Mick Keelty effigy burned on Eureka Day

Following our blog post Mick Keelty burns at dawn, we report that an effigy of Australian Federal Police Commissioner Mick Keelty was indeed burned at dawn on Eureka Day, December 3, at the site of the Eureka Stockade rebellion of 1854.

Graeme Dunstan writes:

I reminded those standing beside me in witness, that Mick Keelty as chief commissioner for the AFP had served as the point man for the Bush/Howard Terror War in this land. Forty different pieces legislation were passed under the Howard regime and with the support of the ALP Opposition, to wind back our hard won rights and liberties.

The AFP had been invested with extraordinary powers of surveillance, arrest and detention, and under the highly politicized command of Mick Keelty, these powers had been inevitably and seriously abused.

The list of abuses is long and it includes the subversion of the ban of the death penalty in this land by the AFP arranging to have the Bali Nine arrested in Indonesia April 2005 and so face the death penalty there and teach other drug mules a lesson.

It includes the AFP people smuggling disruption operation that led the teach-them-a-lesson drowning of a 353 refugees (including 145 children) who had been aboard the over crowded and leaky vessel now known as the SIEVX on 17 October 2001. This was calculated evil at its worst.

It includes the arrest, detention, public vilification and show trials of the Barwon Twelve and the Goulburn Six, Australian muslims accused plotting terrorist acts. The evidence reveals these were mere thought crimes, that their association was under intense AFP surveillance and that AFP undercovers had actively fostered plans for bombings to the extend of teaching them how to make explosives out of fertilizer.

Why? To justify the extraordinary Terror War powers bestowed upon the AFP by Howard regime, the AFP command had deliberately chosen to abuse them.

And the AFP abuse of its power includes the arrest, detention and vilification of Dr Haneef. The recent report of the Clark inquiry had established that the AFP were informed early that there was no evidence of Haneef's complicity in terrorist activity but they pursued him none the less as "a person of interest" for another 8 months. Why? To create a Terror War media beat for Howard in the run up to the federal elections of 2007.

Rather than release the report of the Clark Inquiry into this particular abuse of powers, in the days before our Eureka observance, the federal Attorney General McClelland had announced the report would be shelved and in response to widespread calls to sack Keelty, he had said the Rudd regime would not. Too weak kneed!
Source: PeaceBus (many good links and photos).

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