Ray Fulcher, Melbourne
Responding to the Victorian Court of Appeals decision, on August 18, to quash the terrorism convictions of Jack Thomas, the establishment media launched a furious campaign against the upholding of Thomas’ basic democratic rights.
Following Thomas’ release from prison, the corporate print media was filled with vitriol against so-called “legal technicalities” — democratic rights — the appeals court judges relied on to overturn Thomas’ conviction. Their coverage hinged around the proposition that the “war on terror” is more important than upholding anyone’s democratic rights.
The Herald Sun’s Andrew Bolt and the Sydney Morning Herald’s Gerard Henderson stuck the boot into the judges. Bolt also described Thomas as ''this al’Qaeda trainee” and the Herald on August 21 offensively referred to him as “Jihad Jack”. News Limited’s August 21 Australian editorial declared that “Jack Thomas betrayed Australia by travelling to Afghanistan to serve the cause of terror. In avoiding punishment for
this evil act, he has done it again”.
Say again? Thomas “avoided punishment”? His rights as an Australian citizen were upheld by a court against the unlawful actions of the Australian Federal Police (AFP). But for Rupert Murdoch’s myth makers, that makes Thomas a repeat traitor.
The Australian did not let accuracy get in the way of its crusade against democratic rights, claiming that Thomas went to Afghanistan “to serve the cause of terror”. Not even the AFP or the prosecution made this claim. Thomas always stated — and nobody, until now, has challenged his claim — that he went to Afghanistan with his wife and child to experience a country governed by Islamic law. While there, he
became caught up with the struggle between the Taliban regime and the rival Northern Alliance, a reason he gives for receiving weapons’ training.
Despite Thomas’ acquittal of being an actual terrorist, at his original trial, some media persist in putting Thomas on an equal footing with the Bali bombers. This is even more vile considering that the jury believed Thomas’ testimony that he never intended to engage in any terrorist activity and had never been accused of so much as thinking about making a bomb.
Manipulation
Even some TV news reports tried to link Thomas to the Bali bombers. In what can only be described as a callous manipulation of relatives of the Bali victims, various TV channels interviewed them about their reactions to Thomas’ successful appeal. Unable to distinguish between the Bali
bombers, al Qaeda, Jemaah Islamiah or the Taliban, they condemned the appeals court decision as a “slap in the face”.
This is the sort of reaction the government and corporate media play for — the persecution of anyone they can label a “terrorist”, regardless of the case.
The Australian claimed that Thomas “decided whose side he was on in the war on terror years ago”. It simply ignored the fact that Thomas did declare his position on terrorism years ago — he was opposed to it — which is why he would not “provide a resource” for al Qaeda on his return to Australia.
Unfortunately, branding someone a “terrorist’” under Australia’s “anti-terror” laws isn’t difficult. The laws are broad: they deny people basic rights, allow detention at the whim of officials and the imposition of “control orders” on the flimsiest of police “beliefs”, and define “terrorism” in such broad terms that almost anybody can be caught by them.
For all their railing that Thomas “broke our laws”, Thomas’ media prosecutors avoid one salient point: three Court of Appeal judges threw out his convictions. They also avoid scrutinising the fact that in securing their “evidence” against Thomas the police broke the law when they extracted a “confession” from him under conditions where he had no choice but to “co-operate”. This is not a technicality; it is fundamental.
Without these protections, the police would be free to intimidate, bribe or blackmail a suspect into “confessing” to anything the police put in front of them. Thomas had been tortured by the Pakistanis, threatened with Guantanamo Bay and promised a return home for his co-operation as an alternative.
Not only did the AFP break these laws but, as the appeal judges pointed out, the AFP did so knowingly. The police pushed ahead anyway, no doubt hoping that the prevailing mood of fear whipped up by the Howard government’s “war on terror” would allow for these fundamental rights to be ignored.
Henderson argued in the August 22 Herald that the appeal court’s decision highlighted an emerging division within democracies. The division, as he sees it, is “between the civil liberties lobby, which believes the main contemporary threat to the West turns on an (alleged) diminution of liberty, and a democracy defence lobby, which maintains that radical Islamism poses a real and present danger to Western nations”. But, his characterisation of the so-called “democracy defence lobby” is way too mild. Howard’s “anti-terror laws”, like his Work Choices laws, are an infringement, not a defence, of democratic rights.
Control order
The media vilification campaign prepared the ground for Thomas being served, on August 28, with a control order by the AFP. Thomas, on holiday, was told to return to Melbourne immediately.
This is the first time a control order, one of the most draconian sections of the new “anti-terror” laws, has been served in Australia. They are not for those who have broken the law, but for what a person might, or might not, do in the future. They require little, if any, evidence to be provided to a magistrate to issue them.
The application for Thomas’ control order was made by the AFP. Under Australian law, the Attorney General can impose such penalties including the loss of liberty, directions about where and when an individual can work or travel and who they can communicate with and how. No other Western country has them. Some, like Britain, have control orders, but they also have a safeguard in the form of a bill of rights or human rights act in place.
In an August 31 Federal Magistrates Court hearing challenging the order, magistrate Graham Mowbray described the order as “silly”. However, he upheld the midnight-5am curfew pending a full hearing.
Les Thomas, Jack’s brother, said the order was served for “political reasons”. Attorney General Philip Ruddock justified the order as a means of “protecting the Australian public”. Just how Thomas’ confinement to his house between midnight and 5am every day, and his reporting to police three times a week, “protects” the Australian public remains unclear.
While the order was largely a face-saving device for the AFP and federal government, it has been widely exposed as a vindictive response to the quashing of Thomas’ convictions.
One of the reasons given by the AFP for the order was that Thomas’ wife, Maryati, used to go to an Indonesian school with a woman who later married a man who went on to become part of Jamaah Islamiah. This connection was quickly shown to be false. Other equally tenuous reasons were that Thomas’ military training might mean that Islamic extremists would seek him out for “advice”.
By far the clearest verification that the order is a political stunt is the list of people Thomas is banned from contacting. They include Osama bin Laden and Abu Musab al Zarqawi, the Jordanian-born leader of the Jamaat al Tawhid wal Jihad group, often referred to as “al’Qaeda in Iraq”. Al Zarqawi was killed by US forces in Iraq in June, and he is not the only dead man on the proscribed list. Thomas is also prohibited from contacting prisoners being held in Guantanamo Bay.
While the vilification and persecution of Thomas looks set to continue, his lawyer, Rob Stary, said that the control order will be “vigorously resisted”. If the order is upheld at the September 11 hearing it is likely that a High Court challenge to the laws will follow.
[Ray Fulcher is an activist with the Melbourne-based Civil Rights Defence. For an explanation of the Court of Appeal decision in the Thomas case see GLW #680.]
