Tipping off terrorists

The Australian undeniably generally runs a very pro Howard line. So it was a bit of a surpise to note that its editorial on Friday criticising him for the timing of the terror threat announcement. But the piece was a bit all over the place, and everything is almost back to normal in today's editorial, which offers strong support for the legislation.

On Friday, they criticised Howard for leaving himself open to the charge that he made the announcement for his own political benefit. But how much consideration has been given to alternative ways Howard could have dealt with it?

My point is this: if Howard had not made the announcement and tried to sneak the amendment through quietly, who could possibly think that Bob Brown and the Greens would not have demanded loudly an explanation as to why one little bit of the Anti Terror Bill had to be rushed through now? Peter Hartcher in the SMH suggested that "the amendment could have been dealt with unobtrusively in the usual course of business" but I find this impossible to believe. The government is copping enough flack as it is over its procedures in speeding through the lengthy Bill. If it suddenly introduced this one amendment unexpectedly ahead of the rest, surely it would have been accused of doing amendments "by stealth," or some such, and the media would have only been too happy to speculate at length as to why Howard was adopting such an unusual tactic. I would bet money that such speculation would involve the words "heightened terrorist threat". The astute terrorist would surely have noticed that something was up.

Howard did say that he was damned if he did and damned if he didn't announce the new terrorist warning. But I took the "damned if he didn't" part to refer to being damed if there was a terror incident in the near future and the warning Howard received had not been made public. But as I say, he would also be damned politically if he did the amendment with no explanation, and in my opinion in the process the terrorist planners would have noticed something going on anyway.

The Australian today gives more background as to why the amendment was made urgently, and notes that there was considerable debate between ASIO and the AFP over whether Howard should explain why it was needed. Ruddock says that the agencies (presumably ASIO and the AFP) also approved the form of words used in the announcement. It was therefore certainly not a "one man show" when it came to this decision, but I think early critics of the move gave the impression it was likely a spontaneous, cynical and careless act by Howard.

Update: John Howard had his own "column" in the Herald Sun today and ran pretty closely with the same argument I described above in his defence. Great minds think alike (haha).