ABOOBAKER ISMAIL
However, Chairperson, if I may just deal with it.  Mr Richard, you started out by formulating a hypothetical proposition.  You then go on to relate to a specific proposition and can I finish?  We get to a position now, in the first proposition you do not contextualise any civilians and I don't know where that suddenly flew away to in your questioning.  However you then come and make a supposition about the kind of information or intelligence that existed with regard to the Why Not bar.  Now Mr McBride and previously Mr Gordon Webster have said they spoke to people and they had information from those people that Security Force personnel frequented that bar.  My experience of Security Force personnel is that they usually go back to the same bars night after night.  That becomes their watering hole.  That's the first thing.  To simply try to create some kind of theoretical perspective when we are dealing with specifics here, now we've got to decide, we can test a whole series of them from 0 to 100, we can talk in every percentage and we can go on for days like this.  The issues before us are that Gordon Webster had obtained certain information, he had then said to Mr McBride it was infested with Security Force personnel.  They then tried to check that out, perhaps inadequately, but in their minds, they understood that Security Force personnel frequented that place.  They struck it, in the furtherance of a political motive.  The African National Congress was asked this question and Mr Chairperson, if you'll bear with me, I'm now going to read this into the record with regards to this, because they say, the African National Congress said quite clearly, tactical intelligence was the responsibility of the units on the ground.  Even if they did that reconnaissance badly, it is the way they did it.  Unfortunately I, as Commander, may have failed in my duty to check out that information, to push them on it, but on the basis of all the operations that they'd carried out in the past where they operated meticulously, struck at all their targets etc, I accepted that when I was told there is a concentration of Security Force personnel, I accepted that and authorised the operation to go ahead and that is what is important to us, but I would like to read this into the record, Chairperson and this occurs on page 57 of the MK Hearing in Cape Town on day 1, that is the bundle that, I hope that now these bundles have been put before you, Chairperson.  The question is then raised by Mr Valley and I quote
"I just want to follow this thought through because I want to refer to the first submission of the ANC on page 60, the second last paragraph, left-hand column 60. "The much publicised case of the car bomb explosion at the Magoo Bar and the Why not Bar on June 14th 1986, provides another example of an operation in which civilians were victims in the context of the intensification of the armed struggle.  Three civilians were killed, 69 injured" and it talks about McBride (that's Mr Valley that says that).  I want to go on to the next column, the second paragraph.  "This attack was in line with the ANC's attempts to take the struggle out of the black ghettos and into the white areas."
Then he talks about the Why Not Bar.
"How does this accord with what you were saying?  And I also defer to  Dr Boraine now.
We then have a response from Mr Mac Maharaj and I'm quoting
him:
		"I thought I had indicated that the enemy forces were often located in the commercial or civilian areas.  In this particular case, whatever was the actual outcome, the fact of the matter was that the comrades who acted on this target, had intelligence, tactical intelligence, suggesting that the Security Forces, when off duty, congregated at this venue.  So that was the basis on which they had acted and if they had acted on that basis, then they were in line with the practical problems that I had outlined that we were facing in the country."
And he goes on:
"The same problem, Chairperson, is highlighted in Church Street because it was the Air Force target.  Had the bomb gone off at 16h30, it would have caught the majority of the people, the overwhelming majority would have been from that place, but it went off prematurely and it had been carefully reconnoitred, so there was our problem and the target was selected, not directed at the civilian population but at the Security Force members."