Kasrils under fire over Info Bill
The following article was published online by IOL News:
Members of Parliament processing the Protection of Information Bill yesterday rubbished criticism of their work by former intelligence minister Ronnie Kasrils.
Kasrils, who introduced the first draft of the controversial bill to Parliament in 2008, wrote in a Sunday newspaper that the latest version was looking more dangerous than ever.
He has been a constant critic of the bill and has called for its withdrawal from Parliament.
The MPs, who had been at each others’ throats over several clauses of the bill yesterday, were in unison in criticising Kasrils’s article.
DA MP Dene Smuts described it as “rubbish”, with the exception of one point.
She suggested that the committee respond to Kasrils by highlighting the work it had done to improve his version of the bill.
“Why don’t you take a pink koki (pen) and a green koki and mark up for him in the working document all the bits that we added and mark in green the bits that were in his own bill which we have cut out,” suggested Smuts, who had brought a copy of Kasrils’s article to the meeting.
She said Kasrils had made one good suggestion in the article when he wrote: “There is no mention of members of the intelligence services who concoct and manufacture false information. Given the scandalous abuse of state resources for political purposes in recent years, this is an astonishing omission. Members of the committee must be suffering from acute amnesia to ignore this!”
“On this issue, he is correct, the rest is rubbish,” remarked Smuts. “I don’t believe Mr Kasrils would say those things,” responded the chairman of the Joint Standing Committee on Intelligence, ANC MP Cecil Burgess, sarcastically.
But ANC chief negotiator on the bill Luwellyn Landers also expressed his unhappiness over people who commented on the bill while they were not keeping up with its development. “If that is his article, and I believe it is … because in his 2008 version of the bill there’s no reference to that kind of intelligence that he is complaining about. So he is obviously making it up as he goes along.”
Source: IOL News
