I called this talk 'Writing the story of SIEVX'. This talk isn't about setting out the case for the sabotage of SIEVX and the drowning of 353 of its passengers as a political act of deterrence: that is what my book will be about. This talk is about issues that had to be dealt with, in my coming to the point where I felt this book has to be written, and some of the questions that process raised.
I'm very glad to be speaking on the day before Anzac Day because I want to set on record - and I should not have to do this, but I must - my patriotism and loyalty to my country, and my pride in my country's defence forces. My father was in the Navy in WW2, and I am proud of Australia's tradition of honourable self-defence.
Only last Sunday, the Australian Defence Forces Bishop, Tom Frame, was speaking on 'The National Interest' ( ABC radio) with Terry Lane. I found their conversation very interesting, and I'd like to recall it briefly.
There were two main issues. Firstly, why is there so much disagreement in practice over what is a just war, e.g. in the case of the coalition's recent invasion of Iraq? Secondly, what are the obligations of servicemen and women to conduct themselves ethically in their military duties?
As I understood Tom Frame's answers, and I hope I haven't misinterpreted him, he said this. Firstly, part of the reason why there is so much practical disagreement as to whether a particular war is just or unjust is because different people have different access to intelligence. Some people know more. Therefore, while for example the Pope and the Archbishop of Canterbury and others may feel the Iraq War was not just, there may be people in the system with access to intelligence that gives them the assurance that it was just.
His second point was that the moral responsibility for deciding to go to war is carried by the Prime Minister and the Chief of the Australian Defence Force - John Howard and Peter Cosgrove. These two men cannot separate their personal responsibility from their public responsibility. On their shoulders is carried the moral responsibility of a decision to go to war.
The rest of the ADF and national security bureaucracy , it would seem - though Frame did not spell this out - can basically carry out orders, in the knowledge that those two senior office-holders have done the necessary hard moral decision-making on everyone's behalf.
Now I find that a disturbing doctrine (and I hope I have not misunderstood Tom Frame). To me, this is a view of the world which says:
a) if we don't think this is a just war, we probably don't have enough of the necessary information; and
b) in any case, it is the job of the PM and the head of the ADF to make those judgements - it is not my job as a serviceman or woman.
So this is a comforting doctrine. But it is also a doctrine that can lead to evil actions being pursued by people who can say 'well, I really had no alternative'. That worries me, and I recall a couple of relevant examples.
First, that wonderful film 'A Few Good Men' in which Jack Nicholson played a leading character, the Marines Colonel in charge of a US Army base - I won't go into the plot, but the story really concerns the proposition that democratic societies are defended by military forces who must be prepared to do 'whatever it takes' to defend the values of those democratic societies. The proposition advanced by the Nicholson character was:
'You don't need to know what we have to in order to defend you. We do what has to be done. You have the luxury of being defended by us. Don't ask us to justify what we do, in terms of your ideas of public morality'.
The other example is a fine film which has just been doing the rounds, Graham Greene's 'Quiet American'. In terms of the film's portrayal of the character and actions of Pyle, the quiet American, he comes across as a very disturbing character also. While Pyle's personal morality is amiable and decent, he quite comfortably helps set up a crime against humanity, whereby large numbers of people are killed or maimed, as an act of political expediency. The blowing up of the town square and the massacre of innocent people is seen as a means to an end of hanging something on the Communists, and of creating more pressure to up the ante in the war, through giving military support to the people who planted the bombs - the anti-Communist warlords whom Pyle as a US intelligence agent was supporting.
And Pyle thought this was all OK. I forget his exact phrases but the thoughts were on the lines of 'sometimes out of evil, good comes' or 'you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs' - all on the general line that the end justifies the means.
I believe we are in that same territory with the SIEVX story; the 'suspected illegal entry vessel, unknown' which sank on 19 October on its way to Australia's Christmas Island, drowning 353 people including 146 children and 142 women: so the passengers were mostly women and children.
You probably remember these (display photos) iconic photographs which were all over newspaper front pages at the time - this one, of three little sisters Fatima, Zahra and Eman, who drowned, trapped in the hold of the capsized boat; and this one of their mother, Sondos Ismail, who survived and is now a Temporary Protection Visa holder in Australia, reunited with her husband Ahmed. They lost all their children. Thank God, her husband was able to bring her to join him here, and they have now had another baby, but their future is very uncertain, as they are both on temporary protection visas.
Sondos and Ahmed exemplify the human face of SIEVX. But there are 353 stories like this. Every bereaved family has a dignity and a value in the sight of God, and every family has suffered a huge personal tragedy.
I approach SIEVX primarily as a moralist, concerned about the sanctity of human life, and about the need for integrity in governance. I am not particularly engaged in questions of refugee policy - such questions are important, but that is not my game.
I'm interested in the Fifth Commandment, 'Thou shalt not kill', and I'm interested in restoring integrity to the government of my country. It is apparent to me that what was done to repel and deter asylum-seekers from coming to this country in unauthorised boats in 2000-2001 was immoral and, I believe, criminal - and I am trying to prove that.
When I started on all of this in February last year, I was really just asking questions. I didn't conceive that things could be quite as bad as I concluded six months later that they were. I was thinking - well, there must have been some sort of a cock-up, there must have been some sort of confusion, because there were inconsistencies, quite glaring ones, in the public record.
For example, we put out a 'boat overdue' notice on a boat that we were not supposed to know was coming. Both those propositions cannot logically be true: one of them must be false.
The second question was the claim that we did not know where the boat sank. I could not believe that Australia's highly resourced surveillance system which had been put in place right up to the Indonesian limit of territorial seas, to within 24 miles of Indonesia - with all those boats and aircraft and over-the-horizon radar systems - did not know this boat was coming, and that there was no opportunity to take some search and rescue action.
And then finally there was this very disturbing survivor report which just accidentally popped up in a newspaper report on 21 December 2001 about the arrival here of a 12 year old girl who had lost her whole family, Zainab. The story said survivors remembered seeing ships in the night, that shone searchlights but made no attempt to rescue them. The next day they were told by Indonesian fishermen who picked them up:
'Oh, they must have been Australian Navy ships, you were very close to Australia's Christmas Island.'
Now that was a lie - the boat was only one-quarter of the way to Christmas Island when it sank. They were almost certainly not Australian Navy ships, but what were those ships?
So I started asking questions, and I plugged into the Senate's Children Overboard enquiry as a vehicle for asking those questions. Fortunately, the agenda of the enquiry, the mandate, was close enough to what I was interested in for me to be able to inject those questions. (Government) Senator George Brandis made my task vastly easier, by broadening the mandate of the Committee to include all asylum-seeker boats, not just the one on which a children overboard photograph was falsified - because he wanted to suggest that there had been a general pattern of throwing children in the water and so forth on these other boats. So basically, in what Senator John Faulkner described as 'the greatest own goal in Australian politics', Senator Brandis widened the mandate to one that allowed me to raise SIEVX.
The Committee itself was long and tortuous but what emerged to me more and more as it wove its way was the power and the systemic determination of Government to manipulate information going to that Committee. There was a whole war room next door, of government officials listening to the Committee, computer screens in front of them, ready to respond and check and spin - to do whatever needed to be done to keep the Committee on the track they wanted it to stay on.
And yet the officials kept tripping over each other. They kept making the most incredible mistakes. And inconsistencies kept multiplying. As they corrected one problem, they created another. There's no time here to go into the detail - this will all be in my book - but it was a remarkable exercise in how a large bureaucracy couldn't really keep its story consistent for any length of time.
In the end, government witnesses were just flatly declining to answer questions. In the end, with the full support of Prime Minister Howard, Senator Hill ( Defence Minister), and Senator Ellison ( Minister responsible for the Australian Federal Police), the witnesses from the civil service, the defence force and the police, were really just obfuscating, denying, and - when required to submit official documents - serving them up with huge areas of censorship, of black ink, through them .
In the end it all became a bit of a sad exercise, and the Committee report itself was a kind of a whitewash. But not completely. The report itself which came out in October 2002, just over one year after the tragedy, had enough loose ends in it that there were issues that had to continue to be pursued. And fortunately, Labor and Democrat Senators on the Committee, Bartlett, Faulkner, Cook and Jacinta Collins, have continued in Estimates Committees and other Committees to pursue those kinds of questions, against an increasingly truculent and obstructive and defiant official witness body - who, more and more, having the protection of Government behind them, feel no obligation to answer questions fully or honestly.
It is a rather frightening situation. And that is the kind of governance we have in Australia now. We have public servants, police and military people, who are perhaps intimidated by worries about their career prospects, and who are reassured by a concept of national duty such as that Bishop Tom Frame was setting out last weekend: feeling that they basically have no alternative but to do the government's bidding.
And they were taught in 2001-2002 to think of the boat people as a kind of invasion. Although these boat people were unarmed, although they came simply seeking our permission to be treated as refugees and to make new homes in our country, they were regarded as a hostile force and as a group of people who had to be deterred and stopped and repelled. And of course in all of that, our humanity was lost sight of.
It's difficult for me to convince people of the truth of this. There are several pitfalls.
First of all, it quickly risks sliding into an argument about refugee policy:
'Do you think that we can let people come here in unlimited numbers? Do you think that we can just let people come here without permission?'
It slides away from 'Thou shalt not kill' to that kind of argument. And I have to keep pulling it back, and saying:
'Look, that's not my issue. It's not my issue what you do to determine people's refugee status, or what you do - while respecting the sanctity of their lives - if you decide they are not refugees. My game is about not killing people'.
The other area that is difficult is:
'Well, where is your proof?'
That is a interesting question. I never had legal training, and I never quite learnt what 'courtroom evidence' constitutes. What I do have as a former career diplomat is a great deal of practical training and application in the analysis of intelligence and information:
'Where does this data lead ? What does it suggest? What are the most likely probabilities that emerge out of this data?'
I spent 30 years doing that, and I believe I was pretty good at it. But I do not have a feel for courtroom proof.
And so I try to explain to people the nature of inductive evidence:
'If it looks like a duck and walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it probably is a duck. It could be an undiscovered species of bird that does all those things but actually is not a duck. But the likeliest probability is that it is a duck.'
That is what I call inductive evidence. So much of what I will rely on in the book is that kind of evidence: that there is all this detailed accumulation of facts that cannot really, credibly, be explained by any other thesis than this particular one. Each one of them individually might have another possible explanation, but when you put them all together, the probabilities of other explanations diminish.
Now, the favoured alternative explanation is that the people smuggler Abu Quassey was greedy and ruthless, and that he was assisted by equally greedy and ruthless and corrupt Indonesian police, who helped him and shared the profits with him.
I examined that thesis in detail and scrupulously. But the accumulation of the evidence that I have put together and that others - most importantly, the archival website www.sievx.com - have helped put together simply does not sustain that thesis.
It does sustain the thesis that SIEVX was deliberately overloaded with 421 people, on a 19.5 meter boat, 4 meters wide, with a chipboard upper deck recently fitted to create more deck space to carry more people. 421 people were crammed onto that little boat like sardines, and the boat was sent out to sink -not to get to Christmas Island, but to sink, as a deterrent, as a powerful message that people smugglers are ruthless, that they will risk your lives, that they will take your money, and may kill you.
And it worked. People smuggling stopped almost immediately after SIEVX. Within a couple of weeks the flow of boats had dried up completely. Because the people involved, the customer base, the refugees and asylum-seekers in the little guesthouses around Bogor and Cisarua, realised that the people who were trying to stop them coming to Australia were prepared to kill them - and that stopped them.
Of course this is all deniable. None of this is going to be admitted, because it does not fit with our sense of who we are. And my book is going to tell how a system of plausible deniability was set in place.
Once again, I can best explain this with a couple of literary analogies - first, the story of Henry II and Thomas A'Becket. An angry King complains:
'Will someone rid me of this troublesome priest?'
Now a couple of nobles, courtiers, thinking 'Ah, so that's what the King wants' go off and do Thomas A'Becket in. The King didn't order it. But he signalled it was what he wanted done. And the King went all the way on his knees to Rome to beg forgiveness for that crime.
The other example is the Mafia expression - 'there's a pebble in my shoe'. Once again, the Godfather doesn't have to say 'Take out Annunzio over there', he just says 'There's a pebble in my shoe', and down the line the word goes, that the boss wants something done - and it gets done.
It gets done, often using intermediaries and other agents. It gets done often in ways that we don't know the detail of how it was done. But it gets done.
And that's the kind of system that I see taking place in this people smuggling disruption program in Indonesia, this clandestine program only reluctantly and grudgingly admitted, under pressure of Senate questioning, during the Committee last year and in Estimates Committee at around the end of last year. But still we don't have full information on what this program's charter and mandate was, or what it did. But we do know enough to know that the disruption program set up Indonesian police teams, that it worked with illicit criminal operators like Kevin Enniss, and that it conducted sting operations, of the kind I am talking about.
What kind of a book is it going to be ? A book that I hope will be a gripping read. It's a book that I hope will make a great film, combining features of 'The Titanic' with 'Enemy of the State' or 'The Bourne Identity'. It is going to be a thriller and a tragic human drama, if a film producer comes along with the vision to turn it into a film. I'll try to keep the film rights !
Incidentally I invented the name 'SIEVX' - I coined it because Senator Brandis had told us about all these SIEVs, these suspected illegal entry vessels, there were 12 of them, and I said 'well, this was the thirteenth'. And the irony was that the evidence subsequently turned out that when they thought this boat was coming, they named it 'SIEV8', but then when they knew it had sunk, they simply transferred the number to a subsequent boat, because they did not want to have a discontinuity in the numerical series. So my choice of name SIEVX was more apt than I realised at the time.
On the history of the book: initially, I had the idea that I would not need to write a book, in the sense that I thought that once I got enough of this evidence out onto the public record, our watchful media would pick up on it, and it would become Australia's Watergate, it would become a public story, and I would just sit back and watch the ripples in the pond move out.
It didn't happen that way, because our media and publishers did not seem able to deal with this story. It is too huge and too confronting. It says too much about ourselves, that we don't necessarily want to hear.
And so I persistently found a disheartening cycle, of initial interest followed by withdrawal. It happened every time, with all sorts of people including some very liberal iconic people whose names I will not mention. In the end I decided, like the little red hen in the children's story, that I've got to plant the grain and grow the wheat and bake the bread myself, if I am to have any chance of eating the loaf.
I haven't had a huge amount of help on this, though I have had some very important areas of help.
It was disappointing dealing with book publishers. I went through two cycles of initial hope followed by disillusionment with major publishers, and each time I could not understand why. Each time I ended up with nothing.
Somehow at the end of the day - perhaps it was a process of hardening, what was it Nietszche said, 'what does not kill me makes me stronger' - I have this tremendous feeling of confidence that I can write a good book on SIEVX , that I'm going to write a good book, and that I'm going to write it without an advance from any publisher.
And at the end of the day I hope I will sell it. But if I do not sell it -too bad, it will be given to libraries and research institutes which have an interest in these matters, and one day it will be a source reference for getting at the full truth of this.
So that is the spirit in which I'm now writing the book, and I am feeling very positive and upbeat about it. And I was enormously encouraged by the 'Whistleblower Award' I received a few weeks ago from the London-based Index on Censorship organisation, that actually nominated my work on SIEVX as meriting an International Whistleblower award. I may never get an Order of Australia or Australia Medal, but I got an International Whistleblower!
Regarding the writing of the book: I am well into it, I've written most of the first part of the book. Like Gaul, the book is divided into three parts. First is a careful look at the public record in the weeks immediately following the disaster, and about what can be derived with the wisdom of hindsight simply from that public record. And the amazing thing is that the public record itself, when you go into it, contains huge inconsistencies and raises huge questions. There was a large amount of information sloshing around Jakarta in the early days following the disaster, that could not possibly have come only from survivors.
For example, information about the chipboard upper deck: how would survivors know that a makeshift chipboard upper deck had recently been fitted to the boat ? How would they recognize this? How would survivors know that the boat was 19.5 meters by 4 meters ? How would survivors know that 421 people went on board, when they were sent out in launch loads of 25 each in the middle of the night to a darkened boat, having come in five buses in a convoy? How would they know there were exactly 421? How would they know the details of how many got off, how many drowned, how many survived?
We are dealing with hugely traumatised people in the immediate aftermath of a disaster. Would you ask a passenger from the recent Wollongong train disaster how many people had been travelling on the train ? Of course not, they wouldn't have a clue. All they would know is - thank God I'm alive, and I grieve for the people I know who have died.
And yet there was all this early precise information. And to me that information can only have come from people, possibly indirectly through other channels, who did the job.
And that in itself is just a small example. I have lots of evidence of that kind.
The second part of the book will be the story of the Senate enquiry, leading up to what I regard as a whitewash conclusion, which was that the ADF has got nothing on its conscience, that they did everything that could be done, but that there are a few questions about the Australian disruption program. I was disappointed in that result, but as I said earlier, it left the door open for further work.
And the third part is really what happened since, up to the present day. And I hope that will be an interesting book.
It is like making a Persian carpet - I feel I am making a tapestry, weaving threads here and threads there, and gradually the picture of what happened is taking shape. It is exciting for me to write it and I hope it will turn out to be equally exciting for people to read it.
I think there's really very little else I want to say, so I'll conclude with this: For me, the public issues in this story are huge. They go to what we are as Australians, and they go to the integrity of our government.
I really do want a government in my country that expresses Australian values. Mr Howard is always talking about how our government has to express our values. I wish he really meant it, because Australian values are about hospitality and generosity and decency; they are not about cruelty and callousness and killing people.
I think we've got to put an end to the idea that national security, reasons of state, allow governments to do bad things for claimed good ends. We have to say, governments have to be told, that if they express us, they have got to be moral. And my best contribution to that task is: writing SIEVX.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
