Late last night (our time), the Australian High Commission in London told British journalist and academic Abdel Bari Atwan that he had his visa.

Yesterday’s Sydney Morning Herald reported that perhaps ASIO had expressed concerns about Atwan’s visa application on security grounds. Yet Atwan has never been refused a visa by any Western country. In April, he was in the United States promoting his book The Secret History of al-Qaeda. One has to wonder what our spooks may have been worried about.

Perhaps he lent Osama bin Laden his SIM card when he last saw him in 1996. Maybe Atwan was one of the people Stewie Griffin (the baby on Family Guy) assaulted on the first day of the Holy Month of Radaman (click here to watch the footage). Who knows?

Atwan’s message is summarised by his UK publisher, Richard Beswick of Little Brown, said:

Mr Atwan brings a Muslim’s sensibility to the most important story of our times, while remaining cool and detached in its telling. In the week when Osama Bin Laden has appeared again on our televisions Mr Atwan – who met Bin Laden in the Tora Bora caves – has vital advice for Western governments and their allies in their approach to terrorism. That anybody should be prevented by hearing that advice is a real cause for outrage and a shocking instance of a government ignorantly patronising its citizens.

The problem, of course, is that Atwan’s message – that our foreign policy priorities might actually be pussing orf (as they say in New Zealand) 1.2 billion Muslims — isn’t what the pollies want to hear. Then again, when Federal Police Commissioner Mick Keelty suggested our involvement in Iraq might make us a bigger target for terrorists, he was publicly humiliated.

You’d think that after the Haneef affair, which showed up the cultural ignorance of our front-line terror-fighters, we’d be seeing someone like Atwan addressing security and law enforcement officials. You’d think someone who follows Arabic media regularly and has a finger on the grassroots Middle Eastern pulse might actually prove useful to us. Instead, we have immigration and intelligence officials who are only allowed to tell the pollies what they want to hear. Meanwhile, the rest of us are exposed.

Clearly our leaders aren’t very alert. That should make us very alarmed.