BY SARAH STEPHEN
It is ironic that a new law giving the ASIO secret police agency draconian powers was passed on June 26, a day after the 100th anniversary of the birth of George Orwell.
If he were alive today, Orwell would have had some great material for a sequel to his novel 1984! What could be more Orwellian than Attorney-General Darryl Williams announcing that an unprecedented assault on our basic freedoms will make us all safer?
Williams was referring to the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) Legislation Amendment (Terrorism) Bill 2003 which passed through the House of Representatives after being supported by ALP and Coalition senators. It will allow for any person to be seized and questioned by ASIO if the secret police can demonstrate that the person is likely wittingly or unwittingly to have knowledge of a terrorist plot.
Many fear that ASIO will use its new powers to attack vulnerable and marginalised sectors of society and political dissidents, just as the USAPATRIOT Act has been used by the FBI to conduct investigations unconnected with terrorism and Malaysia's Internal Security Act has been used to imprison hundreds of trade unionists, political activists and civil libertarians.
The right to remain silent and a person's right not be arrested without there being suspicion that they have committed a crime are two central tenets of the common law justice system. Both are violated by the new ASIO law, which implies you are guilty until proven innocent.
Scary scenario
Claire Mahon and Karyn Palmer from the Law Institute of Victoria sketched the following scary scenario, now possible under the new law, in the June 23 Melbourne Age:
"What would you do if government agents burst into your home at two in the morning and interrogated you for seven days? Or if Federal Police removed you from your workplace in the middle of the day and took you to a place where ASIO officers questioned you against your will for a week?
"You didn't do anything wrong, but ASIO argues you could have information that would help them. If you refuse to co-operate or surrender information, you could be jailed for up to five years.
"You ask to see a lawyer, but are told that unless you can name the lawyer they can't tell you whether they'd approve. You tell the agents you don't know the names of any lawyers off the top of your head because you have not been in trouble with the law before.
"They begin questioning you, and when the lawyer finally does get there, hours later, she isn't able to help much. As soon as she tries to advise you or ask why you are being detained, she is asked to leave the room.
"You are not allowed to contact family or friends during the seven days you are kept in detention. The inquisitors say that although they are not permitted to hurt you, even if they did, you wouldn't be able to tell anyone who they were because their identity is top secret."
The new law hands the secret police powers normally associated with fascist regimes or military juntas, undermining laws governing freedom of speech and association. You can now be arrested for having knowledge and associations, rather than having committed a crime.
Thought police
ASIO has long mirrored Orwell's thought police with powers to tap phones, raid homes and offices, install listening devices, intercept mail, hack into computers and infiltrate legal political organisations.
ASIO, established by the Chifley Labor government in 1949, has spied on, and damaged the careers and lives of, militant unionists, left-wing political activists and "subversives" of all kinds. It has denied progressive writers government grants, hounded radical academics and vetted public servants and applicants for citizenship.
In his book Australia's Spies and Their Secrets, David McKnight revealed that until the early 1970s, ASIO maintained a list of up to 10,000 "undesirables" to be interned in military camps in the event of war or other "national emergency". Included on the list were migrants from "potential enemy countries".
Yet ASIO welcomed European fascists and Nazi war criminals, including a Hungarian mayor who had directed the deportation of 25,000 Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz. These Nazis found a ready champion in ASIO. Allied intelligence agencies gave the Nazis clearance in the screening process, allowing them to assume false identities or lie about their past, and frequently recruiting them as agents. ASIO put them to use as spies and covert operatives against the migrant left.
ASIO also provided training for the murderous secret police of South Vietnam and other dictatorships. Legislation passed in 1979 gave ASIO sweeping new powers to bug telephones, intercept mail and search premises, as well as inflicting savage penalties on anyone exposing its agents.
But since the end of the Cold War, ASIO has struggled to justify its existence. The 9/11 terrorist attack handed governments an opportunity to elevate politically motivated violence above all other forms of violence, and introduce a raft of "anti-terrorism" laws.
In a climate of hysteria about the new "terrorism" threat, combined with its new powers of arrest and interrogation, ASIO has now been given the make-over it has sought.
Australians are already one of the most spied on populations in the world. More than 17,000 people had their mail investigated last year, mainly by federal government agencies, a 30-fold rise in the last decade.
The police use electronic surveillance, such as phone taps, at 27 times the per capita rate of their US counterpart. Police inspected 733,000 telephone bills. Neither of these figures include ASIO investigations.
The new ASIO law has been widely criticised for its unprecedented powers of arrest and detention, and its lack of accountability.
Fearful of its impact on journalists, Age editor-in-chief Michael Gawenda said on June 25: "We are in danger of descending into an Alice in Wonderland world where you have to prove a negative to avoid going to jail."
Not accountable
"ASIO will now have greater powers than police officers but with less oversight", barrister and spokesperson for Australian Lawyers for Human Rights Simeon Beckett said on June 26. He said the police are accountable to public courts, ministers and commissions of inquiry such as the Independent Commission Against Corruption, but ASIO is not.
NSW Council for Civil Liberties president Cameron Murphy said ASIO would have "the legal power to kidnap and interrogate ordinary innocent Australians". He added: "These powers will do more to damage our democracy than any terrorist threat could ever hope to inflict."
Stephen Kenny, lawyer for David Hicks, an Australian detained at Camp X-Ray in Guantanamo Bay, said on June 25 that the new law is "more likely to affect innocent people than it is to affect criminals".
Even Allan Behm, a former head of the security division in the attorney-general's department, believes it is wrong for ASIO to have the combined function of intelligence gathering and police powers. This has led to an "abuse of power" in the past, he noted on December 14.
While the law could be used against teachers, journalists and doctors, they are unlikely to be its first targets. The government still has to win public confidence that the law will only be used "responsibly". It is therefore more likely to target the most vulnerable and marginalised groups in society those who are already vilified and discriminated against.
Nikolai Haddad from the Sydney-based Sawiyan Coalition for Palestine believes that Arabs and Muslims will be the first target group. He told Green Left Weekly that the home invasions of Muslim Indonesians last year following the Bali bombings were, in part, a public softening-up exercise. "In the mainstream media and in the minds of policy-makers, terrorists are basically Muslims and Arabs."
National liberation movements
Sympathisers of national liberation guerrilla organisations, such as the Free Aceh Movement (GAM), the Moro Islamic Liberation Front in the Philippines, Lebanon's Hezbollah and numerous Palestinian organisations are also likely to be targeted.
"To most Arabs and those with a knowledge of Arab politics, Hezbollah is among the most legitimate of political groups", said Haddad. "Hezbollah won repute for leading the Lebanese resistance against the illegal and brutal Israeli military occupation of southern Lebanon. It is incomprehensible how supporting Hezbollah can be made a crime, and yet this new law can make such people a prime target."
Terry O'Gorman from the Australian Council for Civil Liberties has also warned that racial profiling "is a real subplot of this legislation".
In an incident at Sydney airport on June 26, Sheikh Taj Aldin al-Hilali, Imam of the Lakemba mosque in Sydney's south-west and Australia's most senior Muslim cleric, was singled out by a customs officer after having already been cleared by immigration and for more than 40 minutes was aggressively questioned. Al-Hilali described the incident as "excessive, discriminatory and provocative".
Keysar Trad, head of Sydney's Lebanese Muslim Association, told GLW he is particularly concerned with the guilty-until-proven-innocent clause. "How does someone who does not have, or does not know, something, prove that he or she does not have it or does not know it?"
Trad described as "unreasonable" the fact that 16-year-olds can be detained. "They will be traumatised for the rest of their lives if subjected to seven days of interrogation", he said.
Haddad believes the unprecedented powers of arrest and virtually unlimited detention are the most concerning aspects of the new law. The law "will undoubtedly lead to abuse", Haddad said, given that ASIO's operations are "far more secretive than the police".
He added: "With the mass public hysteria about 'terrorism', the political constraints on the abuse of this power will be at a minimum. This means that basic civil liberties will not apply to those who oppose the government's national political agenda and fanatically pro-US foreign policy."
From Green Left Weekly, July 9, 2003.
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