"The Terrorism Files"
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if you wanted to talk to Tame Iti all you would have to do is either a) invite hime to the cop shop with his lawyer or B) wait until he was travelling and stop the car.
Fair enough, but I'm sure not everyone named on the arrest warrants would have been so accommodating.
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Now if I was a complete cynic, would it be mad to suggest the potential for the accused to have leaked this information?
After all, if they could potentially achieve a mis-trial, wouldn't it be worth their while to flick this info to the DP?
Only if you ignored the resulting jail time.
Judges tend to take a very dim view of people deliberately trying to derail court proceedings to their advantage. Which is why we don't see defendants doing it.
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I can't believe no-one's picked Kevin up on this:
The Northern Island situation is a good analogy because it is an example of a wealthy country that had to go through 30 years of violence for no better reason than the poliktical elite stirred up a tiny minority of nutbars for their own political purpose.
Presuming that "Northern Island" = "Northern Ireland", which seemed to be the case from the context, that seems a bizarre and offensive statement. The Troubles were purely stirred up by a political elite?! So, hundreds of years of colonisation, plantations, Black & Tans and sectarian conflict had nothing to do with it, then?
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Cheers Graeme. The bit that confused me was
1. You can only enhance the ability of a terrorist entity if it is already a terrorist entity. Even if you're helping it towards committing a terrorist act, if your help is before it becomes a terrorist entity, then you haven't committed the offence.
Under section 13(1)(b) a terrorist entity is one that commits a terrorist act, and a terrorist act is something done for a political cause and intended to cause death to cause terror (among other things). Surely, though, you train to do something with the intention of doing that thing? Or is that where the need for a specific target comes in, despite things like
First speaker: "What's going to be the strategy?"
Reply: "Strategy will divide, will divide Aotearoa ... extreme violence and extreme f...... actions too." -
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Sonic
Lambert, as Matt Macarten pointed out, if you wanted to talk to Tame Iti all you would have to do is either a) invite hime to the cop shop with his lawyer or B) wait until he was travelling and stop the car.
No need for dawn raids unless you were aiming for drama.
Thanks for that. I needed a good laugh.
Can you imagine it?
ring ring. "Kia ora"
"Is that Mr Iti?"
"Ae"
"it's detective john smith of the Ruatoki CIB here, I was just wondering if you could come down the station with your lawyer to talk about some illegal guns, explosives and plots to assassinate the PM and blow stuff up?"
"Ae, sure thing mr Smith"
"Oh, and Mr Iti, please don't try to hide any of the guns or explosives we need for evidence, now there's a good chap. We'll send someone around for it later. Would you mind terribly laying them all out on the grass outside for us?"
"not a problem mr Smith, kia ora"
"good bye"
Click.
Do you think about things before you say them often? Thanks for the laugh all the same.
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"Fair enough, but I'm sure not everyone named on the arrest warrants would have been so accommodating"
Why not they are mostly all well known activists.
You could just announce that there was a planning meeting for a new Wellington bypass, and rounded them all up when they came to protest.
;)
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A couple of notes about "activists" as that word, as well as "terrorist" and "traitor" have been thrown around rather immoderately in some cases, with the (not necessarily intentional) implication that they are synonymous.
There is a wide range of possible meanings for "activist" and there is a wide range of activities. There is a world of difference between an anarchist vegan who protests outside a Te Papa weapons conference and a would-be bomber and assassin. I don't know the latter, but I do have personal contacts with the former who are generally based at 128 Abel Smith St (though I'm far too carnivorous to be involved myself).
I don't have anything to say here about Tuhoe or terrorism except to say that I am against terrorism - and child abuse and whatever else I'm supposed to state public opposition to. I think that the Wellington anarchist community are being tarred with the terrorism brush or the supporting terrorism brush, and not by accident. There is a history here, and it does have a bearing on how the police have acted in Wellington.
Ross Meurant's article on the insular police culture is particularly enlightening here.
The "hippy protestors" of the Peace Action and Anti-Vivisectionist and feminist groups as I've heard them called, have long been a thorn in the side of the police here and there have been a number of confrontations at protests where the police have acted violently and aggressively and then charged those they assaulted with assault on a number of occasions (you know the joke: violently attacked an officer by flinging themselves on his boots and his fists). The police assault charges have always been thrown out of court, but nonetheless the injuries have lingered (one I know of has permament memory loss and has left NZ), others I have spoken to and have known for years have been severely bruised in the process of being arrested - and these are all fairly small, slightly-built women who were not likely to have offered much of a real threat to a cop.
Moreover, they were intimately linked with the Louise Nicholas cases and associated protests outside the police station and college, something that rather pissed the police off.
Some of them have been raped in the past and didn't get any help from the police and see that Rickards is still receiving pay and benefits (even if he is IMO certain to be sacked soon). This matters to them - a lot.
The left is not some huge monolith (Judean People's Front/People's Front of Judea and all that) but there are personal links and contacts of someone-who-knows-someone-who-knows-Kevin Bacon and someone from the Urerewas may have couch surfed in Wellington, or more likely, the police saw an opportunity to go on a fishing expedition and rope in a few "subversives" who have irritated and embarrassed them in the past. My contacts tend towards the latter interpretation. The clearly vindictive nature of the leaks to the media would also support that.
It has been asked, well, why didn't they go to the police if they heard about something bad happening up north? The answer would be (and I think that RB suggested this above) that they have no trust for the police at all - and they have good reason not to. Moreover, there is no grand left-wing conspiracy so in most cases, one group simply doesn't know what another group was up to. From what I hear, there are divisions, with some supporting the Ruatoki people, others wanting the separate themselves - they DO hate violence, but haveing been on the receiving end of it from police none of them want to talk to them.
They have held events and an open day in Wellington to show what sort of people they really are. I didn't see much mention of that in the Dompost or the Herald, but that's not simply because they all support bombing and assassination - there's a lot more to it than that.
Sorry about the long essay, but I get pissed off by simplistic statements alonmg the lines of "well if you don't stand on a street corner and shout that you're against it, you must be for it."
Oh yes, and I'm also against... oh, whatever. Bad stuff.
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Sonic
the point was, being under scrutiny does not necessarily deter. These guys assumed the police were watching them and still carried on. Just as everyone 'knew' what McGuinness was and he still carried on.
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I have already said that I am against trial by media, and this clearly demonstrates why.
I think the rebuttal to that would that there's been a huge amount of trial by media going on already -- a good deal of it of the police, who have been accused of racism, incompetence, "state terror", etc, etc. The government has been accused of directing the raids as a political strike against all Maori. We have been repeatedly assured that nothing more than bushcraft classes were going on. There have been demands for the resignation of the Commissioner of Police. The people saying those things weren't exactly waiting for the matter to be heard before a court.
And John Minto has used the privileged position of being present in court to relate, in print, suppressed evidence in what is at least a selective and possibly a misleading fashion.
So, while I'm conflicted about what the Dom Post has done (I'd have liked to see the evidence made public after the firearms trials), I do think it cuts both ways.
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"Oh, and Mr Iti, please don't try to hide any of the guns or explosives we need for evidence,"
And what explosives did the seize?
May I venture it was a number between 0 and, er, zero?
They were watching these people every minute of every day, are you seriously trying to tell us that dawn raids were the only way to pick them up?
They could have lifted them at New World when they went shopping.
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You could just announce that there was a planning meeting for a new Wellington bypass, and rounded them all up when they came to protest.
Or invite them to form a committee of some description...
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Nice quote from the hikoi:
"When have we ever had bombs here in NZ? All we have is a couple of fringe people talking rubbish in the bush. The Tuhoe people are totally against these people so why must we all be punished with these laws," Ms Tamara said.
Damn straight. Why indeed? Cos it's not just Tuhoe being punished with draconian laws. The prime minister can now declare any of us to be a criminal. Good eh?
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New citizens swear oaths of allegience. Does that mean that those granted citizenship can commit treason while the NZ-born can't?
I don't believe that a treason charge could ever be justified in peacetime these days.
Well I'd be pretty much in agreement with your belief there, I don't know the answer to your question on the first one.
But just saying, it's my understanding that all New Zealanders at least are covered by the treason law. The original poster indicated otherwise.
I wandered down the hill to take a look at the hikoi during lunch time: the unintentional irony of ranks of people dressed up in combat fatigues with keffiyah masking their faces chanting 'we're not terrorists' was certainly worth a walk in the wind.
Seriously, the photo on stuff of the protester with the covered up face and the dog with a muzzle on. That's a future class in 'bad public relations'.
"It's highly unlikely the police would have used paid informants"
Really? they do it with every other crime. Why would they suddenly develop scruples around this?
Because the informant would have to:
A. Already be on the inside somewhat. Been to the camps, or knew someone who had been there who told them about it. The logical place they're going to come from is a peace or environmental activist. They're not going to take money from the cops to nark. They'd be a very principled person, and they would have done it, I would guess, out of anti-violence beliefs. Or...
B. Be someone that the police paid to infiltrate the camps. And the police wouldn't use a civilian to infiltrate a camp of people training with weapons. They'd use an undercover cop. And if they had an undercover cop, they wouldn't be relying on all this recording, their primary evidence from the 10th would be the cop's testimony.
Police pay informants in other crimes where they know the person has knowledge, and the only way they're going to get it out of them is by giving them money. Drugs crimes most commonly.
There are people facing arms charges, and those people were facing considerable damage to their reputations anyway for their involvement in things that were stupid but not illegal, but there was and is no terrorism.
That's not what the SG said. He didn't say there was, he didn't say there wasn't. He made a legal ruling in relation to the TSA.
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The opinions and positions taken suggest that, probably most people have fixed ideas of who was right and who was wrong.
They are not going to have their opinion changed by anyone from the left or right of their position. (alphabetically arranged in case you perceive bias)
Thank God the moderator has a sense of perspective.
Too much hot air and I don't only mean the alleged terroists.
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They could have lifted them at New World when they went shopping
And you'd then be on here demanding to know why, oh why did the police violate an innocent supermarket and terrorise the people of Ruatoki while shopping for their kai when they could have just carried out early morning raids?
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"They could have lifted them at New World when they went shopping."
Sonic that would have interferred with the New World Order - (sorry couldn't resist).
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Um, Te Kooti would probably count
All right, then. One example from about 140 years ago. Any others to add to the growing trend of homegrown terrorism? Might as well complete the list.
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I was taking the piss out of your silly suggestion Sonic, I didn't pretend my story was factual.
They were watching these people every minute of every day, are you seriously trying to tell us that dawn raids were the only way to pick them up?
They could have lifted them at New World when they went shopping.
Let's just test your next piece of tactical genius. Ruatoki is a small town of how many people? A couple of hundred? Ever lived in a small town? Do you think just maybe one or two locals might just have noticed someone watching the suspects every second of every day? Not really going to fly that theory I suspect....
Also, lets think through the scenario as the arresting officers shall we?
Option 1: arresting someone you think has been playing with guns and other nasty toys, in a VERY public environment where if anything goes pear shaped, a lot of people could get hurt very quickly; OR
Option 2: Arrest the suspect at home while he is asleep, where there is little chance of anyone getting hurt.
it is a bit of a no brainer isn't it?
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Judges tend to take a very dim view of people deliberately trying to derail court proceedings to their advantage. Which is why we don't see defendants doing it.
I'm sure you're right. But at the same time, nearly all the chatter of which I've been aware has been from the activist side. A lot of people seem to have been aware of the nature of the evidence.
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"They could have lifted them at New World when they went shopping."
Sonic that would have interferred with the New World Order - (sorry couldn't resist)
Heh. That was choice.
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I think the rebuttal to that would that there's been a huge amount of trial by media going on already -- a good deal of it of the police, who have been accused of racism, incompetence, "state terror", etc, etc.
Ye gods, are you seriously equating accusing the police of racism with facing jail if the charges against you are proven!?!
Trial by media means trying a case that is before the courts in the media instead, where rules of evidence and cross-examinations etc etc do not obtain. That is in no way the same thing as your use of 'trial by media' above.
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Lets look at an alternative scenario Kyle.
Guy gets busted for something, drugs or petty theft. The police say "these gentlemen from the security services" would like a word. The offer, keep us informed about the radicals and the charges go away, and there is a few bucks in it for you.
The nark then has a motive for keeping the information coming, making provocative statements hoping the targets run off their mouths in agreement.
I'm back in the Uk for the moment where it has just been discovered that one of the leading gangsters in Glasgow ran guns to the loyalist terrorists in Ireland while giving MI5 information on who was picking them up.
In returm he got immunity for prosecution while flodding the streets with herion.
His name was Arthur Thompson, look it up.
Thats how the secret state operates, I see no reason it is not the same in NZ.
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Something I've often wondered is how undercover cops don't get rumbled straight away in NZ?
I'd have thought they wouldn't get far before they found someone who was at school with them and remembers them being Dave who joined the police.
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Danyl, I think your crystal ball that tells you what I might say in an alternative reality is acting up.
Better take it back to the shop mate.
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Kyle Matthews said:
Seriously, the photo on stuff of the protester with the covered up face and the dog with a muzzle on. That's a future class in 'bad public relations'.
Well, this is how the Dom Post and other NZ media reports things - you have a large demonstration somewhere, and it's who-ever wears a bandanna, or scuffles with the police who gets photographed. Am I going to tell that person to go home, or remove their bandanna? Would they listen to me if I did? No. Does that person represent what I think? No.
I stopped going to protests for a while, because I realised that it didn't really matter the content, the media had a narrative that they'd happily insert you into for their convenience.
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