It all starts here - Australia’s Gold Coast  - the noted holiday playground, home to retirees, the surfer lifestyle, university students and the many young professionals trying their luck, looking for a new start and fresh opportunities in the sunshine. In the eyes of the Australian Federal Police, this beach-side holiday and lifestyle ‘Mecca’ was also the likely terrorist outpost of a young medical doctor of moderate Islamic faith from India. On the surface, and with the ‘security’ of a 457 employer-sponsored Australian working visa, Dr Mohamed Haneef also took up a new opportunity and fresh start on the Gold Coast, but these ambitions crashed and burned when he was arrested and held in custody for 25 days on suspicion of assisting an act of terrorism in the United Kingdom.

The revelation of Dr Haneef’s mobile phone SIM card being in the possession of his second cousin at the failed Glasgow airport bombing attempt in June 2007 received blanket coverage in the Australian media soon after the news broke. This piece of police intelligence proved later to be incorrect, but it nevertheless was enough ‘evidence’ to connect the young doctor with his cousin who had engaged in the terrorist act. Guilt by association it seems, although the accusation was that Haneef had provided resources – that being a SIM card – used to support terrorism. Even though Dr Haneef was on the other side of the world in Australia when his cousin along with another would-be terrorist crashed their explosive-laden SUV into Glasgow Airport’s passenger terminal, the junior Gold Coast Hospital doctor was arrested on suspicion by the AFP when he attempted to leave Australia to join his wife and newly born daughter in India soon after the Glasgow incident.

What happened next whipped up a media frenzy, along with protracted court proceedings, legal wrangling and heavily resourced counter-terrorism investigation of the case and subsequent government review which would eventually cost Australia’s taxpayers a whopping AUD $11 million.

Dr Mohamed Haneef, while being the central figure in this book, remains something of a mystery throughout, but there are characters-aplenty walking in and out of what at the time in the Australian winter of 2007 brought together the year’s biggest media circus.

The author approaches the Haneef story with day by day accounts of the events leading up to arrest, incarceration, interrogation by the AFP, the court proceedings, and the media’s scramble for information and timelines for filing news reports.

Cat and mouse, cloak and dagger, claim and counterclaim and pretty much every other metaphor you care to throw into the mix is what comes out of the Haneef case. Not quite a farce, but each new day in the telling of Haneef’s time in custody reveals another twist, mostly through the making, correcting, and then revealing of the myriad of mistakes made on all sides.

What the book achieves is to dispel a few myths about the media and how it engages with lawyers, courts, and public officials to get the day’s news copy. There is no guaranteed right to information, and not all information is correct. The defence team themselves struggle throughout the Haneef case to get the facts.

There’s enough here for the casual reader looking for the most complete telling of this saga to date to stay hooked with the story. The Haneef case dominated Australian media coverage during much of the second half of 2007, and many people might still be confused about what actually happened. The ‘mysterious’ Dr Haneef took the lion’s share of front page news space during the run-up to the Australian federal elections held late in that year which saw a change of government.

Don’t expect winners or happy endings. Everyone seems to lose – there are no winners in this story. Even the ‘winners’ don’t really win – there is baggage still hanging around, such is the legacy of legal processes and implied political interference. But the structure of this book and the punchy, matter-of-fact style in the telling does pull the reader through, and there is a sense of satisfaction at the end by knowing more about what really happened to the young, mild-mannered Dr Mohamed Haneef.

Students and academics have much to gain from digging into Dr Ewart’s book. There would be few Australia-specific case studies as comprehensive and as compelling as the Haneef case that deals specifically with the media, legal and political processes tied to the vexed topic of international counter-terrorism wrapped in a single story. And the PR ‘battle’ to support Islamic rights in Australian society is added to the mix, which seems to throw up more questions than answers, but appropriately placed in the context of Dr Haneef’s circumstances post-arrest.

The author also reminds us that this case happened during an election year when the conservative Howard Government was falling behind in the opinion polls, giving rise to some perceived political deception connected to the case which Dr Ewart brings to the surface.

Jacqui Ewart also injects her own side-story into the telling, which makes for interesting reading with recollections of Australian Federal Police surveillance of her own research process leading to the writing of this book. Pausing and making the switch from the journalese of third-person narration part way through to inject the author’s own first person account is dangerous territory for any writer. But the author adds some spice to this compelling yarn by daring to get inside the tale by being part of it, also providing the reader with a neat divide between the first and second parts of the story.

Dr Ewart remarked in humorous fashion at the October 2009 book launch in Brisbane in front of a guest list of about 200 mostly friends and colleagues, that it wouldn’t have surprised her to have among the crowd a handful of covert AFP agents enjoying the hospitality at the launch. During her speech she sent out a cheery hello to those in the room she didn’t know, thanking them for the constant surveillance of her movements over the preceding months that she spent piecing this public record of the Haneef case together.

And if there’s one of the several morals you can draw from this story worth noting for this review it’s this: ‘be careful with whom you give your SIM card to’.

Dr Jacqui Ewart is senior lecturer in journalism and media studies at Griffith University. ‘Haneef: A Question of Character’ is published by Halstead Press and available online at Australian Book Group, Booktopia and other good bookstores.