Posts by johnno
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What Finn said. Sara, have you read the whole affadavit?
I had a lot of sympathy for Tuhoe Lambert, especially when I saw his whanau's story on 60 Minutes. That changed after I read the police document, and I started to think that he should take a whole lot of responsibility for what happened to his 12 year old moko.
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I would argue that the transcripts aren't disappointing at all, and that when seen with all the other evidence, shows the police acted correctly, and that they were forced into the actions they took. I would also argue that the arrested indivduals are much more responsible for the hurt and distress caused to the law-abiding residents of the Ureweras than are the police. And while the police only found four firearms, that at least is four firearms not in the hands of delusional idiots.
My colleague saw some of the video in a closed court. The evidence remains suppressed. I went into the closed court late on for the judge's summation of the evidence he saw. Again, that is suppressed.
I also feel a deep sense of betrayal caused by the deliberate and repeated actions of some whose hubris has distracted attention away from the real issues we need to be addressing. What were they thinking?
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A "bit of 'no good' going down." Yikes.
Excluding illegally published excerpts from illegally leaked copies of alleged transcripts of alleged conversations, what evidence is there?
As I think I pointed out, the police still have extensive surveillance videos of the camps.
Ever been to a dress-up party Johnno? You know that really you're just going to some flat to hang around and talk shit or whatever, but the dressing up part is such fun, it even becomes the real event. Maybe this playing dress-up in the bush involved "no good" in your eyes, but nothing that a quiet word or two in the right direction couldn't have put a stop to.
Aaaahhh, so it was a dress up party. Of course, how silly of me to not have realised. Naughty policemen, they obviously don't have a sense of humour. Maybe they should have entered into the spirit of the thing and gone dressed as unicorns, or taniwha (geddit, the clever, FUNNY Tangata Whenua reference). Hey, I think I'm getting the hang of this.
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Good on you Steven, you saw a pattern I wasn't even aware of....
I guess we'll see the real story when the surveillance videos are shown for all to see in the trials.
But, I will ask this. Is there anything that would convince some of you that, maybe, just maybe, the charged individuals were up to no good?
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Thanks, Sara, but i don't drink alcohol.
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I'm serious, those of you who think the Police were bona fide: What are the underlying reasons for it to have become so exaggerated? How do YOU rationalise it?
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Perhaps it was the 18 suspects and fourteen firearms the police allege their saw at the final camp, two days before the arrests happened. Perhaps it was the six different camps that the allege occurred, and the hundreds of rounds of gunfire they allege they heard. Perhaps it was the observance of a number of individuals wearing balaclavas, listening to scanners capable of hearing ordinary police communications. It could have been the instructions into military manouevers they allege they observed at the camps, where individuals were taught how to ambush a vehicle, extract a wounded colleague under fire, and the counter-interrogations techniques where firearms allegedly pointed at the backs of fellow "campers". ( see the bugged conversation that allegedly took place on June 23, 2007, "That last exercise was a bit freaky for me, having a gun in my back."). Maybe it was some of these things that meant the police decided not to send in unarmed iwi liason officers.
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As an aside, does anyone know what happened to the pregnant woman who went in to labour while she was caught in the traffic backlog caused when the hikoi vehicles blocked SH1 on the way in to Wellington? Last thing I heard was that the convoy was travelling at approximately 10 kmh along the urban motorway near the Aotea off-ramp, across all three lanes, while the police were trying to get an ambulance to the woman. She was stuck at the Ngauranga interchange, and the emergency services were saying there was a lot of screaming coming across the phone....
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This is scary. The detail of the "commando gear" that's most disturbing is the facial covering.
Mr Williams said the interviewees, mainly women, told stories of being ordered out of bed in the early hours of October 15 by police toting guns and wearing black commando gear.
"They were herded into either a shed or a prescribed area and all were kept under guard for a period of several hours."
Adults were not allowed to get food or blankets for hungry, crying children, and a girl as young as 15 was subjected to "an intimate body search", Mr Williams said.
People also told of their houses being trashed by police - including holes smashed in the ceilings - with no effort made to remedy the damage.
Faceless men with machineguns raiding NZers houses at dawn: we HAVE stepped ove some sort of line, surely?
Again, I have to say that this is reasonably common police tactics. The AOS uniform is lagely based on protecting the police - the overalls are fire resistant, as are the balaclavas, the helmet is used to protect the head (obviously), the vest is used to stop bullets.
There seems to be a deliberate attempt to play the martyr card on completely typical and normal police tactics. It'n not as if this is the first time the AOS have been seen in action. Dominating an environment is what they do. During the serving of a warrant and subsequent search, it would be quite normal for police to detain the occupants of a house. I've seen many an instance of innocent people being forced from a house and handcuffed at gunpoint. In fact on one ocassion during a search for an escaped prisoner in Palmy North, the occupants of a Tremaine Ave house were ordered from their flat, handcuffed and left on the side of the street, and then the police fired teargas cannisters into the house. The projectiles caught on the net curtains, and the house burned down. The escaped prisoner wasn't even at the house. On another ocassion, searching for a wanted bank robber, carloads of AOS officers stopped a car in Wellington, forced the elderly occupants out of the car onto the road and handcuffed them. They turned out to be British tourists, and were extremely traumatised. They subsequently sued the police, and lost.
In the instance of the operation in the Ureweras, where a significant number of firearms had been spotted in the surveillance, it was a very reasonably exercise to use the AOS. Its quite simple - firearms involved, use the AOS.
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Johnno - we know there were no firearms found in Wellington.
The Police would have leaked it already if there were.
More fundamentally they raided non-violent activists & there never were firearms thereWe'll have to wait for the court cases to see if you are right. Would you like a small wager ;-)
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The various news reports about the Abel Smith St raid and the Police's own press release say they were looking for "firearms, ammunition and people". So it would seem that they did not know that there where no weapons in Wellington.
The police did use the AOS to raid one property in Aro Valley looking for weapons. Whether they found any or not is still suppressed I think.