Posts by Russell Brown
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1. There is a typo in the title.
Yup. And for the time being, I can't get rid of the bugger, even though I've corrected the headline of the original Public Address post. I'll have to ask the lads to fix it in the morning ...
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Hmmm. Needs some work at our end ...
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http://www.thedailyshow.com/video/index.jhtml?videoId=120872
Jon Stewart suggests playing out the Middle East conflict in New Zealand.
Here basically because Viacom has just posted a searchable archive of the last eight years of Daily Shows and I want to see whether our embedded player works with it.
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Good feeds, bad feeds, meals you made and meals laid out for you. Feeds at home and feasts abroad. Special dinners, long lunches and big breakfasts. Tell us about them all this month …
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As for real terrorists the New Zealand government was pretty quick to prevent the Israeli terrorist Moshe Ya’alon from being arrested. This guy was a real mass-murderer not some S.I.S./police fantasy terror suspect.
And ironically, the warrant related to Ya'alon's involvement as former Israeli Chief of Staff in a political assassination that killed 14 innocent people.
I can't quite work out what I think about that case. On one hand, universal jurisdiction should apply to Geneva Convention breaches if they're to mean anything. On the other hand, I'm slightly wary of a foreign organisation (the British-based Palestinian Centre for Human Rights) going jurisdiction shopping having failed to secure a warrant elsewhere.
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This is timely ...
I'm very grateful to Graeme Edgeler for answering the call and writing a summary of the Terrorism Suppression Act, what it is, what it does, and what it doesn't do, for the benefit of Public Address readers and everyone else.
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We seem to have forgotten that government might have some role in promoting social cohesion. Forgive my naivety, but I'd assumed that this was something that MMP was supposed to foster, and that the rank divisiveness of the Muldoon years would become a distant memory.
Right now we have the most potentially divisive situation since 1981, with no indication of when justice will be done, and the government legally distanced from so much as commenting on events.
If the police want to bring Terrorism Suppression Act charges, they need the permission of the solicitor general (the senior non-political law officer) via the attorney general's office.
I'd be bloody uncomfortable with the government directing prosecutions, for obvious reasons. One of the things I don't like about the amendment bill is that it makes the process more political and less judicial.
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These people, the Clarks, Keys and Bushs , of the world are little more than talking heads reading from carefully prepared scripts (hopelessly in Bushes case). Nobody forced them into public office and if one of them is abducted by aliens, assassinated or spontaneously combusts, there is a little army of like minded individuals crawling over one an other to replace them.
Wow. So can anyone play the assasination game in this fantasy world of yours? I mean, the CIA used to be pretty good at it. And I take it you'd have no problem with what happened with Benazir Bhutto this week?
But seriously, do you believe this shit? Do you really think my civil rights don't suffer and die if someone murders the democratic leader I voted for?
When people are silenced, alienated or face abuse at the hands of state sponsored terror they cease considering the peaceful option.
I'm not clear on what you're saying. Are you saying that's the case here? That it's acceptable to use deadly violence for private political ends in New Zealand?
There are lots of alienated right-wingers around on the local blogosphere. Can they play too?
The lesson the police and security intelligence agencies are teaching their targets is in future be more careful.
That's it?
Your attitude scares me much more than this week's "terror plot" itself.
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Draconian laws, weak government.
The Terrorism Suppression Act as it stands isn't draconian by world standards. I think it was Idiot/Savant who said "it's not so bad". The amendent bill is another matter.
But what do you mean by "weak government"? What do you want the government to do in this case?
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suspect the judge has much the same attitude towards this as the government - even if there is only a small chance that the police are correct it's still worth indulging them because the stakes are so high. If the judge releases someone on bail who then goes on to blow up a food court full of people the judicial system isn't going to look too flash. The judge also has the luxury of knowing that if it is all just an enormous blunder its the cops who will take the fall.
As I keep saying, it seems clear that the police have ample evidence to justify intervention. Where the blunder may yet lie is in how wide they have cast the net. I think one of the most imprtant questions here is what they're planning to do with evidence relating to people who clearly have no involvement.
The HoS has a story in which Jamie Lockett claims his threats to wage war against the state were a joke he was playing because he knew the cops were monitoring his phone - this wouldn't have sounded very plausible to me a week ago but ever since the raids I've amused myself by phoning friends and starting conversations with 'terrorist napalm assassinate clark nuclear koran Tuhoe Hi its Danyl here', so who knows?
Jamie Lockett is such a nutter that it could be true either way, but it doesn't actually make much difference. Even on what might prove to be a hoax, police are obliged to act.
They not only had Lockett -- who has form -- saying these things, they had a connection to Iti and the training camps (which, according to the balaclava guy on Campbell Live on Friday, do seem to have been a bit more than traditional bushcraft lessons). The cops have evidence of Iti trying to obtain grenade launchers.
And they also have, as the SST reveals today, discussions about assasinating Clark, Key and (had he visited as planned) Bush. It probably was all bluster, but people were amassing weapons, and it does literally only take one or two nutters.
I knew about the Key thing, but I thought it would be prudent to wait till it was aired in court, and it's really not clear when that's going to happen.
So we depend on a steady flow of police leaks (and the off one from the other side), which is completely unsatisfactory. I think that's where the police risk blowing it, not in being "hoaxed" or anything, because I think they did have to intervene here.
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