31 July 2007

Trust your government or you support the terrorists

Hey, great: the Australian government has good reasons for kicking Dr. Haneef out of the country, it's just that they can't tell us what they are, because they're secret. This is exactly what the Blair government said about its reasons for invading Iraq at the time.

There's something clearly outrageous about the line of reasoning the Australian government are following in addition to this comparison, however. It is that their information is not enough to secure a conviction, but that it is enough to throw the man out of the country. This means that, were an Australian citizen to have done exactly the same things that Haneef did, they would be walking around in Australia. This either implies there's a loophole in the law that needs to be fixed (and I'm pretty sure there isn't), or Haneef isn't actually that dangerous. Moreover, the implication is that it's fine for Haneef to be on the loose in his home country, but not here, which is again nonsense if he's actually a terrorist, which of course, he is not, even a little bit. As if Haneef would be able to mount terrorist operations given the amount of scrutiny he'd be under after this anyway.