|
February 18, 2005
I watched as much of the Senate estimates as I could yesterday. What I saw was Rick Smith, the head of the Defence Department and Senator Hill, block, obscure, confuse, set up red herrings, procrastinate and split hairs in their responses to the probing from Senator's Faulkner and Evans. Nothing was going to be conceded under any circumstances. Any information had to be dug out
The tactic was to defend their position that no Australian defence personnel were involved in the interrogation of prisoners. They were protecting their butts, and they seemed utterly indifferent to their public image, as they sailed close to the edge of lying to Parliament. Margo Kingston has the background on this kind of strategy.
They've conceded that Australians were involved. Involved in what is the question? Interviews not interrogations, says the Defence Department.
This 'protect the Government's butt at all costs' strategy means that Senator Hill and Rick Smith hde to keep putting out on bushfires that flared up. First we had the serious allegations made by Rob Barton's, the Australian intelligence analyst, seconded to the Iraq survey Group. Interviews not interrogations says the Department, and it then tried to stay on the implausible line.
Then we have this bushfire by David Kaye, the one time head of the Iraq Survey Group on ABC Lateline:
TONY JONES: The Australian Government says that none of them did any interrogations. They make the distinction between interviewing and interrogations. Under the circumstances you're outlining, do you see that that's a real distinction?
DAVID KAY: Look, it's not a distinction I make. I assume that anyone - and operated under ground rules that anyone that was in a room with a prisoner was engaged in interrogation. You weren't playing bridge, and so you had to play by the rules that were established for interrogation. Interrogation involved interviews, involved questions, involved discussions, and I'll tell you, as someone who has conducted interrogations, if you want to get good information out of prisoners, you try to do it on the friendliest, most cooperative ground; you try to become their best friend, their only hope for gaining their freedom or whatever they're interested in - good treatment for their family, messages - you're there and you try to establish a basis of cooperation. I wouldn't tell a prisoner I was conducting an interrogation; I would say, "Let's have a chat, let's have a talk. I need to follow up on some questions raised by things you've said or others." So I actually, if I was talking to someone, would have said, "I've had an interview, I've had a discussion". I didn't often use the word "interrogation", but that's what it was.
TONY JONES: So that's a false dichotomy, is it?
DAVID KAY: Well, I don't understand the basis - I don't understand the distinction between the words.
TONY JONES: "The interrogations were taking place with some form of duress."
DAVID KAY: No, in general - well, look, if you're a prisoner, you're under duress. There was always a military guard in the room. But was the prisoner constrained? No. I mean, certainly every high-value target I talked to, you offered them Cokes, coffee, tea. They were not shackled. They were there to talk, and you would try to engage - because it's the way you elicit information - in a professional conversation with people who you thought knew something about something you wanted to learn about, and that's the atmospherics of the discussions, the way we conducted them. Remember, the high-value targets in most cases involved with the WMD program were people who had travelled extensively in the West, often been educated in the West, spoke fluent English or French or German or Russian. These were people who you wanted to establish a relationship with to get to the truth.
So we have the interrogation of high value Iraqi prisoners conducted in the style of an interview.
|
Interestingly enough the deconstructionists should appreciate the irony of the petard they are hoisted upon here. It is of course all about context. At the time they were throwing about the term interrogation, it was in the context of Abu Ghraib that they were attempting to besmirch Aust intelligence and by association the Howard Govt. Now they object to the same govt using the military textbook contextual definition of interview and interrogate. Joe Public doesn't give a damn about all this semantics. They understand that Aussies weren't involved in AG type misdemeanours and probably wish Labor had consistently taken the line with terrorists that the Beazer is taking with Habib now. ie He won't give him the time of day in the Senate.