how naÏve?

I was scathing earlier this week because of the front page story in the Sunday Age about condemned heroin trafficker  Nguyen Tuong Van. It was real bleeding heart stuff.

I think I said it was a disgraceful, irresponsible, schmaltzy Page One lead story . It showed a picture of twins. Under the headline : “Little twins – one is on death row, the other in the depths of despair.”

And the story said: “The little twins smile happily for the camera, their young lives filled with endless possibilities. Today one of them sits on Death Row, the other is in hiding – filled with despair over the loving brother whose life looks certain to be cut short on the gallows in Singapore.”

The baby photo of Nguyen Tuong Van, now 25, and his twin brother Khoa, was released by Nguyen’s lawyers.

As I said…. what the story and the lawyers didn’t tell you is that the brother “so filled with despair” hadn’t been to Singapore to see his condemned twin for three years. And at one stage he claimed he had no idea about what his brother was doing. And that getting to death row was his own fault and he was stupid.

Well, as I mentioned briefly yesterday that media beatup and heart-tugger is eclipsed by an extraordinary piece of journalistic junk  --written by  Julie-Anne Davies in this week’s edition of The Bulletin.

The headline says “The Final Payment. How a polite, naïve young man wound up as a bumbling mule for a drug syndicate”.

Before I shoot this rubbish down in flames let me quote a few more paragraphs from this tear-jerking twaddle which demeans The Bulletin.

Ms Davies writes about reading Nguyen’s police statement. She says: “It is impossible not to conclude that the hopelessly naïve and immature Van was the perfect patsy. He was desperate to make fast money but unlike most of the other suckers, the cash wasn’t for him. Van wasn’t greedy or trying to feed a drug habit but one thing seems clear, his overdeveloped sense of responsibility for his identical twin Khoa has landed him on Death Row”.

What a raft of crap. Methinks Julie-Anne Davies is the naïve one here. Khoa claimed total ignorance about what his twin brother was doing.

Can somebody tell me how a “hopelessly naïve and immature” man (in his twenties by the way) could, all by himself, find a drug syndicate in Sydney and go to Cambodia and collect nearly half a kilo of smack and strap it to his body and try to smuggle it through Singapore aimed for a Melbourne market? Foreign Affairs Minister Alexander Downer confirmed on this programme yesterday that that was enough heroin for 26,000 hits. Could that have killed a hundred addicts? A thousand?  And we are worried about one scumbag?

And what was the money that Nguyen was bringing heroin here really for?  Was it to pay legal fees for his brother? Pay back a friend?  Pay his brother’s gambling debts? Fund another heroin run out of Asia?  There is much more here than the sycophantic media is telling you.

And the stoic, stony-faced, cunning, vicious, twin brother knows that if his twin brother’s life ends in a noose on December 2 then he is the one who really killed him.

Thursday, November 24, 2005

©Copyright Derryn Hinch 2005