On Lateline in February, ONA whistleblower Andrew Wilkie was asked for an example of intelligence chiefs second guessing what the government wanted to hear.

 

�During 2002 I was asked to prepare an assessment on the situation in Afghanistan. It was to feed directly into the Government’s decision making in the situation in that country at about the time they were looking to start returning Afghans involuntarily to Kabul. I wrote it as I saw it. It was quite a damning assessment. The prognosis I developed was that the situation was dire and likely to stay that way for the foreseeable future.

�But, in fact, the senior management of the Office of National Assessments said that that assessment would not go out because it was just such a political hot potato to be saying that at the time the Government was saying publicly that it would start the return of asylum seekers.�

As far as I know, this allegation has not been denied, despite its horrific implications, that ONA bosses were prepared to allow the government to deport refugees to a country unsafe to return to on the basis of false intelligence assessments. The government wanted to send them back to suit its domestic political agenda. And it did NOT want to be told that this would endanger their lives.

Lieutenant-Colonel Lance Collins� allegations don�t tell us much we didn�t know about the government�s deceit of the Australian people and betrayal of the East Timorese before the independence vote.

At the time, the then Labor foreign affairs spokesman Laurie Brereton got several leaks proving the government was well and truly warned of the disaster that would follow a successful independence vote. Howard and Downer brushed aside the leaks, and the government then tried to bug Brereton. ASIO said no back then, but you�d have to doubt whether they�d do so after five more years of no-holds-barred bullying of the public service by Howard and his henchmen.

The thenLabor leader Kim Beazley had Howard and Downer on the ropes in parliament for days until Paul Keating went on the 7.30 Report to say Suharto had been the best thing since sliced bread for Australia, killing Beazley�s attack stone dead.

Meanwhile, Australia�s senior Defence Intelligence Liaison Officer in Washington Merv Jenkins committed suicide in Washington after intolerable pressure from Canberra for sharing our intelligence on East Timor with the Americans in accordance with intelligence sharing arrangements. Like Collins, the Americans were also concerned that a bloodbath in East Timor was on the cards without an international peace keeping force on the ground for the vote.

Collins� correct intelligence assessments on the pending catastrophe in East Timor never made it to the government. They were blocked by senior �public servants� who knew the government did not want to hear them, and presumably feared what would happen to their careers if they told them the truth anyway.

Intelligence reports are supposed to reflect information gathered and honest assessments of likely consequences. The government then weighs up the facts and the expert analysis against its political and strategic imperatives. That�s honest government. That�s government in good faith. That�s government when politicians are prepared to take responsibility for their decisions, decisions which must sometimes be desperately difficult to make.

We do not have such a government. We no longer have a public service prepared to force the government to take decisions with the facts before them. We no longer have a government or a public service we can trust.

As I�ve written for a long time now, our nation is critically disadvantaged in conducting �the war on terror� because of a collapse of trust in government. Our intelligence agency�s dishonour is all the more frightening when we face constant attempts by the government to destroy our civil rights and greatly enhance state power to detain and question us on the basis of supposed independent and impartial intelligence agency and police advice.

A national leader acting in the best interests of our nation would do everything in his power to restore that trust; including calling a Royal Commission to investigate the systemic dysfunction of our intelligence agencies in the face of a government which wants to use supposedly impartial �advice� as cover for pre-made political decisions.

Of course John Howard would never act to restore our trust. His government is the problem, not the solution.

What scares me is that if the crazy brave whistle blowers who keep telling us what�s gone wrong don�t get the public�s attention soon, the destruction of our long tradition of a �frank and fearless� public service will be complete and there�ll be nothing left to save. Another bulwark of our democracy will be gone, and the corruption of what�s left of our once proud democracy will be so entrenched we�ll have run out of chances to save it.