Posts by Russell Brown
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"February 28: 12.32 pm Sunday Star-Times journalist phones a suspect saying the paper has an anonymous letter about guerrilla training in the Ureweras. Suspect denies it."
Anyone know more about that?
No, but I bet they're kicking themselves over the the SST. Mind you, after the Operation Leaf fiasco, they were probably right to err on the side of caution.
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The police are waging a PR war here ...
To be fair, they're hardly the only ones, and arguably not even the instigators. As far as I can tell Broad never uttered the word "terrorist", and in his initial statements he was at pains to say that the public should not jump to conclusions.
On the other other side, there's been all manner of crazy talk from a lot of people.
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Come on Russell.
Er, I didn't say that. And no being nasty to Deborah ...
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but shallow that I am, I can't help chortling away to myself ... "Boy, this must really piss off the Herald".
Yep. That occurred to me too ...
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I'm also interested in what role police informers ( paid to infiltrate I assume) played in all of this. How many times did they instigate these conversations.
"I think we should kill John Key"
"I agree mate"
Ok round them up.And if you don't like the way the story's shaping up, pluck something random out of the air to make it sound better ...
Come on. As Kyle said, it's highly unlikely the police would have used paid informants, and somewhat more likely that someone who got involved freaked out and went to the cops.
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Shane Jones talking to Mike Hosking on ZB today, per the Herald's semi-literate transcript:
Shane Jones: Yeah I think there's something more disturbing that I am hoping the media will turn its attention to. I rather suspect that a lot of the characters mixed up in this rubbish up in Tuhoe and various other parts are using the cloak of Maoriness to disguise and obscure criminality and soon as the cops round the buggers up and treat them as criminals the better ...
I think there are two issues here, Mike. Number one, the dos and don'ts of a successful operation. At the end of the day Commissioner Broad can give an account of all that, but at a deeper level us as MPs we got to continue to assure people that their safety and their security is of paramount importance.
Now if there are people on P, doing drugs, screaming around with guns breaking the law in terms of arms control then they should face the full force of it cause there is a lot of kaumata Tuhoe want to get on with life, solve the historical grievances, and they are being eclipsed by the self-appointed king of Tuhoe Tame Iti and a number of people who appear to me to be criminals as opposed to genuine dissenters.
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2. The police in New Zealand, if they are indeed the leakers, appear to have little respect for due process and a fair trial. And, in the long run, we need to be offering fair trials even to nut jobs.
I think there's a legitimate argument both ways on that, and Paul Norris had some interesting points to make this morning. This has become such a major public issue that there was a case for saying the evidence needed to be opened.
He pointed out that juries have shown themselves to be robust in such circumstances in the past.
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I was thinking about what our reaction would have been if this had happened 10 years ago when we were both in the thick of these very movements. You know we both would have been pretty sick for someone to take 'our' issues in this direction.
I've really appreciated your consistent perspective on this Kyle, as much as I've been disappointed that many others on the activist left haven't been able to say: "if you were even contemplating violence, you have damaged our ideals and you are no part of us".
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I've been wondering if that happened since it appears none of those activists with more tenuous links thought it might be a good idea to tell the Police what was going on.
I can sort of understand that, especially if the people concerned have difficult relations (and even legitimate grievances) with the police. You'd just shut up and back off, as the young guy in Christchurch seems to have done.
What annoys me much more is that it's clear that people who did know what was in the intercept and surveillance evidence have been publicly running the nothing-to-see-here line.
Even if the particular bugged conversation John Minto was referring to with his "nothing you wouldn't hear at a gun club" line was relatively innocuous, he knew that other conversations could not be construed that way. And he still chose to go into print with a misleading characterisation. He couldn't be expected to say anything to harm the activists' cases, but he chose to go out and actively mislead -- and attack Chris Trotter while he was at it. That was very shabby.
Meanwhile, it's just been on the news that the police will move on "other publications" that reveal suppressed evidence, which definitely puts the kibosh on me passing on anything I've been told (not, I should add, by anyone involved in the police or politics).
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Now you could argue that that was the UK and our police are better than that. I somewhat doubt it. They do have the means to evade surveillance and prosecution very effectively through everything from knowledge of operational techniques to active frustration of investigations, so any such behaviour is highly unlikely to come to public notice.
I repeat: Does it occur to you that as you pour scorn on police evidence you're reserving the right to just make shit up for yourself?
You don't really have an argument beyond saying that these people possibly were only as bad as a disgraced, racist ex-cop on the other side of the world who belonged to the National Front.
It is also worth noting that the five police officers forced out of the police in Britain had not been secretly obtaining and training with weapons, or discussing killing people for practice, or terrorist bombings. They'd have been facing something tougher than public disgrace if they had.
C'mon, Rich: can we hear you say that, assuming the surveillance and intercept evidence is not wholly fabricated, and that the police were telling the truth when they told a court that they also had photographic and video evidence of things like ambush training, that these people -- whether or not their actions warranted TSA prosecutions -- were bad?
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