Paul Buchanan: Principles of the nation at stake

COMMENT

The issue of the day in politics is principle versus expediency.

This has surfaced in the debate over dual nationality for MPs and foreshore rights. But the test case involves an uninvited foreigner.

When Algerian exile, cleric and politician Ahmed Zaoui showed up, he caused a stir because he was initially branded a terrorist suspect rather than a political asylum-seeker (which is what he requested upon arrival).

Because of a fumble by Immigration, he also became a cause celebre that has focused scrutiny on the SIS, an organisation more comfortable in the shadows, and one that is heavily reliant on other sources for information about the darker side of world affairs.

For its part, the Government would hope to avoid questions about its prior knowledge of Mr Zaoui's intent, and the lack of communication that resulted in the initial mishandling of his arrival.

After a series of legal iterations, the outcome of the Zaoui case is now driven by political rather than humanitarian considerations.

Only the Greens hold a brief for him in Parliament, and with the threat of terrorism revived by the Jakarta bombing, the political circumstances surrounding the final decision on his status are not in his favour. Principled adjudication may well give way to short-term expediency.

As for the secret intelligence that the SIS has on Mr Zaoui, the matter appears to boil down to bureaucratic blunder. Since it relies on foreign intelligence reports from the Australians, British and Americans, the SIS receives heavily filtered information.

Its most important job is to forward information from New Zealand to its larger patrons. In return, it receives and analyses third-tier intelligence - since we do not employ full-time field agents in most of the world - to determine its relevance to our security.

Sometimes what it receives is more focused intelligence preferentially provided by various patron states, such as the terrorist list that was disseminated by the United States after September 11.

When Mr Zaoui fronted up in Auckland announcing who he was, the SIS had to make a threat assessment based upon information provided by its intelligence suppliers. They, in turn, depend on the information garnered by their own assets and those of friendly governments, who have their own reasons for using shared information. At this point we are at five degrees of separation.

Either the SIS has a smoking gun on Mr Zaoui that 10 years of public scrutiny in exile has failed to reveal, or it has nothing.

If Mr Zaoui is linked to al Qaeda, as some claim, the US would certainly want to extradite him to Guantanamo Bay. No foreign government other than the Algerian dictatorship has sought his return for prosecution.

The SIS bought itself some time in March by issuing a preliminary security risk certificate that kept Mr Zaoui in prison while it checked his background. But three months later it gave the Refugee Status Appeals Authority a poorly cobbled dossier drawn from press clippings and unsubstantiated sources.

If the man was as dangerous as alleged, certainly the authority would have been provided with a glimpse of the information that details the reasons why.

If the SIS knew this in March, everything since then has been a charade. Either way, holding a last-minute trump card in the form of a secret file that cannot be disclosed even to MPs seems ad hoc when it comes a potential matter of life and death.

Interestingly, the police counter-terrorism squad has not been heard on the matter. Surely a specially-created unit charged with countering terrorist threats would have an interest in Mr Zaoui, and would have weighed in at some level with its assessment. Yet it has been conspicuous by its silence.

This makes the claim of SIS secret intelligence data a bit hard to swallow, since the one agency that has specific responsibility for dealing with terrorists has nothing to say in defence of the SIS - with whom it presumably has a close relationship - or its secret file on Mr Zaoui.

A decision to deport Mr Zaoui after he was granted asylum by the public authority charged with reviewing his refugee appeal would appear to be driven by political expediency, not principle.

The Government may wish to cover the mistakes of its spies. Or it may wish to curry favour with the governments that supplied it with a flawed terrorist list which included Mr Zaoui and other Algerian opposition figures unconnected to terrorist acts.

But these are terms of short-term political endearment rather than principled engagement with the issue at hand, which is whether Mr Zaoui is a threat to our national security.

Since adherence to principle and transparency make for legitimate governance, it might advise the Government to publicly disclose the specific allegations against him, if not their sources.

Considering the stakes involved for our reputation as a nation of principle, as well as the costs to its Algerian guest, perhaps a more uniform approach to matters of principle should be the credo of the day.

* Former Pentagon analyst Paul Buchanan lectures at Auckland University.