Pulling Down The Shades (Satire)

Under Wraps: “Let me begin by thanking all of you for the sterling effort you have all contributed towards keeping this potentially difficult situation contained. The New Zealand Defence Force is forever in your debt.”

“SHALL WE MAKE A START?”, said the man from the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet, ostentatiously rearranging the pile of documents stacked in front of him and glancing up sharply at the five other participants seated around the polished Rimu table. The meeting-room windows overlooked the parliamentary complex below. A howling Wellington southerly sent raindrops clattering, bullet-like, against the glass.

“Colonel, perhaps you would like to begin?”

The taut, middle-aged military man straightened his back and cleared his throat.

“Let me begin by thanking all of you for the sterling effort you have all contributed towards keeping this potentially difficult situation contained. The New Zealand Defence Force is forever in your debt.”

“Yes, I should say it bloody-well is!”, interrupted the young woman from Crown Law. “And you’re just damned lucky that the Operation Burnham Iinquiry heads, Sir Terence Arnold and Sir Geoffrey Palmer are both reasonable men. Because if they were inclined to be unreasonable, then this whole god-awful mess could easily have become a great deal messier!”

“Gwen! My dear young woman”, the Chairman intervened unctuously. “These proceedings will go a lot more smoothly – and quickly – if we all refrain from interjections. Colonel, you were saying.”

The soldier, who had been glowering at the lawyer, turned his eyes back to the prim little man at the head of the table.

“Thank you, Mr Chairman. As I was saying, the potential difficulties associated with the Operation Burnham Inquiry – most particularly the risks associated with the proceedings being conducted in public – have largely been resolved to the NZDF’s satisfaction. Practically the entire inquiry will now be conducted in secret with access to the most sensitive evidence restricted to those with only the highest security clearances. A very small and select group, Mr Chairman, which does not include Messrs Hager and Stephenson!

A ripple of laughter went around the table.

“Madame Director, is there anything you wish to add”, said the Chairman, nodding in the direction of the bespectacled Director of the Security Intelligence Service.

“There’s not a great deal to add to what the Colonel has already told us, Mr Chairman. Obviously those of us in the Service and our friends at the [Government Communications Security] Bureau were deeply disturbed at the prospect of an open and transparent public inquiry into Burnham. The reaction of the Americans would have been one of extreme dissatisfaction and, of course, our Australian cousins would have exerted every muscle to outdo them in the dissatisfaction stakes.”

Laughter once again rippled around the table.

“We can laugh now,” interjected the Director of the GCSB, “but there was serious talk about our being chucked out of the Five Eyes. Do you know that the Deputy-Director of the NSA even went so far as to suggest that it might be time to conduct a re-run of Operation Shut-Down.”

“Which is what, exactly?” Chipped-in Gwen from Crown Law.

“Which is the sequence of events that ensues should New Zealand either withdraw or get chucked out of the Five Eyes Agreement. Not to put to fine a point upon it, the Americans get to occupy the Bureau for as long as it takes them to secure and remove every single file we possess. When Operation Shut-Down is over, New Zealand’s intelligence capabilities will be roughly the same as Samoa’s.”

“And that is not something we at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade could contemplate with anything remotely resembling equanimity.” All eyes turned to the tall and tousled young man dressed in a superbly tailored blue suit, white cotton shirt and shimmering gold tie. “It has taken MFAT the best part of thirty years to restore our relationship with Washington. We are not about to sit back and see that effort reduced to ashes on account of half-a-dozen extinct Afghans.”

“Who were blown to pieces by our trigger-happy friends from the USA”, hissed Gwen, “in an revenge raid over which the NZDF exercised complete operational control. An operation which should never have been authorised and which, apart from killing six civilians – including a student teacher and a little girl – and injuring 15 others, did not manage to kill or capture even one of the Taliban insurgents believed to have been involved in the attack that killed Lieutenant Tim O’Donnell. An operation whose multiple fuck-ups the NZDF did everything in its power to cover-up.”

The Colonel was on his feet. “I will not hear the NZDF slandered in this fashion, Mr Chairman. I would ask you to exclude this person from the meeting!”

But Gwen would not be silenced. “Oh yes, I’m sure it would suit the NZDF for there to be no one in this room with even a semblance of understanding of the level of illegality associated with Operation Burnham. And not just Operation Burnham. The NZDF has been recklessly breaking the law for years in an attempt to keep its crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq under wraps. Handing captives over to the CIA’s spooks to be tortured and killed? Nobbling witnesses? Perjury? What would you say, Colonel? How many of these is the NZDF willing to put its hand up to? One? Two. All three? None?”

The Chairman was on his feet.

“It’s alright, Mr Chairman, I’m leaving. I’ve been lawyering long enough to know that the people in this room are guilty of participating in activity which, were this a trial and not an inquiry, would come perilously close to conspiring to pervert the course of justice. When I joined Crown Law, I thought I’d be holding the powerful to account. Instead, I find myself devising ways for keeping the misdeeds of the powerful shrouded in darkness – safe from the disinfectant of sunlight. This – you – are not what I swore an oath to uphold!”

Gwen snapped her ring-binder shut, stuffed it into her briefcase, and with a derisory snort, left the room.

“You’re surely not going to tell me that that young woman was given a security clearance?”, said the tousled young man from MFAT.

“The very highest”, replied the Chairman, ruefully shaking his head.

“Not for much longer”, sniffed the SIS Director, tapping the screen of her smart-phone. “Not for much longer.”

This short story was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Thursday, 27 September 2018.

Operation Burnham Inquiry To Proceed Under Cover Of Darkness.

Hit & Miss: The Coalition Government should have done everything in its power – up to and including the passing of special enabling legislation – to ensure that the military was prevented from hiding behind the smoke-screen of “national security”. To preserve public confidence in the decency and honesty of the NZ Defence Force it is imperative that everything the military knows about Operation Burnham, the people of New Zealand should know also.

THAT MOST OF the Operation Burnham Inquiry will be closed to the public is deeply troubling but hardly surprising. From the moment of its announcement by Attorney General David Parker, the inquiry had about it an air of reluctance and limitation. As if the entire exercise was in some way illegitimate: the product of forces which had usurped the natural order of things and were being placated only because failing to do so would undoubtedly make matters worse. The heavily armed guardians of our society neither encourage nor welcome scrutiny. On the contrary, they expect the state to keep them safe from citizens’ prying eyes. From the outset, it was clear that the public (and its proxy, the news media) would be prevented from seeing and hearing anything it hadn’t already seen and heard about Operation Burnham.

It is worth asking why political parties so sharply critical of Operation Burnham when they were in Opposition have been so ready to accede to the demands of the New Zealand Defence Force (NZDF) now that they’re in government. The Inquiry is, after all, being held to ascertain the truth or falsehood of allegations levelled against the NZDF in the book “Hit & Run” by investigative journalists Nicky Hager and Jon Stephenson. Was the NZDF responsible for the deaths of six Afghan citizens – including a little girl – or wasn’t it? Did our Special Air Service hand over captured Afghan insurgents to the Afghan security forces to be tortured – or didn’t it?

Such questions put the decency and honesty of the New Zealand military squarely in the cross-hairs of public scrutiny. Surely, a government determined to have a decent and honest defence force would not only move heaven and earth to have these questions answered, but also to have them seen to be answered. To that end, the Government should have done everything in its power – up to and including the passing of special enabling legislation – to ensure that the military was prevented from hiding behind the smoke-screen of “national security”. To preserve public confidence in the decency and honesty of the NZDF it is imperative that everything the military knows about Operation Burnham, the people of New Zealand should know also.

Naturally, the NZDF’s defenders have objected that the idea of politicians sending civilian investigators to rifle through the military’s files is outrageous. How can our allies trust the NZDF with their secrets if at some future point they could be revealed for all the world to see? The problem with that question is the implied assumption that there are some secrets that the world has no right to see. Like the video recording handed over to Wikileaks by Private Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning showing innocent Iraqi civilians being gunned down by the crew of an American helicopter gunship. But why should evidence of a war-crime be hidden beneath the shrouds of national security? What sort of military hides proof of murder?

A decent and honest NZDF would not have the public doubt in any way its willingness to co-operate fully in an inquiry into whether or not it deliberately gunned down unarmed civilians? After all, a military that could collude in suppressing evidence of murder could collude in all manner of crimes. It could be guilty of commissioning perjury, or conspiring to pervert the course of justice. It could be guilty of crimes so numerous and so serious that its commanders can only tremble at the thought of civilian investigators applying the disinfectant of sunlight to the accumulated reek of its misdeeds.

Which is why the fact that most of the Operation Burnham Inquiry will be carried out in the dark is so concerning. What sort of inquiry grants the legal representatives of interested parties only “summaries” of the evidence presented? What sort of a judicial officer submits to a “security clearance” before being allowed to view that evidence? And, when did the doctrine of national security override the right of the people to see justice done?

Two thousand years ago the Roman poet Juvenal asked: “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” “Who will guard the guards themselves?” In relation to the Operation Burnham Inquiry the answer would appear to be: Not the Government. And, not the Inquiry heads; Sir Terence Arnold and Sir Geoffrey Palmer.

In New Zealand, the guardians have no guards.

This essay was originally published in The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 28 September 2018.