Proceedings of the Special Senate Committee on the
Anti-terrorism Act
Issue 8 - Evidence - Evening meeting
OTTAWA, Monday, April 18, 2005
The Special Senate Committee on the Anti-terrorism Act met this day at 7 p.m. to undertake a comprehensive review of the provisions and operations of the Anti-terrorism Act, (S.C.2001, c.41).
Senator Joyce Fairbairn (Chairman) in the chair.
[English]
The Chairman: Honourable senators, I call this meeting to order.
This is the eighteenth meeting with witnesses of the Special Senate Committee on the Anti-terrorism Act. For our viewers, I will explain the purpose of the committee.
In October of 2001, as a direct response to the terrorist attacks in New York City, Washington D.C. and Pennsylvania, and at the request of the United Nations, the Canadian government introduced Bill C-36, the Anti- terrorism Act. Given the urgency of the situation then, Parliament was asked to expedite our study of the legislation and we agreed.
The deadline for the passage of the bill was in mid-December of 2001. However, concerns were expressed that it was difficult to thoroughly assess the potential impact of this legislation in such a short time. For that reason, it was agreed that three years later Parliament would be asked to examine the provisions of the act and its impact on Canadians, with the benefit of hindsight and in a less emotionally charged situation with the public.
The work of this special committee represents the Senate's efforts to fulfil that obligation. When we have completed this study, we will make a report to the Senate that will outline any issue we believe should be addressed and allow the results of our work to be available to the Government of Canada and to the public. The House of Commons is undergoing a similar process at this time.
To date, the committee has met with government ministers and officials, international and domestic experts on threat environment, legal experts, as well as those involved in enforcement and intelligence gathering. This is a very special evening, as we return to the consideration of the international threat environment, as we are joined by video conference by Professor David Wright-Neville.
Professor Wright-Neville is a professor at the School of Political and Social Inquiry, Monash University in Australia, where he works on the Global Terrorism Research Project.
Our video conference, colleagues, is limited to one hour, so your cooperation in keeping questions right on the button and answers as concise as possible is greatly appreciated.
Professor Wright-Neville, we are delighted to see you from this distance tonight. We look forward to your thoughts. This is an important part of our study. We hand the floor over to you.
Mr. David Wright-Neville, Professor, School of Political and Social Inquiry, Faculty of Arts, Monash University (Australia): Senators, it is a great honour to be invited to speak to you from this distance, and I thank you for the opportunity.
I will begin by giving you a brief outline of my background. Before returning to academe in Monash University, I worked for four years in the Australian intelligence community as a senior terrorism analyst. My specialization was Southeast Asia and the growing terrorist network in that part of the world. Since then, since returning to academe, I have continued to focus on Southeast Asia, particularly on groups as Jemaah Islamiyah, which was responsible for the Bali bombings in October 2002. More widely, I have looked at the links between groups in Southeast Asia and further afield, particularly in South Asia, in Pakistan, in Afghanistan and in the Middle East, and also into Western Europe and North America. I must confess, however, that Canada has not entered my radar screen, perhaps fortunately.
I have been asked to make a five-minute presentation — and to condense a complex issue into just five minutes is always difficult, of course. However, it seems to me that several years after the war on terror was announced, we are in a holding pattern. Although there have been some significant breakthroughs, including the arrests and deaths of a number of senior terrorist leaders, and the successful interruption of a number of terrorist cells around the world, against that it seems that the community of support that provides the oxygen from which these networks grow is continuing to consolidate and grow itself.
Specifically, with regard to Southeast Asia, we have seen a dramatic turnaround in the way in which many Indonesians, southern Filipinos, Malaysians, and southern Thais, view terrorism, the West and the battle between good and evil, to use a well-known, perhaps poorly calibrated, phrase.
In a recent survey in Indonesia, a majority of people suggested they believe that Osama bin Laden can be trusted to ``do the right thing.'' Positive views of the United States have fallen from 70 per cent to around 10 per cent in that same period. This attitudinal dynamic is providing a lot of rhetorical raw material for terrorist recruiters in Indonesia, who are continuing to replenish their stocks, to replace those who have been arrested or killed in counterterrorist operations. The holding pattern very much reflects a sort of hiatus, whereby these new recruits into the system are being drilled and trained and taught to counteract the counterterrorism measures that have been successfully used against their peers and against their seniors in these organizations.
I suspect that, in particular, Southeast Asia, perhaps also in South Asia, after the hiatus and they have consolidated, we are probably likely to see the recommencement of activities and serious operations such as occurred in Bali on October 12, 2002. It also concerns me that in regard to Southeast Asia the number of foreign militants who seem to have gravitated toward the area and who are successful in turning what are really parochial disputes in the southern Philippines and southern Thailand in particular into international issues. It is this ability to escalate domestic secessionist disputes into international issues that is attracting funds and recruits from other parts of the world and that portends a more dangerous future in Southeast Asia itself.
Following the trails of Indonesian, Filipino and Thai militants invariably takes us to South Asia, and particularly to Pakistan — a number of religious schools in Pakistan have trained a number of militants in Southeast Asia — but also to Western Europe. Working on research with some colleagues in Europe, one of the things that strikes me and that is informing a lot of my research in Southeast Asia and in Australia, is the extent to which the prison system is now emerging as a principal recruiting ground for a new generation of terrorists. It seems to me, particularly in places like France, Spain, Britain, but interestingly also in the Philippines and Thailand and Indonesia, a number of petty criminals are entering the prison system as petty criminals but leaving as hardened radicals.
What seems to be happening is a dynamic whereby the attitudinal or the soft drivers toward terrorism are not being addressed. We are also seeing that in Australia. I am currently working with the state police force in Victoria, where I live, looking at a way of consolidating and protecting the good relationship that the police have had with different ethnic communities here in Melbourne. There is a sense that that relationship has broken down in recent years; there is a sense of siege, particularly within the Muslim community here. People feel they are being isolated and distrusted by the wider community. There is a sense they might retreat to a sort of enclavism that has never really been a feature of Australian society, and the police are aware of that and are working hard to avoid that situation.
Unfortunately, the same does not seem to be happening in many parts of our own regional neighbourhood, where different communities in Southeast Asia, in the southern Philippines and southern Thailand, do feel themselves under siege. In those societies, where Muslims are a minority, they feel they are being isolated and treated with suspicion by the wider community. There is a retreat into enclavism, and within this enclavism, terrorist recruiters find a comfortable environment within which to work.
Individual members of the community feel reluctant to go to the police or to the authorities with any information, because they feel that they might be tainted with the terrorism brush. Therefore, they tend to keep quiet. This provides a community camouflage for these groups.
I know you wanted me to keep my comments short, which is always difficult for an academic but particularly difficult for an Australian academic.
Hence, in summary, I think we are addressing some of the hard issues, but the soft drivers of terrorism, especially in Southeast Asia, remain unaddressed. In fact, they seem to be getting worse in many cases. We are feeding a sense of paranoia, that terrorism has been politicized within the West, but also within Southeast Asia and further afield, that the terrorist networks are adapting to this and are likely to emerge out of this holding pattern much more deadly, but certainly more active. I will leave it there.
The Chairman: Thank you very much, Professor Wright-Neville. It is very interesting to hear from you. We had a delegation from Malaysia over here just last week, and some of their comments reflected what you are saying today.
Senator Lynch-Staunton: I have some specific questions for you, but after hearing you I will go into something that has been on my mind since we began our review of the act.
You mentioned new recruits and recruiting grounds. Therefore, there are people out there who are willing to devote themselves to terrorism. The question I and others have posed is this: What makes a terrorist? Why is one willing to strap himself or herself and go and kill innocent people? What is behind all that? I can suggest an answer, but I want to hear if you have an answer or a general comment first before suggesting something from this end.
Mr. Wright-Neville: That is a critical question, but one that I do not think there is any easy answer to. At the moment, I am working closely with colleagues from the faculty of medicine, psychiatry and psychology in particular. Our a priori assumption is that with very rare exceptions, where people have a mental illness or whatever, no one is born a mass murderer. No one is born with the view that mass murder in the name of a political cause is a legitimate and logical course of action. Society makes terrorists.
I suspect that the particular mixture of social, economic cultural, religious and political events that turn a person toward will vary from person to person. In my own research, where we have looked at the transformative politics of violence in Southeast Asia, where people who have begun as activists become militants and then a handful have become terrorists, I have identified a progress of progressive embitterment, if you like. It is a growing sense of frustration at their inability to change the system, their inability to improve the material or the social or the cultural lot of not only their immediate family, but their wider community as a whole.
Once a person has this sort of mind set, it seems the individual is ripe for recruitment. The person develops a sort of delusional, syllogistic reasoning whereby simplistically easy answers can be sold to them. Why are you oppressed, or why are you not doing well? It is the fault of the West or whatever. It is this unusual mixture of social, economic and political circumstances that combine in a particular context to have that impact on one or two people.
The question then becomes this: What is it that is driving the spread of this sort of psychological orientation? It is easy to lump it all in as a function of globalization, but what do we mean by that? In shorthand, it means a degree of marginalization, a growing sense of powerlessness over the ability of a community to control its circumstances, particularly the ethical, religious or cultural circumstances in which families and communities exist. Out of this powerlessness is growing a sense of political frustration.
In response to that, myself, along with some of my colleagues in the medical faculty, remain committed to the idea of democracy and human rights and a sense of empowerment as fundamental tools in combating the spread of this mindset.
Senator Lynch-Staunton: Every society, however, no matter how generous, has marginalized and frustrated elements within it that do not react in the same way as some of the reactions we are seeing. How much importance do you attach to the fact that, particularly in the Middle East, the West has been — say, since the Versailles Treaty in 1919 — carving it up to its liking? How much is that still playing in the resentment against the West and the payback? ``We have lived through your imperialism so long, we still see you there, we have had enough, and that is the only way to get rid of you.'' To answer my own question — in other words, if we pulled back and got out of the Middle East, would that help? Would it help if the West stopped supporting Israel? I do not think we have ever really tried to grasp the significance of what motivates the terror that is with us today.
Mr. Wright-Neville: Again, that is an excellent set of questions. I agree with you — every society has its marginalized and angry elements, but very few of these people embrace terrorism.
First, we have to move away from the idea that we can defeat terrorism. We cannot defeat terrorism. It has been a feature of societies for thousands of years, ever since they have organized into semi-sophisticated units. However, we can manage terrorism.
In terms of managing terrorism, I think that the history of colonialism, the history of powerlessness engendered by colonialism and, particularly now, a Western-dominated global economy does not help. It reinforces that historical anger.
I am on the public record in Australia as opposing the war in Iraq, in which my own government was an active participant. That has caused a tremendous setback in fostering an appreciation of the genuine nature of the West in wanting to resolve a lot of these issues.
On the question of Israel, yes, that is also an important point. Rightly or wrongly, there is a perception in many parts of the Middle East, but also in Muslim Southeast Asia, that the West is duplicitous on the question of Israel and Palestine, and that it certainly favours Israel over the Palestinians. Truth be known, I think the Palestinians are being treated appallingly by all parties involved, whether it be the Arab states or Israel or whatever. Nevertheless, the issue has been sold successfully as a conspiracy against Palestinians and against Muslims.
Into the equation, we have to factor a political habit by elites across the Islamic world of deflecting anger of their own malfeasance toward the West. This has been a very successful tactic in a number of areas in Southeast Asia. Whether it is the Asian economic crisis of 1997-98, environmental problems or cultural problems, there has been a pattern of political behaviour whereby the West is being held up a bogeyman and a conspirator, be it with regard to the departure of East Timor from Indonesia or whatever. The West figures as a convenient, evil outsider ever ready to colonize the Muslim world.
During my time in government, it always amused me, when I met with government officials from other countries, to say, ``Don't take this seriously or personally. It is simply a domestic political tactic that we use.'' It has been used for so long now that it has taken root and people believe it. In Southeast Asia, this has complicated the process because closer counter-terrorism cooperation with the United States or Australia now butts up against public opposition to that cooperation. The public quite rightly now says, ``For a generation, you have been telling us that these people are evil, and now you want to cooperate with them against people who are trying to promote Islamic interests.''
As part of the counter-terrorism equation, we have to address this. We have to try to wean governments off the habit of conveniently scapegoating the West, the Israel or other societies for problems that are quite often a part of their own making.
Senator Joyal: I should like to continue in the same vein. You are telling us that the effort we might put into intelligence and all the other capacities for developing and monitoring information in order to infiltrate groups and prevent terrorism would be limited by the fact that the general population, particularly in the countries you have mentioned, seem to support, if not publicly at least tacitly, those who think that desperate action is the only avenue available.
When a population gives its support, consent or assent to those initiatives, we have a much bigger problem than when that is limited to marginalized people who believe they have nothing to lose or who have been brainwashed by ideologues about how to find heaven on earth, which is essentially by killing themselves, as we have seen particularly in some regional conflicts.
How would you approach what is a societal problem more than a terrorist problem? The challenge is how to change the mentality of an entire population so that they cooperate in fighting terrorism rather than supporting it indirectly.
Mr. Wright-Neville: There are two elements to your question. The first is with regard to intelligence. Intelligence has to play a very important role, but it is not the solution to the problem. Intelligence is necessarily reactive. Intelligence by definition in terms of counterterrorism can only establish what has already happened or what is about to happen; it cannot predict the future. Intelligence is an imperfect science. Too often, too many Western governments have retreated into a notion of intelligence failure as an explanation for a particular terrorist act. It is not so much a failure of intelligence as a failure of policy.
Hence, intelligence remains important, but we must understand that it is of limited importance. It plays a fundamentally important role in anticipating events but not changing the course of history. Intelligence can help secure your population at home or abroad and can help to put in place mechanisms that will interrupt the development of a particular terrorist cell, but it does nothing to address the drivers behind this terrorism or this terrorist cell; it does nothing to stop the drivers that will lead to the formation of another terrorist cell further down the track or another terrorist event further down the track.
From recent experience, we have learned that religiously or culturally motivated terrorist groups are highly adaptive. Once they believe that God is on their side, any operation that is interrupted is simply treated as a learning experience. They are not dissuaded from their mission. They will simply adapt the operation and the structure of their organization to try to avoid that situation happening in the future.
With these caveats on intelligence in mind, we must understand that addressing this will be a long-term challenge for us. The phenomenon that we are dealing with today did not develop overnight. My own prime minister is fond of saying that the world changed on September 11. Well, it did not. The world had been changing for a long time before September 11; it only took the heinous acts of that day to make clear the way it had been changing. It will take a long time to address some of the pathologies that have been become structurally embedded in the system that nations have created.
As part of the long-term strategy, we need to emphasize the role of norms and values. We must focus on what Steven Simon, the U.S. scholar and an official in the Clinton administration, refers to as ``norm entrepreneurs'' — that is, we must focus on those people who have the cultural credibility within these societies to foster a mindset that sees mass murder for politics as an evil and illegitimate act. We must foster networks and communities that self-sanction. It is no good for outsiders to tell them it is wrong. That can only lead to a sanctification of people like Osama bin Laden in many respects.
It is interesting that, particularly in Southeast Asia, bin Laden is being constructed into an Islamic superhero, an Islamic Che Guevara, tweaking the nose of the West and getting away with it. People might not like him or what he does, but they admire him for getting away with it, and one reason for that is that the U.S. and the West is so outraged by his actions.
The grandstanding that we are doing and the belligerent counterterrorism policies that we often embrace can be counterproductive in the communities at which terrorists mainly direct their activities. Terrorism is an act of political theatre. Yes, it wants to terrify us, but it also wants to inspire others, and we are helping them do that in many respects. Inadvertently, we are inspiring others by not being more sophisticated or more intelligent about the way we try to cultivate individuals.
In the long term, we must appreciate that sometimes this means allowing communities their right to make their own decisions. Sometimes, this will result in governments that we might not like or might not deal with, and that will be difficult for us. However, to the extent that these governments are unlikely to be able to satisfy the needs of their own people along strictly religious lines, I suspect that over time they will adapt themselves, as I believe Iran was adapting until the ``axis of evil'' speech, which seems to have empowered the conservatives to crack down on a developing critical mass toward democratic reform in that country.
Senator Stratton: In Australia, you have passed, I believe, three anti-terrorism acts. How well is it working? What are the key provisions in those statutes?
As a second question, and you can follow up on this, I understand that there is a review ongoing in Australia at this time of those acts as well. If so, at what stage is that review?
Mr. Wright-Neville: Yes, there is. I will take your questions systematically.
The two most principal acts are, first, the ASIO Act Amendment Bill of 2002 — ASIO being the Australian Secret Intelligence Organization, which is the body responsible for domestic security. It is an FBI-like organization, but it does not have policing powers.
The ASIO Act Amendment Bill, which was introduced in 2002, dramatically empowers ASIO to undertake counterterrorism investigations. It confers on the organization for the first time quasi-policing powers — the right to detain and question individuals. In the initial draft of the legislation, individuals could be held for 48 hours without being charged, but this could be rolled over indefinitely, and individuals could be detained for some time without access to a lawyer. The right to silence was revoked. People who wanted to exercise that right would be charged with a separate crime. Minors as young as 14 could be detained without access to a parent, a guardian or a lawyer. Many of these more draconian elements were revised after debate within our own Senate, where the government at the time did not have a majority, but the bill was watered down only minimally. That is now in effect.
The other legislation is the Security Legislation Amendment Terrorism Bill, again of 2002, which is also an important piece of legislation. It confers upon the minister, the Attorney General, who is responsible for ASIO, the power to designate terrorist organizations and associated investigations. Associating with any of these organizations, whether it be fundraising or whatever, has also been rendered a crime and subject to investigation and prosecution accordingly.
As to whether or not these pieces of legislation are working, that remains a moot point. Prior to this legislation, we did not have in this country a terrorist problem; nor did we have a history of terrorist problems or any evidence that terrorist networks were firmly entrenched in this country. Leading up to the Sydney Olympics in 2002, there was an extensive intelligence audit of the groups who are active in Australia and might pose a threat to the security of athletes from other countries. Within that audit, a number of small problems were identified and addressed effectively and sensitively. Obviously, the Olympics went off well.
Happening soon after the Sydney Olympics, of course, September 11 changed the environment. September 11 happened in this country during an election campaign — or just preceding an election campaign. The issue was heavily politicized. The legislation was proposed, but without any supporting evidence that it was in fact needed. The position of critics like myself, who had come from an intelligence background, was that this was an overreaction and that it certainly pared back essential human rights and civil liberties in this country. The government managed to do it, and the opposition eventually supported them on a number of these key elements, largely because of the sense of community panic generated by September 11.
As to whether or not it is working, obviously the government would say it is, and the intelligence organizations would say it is, because we have not had any terrorist attacks or any legitimate or serious threats of terrorist attacks since then, but nor had we had any before then. It seems to me a curious statement to make.
Something worth noting is an often not-acknowledged or under-acknowledged element of our package of counterterrorism initiatives since 2001, that is, a terrorism hotline. Of all the proposals I have heard from around the world, speaking frankly, this is perhaps one of the most asinine. The public received, in the mail, from the government hotline numbers. If an individual spotted someone he or she thought was a terrorist, the individual was urged to ring up and advise the authorities. After some 40,000 phone calls, there have been no arrests. All it has created is a sense of siege within the Islamic community. Local police are complaining that they are constantly being called out to visit homes that are holding legitimate Islamic religious functions. The hotline initiative to my mind has not achieved much, other than to empower the intelligence and security forces.
If I may quickly, and I know this is a long answer, an area where we have an emerging problem in this country is that of demarcation. Not specified in any of the new legislation is the division of power between our federal police, our state police and the military. In a number of counterterrorism exercises that we have had in this country, there have been a number of disputes between different elements of the security and military forces about who has jurisdiction for a particular terrorist incident.
We seem to be working with tools that were set up for the Cold War, particularly ASIO and some of our foreign intelligence organizations, and trying to re-gear them for a post-Cold War scenario rather than having a long-term blueprint that clearly demarcates who is responsible for what actions. This question of the division of responsibilities is fundamentally important. It is not something that we have come to grips with in this country, mainly because of the sort of investment in counterterrorism that major agencies are making and their reluctance to give up different powers that they have.
Senator Smith: An area I should like to discuss — and it has come up here in an earlier meeting — is the idea of the inclusion in Canada's definition of terrorist activity of the act or omission having been committed for a political, religious or ideological purpose, objective or cause. As I understand it, this had its origins in the U.K. — but perhaps you can enlighten us. I am told some version of that is in Australia, New Zealand and, I believe, South Africa.
I am trying to ask this question objectively. Can you tell us about the situation in Australia with regard to this issue and your thoughts on it?
Mr. Wright-Neville: Senator, I might not be able to speak to your satisfaction on this; I am not a lawyer. Within our own community and within the debate we had within Parliament in the drafting and the lead-up to the declaration of our various counterterrorism legislations, there was significant debate over the definition of terrorism. There was a consensus that they would not reach an absolute agreement, as, indeed, scholars cannot themselves, on what is an appropriate definition.
As a consensus position, drawing on terrorism scholarship, it was agreed that terrorism is any act of violence or threatened use of violence for a political end. It is that caveat — for a political end — that differentiates it from pure criminal violence by itself.
However, this does not resolve the issue. We still have a number of people in this country who look on groups such as Hamas or Hezbollah less as terrorist organizations and more as welfare organizations. This definition does provide in some instances a loophole whereby a number of terrorist groups around the world are increasingly adopting social welfare roles in refugee camps or in other underprivileged areas as a way of deflecting attention or camouflaging their overt political or military actions. It was felt that that definition does not really capture this element.
While we are reluctant to condemn the welfare role of these organizations, neither can we allow this welfare function to be used as a smokescreen for the more violent activities they might be prepared to undertake. Beyond that, and the way the exact wording figures in the different pieces of legislation, I will have to defer to one of my counterparts in the law faculty to answer more appropriately.
Senator Smith: That is fine. In part, this is a response to the issue Senator Lynch-Staunton raised when he asked what prompts these people to blow themselves up. This is a form of jihad, which, according to extreme groups — certainly mainstream leaders from the Muslim community do not sanction this activity— is a quick way to heaven. Part of the problem is the situation you made reference to in Indonesia. A large percentage of people in Indonesia have positive feelings about and trust Osama bin Laden. If anybody epitomizes and symbolizes the terrorist group, it is him. This is a dilemma.
Mr. Wright-Neville: Absolutely. Even if we could arrive at a consensual definition of terrorism, it would not resolve the perennial problem of one person's terrorist being another person's freedom fighter. It is all contextual. It depends on the cause involved. With regard to Indonesia and many other places around the world, the problem is not one of definition but of fostering the norms that will lead people to look upon the actions of these people as those of mass murderers rather than as those of freedom fighters.
Senator Smith: You referred earlier to some concerns from the Muslim community in Australia that they felt focused on. Have they been making suggestions as to what might be changed so that they do not feel profiled or targeted? Are they articulating any precise position on this?
Mr. Wright-Neville: Different elements of the Muslim community have spoken publicly about certain things they would like to see, but there has not been any official or formal feedback process, apart from the capacity to make submissions to Senate committees, such as this one, and so on.
In the end result, most members of the Muslim community were uncomfortable with the nature of the legislation we passed here.
In terms of addressing this feeling of alienation, the research project I am embarking on with my state police force involves in part a series of community forums and consultations whereby I and my researchers will talk to different elements of the Muslim community as well as to other ethnic communities — we will also talk to non-Muslim communities. We are taking this as the attitude of the whole of society towards this type of issue, including women's groups, youth groups, old people's groups and so on. We are trying to get as broad a cross-section as possible. We will ask them how they feel this legislation affects their lives and about the sorts of initiatives and the policing processes they feel most comfortable.
Our working assumption is that the best form of counterterrorism within a society is community policing. It is when the community itself is aware of a potentially dangerous outsider coming into the temple, the mosque or the church, and it feels comfortable in being able to go to the authorities, knowing that they will not necessarily themselves be implicated in this or that the draconian legislation that is here will not be used against them. They have to feel they have an investment in society. That is what we feel has been undermined by much of the legislation. We have to rebuild that sense that they are important and valued members of the Australian community. We accept that they themselves are not terrorists and that they themselves do not necessarily support terrorism. That is our working assumption. If they feel they have this investment, we believe they will be more prepared to work cooperatively with the police.
That is the track we are taking. We are at an early stage in this process, but we do intend to share with other jurisdictions our research at the end of the three years, which will result in the design of a new counterterrorism policing model. We intend to share that with other jurisdictions within Australia and within the Commonwealth more generally.
The Chairman: Professor, earlier on you noted that one of the motivations that was running through Southeast Asia in terms of its support for Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda was the sense of outrage they had for the West, the land that had conquered so many of them.
Is there also a motivation based on what they believe to be the fear in the West over acts such as the ones in New York and Washington, an area that had never been a target before?
Mr. Wright-Neville: There is an element of that, but I think it is at a subterranean level. Mostly, it was the United States and the United States government that they felt most enthusiastic about — although that is a poor choice of words.
In survey after survey, we find that people distinguish between Western governments and Western individuals. Although they have expressed deep regret and sorrow at the loss of life, they nevertheless feel somewhat satisfied that a government that they do not particularly like and a government that they see as a source of so much of their suffering was given such a bloody nose.
How do they balance this? Some are inclined to believe that there have to be some innocent victims in a war. In my own research, when talking to communities in Southeast Asia, a theme keeps recurring — that is, yes, we express great sorrow at the loss of innocent lives in New York, Pennsylvania and Washington, but we have in fact expressed more sorrow than the U.S. or the West has expressed about the innocent loss of life in Iraq. If you want to talk to them about moral equivalents, they are happy to do so.
There is a sense of a deep hypocrisy about the way the West has addressed this issue. There is a sense that they have expressed regret at the loss of life on September 11, 2001, but that other Western countries have not expressed sympathy for the loss of life in the Muslim world that occurred in retaliation to that.
They tend to target their support for bin Laden only to the extent to which it can hurt Western governments, not Western people. This is interesting and should provide a clue as to who we ought to be dealing with in cultivating the norms to develop this to close off support for Osama bin Laden as an individual.
Senator Hubley: I noticed from our notes that, apart from conducting research on Western and non-Western counterterrorism initiatives, you also research the role that intelligence gathering plays in combating terrorism. As well, we have been informed from a different source that not only it is the gathering of intelligence but also how that intelligence is analyzed and how the assessment of that intelligence is carried out that is of importance. Have you seen a change in how that is done since 9/11? If so, is there a greater emphasis put on the analysis of intelligence now?
Mr. Wright-Neville: Based on some of my comments earlier, you may not be surprised to hear that I have little to do with the Australian intelligence community now, which is a mutual decision. I am not sure how intelligence is handled in Australia, but that is a critical question. The problem, to the extent that there was an intelligence problem, was not in the area of collection but rather on the analysis of it. I can only speak to the Australian experience, and part of the problem in the Australian experience — and I am on the public record in saying this — is that it has been a political habit in this country to appoint senior diplomats to head our intelligence services. Particularly at the level of analysis, it is my experience that some of those hard edges of that analysis were often shaved off because of the diplomatic problems they might have caused. That is unfortunate. I am not saying this tendency caused the failure to predict the events at Bali, but evidence was directed at the Australian Senate to suggest that we were reluctant to acknowledge a developing problem in Indonesia because of the diplomatic sensitivities that that would have raised. We buried our heads in the sand.
Beyond the intelligence analysis process, another problem is the matter of what the political decision makers do with the analyses given to them. The issue surrounding the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq played out very significantly. A former colleague of mine in the Office of National Assessments, Mr. Andrew Wilkie, resigned from the intelligence community in a public way. He believed that the information showing the lack of intelligence leading to assessments that Iraq probably did not have workable weapons of mass destruction had been ignored and politicized to suggest a likelihood that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.
Hence, the problem of intelligence analysis is at two levels. First, the culture of analysis has been colonized by a diplomatic culture that stresses, at almost any cost, the importance of having good relationships with their neighbours, relationships that at times have been fractious, particularly with Indonesia since the events in East Timor, and that tends to politicize the intelligence. It is a convenient issue to politicize because the intelligence officers cannot defend themselves or rebut the subtle manipulation of analyses by political decision makers. I have to be careful of the way in which I answer this question.
Senator Hubley: In your Australian model, who should be responsible for the analysis?
Mr. Wright-Neville: Currently, we have only one analysis agency — the Office of National Assessments. We have demarcated our intelligence community into collectors of human intelligence, HUMINT, and signals intelligence, SIGINT, which are distinct organizations. The material collected by them is funnelled into the Office of National Assessments, which prepares the analyses. The Defence Signals Directorate collects the signals intelligence and answers to the defence minister; the Australian Secret Intelligence Service, which does our human intelligence collection overseas, answers to the foreign minister. The Office of National Assessments answers only to the Prime Minister. This division of powers was deliberate because there was a fear that our intelligence was being politicized and coloured by diplomatic concerns rather than the objective analyses of experts. We adopted the habit of appointing former diplomats to head these agencies. Every head of the ONA since its establishment in 1997 has been a former diplomat.
Senator Lynch-Staunton: Canada has security certificates, which equate to the control orders in the U.K. You are aware of what happened with the U.K. with the House of Lords decision and the new legislation. Here, we detain people and give them few privileges and little access to judicial process. Does that occur in Australia? If so, is it as controversial? If not, how do you deal with preventing terrorist activities, either suspected or real?
Mr. Wright-Neville: Our approach is similar to that of Britain and Canada. However, we have had much less public controversy mainly because of the Bali bombing. The public mood was such that it was not inclined towards debating the issue. Despite efforts by a number of journalists and academics to stimulate some public debate on the nature of the legislation that enables the government to detain people for questioning, limit access to lawyers and due process, the public was not interested in it. Rather, the issue was of national security, and the public bought the line that there was a trade-off between security and a small sacrifice of civil liberties. The public remained prepared to bear that trade-off. If this issue were to go before a state Supreme Court or the high court it remains to be seen how the legislation might be interpreted. However, it is a moot point because it has not happened.
Senator Joyal: I should like to bring you back to your earlier comment about the way to approach terrorism on a global scale. The official interpretation of the initiatives in Iraq, and the recent elections in Palestine and in Saudi Arabia, would lead one to believe that they clearly demonstrate that through democracy a population can achieve the objective of control over its affairs. Do you give any weight to that interpretation? Is there any value in introducing democracy in some areas of Southeast Asia in the name of counterterrorism as a better system to achieve national goals than the desperate situation of terrorism?
Mr. Wright-Neville: Absolutely. I might use the examples of Indonesia and Thailand. People are fond of saying that terrorism in Indonesia occurred only after the fall of President Suharto in 1998. My opinion of that is different. The origins of Jemaah Islamiyah, which was responsible for the Bali bombings, go back to the early 1980s. The group was founded by people escaping prison and moving into exile in Malaysia. The Jemaah Islamiyah was fostered by and developed from an authoritarian political milieu in Indonesia. We are now seeing a manifestation of that. Indonesia is dealing with it as a new democracy — and reasonably well, given that it is still trying to establish a police force that is independent of the military, and so on. I am hopeful that, over time, this will develop well and that the threat of terrorism in Indonesia will be managed efficiently.
Let us contrast that to Thailand, where we had a Muslim insurgency in the south of the country, particularly in those provinces where Muslims are a majority. This was largely a secessionist movement that was active in the 1970s and 1980s. In the 1990s, with the periodic military coups and slow consolidation of democracy, the fostering of economic development, these insurgencies almost petered away. A number of critical insurgent groups, the Pattani United Liberation Organization — PULO — for instance, found themselves shrinking in their membership base, losing their raison d'être, eventually degenerated into little more than organized crime networks. They were involved in gambling, drug running, prostitution rackets and so on. This was really the rump of the organization, the hardcore, that had an almost psychological commitment to violence or criminality.
Since then, we have seen a paring back of human rights under the Thaksin government. We have seen a much less inclusive approach to politics and economic development. The sorts of affirmative action that characterized earlier governments have been pared back. At the same time, we have seen a resurgence of insurgency in southern Thailand. Since 2002, we have had almost weekly attacks on police stations and on schools. We have seen the theft of several hundred tons of ammonium nitrate and several hundred high-powered light weapons from police stations by as yet unknown assailants. We suspect they have gone into the hands of terrorist networks in southern Thailand.
In the case of Indonesia, we are dealing with a terrorist problem that was nurtured during an authoritarian period, a problem that is gradually being brought into hand with difficulty. They need significant economic help and other sorts of help from the outside world to affect that over time.
In the case of Thailand, we had the disappearance of insurgency that was fostered during an authoritarian period. This has been revived under a government that has shown less regard for human rights and other economic and social rights than did previous democratic governments.
In Southeast Asia, the evidence is overwhelming that democracy is an essential ingredient to managing the threat of terrorism but cannot be isolated from economic development and other social and cultural initiatives. It must go hand- in-hand with political and economic development, as well.
The Chairman: Mr. Wright-Neville, we have reached our deadline. We will have to say farewell. You have been a remarkable witness and we thank you for coming in the early morning in Australia to listen to our questions. All of us are grateful. Thank you.
Mr. Wright-Neville: It has been my pleasure, I hope I have helped.
The committee adjourned.