More bungling and arrogance from Australia's Federal police

There they go again, our very own Keystone Kops. The Australian Federal Police have bungled yet another "anti-terrorist" investigation. The fiasco finally came crashing down around their ears in the Victorian Supreme Court on Wednesday. To cut a long story very short, three prominent members of the Australian ethnic Tamil community - all Australian citizens - had been charged with acts of terrorism in support of the Tamil Tiger rebellion in Sri Lanka.

Over five years, the evidence against them gradually fell to pieces, and the more serious charges along with it. The operation was a mess. It sank to grim farce when one of the suspects, Arumugan Rajeevan of Sydney, was unlawfully dragged from his car at gunpoint by "federal agents", as they grandly style themselves these days, presumably in mimicry of the FBI. Rajeevan was clapped into handcuffs, denied a lawyer and questioned for five hours. When it gradually dawned on the plods that the evidence against him would not stick, they decided to "unarrest" him, a concept hitherto unknown to the law, as the Victorian judge, Paul Coghlan, pointed out with some asperity.

"The notion of unarresting people is something that I've struck here for the first time," he said. "The notion that somebody can be arrested unlawfully and then just unarrested at somebody else's whim is bizarre."

Justice Coghlan found that some AFP officers had been "frighteningly high-handed". They had abused Rajeevan's rights, and his interrogation by one officer, Patricia Reynolds, had been "beyond any training a proper investigator can have". The three pleaded guilty to a minor charge of sending money to a terrorist organisation, and each was released on a good behaviour bond of $1000. Figures given to Parliament last year show the AFP had spent well over $5 million on the pursuit.

The trouble is that when you give the police and the security services extraordinary and secret powers, as governments have done, it is London to a brick those powers will be abused. We saw that in the affair of Mohamed Haneef, the Indian doctor stitched up by the AFP and the Howard government as an Islamic terrorist. And I wonder, too, if we are seeing it in the matter of an Iranian-born Islamic cleric in Sydney, Mansour Leghaei, who faces deportation after ASIO branded him a risk to national security.

Leghaei and his family - who are Australian citizens, although he is not - have lived quietly in this country for 16 years. There appears to be tremendous community support for him. The local Anglican rector, Father David Smith of the Holy Trinity Church in Dulwich Hill, describes him as "one of my best friends" and is leading what he calls a "Christian Save The Sheikh Coalition".

"Mansour is just not a political animal, " he says. " He has been working towards integration and understanding."

Leghaei is not allowed to know the evidence against him. ASIO needs to give no reason, and no appeal is possible. The spooks have spoken. Big Brother is bigger than ever

Original report here. (Via Australian Politics)



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