haneef
disputing some of the English translation. In one case, the Indian language
Urdu is written as ?Burdu?.

Prime Minister John Howard has fully support Andrews? actions. The ALP,
which supported the government?s actions throughout most of the Haneef case,
is now calling for a ?judicial inquiry? into the case, in order to ?preserve
public confidence? in the terror laws.
\end article.



[AddedNote: The attacks in Australia against Haneef -- an Indian migrant Medical
Doctor -- has been one such example of racially and politically motivated move
by Australian Federal Government. I am totally appalled by the conducts of both
Racist Australian Government and the Press here who, are too happy to pick on what
it seems is a "soft-target" for scapegoating and political diversions.

Fortunately, not a single evidence against Haneef stands scrutiny. The racist
Rat's framed-up against Haneef collapsed. Finally that poor Indian doctor was
threatened with immigration detention so that he must moved back to India.

Drop a line or fax to express outrage at such opportunist and racist behaviour
by the Australian Government. -- U Ne Oo.]

Send Your emails to: Kevin.Andrews.MP@xxxxxxxxxx
Fax to: 61-2-6273-4144
--
http://freeburma.netipr.org/~uneoo/ (Burma HR Activity)
http://freeburma.netipr.org/saorg/ (Refugee Rights Activity)
emails: druneoo@xxxxxxxxxxx uneoo@xxxxxxxxxx
POST: Dr U Ne Oo, 18 Shannon Place,Adelaide SA5000,AUSTRALIA
=======


GREENLEFT WEEKLY AUSTRALIA, 3 AUG 2007
www.greenleft.org.au
The end of wedge politics?
by
Tony Iltis

When it emerged that Kafeel Ahmed, one of the men implicated in the June 30
botched terrorist attack in Glasgow, had a second cousin working in the Gold
Coast Hospital in Queensland, it must have seemed to the Howard government
that its election worries were over. Racism, xenophobia and the manufactured
threat of terrorism have served Howard well in previous elections. However
this time it backfired, with more public anxiety about the frame-up of
Dr Mohamed Haneef than about supposed terrorists in our midst.

Haneef was held for 26 days in solitary confinement. The first 12 of these
were without having been charged with any crime; most of the remainder were
despite having been granted bail. Throughout his detention, government
ministers and their stooges in the media and police force made all sorts of
allegations against him ? from prior knowledge of the June 30 attempted
terrorist attacks in Britain to plotting to blow up a Gold Coast skyscraper.
The fact that, at the time of his arrest, Haneef was attempting to fly to
Bangalore, where his wife had just given birth to their first child, was
also held up as being suspicious.

However, the mud did not stick. The only thing that struck most Australians
as suspicious was that draconian ?anti-terror? and immigration laws allowed
someone to be imprisoned by government decree in contradiction to the
decisions of a court. With the only evidence against Haneef being that when
he left Britain for Australia he gave his SIM card to his relative Sabeel
Ahmed (Kafeel Ahmed?s brother), he was eventually released.

Since Haneef flew to Bangalore on July 29, continued attempts to smear him
have failed. Immigration minister Kevin Andrews? assertion that Haneef?s
departure following his release ?heightened suspicions? was risible. Leaving
aside the fact that it was the same journey he had been attempting to make
at the time of his arrest, it was Andrews himself who revoked Haneef?s
working visa, which is what allowed his continuing imprisonment after his
release. Without this visa, Haneef was unable to return to his job and was
in danger of being locked up in immigration detention at Andrews? whim.

The public release of a few out-of-context sentences from an English
translation of an internet conversation in Urdu between Haneef and his
brother Shuaib only raised suspicions about how the police obtained the
transcript and why the government refuses to release it in full. An undated,
anonymous dossier, purportedly from the Indian police, that was given to an
SBS journalist on August 1 did allow for a 24-hour media frenzy alleging
Haneef was linked with al Qaeda, but by August 3 Indian police had refuted
the authenticity of that document.

The flimsiness of the case against Haneef and the injustice of his treatment
are not unusual. The accusations against 13 men being held under ?anti-terror?
laws in Barwon prison in Victoria, and those against the nine men in Goulburn
prison in NSW, are as nebulous as those against Haneef, perhaps more so.

They are not accused of planning any specific terrorist act but of giving
support to a terrorist organisation. In both cases, the terrorist organisation
is themselves. The Barwon 13 are also accused of possession of a ?thing?
(whatever that means). In 2006, Faheem Khalid Lodhi was sentenced to 20
years? jail after being convicted of plotting to blow up Sydney?s electricity
grid on evidence as secret as that used by Andrews to revoke Haneef?s visa.

Seeing through the lies

What is different about the Haneef case is that fewer Australians are willing
to believe the government?s lies. In 2001, when the federal government
subjected refugees, under no suspicion of any terrorist links, to racist
vilification cruder than anything thrown at Haneef, it helped the Coalition
win the next election. Six years later there are signs that this
?wedge politics? is no longer working, and not only in relation to the
Haneef case.

When Howard recently sent the police and army into Northern Territory
Indigenous communities, only 25% of Australians, according to a Galaxy poll,
accepted the government?s claim that it was motivated by concern about
violence and child abuse. There are very good reasons not to accept this
claim.

For a start, the report into child abuse that the government used to justify
its move specifically identified non-Indigenous men in positions of authority
as the major perpetrators of sexual abuse of Aboriginal children. Yet Howard?s
takeover will enhance these men?s power.

When one considers that sexual and physical abuse were routine in the
Dickensian institutions to which many of the stolen generations were taken,
and also a common experience of stolen children given to non-Indigenous
families, a threat to again steal Aboriginal children in order to ?solve?
child abuse is grotesque. Just as grotesque is that only days after the
police officer who beat Mulrunji Domadgee to death walked free from a
Queensland court, police from all over Australia were sent into Indigenous
communities, allegedly to save these communities from violence!

Furthermore, the Coalition government?s sudden concern about the
?dysfunctionality? of Indigenous communities came after 11 years of
systematically de-funding those communities, whose infrastructure in
health, education, housing, employment and other basic services was
already worse than in most Third World countries. The Howard government?s
banning of Indigenous language education from NT schools increased Aboriginal
disadvantage. The one ?service? that Aboriginal communities have not been
deprived of since colonisation is policing.

If all this was not enough reason to be sceptical about the government?s
claims, there?s the fact that this ?emergency rescue package? includes taking
away land rights and opening Aboriginal land to mining corporations.

Public protest matters

That fewer Australians are willing to go along with the Howard government?s
racist lies reflects the fact that protest and resistance does change public
opinion. The spontaneous uprisings of Indigenous people in Redfern and Palm
Island in 2004, in response to killings by police, put the issue on the
agenda. Likewise, while in 2001 only a minority of Australians supported
the rights of refugees, this minority?s willingness to raise their voices
in the street, together with the protests of refugees locked up in the
immigration jails, has led to a majority now being opposed to the mandatory
detention of refugees.

The role of mass action is also clear in relation to the ?anti-terror? laws.
Civil rights lawyer Lex Lasry and anti-civil liberties Murdoch journalist
Piers Ackerman have both drawn a link between the movement to get David
Hicks out of Guantanamo Bay, which organised thousands-strong protest rallies
in 2006, and public scepticism about the Haneef case.

Howard?s attacks are increasingly directed at wider layers of society.
On August 1, the government announced new police powers that include the
right of police to surreptitiously enter and bug premises without a warrant
and immunity for police to commit crimes in order to advance investigations.
While these new powers are being justified in terms of the alleged terrorist
threat, they will, in fact, be applicable in any investigation of a
suspected crime that carries a potential sentence of 10 years or longer.

The government?s Work Choices laws are another case in point. Union members
may be a minority, leading the government to use its tried-and-tested methods
of stereotyping and demonisation to try to whip up public fear about
monstrous ?union thugs?, but the majority of Australians have jobs and those
not in unions are most adversely affected by Work Choices. Indeed, many
workers are seeing the need for unions for the first time.

The experience of losing protection from unfair dismissal, the right to
strike and holiday entitlements, and facing the downward pressure on wages
exerted by individual contracts, undermines the credibility of the
government?s propaganda around the industrial relations laws and that
which attacks minorities.

The exposure of the lies used to justify the war in Iraq has had a similar
effect. Moreover, after 11 years of staunch greenhouse denial, Howard?s
sudden recognition of climate change, while offering the dubious panacea
of nuclear power, has not enhanced his credibility.

But the dynamics of wedge politics also need to be examined the other way
round: why have so many people fallen for Howard?s lies for so long?

Part of the reason is that racism and other prejudices are strongly
entrenched in Australia, in particular against Aborigines. Moreover, the
saturation fear propaganda since the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the US has
affected the consciousness of the entire Western world.

No official opposition

However, a crucial factor in Howard?s successful use of wedge politics is
that, while there has been opposition in the street, the official,
parliamentary opposition has been missing.

This was clearly illustrated in the 2001 ?Tampa election?, when then-ALP
leader Kim Beazley refused to challenge Howard?s lies about refugees, giving
them more credibility. Kevin Rudd has taken this ?me too? approach to absurd
extremes. He has given total support to Howard?s racist NT land grab. Rudd
likewise supported the persecution of Haneef, although when an increasingly
pressured Andrews lashed out at him for not offering anything different,
he began calling for an inquiry into the ?bungling? of the case.

Despite opinion polls showing that it is Work Choices that will likely win
Labor the next federal election, at the behest of corporate bosses, Rudd has
backed down on every promise to reverse the laws. Most astoundingly, while
he summarily expelled from the ALP trade unionists Dean Mighell and Joe
McDonald for standing up for their members? rights, he was willing to forgive
retiring Tasmanian ALP MP Harry Quick for hitting the campaign trail with
Liberal candidate Vanessa Goodwin and federal workplace relations minister
Joe Hockey.

Such is the public disillusionment with Howard that not even the ALP?s
?me too? politics seem able to save the Coalition. But a Rudd victory at
the polls will not mark a major change of direction in Australian politics.
For this to happen the real opposition, the struggles in the streets, in
communities and workplaces, need to continue and intensify.
.

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