Posts by Kyle Matthews
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Hey, apropos nothing in particular I'm well chuffed my mate Grant Robertson's now odds on to get the chance to represent Welly Central.
The ODT mingled a thing on DBP's competition for South Dunedin with a bit about him in Wgtn Central.
Presumably on the basis that anyone who lived in Dunedin over a decade ago, is still front page news. Love the Oddity.
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Did I say 'nobbed'?
It's not the crudity, it's the lack of a 'k'! Lest we forget them in their silence.
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P.S. Did you know that when Ransome was the Daily News (and later the Observer) correspondent in Russia he used to play chess with Trotsky and nobbed Trotsky's secretary? He later married the secretary, by the way.
Nobbed? What sorta weird-arse lingo are they teaching energy engineers these days?
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The symposium must have been very interesting Stephen. I was at the conference that David Small and Aziz Choudry were involved with when the SIS raided Choudry's house (talk about inspiring paranoia!). I clearly remembering being struck most by Mike Smith speaking (it was a Mike Smith, Annette Sykes double billing, but she hardly spoke, it seemed to me at the time that they might be doing a 'men speak on the marae' thing). He provided a wonderful analysis of power dynamics in New Zealand which I took notes on and published in a magazine, before then I'd never thought of him as such an analytical type. The way he told the "how I ended up on top of one tree hill with a chainsaw" story was also fairly entertaining.
What did Sam Buchanan have to say about the side of police that Pakeha don't see? He has 'copped it' previously so to speak, did he talk at all about the raids on the house in Wellington?
My first thought was 'how dumb are TV3?'. If you have the document you get it on air a.s.a.p. You don't telegraph that you have it and will broadcast it in one hours time.
This got me wondering about why the leaker didn't just put the material on the world wide web and drop the links in a few places and tell people to make their own copies and propagate it themselves. We've seen recently how court orders are powerless to suppress stuff that is online that people really want to see.
On the presumption that the material has come from one or more police officers, and their reason for leaking was to get the material out there, I couldn't see any reason why they wouldn't have done that, unless they were still playing in the 20th century and didn't think of it.
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I don't know. Maybe by getting the warrant under the TSA in the first place?
I'm going to say this again, because it's not getting through clearly.
If the police believe these people are involved in terrorist type activities - ie, preparing/planning for a terrorist action - then why wouldn't they use the TSA? That's the law that was supposedly written to deal with terrorist activities, it's not unreasonable to put it on the warrant if that's what you believe is going on.
I'm sure in hindsight the police might regret not just using the plain Crimes Act, however that's hindsight.
But that wasn't my point. My point was, it's my understanding that the media got the first official word that the police were investigating these people as 'terrorists', from the warrant supplied by one of the defendants. I'm sure it would have come out eventually, but it's a bit precious to complain about being labelled as a terrorist, when you gave the media the piece of paper which said that first.
Dearie me. You haven't said these specific people are guilty of this specific crime, but you have been going on as if there is a specific terrorist threat in NZ.
Oh god I'm a stuck record. I will say it again for the 7th time. We don't know. It may be there was a threat, it may be there wasn't. I don't know. You don't know. The material that would help us know, is probably never going to be made public.
The relevant question is "did the police have reason to believe that there was a terrorist threat in NZ". The answer - still - is, we don't know.
If people could read what I say rather than just assume that I think these people are all guilty, that would save me typing this for the 8th, 9th, 10th etc time.
doesn't exactly help your argument, does it?
That doesn't help what argument?
The labelling of criminals before they face trial happens all the time. David Bain's trial no doubt wasn't helped by the fact that people found the way he came across in the media as a bit creepy. Peter Ellis definitely didn't do well out of the whole being gay and accused of being a child molester. Personally I'm astounded that Michael Jackson wasn't found guilty..
This is entirely normal in our legal system and lots of other ones. It's not perfect, but juries are instructed to ignore it, and no doubt sometimes that works, and sometimes it doesn't.
But the police didn't name the law, I'm not even aware that they asked for the law - my understanding of why we have the TSA is to appease other countries, and to fulfil obligations under certain treaties/agreements that we've signed up to.
But again, if there's a law called the 'Terrorism Suppression Act', and you are the NZ police and you believe that there's some people out there who are going to commit a terrorist act, and you want to suppress them so that act doesn't happen, it's not unreasonable to put that law on the warrant and seek to use it to press charges against them. Yes that'll have perception issues for the defence, that's just life, and if people didn't want that to happen, then maybe they should have written any terrorism laws into the Crimes Act. If you want to bag anyone for that, bag parliament, they came up with the name TSA, and all the content underneath it.
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I do think that it's particularly concerning when members of the agency tasked with upholding the law deliberately and flagrantly break it.
Yeah I agree with that. It'd be interesting to know if the leaking was done by some individual down the structure, or if it was a deliberate decision made by the police as an organisation. The first is probably just reality, when the police are catching flak. The second is of more concern from a moral standpoint I think.
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It is the misuse of power of the state that creates "terrorism" (I hate that word) in the first place.
That's an interesting point Sara. I was trying to think of exceptions - terrorists totally unjustified by repression - but the only ones I could come up with off the top of my head were 'people go crazy with gun' which doesn't count as terror. Anyone?
Personally, not in favour of the terrorist acts, or the acts of the state that inspire it.
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I'm really happy to posit counter-factuals at people whose default assumption is that if the police accuse you, you're probably guilty.
Which I haven't said.
Also, I'd like to hear all the evidence in a criminal trial, not drip-fed into the media by leakers trying to vindicate themselves.
Well I don't think either side should be leaking. Stuff has come from the defence into the public as well.
I'd be curious to know where Campbell Live got the bundles of papers that was being waved around last night - I presume only the police side have that, so someone must have got active with a photocopier as a bit of retaliation for the flak that they'd been catching since the SG spoke.
I can still exercise my (possibly lamentably wrong) judgement about what may happen because this is the interwob. In that sense I will never be neutral and don't aspire to be.
That's fine, I'm not after hearts and minds here.
Just catching some flak for what seems to be me to be a reasonable position for me to hold. If you want to be over there, up to you, hopefully we see how it plays out.
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We can't establish that, so we're going with trespass on morgue charges, but we'll mention all this inadmissable evidence of necrophilia that we.ve gathered, but won't show you, anyway.
Well no doubt the defence will be looking into the argument that their clients cannot get a fair trial now that they've been tagged with the terrorist label.
It's my understanding however that the first evidence of the use of the TSA was when one of the people raided made a copy of the warrant available publicly. How is that the police's fault?
These things happen all the time in our legal system. Go talk to Peter Ellis about how fair he thought his trial was with months of child abuse talk waved around. This situation's not unique.
And I would have thought they would be able to get copies of the intercepts, under either the OIA, or Privacy Act, but perhaps Graeme can answer that one.
You seem to be assuming that the police lost the TSA charges deliberately. I'm not sure why Commissioner Broad, having gone through Rickards, would want to put another nail in his coffin.
I refer you again to the presumption of innocence, a point you seem to have trouble with.
Please tell me where I've said these people are guilty, as compared to the half dozen times I've said "these people may have done something, and we don't/won't know".
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Kyle, conspiracy to murder is a criminal act, as is attempting such. Please stop constructing straw men.
Go back to the original post. They seemed to me to be arguing against arresting people until they had committed the actual act of murder. I found that strange, as it seemed logical to me to intervene beforehand if possible, saving people's lives. Hence my question.
No straw men here.