Posts by Idiot Savant
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What Broad said was that their advice was that the intent of the law appeared to want to nip such planning in the bud before they got to the specific planning/conspiracy stage
Then their advice was simply wrong.
I've been going through Hansard and Select Committee reports for the past hour looking for where they got this strange idea that the bill provided a framework for "early intervention", and I just can't see it anywhere. Contra Broad, there's no mention of it in the purpose of the law, no mention in the Parliamentary debates, and no mention in the select committee reports. Therefore, there was no Parliamentary intent for any such thing.
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Question: is there only an offence of "conspiracy to murder" or can one be convicted of planning to cause injury or damage?
Yes, there is. And all it requires is an agreement (which need to be explicit) to commit a specific crime.
But according to Howard Broad on Morning Report this morning, despite a year of wiretaps and surveillance, the police didn't even have that.
Naturally, he now wants to lower the evidentiary bar, to allow the police to arrest, prosecute, and imprison anyone they don't like. And that's not something we should tolerate.
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On Nine to Noon this morning Broad said that the interception warrants were granted by the High Court Judge under both the TSA and the Crimes Act. I'm not sure on the legal ins and outs of that, whether it means some types of surveillance were under the TSA and some under the Crimes Act.
No, it means that the warrants were granted under the crimes act to investigate offences from the TSA.
(The TSA did however insert the terrorism warrant section into the Crimes Act)
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Silly me. It was the media all along who invoked the Terrorist Suppression Act to get the search warrants for the police to start this whole charade in the first place.
And the media who made up lurid claims of IRA handbooks, napalm bombs, and conspiracies to murder George Bush, Helen Clark, and John Key...
Get real. While journalists never reveal their sources, the only place these claims could have come from was the police.
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And we'll all happily forget the pronouncement of guilt, BY THE PRIME MINISTER FFS, of those yet to face trial. (In a healthily functioning democracy that recognises the rule of law.)
Well, she was briefed by the SIS. And as we all know (Zaoui!), they always get it right.
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Stephen:
would it still be possible to lay other charges?
Sure - but they wouldn't be able to use evidence obtained under the search warrants (or the terror warrants which authorised the wiretaps and surveillance) to do it. Which may mean they have even less than squat.
In oher words, thinking it was terrorism from the outset crippled their chance of building a case for a real crime.
Kyle
I haven't picked through it closely enough to see if he's right to say that it was the media/public that ran with the terror ball, rather than the police having anything to do with it.
Well, only if you ignore the fact that the media were drip-fed the juicy details by - you guessed it - the police.
I'm also wondering now whether they'll got for a final smear, by leaking everything to the media. Grossly improper, of course, but they've done it before (there's a notable case of an acquitted murderer I'm thinking of here...)
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I don't see why it should be a question of an embarrassment for the Police.
What would you call it then when they spend a year on an investigation, tap people's phones, conduct covert surveillance, end it all with a series of dramatic armed raids - and then get told that they've got squat?
Danyl is right - either way, they screwed up. Either they targetted innocent people, or their decision to view it as 'terrorism" rather than ordinary criminal activity led to them not being able to lay appropriate charges. And either way, its a failure of police leadership, for which heads should roll.
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Graeme: that's a very interesting question.
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Ironically, far from being too loose, the TSA is, in the SG's opinion, pretty much impossible to secure a conviction with in regard to any domestic activity.
Which is unsurprising given that it was (according to Parliament when it was originally being debated) never intended to be used against such groups.
Domestic "terrorists" plotting or carrying ot murders and bombings should be prosecuted under ordinary criminal law. For a start, it actually works. Secondly, the precedents and safeguards are well understood. but finally, it doesn't dignify them, or run the risk of politicised prosecutions.
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He's just given a very strong indication on Checkpoint that an apology -- to "the innocent people caught up" in the Ruatoki raids -- will be forthcoming, and that there are discussions with that community in progress.
Oh good.
Sorry, I'm watching Parliament (and the unseemly sight of politicians pretending that nothing is wrong, and smearing those who object to the erosion of our civil liberties as alies of terrorists) rather than listening to national Radio.
Heh. Keith Locke: "if the government designated international groups as terrorists on the objective basis of how many people they have killed or maimed with explosives, and how many people they have kidnapped and held for years... the first group they would designate would be the United States".