An Australian killed, to the studied indifference of his government
An Australian has been killed overseas. But the federal
government is strangely incurious about it, and has nothing to say about
it. Its ideology is getting in the way.
November by a American drone strike, along with a dual New
Zealand-Australian citizen known as “Muslim Bin John”, and three other
“militants”? Why was he the victim of an attack that left so little of
him that only DNA from his family could help identify his remains?
And why do New Zealanders know more about the killing of
Muslim Bin John than we do about Harvard’s death? Last week, New Zealand
Prime Minister John Key spoke openly about Bin John, his terrorist
links and how he had been placed under surveillance by NZ intelligence
agencies before leaving the country.
The only official comment about Harvard in Australia has come from the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (its response is here),
which provided scant detail about his killing. Instead, we have been
given anonymous backgrounding on Harvard from a “senior
counter-terrorism official”, provided to The Australian’s Paul Maley and Mark Schliebs — The Australian, commendably, has tried to follow up the story and Harvard’s background.
According to the anonymous source quoted in The Australian,
Harvard and Bin John were al-Qaeda “foot soldiers” who were “collateral
damage” in a strike against more senior al-Qaeda figures. “There was a
suggestion they were involved in kidnapping Westerners for ransom.” Who
suggested that, we’re not told.
This sort of official “response” is familiar to anyone who
has followed the drone issue; it is the standard practice of the Obama
administration, which has killed thousands of “combatants” with drone
strikes in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Yemen. Until recently, there was
virtually no official confirmation that drone programs even
existed — and there are two: a military one and a CIA one, both
controlled by the White House — let alone that individual strikes were
carried out. The only information provided to the media about United
States drone strikes was from anonymous officials (the kind of official
leakers who never get pursued or punished for revealing national
security information) explaining how valuable they were at crippling
terrorism networks and killing al-Qaeda and Taliban “combatants”.
The problem is, it later emerged that the Obama administration defined “combatants” as any male 18 to 65 years old killed in a drone strike,
regardless of who they were or what they were doing. Drone strikes
could thus be “successful” even if they only killed civilians. Even
Abdulrahman al-Awlaki was initially described as one of several
“militants” after the drone strike that killed him in Yemen in 2009.
Al-Awlaki was a 16-year-old boy from Denver, Colorado, who was in Yemen
looking for his American father, the al-Qaeda member Anwar al-Awlaki,
who had been killed in a drone strike two weeks earlier. No “militants”
of any kind were present when Abdulrahman and several young friends were
blown up in an outdoor cafe. The man who ordered the drone strike that
killed the boy, former White House counter-terrorism adviser John
Brennan, has never been investigated or prosecuted for his role in the
killing. Instead, President Barack Obama promoted him to CIA director.
“The Australian government is strangely uninterested in the killing of one of its citizens …”So experience suggests it pays to be highly sceptical of
what anonymous officials say about drone strike victims. And Harvard’s
family disputes the account from the unnamed official — as Schliebs
related, they say Harvard went to Yemen to teach English and that
conversion to Islam had helped him get his life together. Separately,
the Townsville Bulletin
speculated Harvard might have been radicalised at a mosque in
Christchurch, NZ, although there is no known connection with Bin John.
Criticism of the Obama administration’s indiscriminate use
of drones and the civilian death toll they inflicted eventually became
too much, especially when respected figures like former Afghanistan
commander General Stanley McChrystal warned they could prove
counter-productive because of the radicalising effect they had on
civilian target communities. In May last year, Obama revealed he has
established a new set of guidelines for using drones. The actual
guidelines remain classified, but the White House released some details,
including requirements of “near-certainty” that the target is present,
the “near-certainty” that civilians will not be harmed, and that:
“… the United States will useWere the three al-Qaeda militants targeted in the attack
lethal force only against a target that poses a continuing, imminent
threat to U.S. persons. It is simply not the case that all terrorists
pose a continuing, imminent threat to U.S. persons; if a terrorist does
not pose such a threat, the United States will not use lethal force.”
that killed Harvard and Bin John posing a “continuing, imminent threat
to US persons” in the remote province of Hadhramaut, where the strike
took place? If not, it was in breach of the rules Obama himself laid
down. We know of at least one other strike that was in breach of these
new rules — a strike in Yemen in December
that killed 12 people and injured 15 others when drones targeted a
wedding procession. The Yemeni government later paid compensation to the
families of the killed and injured. Several civilians have also been
killed in a wave of drone strikes in Yemen over the last few days.
What we do know, via Key,
is that Bin John had been known to NZ intelligence services before he’d
left New Zealand, that he was the subject of a warrant by NZ agencies
and, Key says, had links to terrorist organisations. Unlike his
Australian counterpart, or the Obama administration, Key was prepared to
speak officially about individual drone strikes that killed one of his
citizens.
Perhaps Harvard was indeed a “combatant”; perhaps he indeed
was involved in kidnapping westerners. Certainly he was profoundly
foolish to be where he was when he was. But maybe he was in Yemen
teaching English. We don’t know, and we’ll never know. He’ll get no
trial, no opportunity to defend himself, not even the half-baked
“opportunity” terrorism suspects get under Australia’s draconian
anti-terror laws and a Federal Police force with a history of
fabricating evidence. The Australian government is strangely
uninterested in the killing of one of its citizens, having apparently
asked no questions of the Americans about what happened or whether the
strike that killed him complied with the US’ own rules.
And rather than discuss it publicly, it prefers to hide behind anonymous security bureaucrats.
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