Posts by David Cauchi
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"War on terra" is really funny.
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I would liker Kyle to consider this scenario:
My avant-garde art agents have spent 18 months gathering evidence that he has been organising secret necrophiliac training camps in the Southern Alps.
Unfortunately, the evidence we gathered was under the Necrophiliac Suppression Act, which requires evidence of actual tampering with dead bodies.
We can't establish that, so we're going with trespass on morgue charges, but we'll mention all this inadmissable evidence of necrophilia that we.ve gathered, but won't show you, anyway.
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And I'll restate again, while none of the suggestions about terrorism have been substantiated, I'm not aware that they've been unsubstantiated yet.
Please unsubstantiate the claim that you've been engaged in terrorist activity, not to mention child abuse and any other icky smear I can come up with.
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If you're planning to murder, it's down to Clark or Key and you're going to flip a coin on the day, there probably isn't a conspiracy.
Well, that's the way to organise your terrorist cell then.
And, Andy, straw men mate. I think there was possibly one person who could've been construed as saying the police should wait until after a terrorist event, but that was beside the point.
The cops used the TSA to get interception warrants because they couldn't get one under the 'serious violent crime' criterion. That tells you something, doesn't it? The evidence they obtained under those warrants wasn't enough to even lay charges, let alone get a conviction.
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Oh, and isn't interesting that the SG used Graeme's possible defence as an example of why the TSA is 'incoherent'? I thought planning was covered.
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Kyle, conspiracy to murder is a criminal act, as is attempting such. Please stop constructing straw men.
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Neil, in philosophy there is such a thing known as the argument from authority. Usually this is invoked to discount the type of argument that goes 'I'm right because I'm the professor of such-and-such'.
However, what it says is that you look at the argument, not the person making it. This means we don't give something any extra weight because the person saying it happens to be, say, the solicitor-general. It also means you don't discount an argument simply because the person making it is an idiot.
You weigh an argument on its strengths.
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As a visual artist, I'm very aware of the way perception works. You don't see what is objectively in front of you. Your brain constructs a picture out of the signals it receives along the optic nerve using expectations based on its previous experience.
Unfortunately, it's not just artists who exploit this (and related brain functions) to mislead the public.
Bandying about terms such as 'terrorist' and 'very disturbing activities' creates images in people's minds. Some of those people will be jurors.
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Kyle is fear-mongering. Webweaver has the word. Despite the obfuscation, it's all very simple.
There are no terrorists in NZ. If there were, existing legislation is enough to deal with them. What we have here are people up on charges who have virtually no chance of a fair trial, not with the prime minister and the solicitor-general making public pronouncements about the 'very disturbing activities' they've been up to, based on unexaminable and untested evidence.
Oh, and you'd need to know someone's got an interception warrant against you to appeal against it. Correct me if I'm wrong, but the spooks and cops tend not to let you know they're spying on you.
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1. Police had evidence which they believed indicated some sort of terrorist activity. That evidence has been viewed by an independent person, and backed up. The correct response to that evidence was to intervene and eliminate the threat.
See, the whole point of having courts is that the police giving information to one other person to assess isn't enough to prove beyond reasonable that someone is guilty of an alleged crime or even that there was a crime in the first place.
There is a presumption of innocence for a reason. It is to prevent the kind of wrong-headed conclusions that proceed from things like:
If we make the assumption that one, possibly more people, was involved in planning/preparing for, some sort of terrorist activity.
No-one is going to be charged with terrorist activity, let alone already been convicted of it.
I'm wondering what the chances are for a fair trial on the Arms Act charges after all this.