Points of interest
Just kicking back reading one of the better Australian political journals, The Diplomat, and stumbled across a couple of interesting stories I thought I'd pass on...Habib Hush Money
... Australian terrorism suspect Mamdouh Habib was the subject of 'rendition' to Egypt by the US Government in 2002. He claimed ASIO (Australian Secret Intelligence Organisation) officers interviewed him at the Cairo jail where he was tortured. Now it has been reported that there has been an out of court settlement with ASIO. Nobody is saying how many taxpayer dollars were handed over. Could it be best described as hush money? And was this a case of, not unlike the AWB fiasco, implausible deniability?
Sandline in Iraq
... concerning Tim Spicer, the boss of Sandline, the group of "security specialists" who created havoc in Papua New Guinea in the 1990's by leading mercenaries contracted to recover from secessionists a copper and gold mine on Bougainville. Foreign Minister Alexander Downer openly condemned the interference and Spicer was eventually arrested and expelled. Close ties with British intelligence may have saved him from a long jail spell. He now leads Aegis Defence Services, a London-based security company operating in Iraq, under a multi-million dollar contract with the US Government. A recent British newspaper article said Spicer's outfit is helping to facilitate communications between the pro-US coalition forces in Iraq. One of those countries is Australia. Has Canberra raised strong objections with Washington to the troublesome Mr Spicer's new role? Watch this space.
For those of you that don't know about the Sandline affair that happened in PNG, Wikipedia has a pretty accurate entry here.
posted by Mark @ 5:10 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home