Posts by Kyle Matthews
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Please unsubstantiate the claim that you've been engaged in terrorist activity, not to mention child abuse and any other icky smear I can come up with.
Well presumably if you had evidence of that, you'd take it to the police and they would, or wouldn't act on it. I could then unsubstantiate it when they decide not to charge me, or when they do charge me, and I'm found innocent. Neither of those two things are going to happen in this situation..
What I am saying is (I think for the 4th or 5th time):
1. The police felt they had evidence of terrorist activity.
2. That evidence will not see the light of day.
3. We can't be sure if the reason that it won't see the light of day is just because the TSA is a bad law, or if their evidence was weak/wrong.
4. We are therefore left with not knowing what these people did, or didn't do.
5. I think that's a failing of the system. -
Likewise, I think it's touchingly naive to believe that the police are unaffected by institutional imperatives, or that they always get it right, or that they wouldn't do something for no reason. We have had abundant evidence over the years that senior officers can and do make all sorts of mistakes. It isn't demonising them to take that into account when assessing police statements.
I agree.
But also, there's some nutters out there who aren't police, and I suspect at least one or two of the arrested people aren't the most stable.
Given that, isn't the logical thing to take a neutral stance and say "I don't know who's in the wrong here?" (and follow that up with "I'd like to hear all the evidence so I can come to a fair conclusion"?)
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I suspect you might not be entirely right about that, Kyle. Take, for example, the group "Peaceful Tomorrows" which is:
Well that doesn't counteract my point webweaver. I'm not arguing for the Patriot Act, nor indeed am I in favour of NZ's anti-terrorism laws. The Patriot Act is a pile of crap.
I was simply saying, would the families of the victims of 911, want the terrorists stopped, and charged with 'conspiracy to commit murder' before the terrorists got on the plane? I suspect the answer is 'yes'. That's arresting someone and charging them before they've committed the act.
That can be done by non-terrorism laws in NZ, and I presume, the USA. Not as easy legally, as you have to prove what someone was about to do, rather than what they did, but it has the advantage of less people being dead.
And I believe there's an appropriate balance between doing that, and civil liberties. We've had conspiracy crimes for ages in NZ, I've never thought of it as controversial.
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It's all back to front - to me, it seems wrong that the police were able to invoke the TSA in order to get evidence that they hoped would convict people under the TSA. Seems to me, you shouldn't be able to use the TSA to bug people unless you already HAVE a bunch of evidence which VERY strongly points in that direction anyway.
I think that's how all warrants work isn't it? You get a warrant under the arms act, because you believe someone is breaching that act. You get a warrant under the crimes act, to pursue someone under the crimes act.
Thing is, though, Kyle is living proof of the fact that you throw the T-word around enough and people actually start assuming it must be signifying something real out there, whatever the relevant legal opinion might say to the contrary.
Or you could read what I actually said, which wasn't anything about whether there was terrorism out there at all.
To summarise, my argument was, that there has been no evidence come to light in the past week to bag the police. We are still in a state of unknown about what people actually did or didn't do, and the solicitor general's statements don't change that.
The people who can answer that question are those that have read the 100 or so pages of intercepted material. As far as I know, that doesn't include anyone posting here.
I wonder Kyle: Would you scoff in derision at the suggestion that the unavailability of the evidence is quite convenient for the police because they thus won't be humuliated by how absurd that evidence actually is? While enough NZers have uncritically accepted their suggestions about terrorism, none of which have been substantiated.
Well, the Solicitor General said that the police were right to bring these matters to his attention. That could mean that the evidence collected was indicating terrorism, or it could mean that it wasn't.
I doubt very much however that it was absurd, the police would have had their legal teams look over it, and they wouldn't have wasted the SG's time if it amounted to nothing, they just would have dropped the whole TSA shortly after the raids, and held onto the Arms Act offences. What would the purpose be in sending absurd evidence to the SG? They'd just run the risk that he'd say "there's no evidence of terrorism here."
And I'll restate again, while none of the suggestions about terrorism have been substantiated, I'm not aware that they've been unsubstantiated yet. All that's happened is that the SG has declined to use the TSA to pursue them, and then he's bagged the law as virtually useless. That still leaves us not knowing whether people were planning/preparing to commit terrorist acts, it just means that they won't be charged under that act.
Because I privately scoff in derision at your apparent belief that the police are not basically an arrogant, conservative, bullying organisation with enough power to think they should have more and should exercise for the "betterment" of this society.
That's funny. I've been arrested twice - once protesting at a national party conference, once after getting sick of being pushed around by the NZ police at the CHOGM protests in 1995. I've laid 14 complaints with the police complaints authority in my life, I've been hit by police batons a couple of times, I've had a friend have her head shoved into a concrete pole while she was arrested. I've been actively involved in the peace movement of which some of the people tied up in this come from since 1994.
I'm not sure you should be making assumptions that I'm not capable of having a healthy dislike for the police as an institution, and indeed some of them as individuals.
But I'd bet money if ten people met the police commissioner and he could spend an hour telling them his side of the story, 9 of them would see where he was, and is, coming from. He doesn't get to do that however, as the law requires him to now destroy that information.
What I still think is a little hypocritical, is how a couple of weeks ago, people were all trooping out the line 'I will wait and see before I make any judgements on the police actions'. No further information has come forward about whether or not the police were justified in what they did, but now it's become a lot more trendy to bag the police.
It's not an easy job, and if they're going to catch flak when they fuck up, which is fair enough, it should be on the basis of being able to present the facts, not on the basis of having an application turned down to charge people under a particular law, which everyone here seems to agree is a crap law to start with.
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Kyle, do you want laws that catch criminals before they've committed their act?
Umm, yes. I don't have a problem with conspiracy crimes, or attempted murder crimes etc.
And I suspect the familes of victims of terrorism would probably tend to agree.
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Which I think is a good thing. It means that there is a small chance that somebody will one day manage to commit an act that would have otherwise been foiled. But terrorists of any competence would be able to avoid detection until at least the moment of action - so only incompetent terrorists would be caught.
Wait. You're happy with a law that doesn't catch terrorists until after they've committed their act? You don't want to, y'know, catch them before they set off their bomb?
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I'm not sure I agree with this one. Does the public really have the right to know about inadmissible evidence? Part of the reason it's inadmissible was because the collection of it did not satisfy evidence collection standards for the charges these people face. Quite a lot of the point of inadmissible processes is to protect the rights and reputations of the accused.
I'm not saying that we should get to know about inadmissable evidence. If, for example, the police collect evidence under duress - forced confessions for example - absolutely not.
I'm saying that this evidence, which apparently (at least according to John Campbell last night) has statements from "less than 6" (I guess that's 5, obscured for legal protection?) people talking about committing serious crimes is something that I'd like to be used in court.
If we pushed rewind, went back a year or so, and the police changed one thing - the law they put on those interception warrants - then I presume they'd still get the warrants, and we'd be hearing that evidence, and some people might potentially be facing, on the basis of that evidence, some much more serious charges than firearms charges. Innocent or guilty.
All I want in my legal system is if people have done a crime, or prepared/planned/attempted a crime, that they face that charge in a court of law. Or, given the unknowns, "the police have good reason to believe that they have done/prepared/planned for, or attempted a crime" that they face that charge.
Apparently that will not happen in this case. The police believe that some people have planned/prepared to commit some sort of serious crimes, but they will not face those charges.
If that's true, then that's a failing of the system.
I also don't buy the 'TSA must be strengthened' outcome.
I don't believe there should be terror laws either. Personally I'm quite opposed to them.
But if you're going to have a law it should work for what it's intended for. I don't know if that means 'strengthened' or just 'no longer a pile of crap'. What we don't want is for there to be laws that the police try and use in their work, and for those laws to be unworkable. That's not fair on the police, and it's not fair on the public.
If you really want to bust terrorists doing terrorism, you need to catch them at it. Hard but true.
Personally I'm happy for the police to step in early. There's a boundary you don't want them to cross, but it becomes a lot more dangerous for everyone if the explosives are in the person's possession. If someone has been trying to get explosives and there's evidence they were going to use it, that sounds like a good time for the police to intervene safely to me.
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So, conclusion: There's active terrorism in NZ; bad legislation meant it went unprosecuted; if only we'd had better legislation you'd be seeing now just how freakin scary this stuff is; better get that new, improved legislation.
Hmm.
Recently some police officers were taken to trial for sexual assault. Large numbers of people around the country knew that two of them were in jail already, for another sexual assault, committed at a similar time. The court would not let the jury know/consider that, rightly or wrongly.
If we were to believe (as it is in some other countries I understand) that previous convictions should be admissible in court, then after Rickards and his mates got off, then we'd want that law changed to allow that.
So to rework your statement above:
"Some cops did some really bad things; bad legislation meant it went unprosecuted (because the full facts of previous similar behaviour could not be put before the court); if only we had better legislation, Rickards might be behind bars now; better get that new improved legislation."
Not unreasonable.
It's a shame that parliament didn't write good TSA legislation, and that great legal minds didn't get it fixed before it became law.
If however you believe the Solicitor General, and a bunch of other people that the TSA is a dog's breakfast, shouldn't it be rewritten?
So everyone who was "waiting before making a judgement" has decided that their judgement is: Guilty (only not, um, under law, but, you know, that's cos the law's no good).
Well I think people are perfectly capable of making up their own minds, contrary to the decision of courts. Personally I think Rickards probably was guilty. I also think that Peter Ellis was probably innocent. David Bain, I have no idea anymore. But with all of them, I've had the opportunity to hear the evidence and make up my mind.
The 12 people who were put forward under the TSA, I don't know how many of them, if any, are guilty of planning terrorist activities. But as a result of yesterday, I won't get the opportunity to hear all the evidence, and that's a failing of the system.
Maybe they're innocent, which is great. But as much as possible I'd like the decisions of courts (innocent/guilty) to match up with what happened in the real world (did/didn't do it). Having all the evidence before the court is important to make that happen.
What bugs me is that people blame the police. Parliament wrote a law for the police to use to catch terrorists. OK, I don't think we need specific terrorist laws, but whatever.
Having written that law however, it's perfectly reasonable, when the police suspect someone is preparing/planning etc to carry out what they consider a terrorist act, to use the TSA. Idiot Savant however, believes that they shouldn't use the law written specifically for the activities which they thought they were looking at. If they don't use it for terrorists, what do they use it for?
If the police hadn't used the TSA, right now the media would all be bagging them for not using the legislation that had been written to catch and convict terrorists. So they use the TSA, and it gets shot down. How do the police win?
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Your understanding would be wrong. The police could have applied for an interception warrant if they suspected that someone was about to commit a "serious violent offence" (like, say, killing someone, or blowing something up).
What Broad said this morning (having just listened to the 9 to noon interview) is that use of the TSA enabled earlier intervention than the serious violent offence option. That is, a specific target did not need to be identified.
So yes, they did make the choice, but they also didn't write the law which apparently let them down, they just tried to use it.
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sure. based on my limited information (from the msm and this blog), the police are saying they had advice that they would have sufficient evidence to prosecute under the SoTA. turns out they didn't, and now "the bad law is to blame."
Well the 'bad law is to blame' comes from the solicitor general (and Winston Peters, but I'll stick with the former). It's possible that he's covering for the police, but the solicitor general isn't the only one who's said it's a pretty bad law.
There's two possible explanations for the SG's statements yesterday (I'll broaden them out a bit to cover subtleties).
1, he's covering for the police who have cocked up.
2, he's looked at the evidence they've presented and thought "my god, this is terrible! terrorists!" and then looked at the law and concluded "who wrote this shit? We can't convict these terrorists with this." (which is basically what he said, I'm inferring from his words and overstating it a bit because I'm all about the drama).
If we take the police commissioner and solicitor general as honest in their public statements (and obviously we'd all like to believe that's true) then explanation #2 has occurred.
For explanation #1 to be true one or both has to be corrupt or dishonest. Do we have any evidence that that's the case? Or are people just saying it?
I just don't get how a couple of weeks ago everyone would say "I'm waiting to see the evidence of what actually happened before I draw any firm conclusions." We know no more about the evidence today than we did yesterday morning. Nothing has been released, leaked etc, of any substance. The only comment made on the actual evidence that is new has been made by the SG, who said that it revealed some "very disturbing activities". That comment seems to me to add support to what the police did, not take it away.
And yet everyone has decided to bag the police for their actions, today. Knowing no more about what the police were looking at. The only thing we know is that it failed to meet the test of what everyone is admitting is a bad law. That's not an indication of what happened, that's an indication of how it would go in a court of law up against one particular law. Are we only concerned with how it plays out in court, rather than how it played out in the Ureweras?
My understanding that the TSA came into it because it was the only law they could apply for the interception warrants under. Once they'd committed to that, they needed to put it on the other warrants, as that was the only law they could prosecute using that interception information. Presumably what was said/sent on phones etc was pretty important to the whole case. So if that interception information was crucial, then yes they were committed to that 'train track' of using the TSA.I think the other thing that needs to be remembered is that this is the first time that anyone has used this law. It's been a dogs breakfast all around. But the police don't have a good idea of what the standard is for prosecuting under the TSA, and wouldn't until it happened. A lot of the reality of law is written in courts by judges and lawyers.
I've just read Colin Espiners blog on stuff and he's said a bunch of similar stuff to what I've been saying on here.