US documents on Guantanamo Bay prisoners appear to back up torture and mistreatment claims by Mamdouh Habib and David Hicks (who this month will launch a new campaign for justice). They also highlight how ‘secret’ information held by spook agencies is invariably at least 25% in error. Meanwhile, the Moti case – involving the Howard government, The Solomon Islands, Australian Federal Police payments for testimony and possibly general bureaucratic chicanery – will soon have its day in the High Court. All tangled webs usually unravel, eventually.
The government has at last realised the danger of storing information overseas on Australians and, separately, a senate committee wants greater personal privacy within Australia guaranteed. We have a special report on why Defence continues to be in the mess it is in over its training academy. In international news, the AFP is again called into question (producing overtones of the Habib case in Egypt) about being present when two returned asylum seekers were allegedly beaten in Sri Lanka, and there are questions about what happens to prisoners captured by Australian forces in Afghanistan. Meanwhile, Britain is trying to make machines obey the rules…
Other topics covered in May include:
- Cost of exaggeration never ends;
- Juvenile detention follows downward spiral;
- Slowing booze flow is better than ban, researcher finds;
- R18+ video games category likely, but at what cost?;
- TIC nogat tok bilong pepaspra;
- Law is big business…and export success;
- ‘Phantom’ needs to put stamp on new monitor role;
- Czech court rejects data retention law;
- EU arrest warrant abused by countries (Assange, take note);
- Britain to kill trade in execution drugs; and
- Rate of jailing people ‘financially unsustainable’: UK Minister
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