What on earth was he thinking?

In the wake of the murder of a soldier on guard at the War memorial in Ottawa, on Friday Prime Minister Tony Abbott told Melbourne radio station 3AW that the piper playing the Last Post at the War Memorial in Canberra could be a terrorist target. According to a 24 October report by national political reporter Latika Bourke, in the online edition of The Age (see here):

Mr Abbott said while the attack abroad had not "furthered the risk" for Australia's Parliament he warned "there's a copycat tendency amongst these people".

He said authorities has not considered Canberra's War Memorial a target "prior to yesterday" but now would because it serves as a "symbol of our nation".

"I suppose to extremist fanatics it could therefore be a target. There's the Last Post at our War Memorial every day and I guess if someone wanted to do something gruesome that's the kind of thing that could be looked at…”

Why anyone would want to plant that seed in the mind of a potential terrorist or a disturbed loner is an unfathomable mystery to me. The thought is father to the deed, as the saying goes. What on earth was he thinking?

Defence Force Structure - Looking in the wrong direction again!

Guest post by Andrew Farran

The Lowy Institute's blog, The Interpreter, is running a debate on future defence policy with particular attention to force structure. It is a polite wrestle among those representing entrenched military prerogatives and like-minded academics and bureaucrats. Very little lateral thinking is revealed in these courteous exchanges.

The starting point is the view that defence policy is again at a watershed, as in the 1970s. That may have been the case then but the opportunity was not taken to leap a generation and anticipate the 21st century when that was quite possible. There were voices then that could have provided the intellectual basis required to skip decades of wasted expenditure on large capital items that did not even accord with the agreed strategic basis at the time. That basis was that Australia was unlikely to be invaded within the next generation or two as has proven to be the case. The outlook is much the same today but the Lowy discussion regresses to the same old issues as listed by defence planners in the 1970s - how many strike aircraft, how many submarines, how many tanks, etc. to defend a country that would not be attacked - at a steady cost of some 3% of GDP.

Former deputy secretary of defence, Alan Wrigley seeks now to revive the 1970s 'core force’ concept which “would provide an expansion base of military and technical skills that would greatly reduce the time to build a more capable force as any credible threat began to emerge”. The trouble with that was it presupposed that the military skills required necessitated the acquisition of expensive platforms in numbers beyond what the strategic basis could justify. Spread across the services, as it had to do so that each service got its “fair share”, the country acquired a force structure that was over equipped for action that never took place and under equipped for the low-level but lethal campaigns (Iraq and Afghanistan) respective governments got our forces into. The exceptional campaign was East Timor for which the forces lacked critical capability, especially in logistics. 

A later defence deputy secretary, now Lowy and ANU, Hugh White, doubts that the 'core force’ concept remains a sound basis for defence planning today as it was developed in the 1970s in response to big shifts in Australia's strategic environment in the later 1960s and 1970s. As now, there had then been big shifts in Australia's external environment. But defence planning misread the implications of those shifts and the 'core force' concept was largely a rationalisation for getting what the services wanted, not what was needed. There was no "new world" for the forces.

Overlooked in their recall of the 1970s were two significant developments, neither of which fully achieved their potential. First were the reforms introduced by defence secretary Arthur Tange designed to lay down clear lines of authority as between the defence department and the services vis-à-vis the Minister, and minimise turf wars and obstructionism in these areas. The second was the Dibb Report which sought to tailor force structure to a realistic assessment of defence needs in that changing strategic environment. The Report itself was far sighted but its implementation fell foul of the very issues Tange had tried to overcome - and the 'core force’ concept was introduced to placate all parties even if it became an expensive anachronism.  

Lowy readers are being regaled with mind-numbing numbers of required submarines (12), JSF aircraft (50 or 100), legions of tanks - with little or no explanation as to the whys and what-fors.

Hugh White however (to his credit) warned that Australia is in danger of repeating the same mistakes this time around when he wrote: "There is no plan for how the ADF will be used to achieve Australia’s strategic objectives. And that is because no one has decided what our strategic objectives are. In other words we do not know what the ADF is supposed to do. That is why there is no systemic way to decide how many of anything we need. But even worse, it means there is no systemic way to decide what we need at all”. So one can safely say that the services will seek the toys they want and rationalise their wish lists under some fancy new but vacuous strategic concept.

So how in outline might a defence force structure be shaped to reflect the realities of Australia's strategic environment over the coming decades?

Given that invasion is an unlikely contingency, and given the digital revolution in military technologies (especially with guided missiles), we need to refocus and adopt a force structure that takes advantage of area denial strategies because of the relative vulnerability of attack-mode platforms.  

The potentially 'big bad wolf' in the region is of course China. The issue here is how far China might go in enforcing its resources claims in the South China Sea or, if provoked, by further claims from Taiwan for independence. The former would concern most Southeast and East Asian states, the US and Australia; the latter, the US essentially alone (or do we have some undisclosed diplomatic understanding with the US about this?). The question for Australia would be how far to go in supporting those affected parties and with what resources? Any strategic 'commitment' to a US response should surely differentiate between the respective situations and require on our part a clear choice based on the perceived 'national interest' - not just another ‘alliance insurance' premium or token deployment. 

Conflict between the US and China would have negative consequences for both. As 'rival' powers they have an extraordinary degree of inter-dependence which is likely to be on-going. What might disturb that is a political breakdown internally in China when a foreign distraction (i.e. conflict) might suit a struggling regime. The international community should encourage China to stay on track and conform with the norms of global governance. Current trends in multilateral diplomacy and international law would reinforce this endeavour.

Closer to home there is the potentially (actually) unstable arc of Melanesian and Polynesian states around our northern periphery, which may call upon interventionist forces to restore order and maintain a peace (when there is a peace to keep) - or on humanitarian grounds. Specifically there may be problems with PNG but these would more likely be in the nature of police rather than military actions (e.g. Solomon Islands). Our best expenditure has been on SAS-type forces. We may need more of these along with their requisite materiel support (helicopters, amphibious craft, etc.) where versatility and rapid response is imperative.

Surely we will not again indulge in out of area Iraq/Afghan type operations - unless it be a peace-keeping exercise unequivocally sanctioned by the UN or in support of 'civil society'. The capabilities we have developed in East Timor and Afghanistan (the one positive from the latter) could prove useful, militarily and politically, and be very much in our interests to strengthen. Safeguarding our maritime approaches will remain a primary task for which we are presently poorly equipped. At a routine level, early warning surveillance (aerial and other) and high-sea state fast patrol craft are necessities. Then, to monitor, deter and resist less benign intrusions, there is a role for light frigates and submarines (also for intelligence operations). Currently we lack the necessary equipment and skilled manpower for reliable submarine deployments but a new generation to follow the troublesome, near obsolete Collins-class vessels might rectify this deficiency in time (a generation). A role for guided-missile carrying catamarans (as being developed by China) would be interesting!

Air surveillance and deterrence is another formidable issue, because of its expense, our dependence on the overseas supply of aircraft, and the uncertainty of their availability. Will the F35 Joint Strike Fighter ever be available, and at what cost and for what purpose? This question is not being honestly addressed.

There was no reason why similar requirements, and issues, could not have been foreseen back in the 1970s. The broad geo-political trend has long been apparent. All this time Australia's physical security has not been endangered. Yet we have spent billions of dollars on capabilities that either have not been required or would not have been operational had they been. Meanwhile we have lost too many good soldiers, killed or maimed, in conflicts that have lacked credibility and acceptability to the Australian public - or can be justified in terms of protecting the national interest. 

In short we should leave out-of-area conflicts of others to them; be clever and focussed in our diplomacy; clear headed about our national interests; and develop a force structure that is relevant to those interests with more attention than previously to cost efficiencies and effectiveness (administrative and military).

About the Author

Andrew Farran, is a former diplomat (Australian) and academic (Monash University Law School). Diplomatic postings included Pakistan (including two visits to Afghanistan), Indonesia, and the UN General Assembly. He was an adviser to the Australian Government during the GATT/WTO Uruguay Round and a former vice-president of the Australian Institute of International Affairs, a member of the Royal Institute of International Affairs and the International Institute for Strategic Studies, London. He is also a publicist and company director (Australia and UK).

Who’s afraid of WikiLeaks?

Tomorrow (Friday 20 May)  in Sydney I will be chairing a session at the Sydney Writers’ Festival entitled Who’s afraid of WikLeaks.

The members of the panel will be

-  Suelette Dreyfus, author (with Julian Assange) of Underground, William Heinemann, Sydney 2011 – the story of the 1980s-1990s hacker underground, an important segment of which was operating out of Melbourne.

-   Andrew Fowler, author of The Most Dangerous Man in the World, Melbourne University Press, 2011

-  Barbara Gunnell, author of Rebel, public nuisance and dreamer: Julian Assange standing alone, GriffithREVIEW 32, March 2011.

-  Robert Manne, author of The Cypherpunk Revolutionary, The Monthly, March 2011.

-  Guy Rundle, author of Open-eyed conspiracy his time doth take, Overland, Issue No. 202, Autumn 2011.

The session will take place at Sydney Town Hall, 6.00-7.30 pm. The SWF webpage for the session may be accessed here.

I have signed a release for the ABC to make audio or video recordings of the session, and will post links for anything that goes to air after the Festival.

Previous posts on WikiLeaks include Seven key things we have learned from WikiLeaks, Do WikiLeaks cables put informants’ lives at risk?, Guardian columnist on the responses to WikiLeaks, The lawless Wild West attacks WikiLeaks, Secrecy, national security and the internet, Julia Gillard on WikiLeaks, What do the WikiLeaks Cables reveal about our leaders?, The dark side of WikiLeaks, Greg Mitchell’s list of WikiLeaks revelations and  The Guantánamo Wikileaks.

“Centrism” or the rule of law?

In a Friday 14 January post on Salon’s Friday 14 January edition (accessible here) Glenn Greenwald goes to the heart of the tension between certain self-proclaimed “centrist” views and the rule of law.

In it he castigates Benjamin Wittes of The Brookings Institution, and by implication Brookings itself, for a centrism which:

... is devoid of any coherent worldview and instead has one overarching purpose: to defend Beltway elite prerogatives and specifically the bipartisan orthodoxies of the National Security State.

The particular target of Greenwald’s concern is the defence by this “centrist” of the effective immunity from investigation which the Obama Administration has granted to former Bush Administration officials in relation to murder, torture and other acts of criminality.

Wittes claims that this is in accordance with a two-centuries-old tradition of incoming presidents not prosecuting outgoing ones.  Greenwald cites no less a figure than George Washington to challenge this view:

George Washington vowed, in a December, 1795 letter, that there must never be immunity for wrongdoing by high government officials: "The executive branch of this government never has, nor will suffer, while I preside, any improper conduct of its officers to escape with impunity."

He goes on to examine the consequences of a system in which presidents and there retainers know that they will not be pursued for criminal acts perpetrated in the name of national security.

Greenwald’s concern’s resonate with concerns I expressed in May last year in We need to talk about Kevin, about Kevin Rudd’s lack of interest in finding out who knew what when about AWB’s $300 million of kickbacks to Saddam Hussein in violation of United Sanctions; his lack of interest in holding something like the UK’s Chilcot Inquiry to examine events leading up to Australia’s participation in the invasion of Iraq, and who knew what and when regarding the disgraceful treatment of Dr Mohammed Haneef.

I might have added the shocking case of Mamdouh Habib, arrested in Pakistan, flown to Baghram Air Base in Afghanistan, rendered to Egypt for months of interrogation under torture, and then sent to Guantánamo, allegedly with the involvement of Australian officials, a case well described by Sally Neighbour in The Weekend Australian, 15-16 January 2011 (see here) – a matter in which neither the Rudd nor Gillard Governments has displayed any interests until now. The emergence of new evidence has forced the Gillard Government’s hand and the matter is now to be investigated further.

All officials and military personnel of democratic countries need it to be clearly understood that no person is above the law, ever, and no-one can expected to be shielded from investigation when government changes hands when there are grounds to believe they have, or may have, acted outside the law.

Classic Howard: attack a straw man

In John Howard’s recent address to the ultra-conservative Heritage Foundation he deployed his classic tactic for attacking his critics – set up a straw man (words they did not say) and then attack that, rather than address their real arguments.

He said, inter alia:

There is a tendency to see a response to terrorism in terms of placating alternative philosophies in the hope they will accommodate you and abandon aggressive designs on your society…

For the record, my response to his response to terrorism had nothing to do with that, nothing to do with that at all.

My response to his response to terrorism is that terrorist acts, no matter how egregious, do not warrant:

(i)      Joining us in a war with no clear purpose (Afghanistan);

(ii)    Involving us in a war (Iraq) that was illegal, was against a country that had nothing to do with the outrage complained of (the attack on the World Trade Centre), and was just plain dumb;

(iii)   Compromising our civil liberties and the rule of law in this country; or

(iv)   Converting ASIO overnight from a security intelligence organisation to a secret police force with draconian powers and minimal training for its new role.

Any time Mr Howard would like to address those issues I would be interested to hear his views .

There’s more to NSC than just turning up

John Howard had a lot to say on Thursday night 5 August about Julia Gillard sending a junior staffer along to meetings of the National Security Committee of Cabinet in her stead, saying inter alia that it is not a discretionary activity.

I agree with him. It is not a discretionary activity. Nor is it any ordinary committee meeting. While it is notionally a sub-committee of Cabinet, it is in fact the final decision-making body for national security matters, for the very good reason that the number of people who are party to its deliberations and aware of its decisions is kept to a minimum.

Accordingly, NSC meetings should be seen as Cabinet meetings with a restricted membership, rather than meetings of a committee. They are chaired by the Prime Minister, and attended by the holders of the nation’s most senior and sensitive portfolios.

So Julia Gillard’s statements to the effect that she attended NSC meetings whenever she could leave me scratching my head. What alternative commitments were allowed to stand in the way of her attendance?  Were there occasions when Mr Rudd was represented by his 31-year old Chief of Staff and Ms Gillard was represented by her ex-policeman?

But to put all this in perspective, it must be remembered that turning up to the meetings is not the only thing – what they do when they get there is the most important thing. Mr Howard committed us to a dumb war (Afghanistan) and a war that was both illegal and dumb (Iraq).

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We need to talk about Kevin (again)

In the course of the program launching the ABC’s 24-hour news channel on Thursday 22 July, ABC political editor Chris Uhlmann broke a story that former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd treated Cabinet's National Security Committee (NSC) with "casual disregard".

The ABC quoted unnamed Commonwealth officials and Cabinet sources as saying they had been shocked at Mr Rudd's attitude to the committee, which is the key Cabinet body which makes decisions on defence and national security issues.  Mr Rudd had missed some meetings of the committee and on other occasions had kept it waiting or sent his chief of staff, Alister Jordan, to deputise for him.

Reactions to this report have ranged from outrage to a shrug of the shoulders.  I think it is a serious matter and raises a number of important issues about both national security and the way our country is governed, as well as shedding light on the style of Kevin Rudd:

(1)     I am shocked at the notion of a ministerial staffer deputising for a Minister under any circumstances whatsoever, let alone at a meeting of Cabinet or a Cabinet committee.

Ministerial staffers are not Vice-Ministers, they are personal staff - advisers and managers of the ministerial paper flow. They are not elected, they are not selected by any systematic merit-based principle such as one finds in the Australian Public Service, and they are accountable to no-one except the Minister who appointed them. Every political party in Australia is insistent that the personal staff of Ministers are immune from being called before Parliamentary Committees, on the grounds that they are simply advisers and the Minister is the one who is accountable.

Such a situation is barely tolerable when staffers confine themselves to their supposed advisory and facilitating roles, as anyone familiar with the Children Overboard case knows. When they go beyond that and begin to become actors in the political process, we have the perfect setting for plausible deniability: the Minister can claim that he/she didn’t know, or that the staffer misunderstood the instructions in some way, but the individual concerned cannot be questioned or called to account. John Howard raised this to the level of an artform.

(2)    The National Security Committee is chaired by the Prime Minister.  It meets only at his initiative, and at a time convenient to him. If an NSC meeting is called and then the Prime Minister is either very late or fails to show, something strange is going on.  At the very least it bears out the many stories that one hears about the chaotic processes of the Rudd Government.

(3)    The situation is the more remarkable given the former Prime Minister’s reputation for micromanagement. He certainly doesn’t seem to have been micromanaging the agenda of NSC, which suggests that he accorded it a low priority.  This is not the same as saying that he accorded national security issues a low priority, but it is important to note that NSC is the highest decision-making body in the land on national security issues, and the only forum in which all of the key players are gathered together and able to interact with each other simultaneously.

(4)    If anyone did need to depute for the Prime Minister, that person would be the Deputy Prime Minister, not a staffer. If there were something the Prime Minister wanted to inject into the meeting, the meeting Chair (DPM) would be the appropriate person to carry his message, and the meeting Chair would be the appropriate person to give him a debrief after the meeting. There is no need for the Prime Minister to send a staffer along to “represent” his interests, and given the complexity of the matters under discussion, a person who is not experienced in national security issues is likely to be an unreliable carrier of both the input and the outcome.

(5)    Given that Ministerial staffers are only advisers, one wonders why the Prime Minister’s Chief of Staff needed to be there at all.  If the person he advises is not present, why does he need to be present? What value would he add?

(6)    Apart from the discourtesy involved in keeping some of the busiest people in the land waiting for hours and failing to turn up to his own meetings, the reported behaviour indicates a lack of basic management awareness. The time of these busy people is a scarce resource not only to them but to the government they serve. They can serve the government better if the government is careful not to fritter away their time (not to mention goodwill).

(7)    The situation makes me wonder also whether the Prime Minister’s Chief of Staff had all of the security clearances that might be required for participation in anything that might come up at National Security Committee, and if he did I would wonder why. The Chief of Staff’s role is to run the Prime Minister’s Office, not to advise him on national security matters, and the Prime Minister has a National Security Adviser.  The Chief of Staff would of course be cleared to a high level, but access to the most sensitive national security information is rigorously compartmentalised on a “need to know” basis – access to it is limited to people who cannot do their job without it, and there is no access until the individual has had a detailed briefing on the sensitivity of the material and the instructions for handling it. I can think of many things that the Prime Minister’s Chief of Staff would not need to know.

Kevin Rudd responded to the ABC report by having a spokesman issue a media release the following day. In my view the exculpation in the media release only made things worse – a classic case of “when you are in a hole, stop digging”.

(1)    The media release states that Mr Rudd attended “all critical meetings”.

This is an acknowledgement that he did not attend all meetings. How many of the 50 meetings which were held during the Rudd Prime Ministership were “critical” meetings? On my understanding of the plain English meaning of the word critical they can only have been a small proportion. Presumably there was a larger number of meetings that were very important but not critical – he does not affirm that he attended all of those.  And if they were not seriously important, why were they listed for consideration at Cabinet level? If they were not important enough for the Prime Minister to attend, why have a Cabinet meeting at all?

Also, we don’t know which meetings are “critical” until they are over. When you have forces engaged in military operations there is always breaking news.  I can recall some very important issues being raised at NSC without notice by Admiral Barrie and me, simply because they had arisen at short notice and it was appropriate to raise them and get an NSC decision so that we could take the necessary steps to deal with them.

(2)     It is actually acknowledged in the media release that Ministers were represented (the spokesman’s word) at Cabinet meetings by Ministerial staff – unelected, unaccountable. I never heard of such a thing. Of course there are times when the Prime Minister cannot attend – when he/she is overseas. In my experience NSC meetings were chaired in John Howard’s absence by Acting Prime Minister John Anderson, and they dealt to finality with the matters on the agenda. I never saw John Howard’s Chief of Staff Arthur Sinodonos at an NSC meeting, and I cannot imagine John Howard, Paul Keating, Bob Hawke or Malcolm Fraser permitting a staffer to substitute for a Minister at a Cabinet meeting. As for interstate travel, Cabinet timetables should be organised to fit with the PM’s travel program – and vice versa.

This last aspect is perhaps most worrying of all. If the culture of the Rudd Government was that staffers can substitute for Ministers, and that carries over into the Gillard Government, then heaven help us.  Assuming that Labor is re-elected, the Coalition and the Greens had better push for a Senate Inquiry to re-open the question of the accountability of Members of Parliament staff, last examined under a Coalition Government in 2003. My submission to the Senate Finance and Public Administration Committee on that occasion can be downloaded from here – it is Item 7 on the list of submissions received.

Why Julie Bishop must go

Julie Bishop’s behaviour last week in relation to the expulsion of an Israeli diplomat demonstrated conclusively that she has no place dealing with sensitive matters of foreign relations, and indeed is not fit to hold a leadership position with any self-respecting Australian political party.

Politics is a rough game but there are certain courtesies and civilities to be observed within our parliamentary system or the system cannot operate and, when it comes to matters of national security, the nation’s interests are put at risk.

When I heard that Julie Bishop had said in relation to the expulsion that there was no absolute proof of Israeli involvement in the forging of Australian passports, I wrote, “What would she regard as proof, I wonder”. At that stage I assumed that she had no more knowledge than I had, i.e., what was in the public domain. When I heard that she had been given a briefing on the matter by Australian security agencies, I was shocked.

I think Julie Bishop violated three rules of political courtesy and common-or-garden professionalism in relation to this matter.

(1)    If she was not prepared to accept a priori that the senior officers of the security agencies would behave in a professional manner and brief her in good faith on the evidence as they saw it, she should have said so and declined the briefing.

(2)    If she was in any doubt about what the evidence showed she should have told them and asked them questions to establish whether she and they really did draw different conclusions from the same evidence, or whether there was some misunderstanding on one side or the other.

(3)    If she remained unconvinced, she should have advised the briefing officers at the time that she found the evidence unpersuasive, and having been given the courtesy of a briefing she owed it to the Government to tell the Prime Minister and/or the Foreign Minister that she was not convinced and that she proposed to say so.  It was outrageous, and insulting to all concerned, for her to rush off and say that there was “no absolute proof” (whatever that means) and that the Government was just trying to curry favour with the Arab States in the interests of its aspirations to win a seat on the UN Security Council.

In her television interview she showed herself, not for the first time, to be completely out of her depth.

In our parliamentary system, there are times when it is in the interests of the nation’s security that the Government be able to take the Opposition leadership into its confidence and brief them on sensitive matters to ensure that our security interests are not inadvertently compromised by their public response to Government action. This need could arise at any time.  By her behaviour Julie Bishop showed that she cannot be trusted to behave appropriately in such matters, and that she lacks the judgement to be entrusted with sensitive classified information.  She must go.

Expelling an Israeli diplomat

In expelling an Australian diplomat the Australian Government has responded appropriately to the forging of four Australian passports, which it is satisfied was the work of the Israeli Government. Foreign Minister Stephen Smith rightly states that this is not the action of a friend.

Former Foreign Minister Alexander Downer does not contest the conclusion that the Government has drawn from the evidence presented to it by the Australian Federal Police and the security agencies, but says that expelling an Israeli diplomat is an over-reaction on the grounds that everyone does it (did ASIS do it on his watch I wonder?).

How little he understands the rules of the game. Others may well do this sort of thing – I would never seek to argue that this particular Israeli action is the first time in the history of human endeavour that an intelligence agency has forged another country’s passport. The point is, when they do it, or otherwise break the laws of a foreign country, they do so in the realisation that if they are caught their government will be mightily embarrassed (come to think of it, that doesn’t seem to apply to Israel, they are pretty hard to embarrass) and any operatives who are caught with their hands in the cookie barrel will face the full force of the law. Viewed in that light, the Australian Government’s response was rather benign.

But then Alexander always was rather relaxed and comfortable about the Australian national interest. It was on his watch that an Australian company, the recently privatised AWB Limited, violated Australian domestic law and channelled over $300 million to the Saddam Hussein regime, at a time when we had Australian service men and women in harm’s way leading the multinational naval force in the Gulf, and Alexander was running around the country saying that he was a big fan of sanctions.  Didn’t he know, or didn’t he care?  We will never know, because Prime Minister Rudd is not interested in finding out. 

Ever the insouciant one, Alexander responded to a reporter’s question about the fact that Britain had expelled an Israeli diplomat, how could we be expected to do less, by saying that it was a long time since our hands were tied by what Britain did.  We are independent now, he said (not that that stopped us from going along for the ride in the Anglo-American illegal invasion of Iraq).

How glad I am that Alexander Downer isn’t Foreign Minister any more.  

As for the current Opposition spokesperson, Julie Bishop echoes the line of Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman that there is no proof of Israeli Government involvement. What would she regard as proof, I wonder.  It seems to me to be beyond reasonable doubt. Even Alexander didn’t seem to be questioning that.

Afghanistan: New York Times is wrong about this one

I am a great admirer of The New York Times; it is a great exemplar of quality journalism in both its news reporting and its opinion pieces. I must, however, take issue with an editorial on the Dutch withdrawal from Afghanistan in its 25 February 2010 edition.

The editorial laments the Dutch intention to withdraw the 2,000 troops it has fighting in Oruzgan Province and concludes:

Europe’s leaders need to tell themselves — and their voters — the truth. The war in Afghanistan is not just about America’s security. It, too, is about denying sanctuaries to Al Qaeda, which has also carried out deadly terrorist attacks in Europe.

Is there anyone who seriously argues that “victory” in Afghanistan (whatever that means) would deny Al Qaeda the capacity to carry out terrorist attacks in Europe? Give me a break. Al Qaeda has shown itself to be an extraordinarily adaptive organism; it responds rapidly to changing circumstances. When the Taliban ruled Afghanistan (eight years ago now) Al Qaeda made use of training camps in Afghanistan because it suited it to do so. Following the US invasion in 2001 Afghanistan became less convenient to Al Qaeda so it evolved to a different set of arrangements. There is nothing we can do in Afghanistan that makes Europe, Australia or the United States the slightest bit more secure – on the contrary, we simply provide a pretext for domestic malcontents to plan hostile acts.

Petro Georgiou on the anti-terror laws

In an op-ed piece in the 24 October edition of The Age, published online here by The National Times, Liberal backbencher Petro Georgiou describes how the recently introduced National Security Monitor Bill is a travesty as far as its claimed purpose of providing for independent review of the 49 counter-terror laws that have been passed since 9 September 2001 is concerned. He says:

The bedrock of all the recommendations for a reviewer is independence from executive control and censorship, freedom to determine priorities, and examine all terrorism laws. Independence requires the ability to report publicly to Parliament, subject to not prejudicing national security, operations or trials.

The monitor bill fundamentally negates every element of statutory independence. It deploys every legislative artifice, legal and symbolic, to neuter the monitor. Other than the overweening crassness of the refusal to mention the word ''independent'' and the specification that the monitor can only be part-time, [Yes Minister character] Sir Humphrey [Appleby] would be impressed.

The bill prevents the monitor from determining his or her own priorities - that role is given to the Prime Minister, who can also change them and demand so-called ''interim'' reports. The monitor can only report to the Parliament annually.

The monitor cannot examine any law that has not been applied in the current or past financial year and any report has to be vetted by the Prime Minister and every relevant federal, state and territory minister. The monitor is prohibited from reporting to the Parliament on a range of fundamental issues including security operations, information provided by agencies, information about operational activities and methods, priorities and resources.

Georgiou concludes:

The monitor bill is a travesty, but it is not a joke. The avalanche of terrorist laws since 2001 has radically curbed the protection of the individual. To safeguard our democracy, strong, independent and ongoing scrutiny of these laws and their operation is needed. The Government's monitor is a subverted safeguard. If this legislation passes into law, the monitor will effectively be handcuffed, gagged and tied to the whim of the government.

This state of affairs has to be of concern to everyone who is concerned about the impairment of basic civil and legal rights enshrined in the spate of anti-terror legislation that was rushed through the Parliament by the Howard Government to the enthusiastic cheers of the Labor Opposition.

The release of Abdel Baset el-Megrahi

There is widespread anger at the 20 August decision by Scottish Justice Secretary Kenny MacAskill to release convicted Lockerbie bomber Abdel Baset el-Megrahi from prison, on compassionate grounds. Megrahi was convicted in 2001 of the bombing of Pan-American flight 103 above the Scottish town in 1988, causing the death of 270 people, 189 of them Americans.

Understandably there is anger; official anger, clearly expressed, on the part of the United States Government, and personal fury on the part of bereaved family members. FBI Director Robert Mueller, who was the assistant attorney general in charge of the investigation and indictment of Megrahi in 1991, wrote to MacAskill saying that the decision makes a mockery of the rule of law and gives comfort to terrorists around the world. “I am outraged at your decision”, he said – unusually strong language for official correspondence between agencies of friendly countries.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that she was “deeply disappointed”, and President Barrack Obama denounced the decision as "a mistake".

While the anger is understandable, the insistence that Megrahi should die in a Scottish prison smacks more to me of vengeance than of justice, and given that in making his decision MacAskill was exercising a power available to him under Scottish law, it is preposterous to claim that the decision somehow undermines the rule of law, however much the complainant might dislike the law. To keep Megrahi in prison in response to political representations would be more undermining of the rule of law.

Perhaps more interesting is the entirely separate question of whether Megrahi’s conviction was a safe one in the first place. A Scottish judicial inquiry decided two years ago that there was enough doubt about the justice of the original trial to allow Megrahi a fresh appeal, and the trial and conviction certainly have their disturbing aspects. In this Radio National Rear Vision program broadcast on 2 September you can hear the views of the Scottish lawyer who proposed the framework for the original trial, Professor Robert Black QC FRSE FFCS of the Edinburgh Law School, and the UN's special observer to the proceedings, Dr. Hans Köchler, Chairman, Department of Philosophy, University of Innsbruck, as well as the latest from Megrahi's solicitor. You will also hear the views of Dr Jim Swire of UK Families-Flight 103 (UK Lockerbie relatives' group), who

“went into the court thinking these must be the guilty guys who blew up my poor daughter, and I came out of thinking ‘Well these clearly were not the guys, so who the heck was it who did do it and why am I being mistakenly led to believe that these two were responsible when clearly they weren't?’ ”.

The program may be accessed here as streaming audio, audio download or transcript.