BY NORM DIXON
Australia's big-business media — in particular Rupert Murdoch's stable of daily newspapers — continue to deliver a barrage of increasingly sensational "revelations" about Willie Brigitte, the French citizen deported from Australia on October 17 for violating his tourist visa.
Since news of Brigitte's deportation broke in Australia on October 27, the mass media, the federal and NSW governments, and their police and spy agencies, have attempted to whip up a "terrorist" scare campaign based on little more than assertions, rumours, exaggerations — and outright lies.
However, no evidence has been presented to back the most extravagant claims being made by the media, governments and police against Brigitte: that he established "terrorist cells" in Sydney's south-west; that he was an al Qaeda "sleeper agent"; that he was recruiting members for terrorist groups and training them in bomb-making; that he was planning a terrorist attack on "Australian soil"; and that he has been involved in terrorist plots around the world.
Brigitte remains in jail in Paris. He has not been charged with any offence, but is being investigated for the vague catch-all "criminal association relating to a terrorist enterprise", unrelated to his visit to Australia. Under French anti-terrorism law, Brigitte can be held without charge for up to four years.
The Australian media continues to recycle claims that originated from French Radio Europe 1 reporter Alain Acco's October 25-26 account of Brigitte's story, which was largely based on assertions by anonymous sources "close to" the flamboyant French "anti-terrorist" magistrate Jean-Louis Bruguiere. Bruguiere has been regularly criticised by human rights groups for his use of unwarranted and indiscriminate detention.
For example, on November 8, Murdoch's Brisbane Courier-Mail and other papers in the News Limited stable claimed, "Terror suspect Willie Brigitte has admitted negotiating with terrorist chiefs in Pakistan to harbour an explosives expert in Sydney." A string of articles in the Murdoch papers in the days that followed speculated that the "explosives expert" may now be somewhere in Australia.
In fact, according to Acco's "sources", Brigitte refused "to house an explosives expert from Pakistan". According to Acco, Brigitte told his interrogators that he "led a quiet life in Sydney". Yet, this denial continues to be twisted into its opposite.
Federal attorney-general Philip Ruddock has seized on every new "revelation" to push for the Australian Security and Intelligence Organisation's already draconian interrogation and detention powers to be made tougher.
On November 3, ASIO chief Dennis Richardson openly backed Ruddock's push for more police powers when he complained to a Senate estimates committee that government's ASIO legislation contained "inadequacies in respect to the practical workings of it".
Richardson told the committee that Brigitte "was almost certainly involved in activities with the intention of doing harm in Australia", yet in almost the same breath admitted that ASIO did not use its already extensive powers to hold and question him. "[The Brigitte case] was treated ... as a relatively routine matter and ... it was not given a high priority", Richardson said.
Nevertheless, the corporate press has uncritically repeated ASIO and police "beliefs", "suspicions" and "fears" as fact (the word "authorities" is often used to disguise the true source).
The most incredible of these were splashed across the front pages of Murdoch's newspapers on November 10, with headlines such as "Brigitte's N-reactor bomb plot". "Australian authorities now fear that suspected al Qaeda bomber may have been plotting attacks against Sydney's Lucas Heights nuclear reactor, or military sites such as Garden Island naval base and Holsworthy army barracks", Murdoch reporter Martin Chulov wrote in the Australian and other News Limited newspapers.
The evidence for this sensational claim? "ASIO ... conducted secret hearings last week ... and has reaffirmed initial suspicions that [Brigitte] was a skilled bomb-maker sent to Australia to commit a serious terrorist act... Brigitte's potential interest in strategic nuclear and military sites has been discussed at length in at least one of the hearings. However, it is not clear whether it was a worst-case scenario or stemmed from a fact-based piece of intelligence]." Translation: ASIO probably made it all up.
The Australian Associated Press (AAP) on November 10 presented the Australian's ASIO-generated "scoop" as "reports that suspected terrorist Willie Brigitte may have been planning a terror attack on Sydney's Lucas Heights nuclear reactor". The Melbourne Age compressed it further: "The Frenchman accused of posing a terror risk to Australia ... may have been planning an attack on Sydney's Lucas Heights nuclear reactor."
Remarkably, the France-based Agence France Presse on November 10 chose to drop all reference to ASIO as the source, reporting: "Without identifying its sources, the Australian said Monday that Brigitte may have been plotting an attack on the reactor."
(The Brigitte case is not big news in France. In fact, most coverage there comes from the AAP wire service and Australian newspapers; major French media clearly don't believe there is much to the story.)
Rather than point out that the entire "N-plot" story was fabricated in an ASIO brainstorm-session (correction, "secret hearing"), Ruddock chose to keep it on the boil by ambiguously stating on November 10: "There are a number of locations in our community, which are essentially vulnerable. Part of the nature of intelligence is to work out locations that could be at risk."
However, the ASIO-Murdoch "N-plot" almost immediately began to unravel after the Seven Network on November 11 — based on a report aired in France by none other than Radio Europe 1's Alain Acco — claimed that French "investigators" had "revealed" that Brigitte had admitted to being part of a cell planning to blow up Australia's only nuclear reactor.
According to Seven, Acco's French "sources" claimed that "Australian authorities" had told the French secret police that photos of Lucas Heights and a recipe for explosives had been found in Brigitte's Lakemba flat.
This hodge-podge of a "report" reveals something of how Brigitte is being framed by the media and security forces. It seems that Acco's French state sources fed him a version of the bogus ASIO "worst-case scenario" leaked to the Murdoch press. Sections of the Australian media then picked it up and presented it as more "proof" that a plot had been under way.
By November 12, even the federal government seems to have felt it was necessary to tone down the hysteria, lest it be completely discredited. An unnamed spokesperson for Ruddock quietly went to the press and "categorically denied" that any photos of Lucas Heights or lists of bomb ingredients had been found at Brigitte's home.
Ruddock's spokesperson candidly admitted to AAP on November 12 that ASIO and the Australian Federal Police (AFP) did not have evidence with which to prosecute Brigitte: "There's nothing on the table at the moment ... If we had credible evidence against him, he would have dealt with him here."
Chulov's November 10 Australian article also reported that "police" had "discounted a theory espoused" by the French secret police that Brigitte "was sent here to shelter a bomb-maker. Instead, they believe he himself had the bomb-making expertise and was very likely to try to establish a terror cell".
On what basis was the conclusion reached that Brigitte was in fact an "explosives expert"? Clearly, not from new information from Brigitte. On November 11, the Australian reported (in an article co-written by Chulov) that senior AFP agents had yet to question Brigitte in France. The report stated that AFP director of counter-terrorism Tim Morris was to travel to Paris later that week "in an attempt to discover details of [Brigitte's] movements in Australia".
Nor does it seem to be based on ASIO and AFP interviews with the Sydney people whose homes were raided after Brigitte's deportation, since everybody has been released without charge after being questioned.
All this baldly contradicts a hysterical November 7 Herald Sun article, also co-written by Chulov and clearly based on briefings from the AFP and ASIO: "Two of Willie Brigitte's Australian associates have bomb-making skills that authorities fear were passed on by the al Qaeda-linked explosives expert before he was deported...
"Both agencies are trying to add confessions to a strong circumstantial case they have built against some of Brigitte's Australian associates... Debriefings of Brigitte, and an investigation into his five months in Sydney, have also led police and ASIO to believe he was the leader of a fledgling terrorist cell and was trying to recruit a number of locals.
"Authorities are now convinced Brigitte had the knowledge and background to build sophisticated bombs and are also exploring suggestions he was skilled in the use of poisons. They say his sojourn in Australia had all the hallmarks of a classic terrorist sleeper operation that had entered a dangerous phase.
"Authorities have come to the conclusion the local men are most likely to have developed their explosives skills through training but are unsure about where or when their lessons took place[!]."
In reality, this article — and the Murdoch media's entire coverage of the Brigitte affair — has all the hallmarks of a classic ASIO misinformation operation designed to fan the terrorism scare and frighten the Australian people into accepting even more anti-democratic secret-police powers.
From Green Left Weekly, November 19, 2003.
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