Goff’s office knew also

Fran O’Sullivan writes on the Air NZ Kuwait flights, and reveals that a month before the first flight, a report including info on the flights was sent not just to Winston Peters’ private secretary but also Phil Goff’s.

O’Sullivan also deals with the fact that it is unfair to blame public servants for breaching policy:

It is unfathomable that so many public servants did not twig that the flights countervened Government policy as Clark and her senior ministers now claim.

Either the bureaucrats are incompetent, in which case the tumbrils should roll. Or there is no clear Government policy on Iraq, as the Australians believe. Or the Government (which was angered that the Investigate story undercut its attacks on National leader John Key’s vacillating stance on Iraq) shifts policy according to how much domestic capital it believes it can extract.

I think the shifting policy theory holds true.

Bill Ralston also has some fun with the issue:

The fact that two top Foreign Affairs advisers in his office apparently couldn’t be buggered reading an email report from the Combined Threat Assessment Group (CTAG) telling them New Zealand had just become a bigger target for al Qaeda is a bit of a worry. CTAG consists of the cops, the military and the country’s various spy agencies and its job is to monitor terrorist threats. A kind of important job, really, yet these characters in Winston’s office probably yawned “Ho hum”, clicked on “Received” and went back onto Trade Me instead.

What other vital warnings have they overlooked? I can imagine the pair now frantically going through their inbox. “Hmmm, what else have we got? Oh, this one from the SIS last month. Bin Laden’s holidaying in Queenstown. I’ll ring Millbrook and see if he’s still there. Hang on, here’s another dated September 10, 2001, from the Waihopi spy base, saying “Warn the Americans something about airplane hijacks and the Twin Towers. Might delete that one.”

Weirdly, Winston Peters didn’t seem to care too much that his office doesn’t bother to read all of its email traffic, explaining that the CTAG report was buried in a mountain of paperwork and they couldn’t get through it all.

I have to say, that one would think a CTAG report would be fairly high priority for reading.