IT is neither new nor incriminating, but Immigration Minister Kevin Andrews is becoming desperate.
His bid late yesterday to escape the political noose by citing a nebulous internet conversation as the basis for Mohamed Haneef's incarceration, and ongoing demonisation, is as flawed as the policing and prosecuting that preceded it.
On the material disclosed by Andrews yesterday, Haneef is guilty, but not of terrorism.
He is guilty of being extremely perceptive and fearful of the probability that he would be wrongfully framed in Australia for giving away his mobile phone SIM card, a year earlier, to his second cousin, Sabeel Ahmed in Britain.
Haneef is also guilty of receiving an internet chatroom message from his brother Shoaib in Bangalore, who was concerned that the family's sole breadwinner would be unjustly linked to the failed terrorism plots in London and Glasgow because of the connection to the SIM card.
But we already knew this. Haneef had volunteered it to the police in his first interview on July3, a record of which was subsequently leaked to The Australian.
He had told police he was worried about being framed over the card, and that he had tried to contact a British counter-terrorism police officer four times before trying to board a flight to India on the evening of July 2.
And he told Australian police in that first interview how Ahmed's mother had been concerned that the police discovery of the SIM card, which had once been in Haneef's
