100,000 Pages on His File

Our Oz police are ruthlessly efficient - in writing reports and making files. The inquest on people who died in the Lindt Cafe terrorist attack in Sydney revealed the almost horrifying small fact that  the 'Moderate Muslim'  who perpertrated the attack was so well known to the police, psychiatrists and Magistrates that his file was taller than I am.  Yet he was still out there roaming the streets like the ordinary law-abiding citizens. Even staunch chaps like m'self who also had a big fat file once. (but more of that later)

Now, if only he had tweeted a phrase or two 'insulting' muslims, or - horrors - posted to facebook some innocuous remark, he would be in the pokey

It was mentioned by someone in the Tavern today that only a smart, intelligent, empowered woman like Deputy Commissioner Burns (our Anti-Terrorism chief !!!) could  be so meticulous in her efforts to be tidy. And sure enough......

This 'thrust into high position' woman seems to be highly competetive,  faffing about in charge of the seige and reserving her decisions until every last known bit of 'intelligence' was in before making a decision, with her main competition  being Christine Nixon, who went out to a fancy restaurant dinner while people burned to death in Victoria's bush fire a few years back.

The mind boggles. 

Where do they find these incompetents? They must be running out of parachutes by now. Heavy drop ones in Nixon's case.

And while the inquest lumbers on producing many more pages for the file, a terrorist attack in Manchester diverts attantion to the other side of the world. 

No doubt when the smoke clears and medals are handed out, the inquest for the poor souls killed there will show that a 'moderate muslim' that the cops had 'had their eye on', was the cause and his file would be friggin' enormous too. 

And the magistrates and psychiatrists? 

“Why were the Magistrates who released Monis not called to give evidence?” NSW Police Association Acting President Tony King slams the Lindt Siege inquiry as a ‘witch hunt’.

I do have some sympathy for the copper on the beat. His time is wasted on trivia and report-writing, while the fat-cats above launder their political sheets. The shrinks are in no position to incarcerate, unlike the Magistrates, and their reports were accessed. It is there on Wiki already.....

On 29 May, (2015) lawyer Nazir Daawar said that he found Monis "a smart guy, but a very evil smart guy". Daawar refused to represent Monis over the Afghan letters and went so far as to say "he would have urged police to shoot him with 'no negotiation'". Dawaar had served in Afghanistan and demanded that Monis plead guilty over the letters he had written to families of soldiers that were killed there.Conversely, lawyer Chris Murphy told the court he thought Monis was "not very intelligent" and a "broken man" who "cried like a baby" when recounting alleged mistreatment in Silverwater jail. All of the lawyers spoke of Monis' attention-seeking behaviour.

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sydney_siege_inquest

At the end of the first week, a picture has emerged of "a complex, disturbed individual desperate for recognition and status but completely lacking the skills or achievements to bring that dream to life". Gormly summarised that "Monis could be plausible, courteous and controlled, but he was also almost entirely consumed in his own self-importance. ... By 2014 he owned no property, was in debt, and had developed no employment skills. His attempts to develop a personal, religious following ... had failed. ... He was facing future serious criminal charges... he had made no public impact of note on the Australian political scene". Monis may have felt that he had "little left to live for".

Several folk in the bars had things to say. Bernard for one was quite incensed. I am left, along with many other to take the words of my friend Starr as being as close to accurate as brevity allows and as one is allowed to see.  Starr said:

 Everyone, please remember the following protocol in relation to the Manchester atrocity:

1. This has nothing to do with Islam.

2. The person involved was a mentally ill 'lone wolf'.

3. Those who object to points 1 and 2 are racist islamophobic radical extreme right wing bigots.

4. Change Facebook profile to flag of inflicted country.

5. Light some candles, hold a vigil and go on a peace march.

6. Wait for the next slaughter to happen.

7. This is Trump's fault.

8. Create a hashtag in support of Muslims who will be the victim of racist attacks for this.

9. Repeat.

 Points one and two seem to encapsulate the 'Official' attitude. 

Even as the conversations developed, the TV news in the Oz room was full of 'advice' from those same police forces, to 'report anything suspicious'. But don't you dare mention 'Muslim' or you will be arrested for Islamophobia and/or Racism.  Best advice would be to choose your words carefully lest you are the one that falls under the suspicious eye of the  police filing clerks. It is not a surprise that the shrinks all steered clear of mentioning that Monis' entire life has been indoctrinated by islamic hatreds and carnage-demanding. 

But Bernard Gaynor gave us the good oil on our Oz inquest.

Martin Place: 

the greatest domestic intelligence failure in Australian history

The Martin Place siege report is an alarming read.

That’s not because of what it identified, which should give every Australian goose bumps anyway, but because it has actually covered up what should be described as the greatest domestic intelligence failure in Australian history.

There are only three sentences in this report that you need to read to understand this. They can be found on page vii:

http://bernardgaynor.com.au/martin-place-the-greatest-domestic-intelligence-failure-in-australian-history/

“Monis was well known to security and police agencies. He had been investigated a number of times and successfully convicted on 12 postal charges. He had met with police and ASIO representatives on numerous occasions and these agencies, along with others, 

held hundreds of thousands of pages of information on him.”

These sentences demonstrate clearly, concisely and in no uncertain terms that the government spies knew about Monis. His collective file, as detailed in the report, is hundreds of thousands of pages long. 

If it was only 100,000 pages long, (as my title suggested) it would be at least 11 metres thick. Oops, my mistake. Each page is probably printed ‘double-sided’ to help ‘save’ the environment, so make that a more modest 5.5 metres.

Still that’s pretty sizable. 

But it did no good at all. 

In fact, the New South Wales police would have been better served by this file if they had used it to build themselves a bullet-proof barricade against the non-Islamic, Islamic State supporter. Or maybe they could have set fire to it and tried to smoke him out.

Alas, however, Michael Thawley, AO, the Secretary of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet and Blair Comley, PSM, the Secretary of the New South Wales Premier and Cabinet, would have us believe that there was no failure in the fact that these agencies held more than 100,000 pages on Man Haron Monis, even though not one of them identified that he was terror threat.

On page 52 of this report, they asked themselves a rhetorical question:

“A further question is whether the judgments about the threat he posed were reasonably made at the time.”

I say rhetorical because they had already answered it up at the front of the report on page iv. Here it is:

“Overall, the Review has found that the judgments made by government agencies were reasonable and that the information that should have been available to decision-makers was available.”

And a page later, reflecting on the assessments made about Monis:

“None of the results of these investigations, or the continuous assessment of information related to Monis in the intervening periods, provided any indication he had the intention to commit an act such as the Martin Place siege.”

Seriously.

Are we really meant to believe that a forest could be cut down so reports could be written on Monis because he wasn’t a threat?

And are we really meant to believe that some guy could clock up 100,000 plus pages of reporting and every security, intelligence and policing agency in the nation could still determine that he wasn’t dangerous or a priority?

Obviously, something somewhere has gone very badly wrong in the intelligence assessments.

In the week before the siege, 18 complaints were made to counter-terrorism agencies about Man Haron Monis. ASIO checked those reports and found nothing to worry about, even though Monis was on bail for helping to murder his wife, hung out with Hizb ut Tahrir and had just lost a court case where he was found guilty of sending offensive, menacing and harassing letters to the families of dead Aussie diggers. To carry out his crime, Monis had to find their addresses. That’s not a comforting thought.

Yet no alarm went off anywhere in early December and alarms are still not going off now.

However, two lives and almost 100 more pages of reporting into Monis later, the sirens should be blaring out a loud warning and flares should be sent high into the sky. It is an embarrassing fact that 18 members of the general public identified that Monis was a terror threat a week out from the Martin Place siege, yet the entire national security apparatus failed to come to the same conclusion when it was brought to the professionals’ attention.

That is a failure in any language.

It is unforgiveable that the Martin Place siege report has absolved the intelligence and security agencies for what is a clear failure.

And it is unforgiveable that the intelligence and security agencies are so clearly failing because they are not falling for a well-planned deception campaign. 

They are deceiving themselves because political-correctness has destroyed logic and moral courage.

The rot, as it always does, starts at the top.

The former boss of ASIO, David Irvine, gave a public address in August last year. It was one of his last public statements in his role. And it contained the following gems about the threat we face:

“Those involved seek motivation, legitimacy and justification for their use of violence (directed against “non-believers” or, more simply, anyone they perceive as being against them and their beliefs) from a self-righteous, twisted and, I suspect, hatred-filled interpretation of one of the world’s great and enriching religions – Islam. We have seen not dissimilar phenomena or distortions in other great religions over the centuries.”

Yes, folks, this was the Head of our 'Intelligence' Service.  

and

“These terrorist organisations, which young Australians are joining, are willing to sacrifice young brain-washed souls in the name of a distorted, hate-filled interpretation of Islam.”

In plain language.... how dare you Oz citizens be scared shitless and witless, blaming these poor, innocent contributors to our rich and vibrant multicultural society. Islamists, mohammedans, muslims, whathaveyou, are lovely people. You though are nasty bigots. 

and

“In my experience the overall leadership of the community of Muslim Australians in dealing with these issues, always in their own quiet way, has been outstanding. In this sense, the Australian Muslim community has made, and will continue to make, its own valuable contributions to our national character, our national livelihood, our national security and to our national cohesion.”

and

“Let me reiterate, we are not fighting Islam, in Australia or anywhere else.”

Now for those who might think that I placed an undue focus on female half-wits in positions of power, please see this a 'balance'. 

But..... he is right of course. We are not fighting Islam. Islam is fighting us. We sit on our arses blaming the poor sap down the street who pays his  taxes to feed the likes of Irvine, Burns and Nixon et al. We call him a bigot. 

I particularly like the fact that the Director General of ASIO has paid tribute to the ‘quiet’ way Muslims have dealt with these issues. Silent is the word I might have used, and it would not be a compliment. I also can’t help but chuckle at the fact that this community has been praised by David Irvine for its contribution to national security. But at least he’s acknowledging the reason ASIO has grown in size so rapidly over the last decade. 

Australia’s Islamic community is the best thing that ever happened for an empire builder at ASIO.

The only conclusion any ASIO intelligence officer listening to this speech could come to is that he’d lose his job if he made a critical assessment about the nature of Islamic belief on terrorism. He’d probably also conclude that logic is irrelevant at ASIO HQ.

David Irvine admits that there is a violent strain of Islam. And then he goes on to state that we are not at war with Islam. At all. Not even with the distorted, hate-filled interpretation that even he recognises exists.

Au contraire, my friend. That ‘violent, hate-filled’ ‘distortion’ has declared war on Australia. And that is why Australian jets are dropping bombs in Iraq.

The very fact that Irvine makes this concession about Islam means that he has a duty to ask the next question: is there something inherent to the nature of Islam that leads to the creation of the Islamic States and al Qaedas and Hezbollahs and Hizb ut Tahrirs and Jaish al Mahdis and any other number of violent groups?

To answer that, you must understand Mohammed. And if you read Mohammed’s life, then you will quickly come to the conclusion that the answer is yes. Mohammed was violent and his followers are too. Any student of history can attest to this.

Instead, Irvine goes on about an enriching religion without being able to offer any logical justification for his claim.

Like I said, logic and moral courage have gone. There is no starker contrast than this:

If you work in an intelligence agency and decide that you want to be a woman, everyone will take you at your word and believe that you are female, regardless of all the evidence to the contrary.

But if you work in an intelligence agency monitoring a terrorist who states that they are Muslim, quotes from the Koran and then behaves in exactly the same manner as Mohammed, then everyone will dismiss the terrorist’s words and actions and try and find some other ‘deeper’ meaning for them.

And that is why ever larger intelligence agencies produce hundreds of thousands of pages of reporting that don’t help anyone. 

Fairy tales are believed and reality is ignored. It is as simple as that.

Unfortunately, the future is likely to show more of the same.

The Martin Place siege report also makes the following alarming finding:

“Monis was assessed by ASIO in early December 2014. On the basis of the information available at the time, he fell well outside the threshold to be included in the 400 highest priority counter-terrorism investigations. He was only one of several thousand people of potential security concern.”

There you have it. There are at least 400 dudes having coffee out there right now that intelligence and security agencies believe are more dangerous than Man Haron Monis. 

And there are several thousand more just like him.

ASIO is responsible for assessing domestic security threats and it only has just over 1,600 staff. As such, it is impossible for ASIO to adequately monitor this number of threats. The only assessment that can be made with any level of confidence is that an attack could be planned and carried out without any security or intelligence agency knowing about it. Actually, we have seen that even if the security agencies know about the Man Haron Monises, they can carry out their attacks anyway.

I had to fill many tankards and moved down the bar, so if you want to hear the rest of what Bernard had to say (all useful comment) just go to the link.

 Meanwhile, I mused over the lessons to be learned. We know it well.

The Powers that Be are NOT on your side.

Once when we went to war, be it against a national enemy or a civil scourge, we would claim God to be on our side. Hmmmm. My Supplier wants you on His side. 

It is essential in this great battle against a demonic enemy that we do what is right. In which case, first rule is, love the sinner. Yes, we may hate the sin of Islam, and we should, but the mohammedan is in Thrall. 

It is a difficult conundrum.

But that does not excuse our public servants. They should be sent down.

Oh yes. That big fat file of mine. I didn't know I had even a slim one. Well not true. I figured I had one but had no idea of its size. It was kept in the old KGB HQ in Dzerzinski Street with the jails underneath.

A friendly soviet agent  in Melbourne at the end of the cold war told me all about my file. It seems it was quite thick. 

Drink up. Strengthen that right arm.  It may have to lift a file or two of your own one day, kept up to date by a police clerk. Mz Burns herself perhaps.

Pax