Thoughts on the Urewera case
March 21st, 2012 at 5:36 pm by David FarrarI find myseelf in partial agreement with No Right Turn and Russell Brown on the Urewera case. First let me quote NRT:
Four and a half years after the initial raids, the jury has finally reached a verdict in the trial or the Urewera Four, finding them guilty of some of the firearms charges, but failing to reach a verdict on the core charge of “participation in a criminal group”. On the former, its worth noting that this crime has a reverse onus of proof; once its alleged, and possession is proven, the defendants have to prove themselves innocent. Clearly, they didn’t do that to the satisfaction of the jury in all cases, and its not hard to see why. “Bushcraft” is one thing, but training to use guns against people looks very dubious indeed, and something which is hard to see as “lawful or proper” under any circumstances in a peaceful society. Likewise, on at least one of the charges in question – possession of a Molotov cocktail – there seems to be very little scope for there to even be a “lawful and proper” purpose for having one. If you want to do that sort of thing, stick to paintball.
I agree there was no lawful purpose for what they were doing. Those taking part were not good people with good intentions. They are not martyrs. Many of them are gross hypocrites. Valerie Morse calls herself a peace activist and runs around the bush practicing how to shoot people and blow them up. People should remember this whenever any of them bleat on about peace again.
The defence line that they were training to be security guards in Iraq, was surely a bad joke.
Russell Brown points out:
But some of those involved – Whiri Kemara in particular – did amass weapons and military equipment (his records, under two accounts, at Trade Me are an eye-opener). Kemara even attempted to buy a grenade or flare launcher in Auckland.
So I am glad there are some convictions for illegal use of firearms. I do not like people with no licenses running around with guns, talking about killing people, and learning how to throw molotov cocktails.
No Right Turn has also said:
On the organised criminal group charge, its good to see that the government’s fantasies of armed rebellion were not believed by the jury.
There were fantasies of armed rebellion, but they were the fantasies of the people involved, rather than the Police. The Police did over-react and I will come to that. While there were a couple of dangerous people involved, the majority of those in the Urewera 17 were probably more likely to hurt themselves than anyone else, with their exercises.
Russell Brown nicely says:
These guys weren’t heroes and they weren’t terrorists. They were dickheads.
This is very true. One of my activist acquaintances who knows some of them commented that the majority of them were lusting after Morse, and were basically trying to impress her with their dedication to the cause. They were as Russell says, dickheads.
The reality is that they probably had no ability to go from playing wargames in the bush, to actually planning a real attack on someone or something. Hence for that reason I am not surprised the jury could not reach a verdict on being part of an organised criminal group. Their own incompetence probably saved them. Plus to be fair to them, there is a difference between talking about doing something, and actually planning to do it.
Another element of the defence case rings truer: that these people couldn’t possibly have been part of an organised criminal group because they were plainly such fools.
Basically yes.
Now I do think it was right and proper for the Police to take some action. You do not want extremists stockpiling weapons, and training people on them, while discussing shooting people and armed revolution.
But treating as a terrorist threat, and sending in the STG and AOS to bust down doors was over-kill. They would have been better to simply arrest in the normal fashion those involved, and charge them with firearm offences only. They should also have told Iti they know what he and his group have been talking about, and that if they continue down that path, they will be in a whole world of trouble.
I do not believe there is any point of seeking a retrial on the criminal conspiracy charge. I think it is time to move on. However don’t expect sympathy from me for those arrested, let alone support for an apology. While the Police did over-react and their method of arrest and initial charges were over the top, those arrested were using illegal firearms while discussing how to kill people and blow things up. If you’r'e that stupid, you deserve to suffer some consequences.
March 21st, 2012 at 5:51 pm
A hung jury could quite easily mean a very large majority of jurors thought they were guilty of the more serious charges, but there just wasn’t enough to get 11, or a majority verdict of 10-1. We just don’t know.
Guilty of being a dickhead sounds to me like guilty of nothing more than helping your constituents: It’s a BS excuse. You say the police over-reacted. I guess they should have just walked in there with their notebook and taken some names.
When the police under react, they are criticised. When the over react, they are criticiseed. At Pike River they were being urged by some serious commentatators to mount a resuce mission immediately, and when they didn’t they were gutless and cowards!
No one can predict the future, but if Tama Iti and the others went on a shooting rampage from what they had learned in the bush, you would all be asking “what were the police doing”? Why didn’t they go in there boots’n'all and arrest them?
There are many heroes and commandos hiding behind keyboards in this country.
Vote:March 21st, 2012 at 6:04 pm
In many democracies at least some of these “dickheads” would likely have been shot during the initial arrests. I’m thinking of some states of the USA, perhaps European states such as France and Germany, Latin American nations, and certainly in our new friend, the People’s Republic of China.
I’m not a policeman, but assume that the large size and show of force of the Ureweras operation was to intimidate the suspects and prevent any potential resistance without a shoot-out. If these guys are as silly as the court case makes them seem, one or more of them may have been stupid enough to fire a shotgun at the police or even throw a Molotov cocktail.
I presume that since the Otago massacre after a lone policeman went out with a revolver, the police are just being responsible by taking overwhelming force to incidents involving “dickheads”, firearms, and Molotov cocktails.
Vote:March 21st, 2012 at 6:07 pm
Well said, Nick.
Vote:March 21st, 2012 at 6:11 pm
good god .. the media interviewed Minto about it
Vote:March 21st, 2012 at 6:15 pm
NRT says
Let us not forget that the government he refers to is the one led by Helen Clark, with a police force led by Commissioner Howard Broad; just in case Idiot-Savant forgets, and sheets the blame onto the present administration.
Vote:March 21st, 2012 at 6:16 pm
DPF….
“Lusting after Morse…”
You naughty boy!
But you may well be spot-on!
Pity her brain does not match other attributes. Sexist? Yes. But many “crimes” are committed in quest of the opposite sex.
Vote:March 21st, 2012 at 6:24 pm
Thought you were going to start talking about the MegaUpload case. They learnt nothing from this case then…
Vote:March 21st, 2012 at 6:41 pm
so true.
Vote:But like any organization that sets up elitist groups, they become the power and eventually discredit the organization.
2 down 1 to go.
March 21st, 2012 at 6:49 pm
So my prediction that the police would finish up looking silly in this case comes true – having blown $4M on this nonsense and a handful of twits in the bush. Your average country cop could have handled this better with one hand tied behind his back.
Technology is no substitute for brains.
Vote:March 21st, 2012 at 7:01 pm
It was all destined to become a pile of shit. I’ve met jokers in the hunting and shooting fraternity with more weapons than these wankers. We call them “Gun nuts”.
Most of us who manage to shoot what we eat from time to time manage with a couple of rifles and a shotgun or two.
How could anyone who checked out the Tattooed Dwarf and his fatarsed mate Kemana ever regard them as blokes that could race about the bush dealing death to the Pakeha invaders!
Urs looked up to it maybe but I suspect he was just besotted with the idea of all that revolution and his Maori squeeze.
Huge fail for the Police and a moral victory for the Tuhoe retards.
What really hurts is seeing a useless space like Fairbrother getting plaudits as a legal bloody genius!
Vote:March 21st, 2012 at 7:06 pm
Oh FFS! Valerie Morse hot? Standards have dropped a fucken long way in NZ haven’t they.
So, the reason they aren’t considered an organized criminal group was because they were not far enough along in their planning? Should the cops hold off until they are about to commit a crime before arresting them? Might be too late by then.
Vote:March 21st, 2012 at 7:17 pm
The tenor of many of the apologists appears to be ,”Couldn’t happen here” and how many times has that caught the authorities in the past.
These guys were practising serious stuff and the cops did the right thing. The crooks have been found guilty on some charges ,that’s a victory for the crown, not the crims.
Vote:March 21st, 2012 at 7:21 pm
Shit Bevan, Valerie would look reasonably hot with a burning flag draped round her.
You have to remember that revolutionaries don’t get to mix with really classy chicks.
Vote:March 21st, 2012 at 7:21 pm
I dont think the cops over reacted with using the STG & AOS. You have here a bunch of nutters with an unknown number of firearms and molotov cocktails running around the Ruatoki Valley in the Eastern Bay of plenty with some suggestion in relation to armed attacks against high profile people.
Any one who has lived near Whakatane/Taneatua knows that the folk from the Ruatoki valley are very different. There are Maori people up there who do not/can not speak English, they are very tribal, and very tight. (inbred??)
If the local white community cop had showed up with a pair of handcuffs to lock the nutters up hmmmmm I wonder how successful it would have been?
The cops used the resources they needed considering all the issues with isolation/weapons/numbers and a possible hostile community – any one who says anything different should put them in the cops shoes.
Vote:March 21st, 2012 at 7:22 pm
I reckon you have this right kowtow. I’d like to see a formal inquiry into the Police actions though – it might well show that they were quite reasonable in the circumstances.
Vote:March 21st, 2012 at 7:35 pm
Let us look at this rationally.
A badly drafted law let a number of those involved off the hook. This law was drafted and rushed through by Clark.
An OTT police action muddies the waters.
Incompetent understanding of the law by the police, plus presumably Crown Law further muddied the waters.
Then we have delaying actions by defence counsel and 5 years later, 5 years, we have a trial.
The whole thing is a clusterfuck from start to finish.
To add insult to the injury the police have learnt nothing given their nonsense over the Kim Dotcom raid. Talk about overkill.
I thought Commisioner Marshall was supposed to sort the Keystone Kops out.
Vote:March 21st, 2012 at 7:44 pm
Come on people if they had been dangerous it would not have been the cops who dream they have passed selection by running around in balaclavas.
It would have been the hard mob dealing with it.
Automatic weapons and explosives, christ what a pipe dream by the cops.
Vote:March 21st, 2012 at 7:51 pm
Quite right Grumpy. A few hard old bastards like you, with fixed bayonets, would have deflated those little fatarsed golliwogs pdq.
Vote:March 21st, 2012 at 8:10 pm
What worries me is that it seems to be not very hard in this country to amass large collections of firearms without a firearms license.
Vote:March 21st, 2012 at 8:14 pm
Kemana had one Richard.
Maybe we should take firearms licenses off obvious faulty units that get their faces etched, especially if they are so bloody fatarsed it is obvious they never chase animals through the scrub?
Vote:March 21st, 2012 at 8:51 pm
Well it pretty much comes down to this – this bunch of crazies were playing with fire, and got burnt. Boo-hoo.
Vote:I have no problem with the actions of the police. They were in a lose-lose situation. If they’d taken a softer approach, they’d probably have been roasted for not taking it seriously enough.
Let’s face it – any group with Tame Iti and Valerie Morse in it is bound to be brewing up trouble, one way or another.
These losers can count themselves damned lucky that they’ve effectively been smacked with a wet bus-ticket.
March 21st, 2012 at 9:27 pm
Adamsmith,
Defence counsel engaged in no ‘delaying actions’ on this case and were not responsible for the length of time it took for this case to get to trial. Evidential objections are in no way ‘delaying actions’. In big cases the responsibility for the length of time it takes to get to trial almost always belongs to the Crown, together with the difficulty if setting aside a courtroom for 3 months (which was the original estimate). I have seen a six week trial delayed by almost a year because of a mix of witness and courtroom problems. Defence lawyers were all set, but we don’t count…
The rest of it you have correct
Vote:March 21st, 2012 at 9:27 pm
Next Tui ad,
Training to exit a vehicle while under heavy fire is ‘bushcraft’. Yeah Right!
Vote:March 21st, 2012 at 9:31 pm
I mean, seriously, do you really believe that the defendants wanted to be on bail for 4+ years? Very few defendants want a trial delayed, and no defence lawyer wants a trial delayed. Any delay automatically reduces profit when legal aid is concerned. If anyone would benefit financially by delays in the trial process it would be the privately owned firm that undertakes the prosecution for profit.
Vote:March 21st, 2012 at 9:40 pm
DPF: They would have been better to simply arrest in the normal fashion those involved, and charge them with firearm offences only.
Nope. The police should just have posted their training video on youtube. That would have been all that is necessary.
Vote:March 21st, 2012 at 10:29 pm
FES is it possible these aren’t “normal” defendents? Is it possible these defendents did what they did originally and since playing it to the hilt in every way, not to “get themselves off” but merely to maximise the publicity for the point they were always trying to make in the first place?
Is it possible the rights and wrongs of this case got a bit lost in those political machinations, regardless of how impossible it would be for the courts ever possibli to be influenced by such, ever, never???
??
Agree berend. However much that would have made a mockery of the law. It would have been cheaper than $3m and counting, all to give a lot of racist hori’s a laugh.
Vote:March 21st, 2012 at 11:08 pm
Who were exactly? Just the activist guys or some of the gals? Or would they be called something else if so what?
I wonder what Tama & co thought of all that, all those skinny wanna-be macho activists trying to impress the peace-nik chicks? Probably had a good laugh most of the time, and probably also couldn’t believe their luck some people with so much white-guilt would be so fkuced up enough to continually hang out with them in very questionable circumstances. Jeez even the molotov cocktail firebomb throwing wouldn’t scare them away
Vote:March 21st, 2012 at 11:27 pm
Unusually, I agree with much of what you say in this piece – but, DPF, it’s UREWERA. Not Urerewa – which is in your tags as well as the title, I see. Get the basic facts straight.
[DPF: Ta. I think I must have got the tag wrong a couple of years ago, and since then been using the tag as the spelling guide. Now corrected]
Vote:March 21st, 2012 at 11:31 pm
LJ,
No, I don’t think so. I am sure they would have wanted to make political capital out of it, but I very much doubt their lawyers would have conspired to delay at all. If they wanted a ‘martyr’ type situation then there was no need for the SC appeals- much more impact (and a MUCH longer trial) with 17 defendants.
Vote:March 21st, 2012 at 11:34 pm
And don’t forget that throughout this there had been a High Court judge pushing both sides to get on with it quickly. Very hard to say no to an HC judge…
Vote:March 22nd, 2012 at 1:35 am
Armed police are generally the response to an armed threat.
Vote:March 22nd, 2012 at 3:46 am
Enough of this ‘country cop’ idea. History has shown otherwise.
Vote:There have been enough ‘country cops’ killed in New Zealand, dying on the front path of some house as they went in a casual way to sort out some trouble.
Stanley Graham on the west coast in 1941 murdered police who were using the ‘country cop’ approach. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_Graham
The early 60′s saw four police murdered, two in Lower Hutt and two in Waitakere. ‘Country Cop’ approach again. That led directly to the formation of the Armed Offenders Squads.
The country cop approach advocates need to get real.
March 22nd, 2012 at 5:02 am
Int he 70s in Europe there were plenty of cases of dickheads fantasising about being freedom fighters who ended up kidnapping, robbing, bombing and murdering people. Most of them were amateurish and their plans were naive and badly thought out. Not all ‘urban terrorists’ are mastermind criminals. To think that it wouldn’t or wont happen here is wishful thinking.
Vote:March 22nd, 2012 at 6:58 am
> Valerie Morse calls herself a peace activist…
I didn’t realise Morse was on trial. Tell me again what she was convicted of?
[DPF: gross hypocrisy]
Vote:March 22nd, 2012 at 7:21 am
Ross69
Ross has been convicted many times over of being a complete and utter fuckwit.
Vote:March 22nd, 2012 at 8:13 am
interesting parallel with the French nutter in the news
Seems the powers that be knew about him and were monitoring him. just did not think he was a real threat.all the cocks on here that think the burnt penis raids were over the top would be the ones moaning like stuck pigs if some thing had of happened with Iti and his band of fuckwits
Mohammed Shafiq, chief executive of the UK’s Ramadhan Foundation, tells BBC World that there are serious questions that the French intelligence agencies must answer. “He’d been monitored for the last four years, according to news reports – why wasn’t he stopped? Why wasn’t he monitored? Muslims across the world find what he did was abhorent, we must not allow Marine Le Pen or any of the far-right to take political advantage of this,” he said.
Next time go in with guns blazing and save us all millions in court costs
Vote:March 22nd, 2012 at 8:20 am
I’m sure that the fantasy of armed rebellion would eventually have ended up as reality for one of the eighteen arrested. As the evidence showed, they were particularly intetested in recruiting the naive to be foot soldiers in their cause.
If one of them had decided to leave a homemade bomb on a train/bus/public place then you or I could be maimed or killed.
Vote:March 22nd, 2012 at 11:57 am
It would appear that the person under seige in France who deliberately targetted and killed local Jews was known to authorities who dropped the ball. I think this is a salient lesson with regard to this case.
Vote:March 22nd, 2012 at 12:04 pm
My view of the activities of Tama Iti and his fellow conspirators is that they were half assed trying to organise themselves into a romantised notion of a resistance, similar to the French resistance of WW2.
Vote:The Para Military training that they engaged in was more of the defensive variety, albeit rather amateur, and despite claims of them attacking public figures, the training they were undergoing would not in any way have prepared them for any terrorist activity.
The Tuhoe activists would not have been able to organise themselves along the lines of the IRA, they lacked that essential ingredient and that is a genuine hatred of the state and a fatalism that would have propelled them into planting I.E.D.’s or mounting hit and run attacks.
March 22nd, 2012 at 12:16 pm
***One of my activist acquaintances who knows some of them commented that the majority of them were lusting after Morse***
They should have gone on that nude protest she was involved in outside Parliament a few years ago. I remember seeing her pictured naked in the DomPost.
Vote:March 22nd, 2012 at 12:40 pm
If there really are groups intent on causing organised armed mayhem, then the police have given them a helpful heads-up about the processes they will employ – via intelligence gathering – to curtail any nefarious plots. The over reaction to the team building exercises being carried out by Tama Iti and company will, no doubt, provide potential terrorists with a ‘blue print’ of what NOT to do in the lead up any desperate act they may be preparing.
So in reality the security apparatus has failed on a variety of levels.
First, they have clearly demonstrated that ‘security’ means attacking those who dare question the authority of the status quo. Dissent is something best dealt with under the heel of the jackboot.
Second, they have alienated the support of, not only Maori, a large chunk of the wider New Zealand community by terrorising woman and children at gun point. Nothing anyone can say will ever justify the terror those people at Ruatoki were subjected to at the hands of the armed paramilitaries the police dispatched.
Third, they have provided a valuable lesson to actual terrorists on the steps they need to take to avoid detection and apprehension in the future.
Surely those who planned, oversaw and executed this fiasco must be looking at severely curtailed careers, at the very least.
Vote:March 22nd, 2012 at 4:13 pm
Have you ever actually visited planet earth Yoza??
Vote:March 22nd, 2012 at 4:38 pm
Yoza
Vote:Lives in a parallel universe
one were Maori lived in peace and harmony before the nasty nasty settlers came and killed them all
And were team building exercises involve guns Molotov cocktails and plotting to succeed from the nation
Its a pity we can not send it back to 1830 as a maori Might open the lefty retards eyes as to the state of maoridom pre colonization
nothing like wiping out 25% OF YOUR POPULATION To give one the warm fuzzes
March 22nd, 2012 at 11:03 pm
Here’s one for KIA. When is this country’s security apparatus going after the members of this terrorist training camp?
Vote:March 23rd, 2012 at 12:17 am
The Urewera Four act as though they have got suicidal tendencies.
Vote: