Quick Shots - 12/Mar/2015

At Least He Won't Get Tortured

Contrary to my belief that he would end up in G'itms getting tortured by the US Marines, Jake Bilardi seems to have gone up in smoke with a suicide bombing squad.

The passport of a Melbourne schoolboy apparently killed carrying out a suicide bombing in Iraq overnight was cancelled in October last year, just months after the teenager left Australia to fight with Islamic State. 

Islamic State claims the schoolboy, who converted to Islam aged 16 after self-radicalising on the internet, died in a series of co-ordinated car bombs across the city of Ramadi.

Foreign Minister Julie Bishop says the government is trying to independently verify Mr Bilardi's death and has been aware of his presence in Iraq and Syria "for a number of months".

I guess that's that.

Lives Still In The Balance

It's strange that we're all worked up about Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumuran as a nation, but... we are. We just are. But it still seems a little too soon for a post-mortem of the sequence of events. All the same, this bit caught my eye:

Regrettably, when we attempt to analyse the sequence of events leading up to this point, it seems Australian institutions are just as adept at sidestepping difficult questions and inconvenient truths. Last Thursday the head of the Australian Federal Police, Andrew Colvin, categorically denied the agency would have blood on its hands if the executions went ahead, pointing to judicial findings that vindicated the actions of the AFP. 

As it happens, the Federal Court of Australia did indeed rule that the AFP acted lawfully in providing information about the Bali Nine to the Indonesian National Police (INP). The issue of culpability, though, ought to go beyond what might be narrowly construed by the courts and also ask broader, doubtless more vexed, questions that encompass moral as well as legal imperatives. Did the AFP comply with specific national legislation and protocols relating to international police assistance? Yes, they did. Did they also act in a way that exposed Australian citizens to the death penalty? Yes, they most certainly did. 

Former Justice Minister Duncan Kerr was highly critical of the way the AFP ran the Bali Nine operation, noting that standard operating procedure at the time was understood to be "do not co-operate in capital punishment investigations". In particular, Kerr criticised the way the operation seemed to reflect the broader problem of Australia's equivocal approach to the death penalty. 

There's also no doubt the actions of the AFP went against the spirit of the Mutual Assistance Act but, perplexingly, protocols guiding informal police-to-police assistance differ from the Mutual Assistance Act and did, in fact, permit the AFP to assist in the investigation stages of offences that attract the death penalty.

Basically, they were sold out to a country that would execute people and the AFP is denying culpability on a bunch of legal technicality. They put people in harm's way. I'm sure they sleep well at night but it seems to me a form of self-preservation unbecoming of men who stand for the law.