So much for Rudd's 'full judicial inquiry'

By the close of the following day Dr Haneef provided full explanations of the matters that may have given rise to suspicion. All of the factual matters were either confirmed by documents in their hands or easily checkable by a few phone calls to the Gold Coast; to India; and to the UK.

There is very little evidence that the checking was done. There is evidence that the most exculpatory information, like the calls to Mr Webster and the Kafeel email, was either ignored or suppressed. The duty in s.3W(2) to release Dr Haneef, if a reasonable belief was no longer available, seems to have been either not adverted to or ignored.

It seems that important decisions in this case were being made by management and not by the investigators who were being asked to make the arrests and the detention order applications.

Options, options, options

Dr Haneef's lawyers always assumed that the decision his visa be cancelled, thereby, facilitating his continued detention, was a panic stricken response to the sudden prospect that he might be granted bail.

However, a different picture is portrayed in the submissions.

On July 3, the day after Dr Haneef's arrest, the minutes of the whole of government National Counter Terrorism Committee show discussion about the prospect of seeking a Protective Detention Order (PDO) for Dr Haneef. The consensus of this and later discussions was that there was insufficient evidence to support these options.

The continued detention without charge under part 1C Crimes Act was seen as a good stop gap measure. However, orders for this form of detention were not seen as being available indefinitely, and the documents reveal a plea to the AFP in the UK to seek evidence from the UK authorities to support a PDO.

Into this series of discussions, the option of immigration detention thrusts its face on July 8 when non-secret and secret briefs from the AFP to Minister Andrews were revealed which would allow him to cancel the visa. They were updated a number of times.

The new picture then is one of immigration detention to detain Dr Haneef being an option along with PDOs; detention without charge; bringing a criminal charge; and control orders, at least from July 8 and probably from an earlier date. The prime advantage of the visa cancellation option seems to have been that neither the Department, nor Mr Andrews, who made the decision, placed a high bar on the standard of evidence required.

As it turned out, the non-secret evidence that Mr Andrews accepted indicated that the highly selective version of a chat room conversation between Dr Haneef and his brother that Mr Andrews released, that day, was the whole of that chat room conversation.

Mr Clarke’s Inquiry

Mr Clarke and his team are working very hard to discover the truth as to how what happened to Dr Haneef was able to happen. However, Mr Clarke’s job has not been made easy and his Inquiry is not the full judicial Inquiry that the present prime minister repeatedly promised.

It is not even the semi-open virtual Inquiry that Mr Clarke, himself, promised. On April 30, 2008, in his opening statement, he said: