WORLD SOCIALIST WEBSITE
By Mike Head
05/05/2009
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Paddy Bar backpack blast |
On the night of October 12, 2001, thousands of holiday-makers from Australia and other countries were in Bali’s Kuta nightclub district when the bombings killed 200 innocent people, including 88 Australians and 40 Indonesians, mostly nightclub workers and taxi drivers.
Travel advisories issued by the Howard government had assured the Australian public that Bali was “calm” and tourist services “normal,” despite a heightened terrorist risk produced by Australia’s participation in the US-led invasion of Afghanistan.
After a two-week trial in the ACT Supreme Court last week, ex-Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) officer James Sievers was found guilty of communicating information he had obtained as an ASIO employee, and his former housemate Francis O’Ryan was convicted of aiding and abetting him.
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Former ASIO officer James Paul Seivers |
The two men are currently on bail, awaiting sentence on June 3.
Sievers is the first ASIO officer to be charged under the section, which is designed to help shield the domestic spy agency from public scrutiny. The Rudd Labor government, through the DPP, sought and obtained a re-trial after a jury last May failed to reach a verdict despite 13 hours of deliberations.
Prosecutors alleged that Sievers, who had access to the documents during a 2004 Senate inquiry into the bombings, passed them to O’Ryan, who posted them to the Australian’s Sydney offices. O’Ryan was said to have written on two of the documents, “please see details of prior intelligence through which a tragedy might have been prevented” and “sin spots-nightclubs”.
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Many Bali bombing casualties were burned to death |
Right up until the bombing, the Howard government insisted it was safe to visit Bali, despite receiving explicit warnings from US intelligence agencies, as well as its own Office of National Assessments (ONA), which had identified Bali as a potential terrorist target at least three times, including in a briefing to then Foreign Minister Alexander Downer.
ASIO itself advised Qantas, the main airline servicing Bali from Australia, that given the JI presence in Indonesia, Bali could not be “considered exempt from attack”. On the basis of reports by ASIO and the Defense Intelligence Organization (DIO), the Defense Security Agency issued a “high” threat assessment to all military personnel traveling to Indonesia. As a result of these warnings, Qantas crew members and diplomats were instructed to avoid well-known hotels, bars and nightclubs in Bali.
When the documents were published, they re-ignited public anger over the failure of the Howard government and the intelligence agencies to alert travelers and try to prevent the bombings. In the days after the atrocity, then Prime Minister Howard initially denied receiving any prior warning of the likelihood of such an attack. But when the Washington Post reported that the CIA had identified threats to attack a tourist site in Indonesia, mentioning Bali, Howard was forced to change his story on the floor of parliament, while still claiming that the CIA’s information was only of a “general” character.
In an attempt to deflect attention from the serious questions raised by the classified documents about his own government’s role, the Howard government instigated a police operation to find the “leakers”. Australian Federal Police raided the Australian’s offices and eventually produced evidence that O’Ryan’s credit card had been used to purchase the post office envelope that contained the damning documents.
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George W. Bush and his father have long family ties to CIA |
A number of questions remain unanswered. Why did the Howard government pursue the case so relentlessly? What was so sensitive about the Bali documents? Why did Howard want them suppressed? And why has the Labor government fought for convictions in the case as well?
The leaked documents demonstrated that the Howard governments and its intelligence advisers were well aware that Australia’s participation in the war on Afghanistan had made Australians, and Bali, targets for Islamic extremists. Did the government deliberately choose to ignore the warnings of some kind of terrorist attack in Bali in order to politically exploit the outcome?
Howard certainly seized upon the Bali events, which he dubbed Australia’s own “September 11,” to intensify the phoney “war on terror” both at home and abroad.
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Wreckage of Paddy Bar |
Domestically, the Bali tragedy was utilized to overcome popular opposition to the introduction of unprecedented “anti-terrorism” legislation that dismantled basic legal and democratic rights. The first wave of laws, passed in 2002, defined terrorism so broadly that it could cover political dissent, make terrorist offences punishable by life imprisonment and give the government power to outlaw organizations.
Another provision, giving ASIO powers to secretly interrogate and detain people without charge or trial, foundered, due to widespread opposition. Largely as a result of the Bali bombing, however, this provision, along with other draconian measures was pushed through by mid-2003, with Labor’s support. More legislation followed over the next three years, establishing three other forms of detention without trial, creating executive powers to proscribe groups, and allowing for semi-secret trials.
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Bali bombing victims unloaded at Sanglah Hospital |
Any re-opening of the Bali issue raises the danger that it will expose Labor’s complicity in the political exploitation of the bombings, and poses the question of whether the Labor leadership, including Rudd himself (who was Labor’s foreign affairs spokesman in 2002), was given any forewarning of a possible Bali attack.
The author also recommends:
More evidence of Australian government’s failure to warn of Bali bombings
[15 May 2004]