Hard News: To defame and deflect
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Hebe,
I swear I saw Murray Horton ascending in the Rapture on this morning's commute through Addington.
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I've heard Key's "Hager's last allegations were categorically disproven" sound bite about 3 times across different media now, and not once have I heard a journalist ask him which allegations were the ones that were categorically disproven. He gets a free ride that allows him to set the agenda.
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bob daktari, in reply to
He gets a free ride
and that won't change - if anything Little will come out of this the worst
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Key strokes… Doh! ex machina?
When quizzed mid-afternoon he said he had no idea what would be revealed. But, pointing to Hager’s election bombshell Dirty Politics, he said: “Nicky Hager was wrong last time. His information is old. I guarantee you it will be wrong this time.”
Says Key in The Herald – a Stuff story repeated his earlier – pre-election ‘loser’ description of Greenwald – ever classy…
…and what a guy – a guarantee given on no information to hand – the man is a tool, hell a whole sack of tools…Spier, spier , pants on fire…
I look forward to Key’s excoriation over XKEYSCORE revelations…
The Spy who came in from the clod?
or
The Clod who came in from the Spies?<transferred from the Dirty Politics comments thread>
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'disinformation, categorically disproven, fabricated, self-serving'...
Farrar will be busy today checking how the lines are playing. -
...not “a good, hard-working honest, New Zealander”
That is one of the most chilling phrases yet. I fear we are heading into a period of Fascism. This is the type of language with which it begins.
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Current lead on the Herald website, by David Fisher – Snowden revelations: John Key failing leadership test with terrorists-under-the-bed response.
John Key worked to undermine the spying revelations before he knew what they were.
Even before the New Zealand Herald approached his office for comment, he offered a "guarantee" the revelations today would be wrong.
Then, exactly like those in the United States, he pulled out the terrorism bogeyman, presumably as some sort of cure-all for allegations of over-reach by our intelligence agencies.
It's a hackneyed line that was trotted out early overseas and - two years after the initial revelations from Snowden - there has not been a single, sustainable example to justify the extent of the surveillance carried out.
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As Lamia Imam has been saying on Twitter since yesterday: if Snowden is making stuff up, why would he be facing espionage charges?
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Good on the NZ Herald. Investigative journalism is alive and kicking against the pricks.
Now it's up to the gallery staff to get in the way of the PM's 'speaking through them' and make him accountable. I wonder if any will step out of their savvy "ball game commentary", and actually take him to task for not answering questions, for spinning lines against Hager and for treating them like idiots.
Will we see Gallery reporters get angry at being ignored rather than just accept it as justifiable politics.
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We all know key will lie his arse off over this, he 'won't recall' etc.
He is weak gutted and does not deserve any respect from anyone in NZ. -
If Snowden and Hager really have made the whole issue too big to ignore, then the only thing the PM has remaining up his sleeve is to scare people by blowing something up. Not in the spin doctor sense, but in the detonator and blasting cap sense.
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Key and Netanyahu are like two peas in a pod
ratchet up the fear - never mind the facts...Key's 'you are not a decent kiwi if you question me'
stance would be risible, were it not so dangerously divisive.he is an ugly excuse for a statesman
and a karmic black hole! -
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On Stuff, Michael Field does a useful job of explaining why we might want to eavesdrop on our Pacific neighbours
I read it - and John Hayes view - as being more an argument that this is entirely the wrong sort of intelligence gathering. Its not focused, its not targeted, it lacks context. And it seems largely to be being done not because we need to - our needs would clearly be better served by embassy staff reading the papers and talking to people - but so that we have something to trade to "the club".
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– and suggested that only someone who was not "a good, hard-working honest, New Zealander" could think otherwise –
That is a contradictory statement if ever I heard one. Hard-working, honest? What? like a money trader is hard working and honest, the whole banking industry is based on devious and duplicitous practice, it depends on "insider knowledge" and therefore "insider trading".
Like I said on David Fishers article. "Key should listen to the likes of David Lange but then he has been living in the vacuum of the banking industry since then."
He may have been a market leader but now he claims to be a leader of people and warns us of "Reds Under the Bed" (for Reds read Terrorists) yeah, right.It may be something to do with his appalling pronunciation but now we seem to have a Minister for Terrorism and the people of New Zealand are fighting "The War on Tourists"
Perhaps its time to reach in through the window of Parliament and grab the Key and put an end to this dangerous behaviour. -
Ian Dalziel, in reply to
blowing something up... in the detonator and blasting cap sense.
We have a police station in Chchch being primed and packed for an imminent implosion by the Govt - possibly April! (or a slow newsday)
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Ian Dalziel, in reply to
at home he feels like a terrorist...
Perhaps its time to reach in through the window of Parliament and grab the Key and put an end to this dangerous behaviour
Snap - I commented elsewhere that someone needs to snatch the Key from Parliament as he is driving the country in the wrong direction, arguably on the wrong side of history!
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On Stuff, Michael Field does a useful job of explaining why we might want to eavesdrop on our Pacific neighbours
Not really. He lists a bunch of might-have-helpeds, all of which involve extremely pervasive outright spying on people in other sovereign nations, right up to their senior politicians - for their good. They do not ask for such help, and probably would not want it, and if it was provided, people would just plot trouble in ways that such surveillance is not helpful for.
Furthermore, I dispute that the Fijian coups came as a huge surprise to NZ. The exact manner, perhaps, but the underlying trouble that led to them was plain to see.
Even if we could actually help hugely with the exact manner of these events, is it actually on us to do so? Isn't it quite possible that attempting to intervene in a coup in Fiji could actually do more harm to NZ than good? Isn't that why we never have? I certainly don't want any part in their trouble. The best thing we can offer is a safe haven for their refugees. Which we do.
This idea of us intervening in the affairs of other nations over their internal strife is crazy shit. I would accept that helping out if nations are attacked externally makes sense, particularly through multilateral channels like the UN. The idea of us secretly spying on them so that we could intervene is even worse. It's actually aggressive behavior, and I don't want any part of it.
Our intelligence services are for protection of ourselves. And we seem to have very little need for such protection. Let's keep it that way.
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Joe Wylie, in reply to
On Stuff, Michael Field does a useful job of explaining why we might want to eavesdrop on our Pacific neighbours
Not really. He lists a bunch of might-have-helpeds, all of which involve extremely pervasive outright spying on people in other sovereign nations, right up to their senior politicians – for their good. They do not ask for such help, and probably would not want it, and if it was provided, people would just plot trouble in ways that such surveillance is not helpful for.
Field's piece reads like a 21st century version of the musings of the kind of old colonial hand who kept the natives in line with a sack of beads and a dozen Lee-Enfields.
A large chunk of Fiji's population live in New Zealand and more may come if things ever go bad again.
We need to be watching.
Is it just Field, or was that kind of implied rascism and condescension all the go back on his watch?
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Naturesong, in reply to
At least theres no language comparing people to insects or sub hmans.
Small mercies.
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I'm wondering, are lawyer-client emails subject to privilege as communications? I'd imagine a fair few may have been caught up in a dragnet.
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Staggered, but not surprised at this release. As already suggested above, surely the best way to deal with our Pacific whanau is to talk to them as people - such an old-fashioned concept it seems.
My reading on what the "Yeah Right" Honourable John Key has been saying distills to:
"GCSB does not spy directly on NZers". However, it is completely plausible that 5eye partners connect directly to GCSB feed and feed gathered intelligence back to National Party HQ. -
Hebe, in reply to
“GCSB does not spy directly on NZers”.
Nah; reciprocal agreement with Australia. They do us, we do them. Sorted.
I must be alone in not getting excited about all this: only the detail is new, and what else would Waihopai have been doing? Business as usual.
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BenWilson, in reply to
Is it just Field, or was that kind of implied rascism and condescension all the go back on his watch?
Dunno. But I was struggling all the way through it to figure out how cellphone metadata could have helped in the various twists and turns of civil war in the Solomon Islands. Unless you actually listen to the calls, preferably being fluent in Pijin and some of the 70 other languages spoken there, you aren't going to find out a great deal more than who sometimes talks to who. Even then the proviso is that people involved in serious trouble aren't using burner phones.
Seriously, this is a country where the PM was kidnapped by his own counterinsurgency forces. We're meant to be keeping these people apprised of their own intel? That could possibly have just made it even easier for interests counter to ours to prevail.
I mean really, who would like to be spying on the cellphones of people in Fiji more than the dictatorship itself, or anyone sympathetic to it who was working in it prior to a coup? Which was probably a substantial number of the very people we'd be handing the intel to, since the coup was directed by a military Admiral. We'd be a running joke if we helped at all - Cheers John, you helped us pinpoint the last guy writing his anti-government blog and now he's been deported - to NZ.
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Russell Brown, in reply to
I read it – and John Hayes view – as being more an argument that this is entirely the wrong sort of intelligence gathering. Its not focused, its not targeted, it lacks context.
Yes, I could have been clearer there. He explained further along those lines on RNZ this morning.
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