Warren

This is an excellent commentary on the process and principles of intelligence, East Timor and failures in Australian ministerial leadership.

To give Downer his due, he was the man who quipped that he only read DFAT cables while dozing in a [VIP] plane seat. Treatment of the job as a consolation prize for being edged out of the Liberal Party leadership was transparent - parallels with Hayden obvious.

Hopefully Australia won't intervene so late again through a failure of imagination, leadership and guts.

The treatment of Merv Jenkins underlines a cruel truth that those in the intelligence profession who question issues on principle are rarely supported. They are often hounded, shunned and are then alone.

Anyone contemplating a career choice of joining part of the bureaucracy that has a clamping security culture may want to think again. This http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australian_Secret_Intelligence_Service is interesting.

Those last bastions of silence, DSD and ASIS, may be happy places, treating their employees well, maybe not, no-one knows, no-one talks, oblivion.

Again a timely article.

Regards

Peter Coates
http://spyingbadthings.blogspot.com/

The article - along with Haigh's - offers more of the same distraction that we have had to tolerate as "dissent on East Timor" since 1999. Downer was minister of chutzpah, took pride and pleasure in the fact, so why take his public utterances so seriously? More pointedly, for articles purporting to offer insight into diplomatic and intelligence business, why perpetuate discussions that ignore relevant strategic factors around sovereignty, resources, alliances and corruption?

The Indonesian presidency endorsed an ET independence referendum out of response to international pressure, though not the kind of pressure certain luvvy middle class activists would have us believe. Given Indonesia's vulnerability from the speculative plunder of the 1997 monetary crash, leading financier-oligarchs maintained such pressure, alongside various manipulations at lower levels of Indonesian society, eventually forcing Indonesia's acceptance of INTERFET by the same brutal mechanism of rentier extortion. You wants the loan, you follows our orders.

Downer's role was really just that of a local figurehead representing a certain competitive clique among the same circles of oligarch-financiers, but with tacit support among the state's diplomatic and major party establishment too. That they could “pull off” East Timor was a win for their preferred opportunism ahead of rival opportunists with stronger presence in the UN, US and EU. That is why the intervention was delayed as long as possible, with all the silly charades, pretences at concern for stable bilateral relations, fake fretting over sovereignty, vague and unexplored allusions to less formal but more significant “chains of command” and so on.

As for the decisions within the Indonesian side, that is in many ways a yet messier and uglier story. But we should not expect soon any palimpsest there over the prevailing western morality and passion plays about “human rights”, “rule of law”, “democracy”, etc.

Security is a wonderful business to be in because if nothing bad happens you can take the credit for it, and if something bad does happen then you get a bigger budget. Can anyone point to a single tangible achievement made by our national security service over the last decade? Meanwhile we're not even allowed to know how much of our money they are spending.