The day John Howard said sorry to Mick Keelty

It was a fulminating Alexander Downer who, as foreign minister, initiated the drama with his incendiary reaction to Keelty’s matter of fact observations about the Madrid bombing on Channel Nine’s old Sunday show.

“If if this turns out to be Islamic extremists responsible for this bombing in Spain, it is more likely to be linked to the position that Spain and other allies took on issues such as Iraq,’’ Keelty told Laurie Oakes.

Downer exploded and in an extraordinarily inappropriate intervention, Howard’s chief of staff Arthur Sinodinos cajoled our most senior cop into releasing a cringeworthy statement the following Tuesday.

``I regret that some of my words have been taken out of context ... As I have said before, we cannot allow terrorism to dictate national policy,’’ it read.

Privately, Keelty was filthy. He has never discussed the matter publicly. He was interviewed by Andrew Denton for an Enough Rope profile where the issue came up - and because Denton had given Keelty right of veto over the interview, Keelty regretfully asked Denton not to screen it because it drifted into discussion of the affair.

The fascinating part of the unscreened interview involved John Howard’s subsequent remorse at his government’s public shaming of Keelty, which Howard demonstrated by inviting Keelty to a private dinner at Kirribilli House in Sydney to apologise.

Keelty has had plenty of detractors - not just over Haneef, but his ham-fisted calls for media blackouts on the reporting of terror cases.

It’s curious that many of those critics would have been lock-step with Keelty in his analysis of the consequences in Spain of supporting the war on terror.

That overwhelming majority of ideologically ambivalent Australians are likely to remember Keelty more as a decent bloke who did his best at a time when the world was turned on its head by terrorism.

On Keelty’s watch as commissioner - which began in 2001 - Australia has not experienced a domestic terror attack, but has also pinched and prosecuted more than a dozen people who were demonstrably planning one.

It could also be argued that the Haneef affair doesn’t show a failure of the criminal justice system - but proves that the system actually works. Haneef was investigated but not ultimately charged with anything. He is a free man.

It was Keelty who expanded the AFP’s Asia-Pacific offices, our own frontline against regional drug trafficking.

The human side of Keelty has been lost or ignored by the media. In 2007 he lost three close friends - the AFP’s ACT commissioner committed suicide, and two of his closest friends in the AFP perished in the Garuda crash. In the aftermath of that tragedy, despite his personal loss, Keelty was all work, harnessing the power of the AFP to bring our injured back home, where they received care which quite probably saved their lives.

Predictably enough Keelty’s resignation will be used tomorrow to rehash his failings and ignore his achievements, despite the fact that, on balance, he helped make Australia a safer and better place at a time of unforeseeable turmoil.