Sydney Hostage Siege Unfolding

[Magda Hassan]

The following articles are from Max Ellis a pretty mainstream political observer and even he can see there is some thing wrong with the very stage managed event.

The siege at Martin Place ended at 2am last night with the police storming the cafe, numerous shots being fired https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PbYy3OuU4sand two hostages being killed, along with the alleged "terrorist". Bob Ellis considers the things that will now be covered up or glossed over.



"Shotgun pellet wounds". '"Out on bail". "The Prime Minister refused to speak to him". These are some of the things that should be talked about and will be covered up or fudged in the next few days.
Did the "terrorist" have a non-lethal weapon? Why was this not known? Was the initial gunfire non-life-threatening!? Was it police gunfire, not his, that killed the "innocents" who died?
He was a man charged with sexual assault this year and, before that, with complicity in the murder of his ex-wife, who was burned to death. He had written insulting letters to the families of dead Australian soldiers in Afghanistan.

Man Haron Monis: fringe figure whose crime record and erratic behaviour made him notorious http://t.co/1d6IHIz3B2
Lenore Taylor (@lenoretaylor) December 15, 2014

He was a "self-styled cleric" preaching hate in a time of a Red Alert. He was accused of sexual offenses. Yet he was out on bail.
Why did the Prime Minister refuse to speak to him? Why has the Prime Minister not done a press conference this morning?
Is it, indeed, a "terrorist incident" any more than, say, the killings at Sandy Hook? Was there a "death cult" inviolved, as the Daily Telegraph alleged, or, as his lawyer suggests, a 'nutcase'?

It's official, @TonyAbbottMHR has labelled #sydneysiege as an "ISIL DEATH CULT" after the Daily TeleCraps did pic.twitter.com/6g4F644Itj
Lord Finnigania 平大王 (@Thefinnigans) December 15, 2014

The 'Red Alert' in New South Wales has been worse than useless. The Whitlam funeral boasted five prime ministers and five hundred celebrity 'prime targets' and I, for one, was able to get in with a radio and a laptop that could have been bombs. It would have been easy to smuggle a pocket-knife in. There was no electronic device we had to go through. There was, moreover, no search of the crowd outside. There were no snipers on any balcionies or roofs, as there might be at a public meeting addressed by Barack Obama. There was no significant 'security' at all, plus five hundred prime targets and a nationwide Red Alert.

Tune into @Channel9 for the latest details on #SydneySiege or Live Stream: http://t.co/zLbH87cNQK #Today9 pic.twitter.com/s5BygEns5o
The Today Show (@TheTodayShow) December 15, 2014

There were no body-searches at any Opera House opening night. And Man Haron Monis, proven a violent, crazy man, was allowed out on bail.
The is incompetence here and millions wasted, on a cocked-up populist Chicken Little operation, that failed to note that a man involved in the murder of his ex-wife and the persecution of dead soldiers' wives might be dangerous.
Baird said:

"We will get through this. We will get through this."

But some officials won't.

The rate at which we're learning things about the Lindt Cafe fire-fight is among the slowest in modern history.
We don't know yet whose bullets, or stun grenades, killed Katrina Dawson. We don't know yet whose weaponry wounded four others. We don't know the others' names.
We don't know why there were so many shots fired; and whether, in the dark, they knew who they were shooting at. We don't know why this has not been revealed.
We don't know why the police forebade the hostages to give any detailed media interviews. We don't know why the prime minister refused them help when two of them begged for it. We don't know why a Muslim cleric was not allowed to talk to the 'terrorist', as has happened in similar situations, hundreds of times, thousands of times across the world.
We don't know much about anything. And we can only surmise an enormous cover-up is taking place.
Kate McClymont is nowhere to be seen. Somehow this case, involving Liberals, does not interest her in the way the Craig Thomson case did. Somehow she finds in it nothing to care about.
A plausible scenario is that both Man Haron Monis and Tori Johnson were alive when the cops came blam-blamming in, and both dead a second later and Katrina Dawson gravely wounded. Another is that Johnson was dead, and the 'cross-fire' of police bullets, in startling numbers, wounded Dawson and four others. If Monis's weapon wounded six people, we would have known of it and the survivors would have been on television by now.
Or there may be some other explanation.
Were there helmet-cameras, as there were in the raid on the home of Osama Bin Laden? What has happened to that videotape, if any? What has happened to the footage shown on Russian television, and nowhere else?


Why have the witnesses been told they can't speak? Even John O'Brien, who left the premises eleven hours before?
It is almost certainly something to do with the prime minister's refusal to help the hostages out and thus let five of them, the women, probably, out of there. It is a massive cover-up, probably, of the Abbott cowardice, last seen when he cuddled koalas with Vladimir Putin. Or it may be something else.
It would be good if we knew something soon.