Give us the truth

The new head of Australia’s spy agency (ASIO), Paul O’Sullivan, has given his first public appearance since assuming the job. A terrorist attack on home soil is possible, he claims. Tell us something we don’t know. He proves that he is a puppet of the Howard government by claiming there is no link between Iraq and an increased terrorist threat.

The Sydney Morning Herald’s Marian Wilkinson asks for some honesty:

“The Iraq war was not mentioned until a student asked if the war had made Australia more of a target. O’Sullivan gave the stock Government response: ‘It seems to me you can’t link that debate to whether or not Australia is a terrorist target because we were clearly a terrorist target before 9/11 and we remain a terrorist target.’

“It must be time for Australia’s intelligence chiefs to accept there is a critical debate under way in Europe and America that the war is providing a training ground for foreign terrorists who could end up attacking Westerners at home and abroad with more lethal skills.”

Australia was indeed a target before 9/11 but how much longer must we suffer these infantile claims that the Iraq disaster hasn’t increased our chances of being hit?

The Christian Science Monitor in June 2005:

“Iraq may prove to be a better training ground for terrorists that even Afghanistan was in the early days of Al Qaeda’s presence there, and the result is the “training a new kind of Islamic militant” according to the BBC. The New York Times reported Wednesday that this assessment, taken from a new classified CIA report of the situation in Iraq, says that the country is serving “as a real-world laboratory for urban combat.”

I suspect O’Sullivan knows very well that Australia’s involvement in Iraq – and Afghanistan – has brought us closer to a terrorist strike but he is unable to publicly say so because our intelligence agencies are so politicised and scared of telling government what it doesn’t want to hear.