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November 22, 2008
Barack Obama has stated his intention to shut down Guantanamo Bay and there's some spirited debate going on about what should be done with the inmates. Geoffrey Robertson QC seems to think it shouldn't be all that difficult, considering that ordinary courts require evidence which should be the undoing of most cases, and evidence tainted with torture won't count any more. There could also be some other small matters to be cleared up, which shouldn't require too much effort:
TONY JONES: And what about trials that have already been conducted under the military tribunals and the system which will now effectively be defunct, and that includes, obviously, the first of those trials, that against David Hicks?
GEOFFREY ROBERTSON: Yes, of course. I think it's time while we've still got the monarchy to give David Hicks a royal pardon because his trial was obviously an expedient at the request of an Australian Government that needed to sure up votes.
Are we allowed to say that now?
Since that interview Hicks made his public plea for an end to the now quite silly looking control order, and the AFP almost immediately released a statement saying they wouldn't be seeking a new one. Why ever not? Surely once a convicted terrorist, always a convicted terrorist?
The Haneef inquiry has also handed down its report, but we're not allowed to know what it says in the interests of national security. Unless either Mick Keelty or Kevin Andrews recently changed their name to National Security, the report must say something about top secret AFP surveillance and evidence gathering methods, and it's understandable that those should not be made public if what we've seen so far is meant to inspire public confidence.
Robert Merkel suspects this is the end of the road for Keelty
The upshot is likely to be that Mick Keelty’s time as AFP head will end; perhaps other senior AFP officers may follow him.
Can't see it myself. As Merkel points out, "The one example where Labor has acted on a perversion of justice - mandatory detention - they were at pains to pretend that they weren’t doing so." Rudd's shown no inclination so far to apply his Behoeffer principles when it comes to prominent people. If anything, Keelty will quietly leave when he realises he's being starved of media attention. Letting it be known that they're dropping the Don questions from the citizenship test on a Saturday, the doldrums of the political news cycle, is about the most significant thing they've done when it comes to important people.
We're not likely to see any spectacular indicators of change here, unlike the Americans who appear to be getting into a real groove with this new justice stuff - raining down nastiness on Cheney and his crew. No, the most outrageous thing we could come up with is The Howard Years, and it's doubtful any major consequences of children overboard or the AWB rort will come of that.
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Obama is, however, apparently going to let an enthusiastic Bush Administration torturer called John Brennan run the CIA, which does not bode well for a new era of civil liberties and respect for human rights.
I agree that Kelty is unlikely to go any time soon ... don't know where Robert got that notion. The government has bent over backwards to prevent the Haneef inquiry uncovering anything that might even mildly embarrass the AFP or Howard's mob.
I understand the Bradman question will be replaced with one about B A Santamaria, to reflect the way the obsessions of our new PM differ from the last one's.