terrorism

I need to stop making a habit of agreeing with John Pagani, but he keeps on saying sensible things. This time on the Urewera issue and the Search and Surveillance Bill:

I’ve filed a longer piece elsewhere on this, but it’s worth a mention because of the deafening silence among other left blogs today:

Members of the “Urewera 18″ group threw Molotov cocktail fire bombs and fired semi-automatic weapons at training camps in the bush, court documents show.

This news demolishes the comfortable, smug analysis of Urewera that said the cops over-reacted and that the local cop could have just wandered up the hill and told them all to calm down.

No wonder they didn’t want the evidence to come out.

There is a twisted far-left narrative that goes: The cops needed to confect a conspiracy because they were so excited about a war on terror! Having a Terrorism Act they had to find some terrorists! They made it up!.

Anyone repeating this claim now discredits themselves.

Molotov cocktails and semi-authomatic [sic] weapons require lengthy and detailed explanations from the accused (and now acquitted) long before they require explanations from the police.

Yes, there is a right to silence in criminal law. But we are talking not about criminal sanction.

These people have demanded the moral high ground, and demanded the support of the left. Far to many gifted it too cheaply.

I now have a new found respect for John Pagani.

It is not very often that I agree with John Pagani, but today I must with his blog post about the Urewera arrests.

So just adding that up:
- The High Court said the evidence could be admitted.
- The Court of Appeal said it could be admitted.
- The Supreme Court overruled, in some but not all cases, by three to two.
(Why doesn’t it surprise me to see the Supreme Court once again judicially legislating? But that argument can wait for another day.)

As Greg O’Connor of the Police Asociation says:

the Supreme Court has ruled on what it has identified as a gap in New Zealand’s law covering the use of any video surveillance by Police.  It has essentially ruled that because there is no affirmative provision in law making such surveillance legal, it must by default be considered illegal.  As such, it has ruled any evidence gathered from such surveillance is inadmissible except in narrow circumstances where other considerations ‘on balance’ mean it should be allowed despite being improperly obtained.

“That is different to how the law has been interpreted by the Courts up until now, where it has essentially been assumed that because video surveillance is not prohibited, it is generally permitted.

And this is supposed to be evidence of police incompetence? I don’t think so.

This post was timed for 09:11 on 09/11

Ten years ago I sat in my lounge in Howick and watching the unfolding horror of 9-11 live. I didn’t go to work that day, I sat glued to CNN watching live.

I watched the buildings collapse and I was speechless.

The company I worked for had an office in one of the World Trade Centre Buildings. My boss regularly flew from Sydney to New York. He was in the air when this happened.

I had a friend who worked in one of the twin towers. She had slept in that morning, she was late for work and never made it. Her office was above the impact zones. The buildings came down before her train got to the station and she came out onto the street to find out her office, her work mates and her job had just disappeared. She turned around, went home, packed a suitcase and went to the airport and got the first available plane back to New Zealand.

What struck me in the whole awful reality that was 9-11 was that when everyone was running out the emergency services personnel were running in. They were heroes and they died because of their heroism.

The one thing Osama bin Laden miscalculated was the resolve of the American public. It took them nearly ten years but they got him. Terrorism must always be punished, the perpetrators hunted down and killed. There can be no halfway, no giving in. Osama bin laden thought he won, he was wrong.

Check out the video from a news piece last night on ONE News (at 1:29 in the video) where Valerie Morse is interviewed at her home or office.

This image is screened as she comments on the Urewera raids.

She probably wonders why no one sensible will give her  the time of day.

A New Zealander with links to terrorist group al Qaeda and who once was arrested trying to enter an al Qaeda stronghold in Pakistan is back in New Zealand, but the Prime Minister does not believe he is a threat.

Yes but what I want to know is does Phil Goff remember the SIS briefing him on the Kiwi who is a member of Al Qaeda, or has he
forgotten that also?

Watch this Thai soldier get blown up as he checks out an abandoned car in Bangkok and then get up and walk away. Those Bomb suits are the business.

One of the dead was Osama bin Laden, done in by a double tap — boom, boom — to the left side of his face.

From an article in the National Journal.

Most decent blokes will go down defending their missus. Not Osama bin Laden.

Osama bin Laden is said to have been hiding behind a woman, presumed to be his wife, when US forces raided his compound, US officials have revealed.

The head of US counter-terrorism John Brennan has a told a White House media briefing the way Osama was killed will harm his image among supporters, Britain’sThe Telegraph reported.

“Living in this million dollar plus compound, in an area that is far away from the front, hiding behind a woman: it really speaks to just how false his narrative has been over the years,” he said.

Mr Brennan said a woman, “presumed to be bin Laden’s wife” was “positioned in a way that indicated that she was being used as a human shield, whether bin Laden or his son put her there, or she put herself there”.

What a coward. hiding behind the skirts of a woman. Sniveling coward is perhaps more apt.

They should have put his head on a pike and fed his body to the pigs. Unfortunately the Americans gave him a decent burial.

The body was photographed before being buried at sea, although no images have been released by the Obama administration.

The US official who disclosed the burial at sea said it was not possible to find a country willing to accept the remains. Pressed by reporters to say which countries had been contacted about taking the remains, the official said, “I’m not going into details of those conversations.”

Obama said the remains had been handled in accordance with Islamic custom, which requires speedy burial.

An official at yesterday’s Pentagon briefing said the body, once aboard the USS Carl Vinson, was washed and placed in a white sheet. It was then placed in a “weighted bag,” and a military officer read prepared “religious remarks,” which were translated into Arabic by a “native speaker” who was not further identified.

The body was then placed on a “prepared flat board, tipped up, whereupon the deceased’s body eased into the sea,” the official said.

I hope those religious remarks were “Go to Hell”

A must see movie, this is the Spinal Tap for Suicide Bombers.

A muslim hate site has issued death threats against South Park.

“South Park,” the Comedy Central series, is an animated show that tries its best to push buttons and the boundaries of free speech by mocking every high-profile target in sight, from Hollywood celebrities to religious figures. But its creators may have gotten more than they bargained for with two recent episodes that satirized the Prophet Muhammad — one that elicited an ominous message from an Islamic group based in New York, and one that was censored by the cable network that shows it.

In the 200th episode of South Park the characters agonizing over how to bring Muhammad to their fictional Colorado town. At first the character said to be Muhammad is confined to a U-Haul trailer, and is heard speaking but is not shown. Later in the episode the character is let out of the trailer, dressed in a bear costume.

The next day the “South Park” episode was criticized by the group Revolution Muslim in a post at its Web site, revolutionmuslim.com. The post, written by a member named Abu Talhah Al-Amrikee, said the episode “outright insulted” the prophet, adding: “We have to warn Matt and Trey that what they are doing is stupid, and they will probably wind up like Theo van Gogh for airing this show. This is not a threat, but a warning of the reality of what will likely happen to them

The cowards at the network censored South Park so as not to offend Muslims. Fuckers, they were quite happy to offend Catholics. Either you offend everyone or noone. There is no median.

Jon Stewart leaps into the argument.

There is of course another solution.

Draw Mohammed Day