Cool Heads, Lukewarm Brains, And Dr. Haneef

Dr. Mohammed Haneef, charged with owning a SIM card found in a burned-out jeep in Glasgow, is a free man. He left Australia for a "hero's welcome" in India after Australian Immigration Minister Kevin Andrews changed his mind about revoking Dr. Haneef's visa. The Aussie IM decided that Dr. Haneef's work visa would remained canceled.

Dr. Haneef's employer, Gold Coast Hospital, wants him back. They said that the doctor's job was waiting for him, if an outbreak of sanity occurred in the Australian Immigration Ministry.

Australian judicial authorities had a lucid moment last week, realizing that their case against the doctor was baseless.

Much to his credit, Australian Director of Public Prosecutions Bugg said that his office shouldn't have recommended charging the foreign doctor in the first place.

Australian authorities haven't come out looking all that competent in this caper. Even the arrest of Dr. Haneef, as he was leaving Australia to be with his wife and newborn daughter, probably wouldn't have happened if the good doctor hadn't called the police to let them know that he was leaving.

That call they paid attention to. The ones he had made, trying to clear up the mess, hadn't been returned.

I'm afraid that quite a few people in the Australian government should get some sort of award for their performance.

I suggest the creation of an award for the sort of outstanding law enforcement and jurisprudence displayed recently: the Keystone Cops Tinplate Slapstick; presented to deserving officials, for nitwittery above and beyond the call of nature.

Foolishness aside: Even though this exercise in lunacy has a guardedly happy ending, a bungled bit bureaucratic buffoonery like this is a very serious matter.

I'm acutely aware of how Dr. Haneef's rights were mis-handled. That shouldn't have happened, obviously. The good news here is that Dr. Haneef was able to clear his name quickly, unlike another sure-fire suspect, Richard Jewell, Dr. Haneef was not attacked by news media, and was able to clear his name quickly. (I bring Mr. Jewell up a lot in this connection, because I believe there are similarities in the way these two men were treated.)

Just as bad, perhaps worse, this get-the-foreign-doctor debacle makes it much easier for people to distrust the Australian government, and by extension all governments. People with the sort of power wielded by government officials are frightening when they turn their brains down to 'lukewarm.'

I hope that Dr. Haneef is allowed to work in Australia again, and that he is safe in doing so. It seems that Australia needs good doctors.

Perhaps the Australian Immigration Minister, if he decides to unrevoke Dr. Haneef's work visa, should consider encouraging foreign psychiatrists to work in Australia. Judging from the way so many officials acted in the Haneef matter, the psychiatrists would have no trouble finding work.

Posts on this topic:

• "Cool Heads and Terrorism Investigations: It Could be Worse"
  (July 27, 2007)
• "Lesson for Terrorism Investigators: Return Those Calls!
  (July 21, 2007)
• "Arrests, Doctors and Terrorists: Keeping a Cool Head
  (July 2, 2007)
  • My views on rational investigations and Richard Jewell

Information from FOXNews.com, "Doctor Gets Hero's Welcome in India

Cool Heads and Terrorism Investigations: It Could be Worse

Dr. Mohamed Haneef is off the hook, sort of. He's the doctor charged by Australian authorities with reckless support to a terrorist organization. That's pretty serious. If he'd been convicted, he could have been sentenced to 15 years in prison.

Here's what he's supposed to have done:

• Let a second cousin use his SIM card
• Owning that SIM card when it got left in a jeep on the other side of the world
• Still being the SIM card owner when someone tried to use the jeep to torch an airport terminal

Sounds pretty trivial, put that way.

Dr. Haneef was freed today, after an Australian chief prosecutor said it was a mistake, charging him with being connected to the London/Glasgow car bombings in Britain.

The decision to release came after a review of the evidence by Australian Director of Public Prosecutions Bugg. After this review, Mr. Bugg found that his office should never have recommended charging Dr. Haneef. There's more at "Australia Drops Terror Charges Against Indian Doctor Accused in Failed U.K. Bombings Plot."

Mohamed Haneef isn't quite out of trouble yet.

This week's SNAFU is about Dr. Haneef's visa. It's been revoked. Immigration Minister Kevin Andrews, back when Dr. Haneef was an escaping fugitive (who had called the police to let them know he was leaving the country), revoked Dr. Haneef's visa. Now the Immigration Minister is pondering whether or not to change his mind.

Dr. Haneef has what I'd call a pretty good reason for wanting to leave Australia. His wife had a baby by C-section, and he wanted to be with her and their baby.

Ironically, 11 years ago today, a bomb went off at Atlanta's Olympic Park, the start of a really unpleasant part of Richard Jewell's life.

I hope that Dr. Haneef gets the right to get on with his life faster than Mr. Jewell did.

Posts on this topic:

• Cool Heads and Terrorism Investigations: It Could be Worse (July 27, 2007)
• Lesson for Terrorism Investigators: Return Those Calls! (July 21, 2007)
• Arrests, Doctors and Terrorists: Keeping a Cool Head (July 2, 2007) (My views on rational investigations and Richard Jewell)

Information from FOXNews.com, "Australia Drops Terror Charges Against Indian Doctor Accused in Failed U.K. Bombings Plot

Arrests, Doctors and Terrorists: Keeping a Cool Head

It hasn't been easy, trying to keep track of what's been going on with the British investigation of the London and Glasgow car bombs.

So far, the score seems to be eight arrests, of which anywhere between three and five were doctors. I don't blame the news services for being vague. This affair has been moving very fast.

So far, there seem to be four doctors who can be identified from the news reports:

• Dr. Mohammed Jamil Abdelqader Asha, a palestinian neurologist born in Saudi Arabia, with a Jordanian passport
• Dr. Bilal Talal Abdul Samad Abdulla, who was in the jeep with the jeep's driver
• A doctor who lived in Liverpool and worked at Halton Hospital in Cheshire, and who was from Bangalore, India
• A doctor at a Queensland state hospital, arrested at a Brisbane airport while trying to leave Australia. His name has been withheld by Australian authorities

The doctor in the Brisbane arrest was not an Australian citizen, according to Australian Attorney General Philip Ruddock.

The Indian doctor in Liverpool may be one of the unluckier people in the United Kingdom. He may have been detained because he had a mobile chip from, and was using the Internet account of, another doctor who had worked at Halton Hospital and had moved to Australia.

Was the former Halton doctor the same one who was arrested in Australia? Good question.

In Amman, Jordan, Dr. Asha's father told The Associated Press that his son isn't a terrorist. That's understandable. It may be true.

Fitting a familiar profile doesn't mean that someone is guilty. Back in 1996, a bomb at an Olympic Park party in Atlanta, GA, killed one person and injured more than a hundred.

Bear with me. This flashback to 1996 has a point.

Richard Jewell, the overweight white security guard who discovered an abandoned knapsack contained a bomb, and moved people away from it, seemed an ideal suspect. The Justice Department and Defense Department felt that the bomb could have been the work of a "nut case," or a militia group "gone bonkers," CNN reported on July 27, 1996. CNN's source said that this was a "gut feeling" coming from law enforcement's first look at what had happened, who had been there, and the pipe bomb that was used.

That "gut feeling" was quite natural. Many of the people at the Olympic Park were black. The guy who found the bomb was white. Suspecting him was, perhaps, quite natural. Other evidence pointing to Jewell included his allegedly owning a knapsack that looked like the one with the bomb, and allegedly saying "You better take a picture of me now because I'm going to be famous" (presumably said to witnesses who couldn't be found again). He even had been near a wooded area when his neighbor heard an explosion. Suspecting Jewell was perfectly natural. The FBI did the right thing by investigating him.

Although it might have been better to investigate others with equal zeal.

What happened in the news was something else.

Under the law, he was 'innocent until proven guilty,' but for 12 weeks he was the news media's Olympic Park Bomber. Suspected, but, you know, you've got to say "suspected."

Richard Jewell was cleared, and his innocence affirmed by the U.S. Attorney Kent Alexander, but not until his name and portly likeness had been thoroughly distributed around the USA.

That flashback to 1996 has a point. Here it is:

Considering what can happen in a fast-moving investigation, it's probably just as well that we don't have the names of all the people who have been arrested to date. There could be a Richard Jewell among them.

Information from The Independent, Fox News, CNN and The Muslim News.