AFP false evidence 'cock-up' in Haneef case

Dr Haneef and his wife Firdous on vacation at Surfers Paradise earlier this year.

I really enjoyed reading this tidbit in the SMH regarding the Howard government and AFP 'cock-up' surrounding the detention and charge of Mohammed Haneef:

In Britain, a source close to the investigation confirmed the SIM card was found in Liverpool, and said the Australian police were considered a laughing stock by Britain's Metropolitan Police for allowing "such a major cock-up" to happen. "Australian police have got their wires crossed. This is very embarrassing for them. The police here are laughing at the Australian police, saying, 'What on earth have they done?' [Haneef] is clearly more of a political case than a police case."

Even Peter Beattie was on the TV news tonight, putting the boot into the AFP over their presentation of false affidavits to the court. If Peter Beattie is coming to the party, you know it's all over for Howard and his ministers. They're going to have to apologise to Haneef at some point, or look even sillier than they do now.

If anyone has failed a 'character test' in this whole affair it's Kevin Andrews, Howard, Ruddock and everyone else who put the boot into Dr Haneef despite the detention and charge looking like a farce right from the start.

Protecting freedom by denying freedom

Gold Coast doctor Mohammed Haneef was last night ordered detained for another 48 hours without charge in Brisbane. This may go on indefinitely, given that there are no restrictions on the number of times police may apply for extensions. If it goes on much longer without charges being laid, the government will probably have him kept in jail until after the election, just to avoid embarrassment. Not so far-fetched, given what they've done to David Hicks.

John Howard and Attorney General Philip Ruddock have been milking this for all it is worth, with Philip Ruddock today trying to insinuate that Haneef was a liar with regard to the reason he gave for leaving Australia on a one-way ticket:

While Dr Haneef's family and friends had said the urgency related to his newborn daughter being ill, Attorney-General Philip Ruddock said: "That may be well the reason, but certainly the appearance was that his intention (was) to leave with speed."

Mr Ruddock suggested that Dr Haneef had given other reasons for his behaviour.

"The further explanations that have been offered may be reasonable but they may also be a cover for something else," he told Southern Cross Broadcasting.

Leaving aside the fact that Dr Haneef actually sought leave from the hospital to travel to India, is it really so strange that the birth of a man's daughter in another country would cause him to leave with as much haste as possible to see his wife and baby? I suppose given that Philip Ruddock appears such a soulless bastard it shouldn't come as a surprise that he thinks it strange, but I don't.

Treatment of 'terror' suspects is worse than suspect

I hope I'm not the only one who finds the arrest and continuing detention without charge of Gold Coast doctor Mohammed Haneef disturbing. The life and career of Dr Asif Ali have already been irreparably disrupted, and the raiding of homes around Australia of several muslim doctors with ties to Britain just smacks of massive overreaction.

The story of why Dr Haneef had booked a one-way ticket to India, and his so-called 'connection' with the Keystone Cop wannabe terrorists sounds perfectly plausible. It's hard to believe, after almost a week under arrest without charges laid, that Australian or British police are going to find anything on Haneef or any of the other doctors whose lives they seem determined to ruin. Taking due care and questioning the guy is fair enough, but they can't just hold onto him forever in the hope that evidence will materialise.

The media aren't helping matters by sensationalising what is so far a non-issue, and as for the human scum that are using the story as an excuse to abuse non-white doctors in Queensland hospitals... words, for once, fail me. I bet those low-lifes are among the people who voted for Howard in the 2001 election.

The same Howard whose bootlicking attitude to Bush Administration foreign policy has made Australia more of a terrorist target than it ever would otherwise have been, has been using the attempted terrorist attacks in the UK, and their tenuous 'Australian connection' to trump up his case for pouring yet more money into our US Army tag-along force Defence Force:

John Howard warned yesterday that Australians would have to get used to spending more on defence, faced with unconventional security threats led by Islamist terrorism.

The Prime Minister said the British "doctors' plot" and its global connections stretching to Australia, starkly demonstrated the borderless world of Islamist terror.

"They blow themselves up in the process of trying to blow us up," Mr Howard said.

"It's a new and different enemy and you need new and different methods."

Think It Can Only Happen To Haneef?

More of The Australian's Fine Produce

We wrote about what happened to Greg McLeay last week, pointing out how the idea of human rights has become almost valueless in our society of fear. Looks like the case has become even more similar to that of Mohammed Haneef. David King 'journalist' writing for The Australian has a piece smearing McLeay, based on... things he was charged with but never convicted for. Also he once refused to leave a place when asked and went to court for that too. He writes:

SYDNEY accountant Greg McLeay said he wanted his children to learn respect for the police and claimed his scuffle with cops during APEC would teach them otherwise.

But the 52-year-old's court record suggests he has, in the past, struggled to find respect for the law himself.

The implication is clear, the police were beating him because he had been convicted of a crime in the past, so he deserved it. And even if he didn't, well he did something wrong so maybe he started it. We're not even in court and the hit pieces on another victim of our nascent state terror apparatus have begun. From now on the only people who can complain about being beaten by cops while going about their lawful business are nuns and only if they were virgins at the time.

How Could They Have Gotten That Impression?

al Qaeda al Qaeda!!!

Muslims feel cut off, left isolated by fear

Connie Levett Immigration Reporter
August 20, 2007

FEAR is isolating Australian Muslims, leading to distrust of the Government and driving them outside the country in their search for information and community, the first national fear survey has found.

The survey set out to look at how Australians viewed their safety after the events of September 11. 2001 but the pilot study found Muslim reacted very differently to the wider population. "The trial was quite stark," said Mark Balnaves, of Edith Cowan University, who co-authored the nationwide survey. As a result of the early indicators, Muslims, who make up 1.5 per cent of the population, were treated as a special sample, to clarify the early results.

"For Muslims it wasn't a generalised fear," he said. "Where non-Muslim Australians may have a fear of travel on planes, Muslims had a fear of going out of the house, of going out into the community.

"There is a fear of government, distrust of the media and the [consequent] closure of the [Muslim] community is quite worrying," Professor Balnaves said.

The research showed that Muslims were much more likely to have kept the "Be Alert Not Alarmed" packs and had a sense of needing to defend Australia. "Then they realised they might be the very people who were seen as a threat," he said.

...

The survey comes as Pauline Hanson and another would-be Queensland senator, James Baker, promised to campaign on the issue of Muslim immigration. Mr Baker proposed banning Muslim immigration for 10 years and putting other measures in place "to ensure Australia's Muslim population is in no doubt we mean business in stopping extremist attacks".

Those measures included revocation of citizenship and deportations of the families of convicted immigrant terrorists and suicide bombers.

The interviews, where anonymity was guaranteed, revealed Muslims were suspicious of connections between government and the media, believing the media may be controlled by the Government.

"So they are going to extreme sources, outside Australia," Professor Balnaves said. "To Al Manar [the Hezbollah-backed website], to blog sites with groups that would be counted as highly radical" in search of information they see as less biased against Muslims.

SMH

Of course that's the problem isn't it? We see Hezbollah as an extremist organisation. Israel, which has invaded Lebanon three times, killed hundreds of thousands of Lebanese and which continues to occupy Lebanon, is our friend. There's a fundamental disconnect there. How does it not look like bias when our media regularly objects to Muslims even defending themselves against aggression? Iraqis fighting to free their country from an illegal occupation are referred to as 'insurgents'. The media heaps blame on the Iraqi govt. for invading itself and destroying their own country. Iraqis themselves aren't even discussed as people. When was the last time you heard an Iraqi talking about their country? It's always some paternalistic asshole telling us what he thinks is best for them. Hell just look at Mohammed Haneef and the crap he had to go through for being someone's cousin. Now we've got Pauline Hanson and her ghoulish friends trying to make a few dollars off a terrified and hounded Muslim population. This study should be filed under 'F' for freaking obvious.

Kevin Andrews, Catbert With Ministerial Portfolio

Catbert

KEVIN ANDREWS has fudged his CV. Both his parliamentary and ministerial websites claim he was "co-author" of three books in the days before he entered Parliament. All appear to have been pumped out by the then Melbourne barrister in a remarkable creative outburst in 1990.

But the publishers do not see his role that way. They credit other authors and editors with assembling these collections. The name Kevin Andrews is not on the title pages. He appears to have done no more then contribute one paper to each. He does not even have top billing.

Over the past week, the Immigration Minister has been scathing about irregularities in the CV of Dr Mohamed Haneef's former Gold Coast colleague Dr Mohammed Asif Ali. The doctor is reported to have left the country and lost his job for exaggerating his employment in India by three months.

"This only came to light because of an Australian Federal Police investigation," Mr Andrews told the ABC.

"I think that Premier Beattie should be assuring the people of Queensland that this is an isolated case - that there is no other case in which somebody has falsified their information."

The three books Mr Andrews claims to have co-authored are:

* Rights and Freedoms in Australia, published by The Federation Press. The title page names the Melbourne lawyers Jude Wallace and Tony Pagone, QC, as editors of this collection of 25 papers. Mr Andrews's lone contribution is titled "You as an Elderly Person".

* Trends in Biomedical Regulation, published by Butterworths. The title page says this collection was edited by Hiram Caton, then of Griffith University. Mr Andrews contributed one of 21 papers: "Regulating Embryo Experimentation".

* Issues in Biomedical Ethics, published by Macmillan in India. This record of proceedings of an international congress of the Festival of Life was edited by Dr C. J. Vas and E. J. De Souza, leaders of a Catholic ethics centre in Mumbai. Mr Andrews's contribution, one of 39, was "In-vitro Fertilisation and Genetic Manipulation - Australian Developments."

Publishers consulted by the Herald said they would regard Mr Andrews as merely a contributor to these collections. The definition of authorship in the Vancouver Protocol cited by academic bodies like the National Health and Medical Research Council requires at a minimum: "substantial participation [in] conception and design … drafting … and final approval of the version to be published".

That is not the minister's view of the situation. He stands by his claims of co-authorship.

"The minister did not ever claim to be a lead author," explained his spokeswoman, Kate Walsh. "He is the co-author of publications that have no lead author, that have a series of chapters written by different people."

SMH

That's funny, his website doesn't mention any of those other people, leaving the impression that he wrote those books himself.

Publications

Rights and Freedoms in Australia (co-author), Sydney: Federation Press, 1990.

Trends in Biomedical Regulation (co-author), Sydney: Butterworths, 1990.

Issues in Biomedical Ethics (co-author), Delhi: Macmillan, 1990.

Andrews' Ministerial Website

I guess Andrews' free education (courtesy of the Whitlam govt.) was wasted on him. A co-author is a joint author of a particular work, not a contributor to a collection of articles. Claiming otherwise is plagiary, which he doesn't have to worry about, being a scummy liar already. More importantly, is he really suggesting: Thank god we arbitrarily imprisoned a man for weeks, ruined his life and job; slandered and libeled him before unjustly deporting him because it brought to light the fact that someone who worked in the same hospital as him added THREE MONTHS to a job they had? You lose your job for that? Is that a key skill criterion these days? By that metric Andrews' should be rubbed with ash, dressed in sackcloth and forced to spend the rest of his days as a wandering tinker for faking his CV.