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.
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#onetermtony trying to take advantage of Sydney Siege is just disgusting. #shamepm #auspol http://t.co/1ZVnbiSOP3 via @canberratimes
— Martin Silsby (@MartinSilsby) December 17, 2014
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