From The Morgue

There is a Traditional Maori Folk Song – an actual folk song, not a “Flight of the Conchords” style folk song – called “Terina”. The lyrics are:
Terina, aue Terina
Tipe e rea
Terina e
Kaya e huri ke
Ko koe rä
Taku nei raukura
Ma tau a-roha
E rau o taku
Tïtapa e.
This song has been recorded many times, often by Sir Howard Morrison. It appears on CD collections of traditional Maori songs. And it takes its tune directly from the closing theme song to Stingray.
(Yes, that Stingray. The one with the submarine. Anything can happen in the next half hour!)
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Rumsfeld always got snark for his “unknown unknowns” comment, but I thought it was one of the few things he said that made sense. And yet, even though I didn’t stand firm in Rumsfeld’s defence over that comment, I somehow still manage to sleep through the night. How mysterious.

The English language needs words for the following things:
* how when you’re looking at someone and they look at you and you automatically look away really fast.
* the phenomenon of accidentally sending an text message or email to the person you’re talking about, not the person you’re talking to
* the simple joy of speaking in a bad Sean Connery accent
Proposals welcome in comments.

The Sunday Star Times continues to provide a forum for Nicky Hager, NZs best journalist. Today it came up with this must-read piece about the leaked police affidavit for the “terror raids”.
The full affidavit was leaked on the web last week. I haven’t seen it, but Hager describes it here, and in the process confirms some of my earlier suppositions.
Some relevant quotes:

A large part of the affidavit’s force comes from the omission of information that didn’t fit the terrorism story. For instance, nowhere in the affidavit is there mention of the fact the bush camps included training sessions on subjects as diverse as Maori herbal medicines, bush skills and Tuhoe history. But this context helps explain why a range of peaceful young Maori and environmental and peace campaigners were at supposed terrorist training camps. …The camps included people learning to use firearms, which is a lawful part of the Urewera way of life. But, judging from evidence in the affidavit, some people were mixing firearms and military-style training with their hothead political talk. This is not necessarily illegal, but it is foolish and dangerous. The people who joined in should have known better. Some at the camps openly expressed concern. The police did everybody concerned a favour by disrupting it.

There’s a distinct point in May when the affidavit starts talking about terrorism …there is what appears to be legal advice analysing the 2002 Terrorism Suppression Act and arguing it was relevant to the Urewera case. Thereafter it seems the police were set on uncovering terrorism, a mindset that led inexorably towards the 300 armed police raiding houses on October 15 and the subsequent terrorism charges.

Read it all. I went to a free concert on Saturday in which many musicians and activists expressed their unhappiness or fury over what has transpired. This whole affair seems, still, a de facto suppression of activism. I believe those in the police who drove this affair genuinely believed they were chasing a threat; their ignorance and fear, however, ruined their judgement. It just isn’t good enough. We must demand more from our law enforcement than this; we must demand a higher standard.
(I watched Upper Hutt Posse rather than the Klezmer Rebs. Didn’t even know the Rebs were on! But I’m sure they were stonkin’ good.)

Officials in northern Sweden have just given the all-clear for the construction of the world’s largest elk, or moose as the animal is known in North America.
Perched on top of a mountain, the 45-metre (148-foot) elk will double as a restaurant and concert hall that can seat up to 350 guests. From its antlers, more than 500 metres above sea level, visitors will be able to enjoy the spectacular view over the valleys below.

My life will not be complete until I climb a mountain to attend a concert inside a giant moose. Could yours be?
(Why the moose? I don’t know. It’s been my totem animal at least since 1990, when I remember aligning Morgan Moose with the Mickey Mouse Club Theme Song as sung in the end of Full Metal Jacket and, painfully, as reimagined hip-hop stylee in the early-90s TV revival that included Britney and Justin as mousketeers. I have been a moose of very long standing. When I made contact with the Dancing Moose for the first time, our friendship was sealed forever the day we discovered our mutual affection for the ungulate. Not that I would ever be foolish enough to google something like “Moose appreciation” – that way lies the deep, deep pits of fursuit madness.)

“This is such unbelievably good news. My whole body is shaking with joy,” project founder Thorbjörn Holmlund said.

Karl du Fresne is not my favourite person in the world. He is, now that the sickening Michael Bassett has departed from the scene, the curmudgeon most guaranteed to get my hackles up. (Which is, of course, his function, as he well understands.)
And yet today I found myself agreeing with him. He acknowledged the “terror raids” to be a nasty overreaction by the NZ police. He acknowledged that, in the public mind, the police response itself evened out the existence of dodgy characters in the woods – leaving a public relations dead heat. And he said that the march of some Tuhoe down to Parliament was a spectacular own goal in terms of PR; instead of peacefully making a damning, silent protest, they donned masks and scared people. There goes any chance for public support.
He thinks this is foolish, self-defeating behaviour by the Tuhoe group. They could have had middle NZ on their side, and they squandered their chance. This is where we part ways (and I say this with some relief; it’s uncomfortable to be on the same road as du Fresne for any length of time).
The way I see it is this: why the hell should Tuhoe care about winning over middle New Zealand? That’s not the goal of the marchers at all. They were sending a message to police and to government that they will not be quiet, they will not roll over, they will not be the well-behaved colonised natives seeking peaceful redress for numerous injustices.
They weren’t trying to win support from middle NZ. They couldn’t care less about middle NZ. As much as the endless stream of letters to the editor gasping in fear at the scary brown people made me grumpy, scaring Mr and Mrs Smith didn’t seem an own goal to me any more than it seemed the point of the exercise. It was just a side effect of their larger political goal.
That goal was to establish Tuhoe as a political force in this nation. To get their name and their greivances on everyone’s lips. To make sure the decision-makers in this country think twice before they abuse that community again.
And judged by those criteria, it wasn’t an own goal. It was a resounding success.
(I leave it as an exercise for the reader whether or not du Fresne’s evaluation of the Tuhoe hikoi as foolish amounts to “dumb ignorant natives” racism.)

Misguidedly, we rented NZ sheep-zombie horror-comedy Black Sheep on Sunday night. Made it about halfway through before we could take it no more. Just not any good. In many ways, actively bad. I’d heard mixed reviews – how is that possible? Where did all the positive reviews come from? (I detect the stern hand of Robert McKee in the script. It was by-the-numbers Story. )
After this and poor old Welcome to Paradise, my new before-breakfast theory of why NZ comedy so often fails: we try and do American comedy, but we are not Americans. Let me expand: comedy, by and large, emerges fully-formed from its culture. Friends and Seinfeld are a direct expression of the deepest recesses of the peculiarities of American culture. We can get enough from it to laugh our Antipodean rears off, but it is foreign to us. That culture isn’t our culture.
And here’s the trick: we sit down to write, and our ideas of what is funny are structured by US content. We think we can ape the mannerisms and affect of US comedy and put in a Maori dude and somehow we’ll make comedy happen. But it doesn’t work. We just don’t get US culture on a deep enough level to make US-style comedy, and years of data have shown we’re not going to accidentally create a new Kiwi-style comedy that way either.
The Conchords are born out of Kiwi culture. Stone-faced guys, a bit out of their depth, with inner wells of emotion and expression, watching out for each other while wrestling with the anxiety of the tiniest absurd success – this digs right into what it is to be a New Zealander.
The irony that the most Kiwi comedy since Fred Dagg and Billy T James had to be made in New York using American money is lost on no-one at all, of course.
(That said, there were one or two good lines in the half of Black Sheep we watched. “Those fish died free”. )

I’ve never blogged about the despicable John Howard,
and now I don’t have to.
Anyway, can’t blog right now, I’m too busy stalking Sigourney Weaver.

I think, reading over it, my final paragraph yesterday was a bit too much of a rush job. Let me clarify, briefly.
I think the police response was far out of proportion to the evidence gathered (again, judging by what evidence has been released and extrapolating from there; if your extrapolation is different, your conclusion probably will be too).
There was no need for a national swoop, for arrestees to be refused bail, for Ruatoki to be treated like it was. There was simply no need for this level of action.
There was no rationale for pursuing action under the terrorism legislation. If surveillance had been continued, then perhaps in time words and deeds recorded would make such action appropriate; as it was, this wasn’t the case.
The police were clearly concerned over what they had found. The rights or wrongs of the surveillance notwithstanding, they had uncovered something and had a mandate to respond to it. I think they went about responding in a completely inappropriate manner that has more to do with what they believed they’d found than what evidence they’d actually accumulated.
So, I’m not saying the police should have just forgotten about the whole affair. Yesterday’s post did imply this, I know. Consider that rushed-off paragraph superseded by this rushed-off blog post.
Also, to those who are commenting that we’ve only seen a fraction of the police evidence dossier: consider the source of those excerpts. They were selected by a newspaper and run under the headline “the terrorism files”. It is inconceivable that the newspaper would done anything but select the most sensational and terroristic rhetoric from the surveillance. Even this cherry-picking had to include a lot of things that weren’t particularly dramatic. I can only conclude that there just wasn’t that much to go on.
I need to talk about something other than the raids, especially because I’m too busy to do this complex subject justice. For a change, I highly recommend reading around bloglandia for more; there is much there that is of insight, even if I disagree with much of it. These raids may yet be the making of the NZ blogosphere…
So as a complete change of pace, here’s the five minute Doctor Who special that aired on UK TV a few days ago, in which Peter Davison gets back in the old cricket gear to reprise the role in a brief meeting with new Doctor David Tennant. Lots of fun. (Minor spoilers for the end of series three, which aired on NZ TV the other night…)

So on Wednesday last, Fairfax Media’s Dominion Post printed key chunks of the evidence that had prompted police raids and seventeen arrests under our anti-terrorism laws. (There’s a whole big argument about whether they were right to do so, but I’m going to keep my hand out of that wasp-jar for today at least.)
Russell Brown links to everything and hosts good chatter here.
When I read through these excerpts, I found myself thinking: Is this it? This is all they had? Some of the talk is, frankly, sickening, but to have a year’s surveillance of a “terrorist cell” only come up with a half-dozen sentences that really were obnoxious? And at least half of them were obviously spoken by the shamelessly barmy Jamie Lockett. That’s *it*? (John Campbell helpfully dropped information the DomPost hadn’t seen fit to include, namely that only five or so of the seventeen arrested were quoted in these excerpts.)
Okay, to be fair that’s not it – there was rifle firing, there was a ‘staged hijack’, there were gun-to-the-head loyalty tests, and other bits of theatre. But still. If there was something going on, surely they’d have it on tape. If they were bold enough to pull the pin and swoop on these terrorists, surely they’d have something major.
But they didn’t. A number of bloggers (friends among them) and many letter-to-the-editor correspondents think they did, but I just do not see it.
Instead, here’s what I think was actually going on. Bear in mind this relies on no special knowledge or insider goss – this is all based on the public record. This is my best guess right now as to the true story of New Zealand’s terror cell.
You will recall that my main confusion, right from the start, is that peace campaigners are allegedly caught up in plans for violent action. Either the peace campaigners led a very successful double life, or the police had it very wrong.
Here’s my theory, then. It’s just my theory.
The arrestees all attended Ruatoki camps. The camps were designed as a place for a variety of activists to meet, talk about what they have in common, discuss and practice civil disobedience, etc. By their nature, these camps would have to be secret, far from the public eye and operating only with trusted souls, leaders within their respective communities who were unlikely to be spies.
Similar gatherings have taken place all over the world, on greater or smaller scales. At the G8 protest in Gleneagles, a massive variety of groups were represented, from Church-based social justice groups to spooky Black Bloc anarchists from the continent. There was a lot of interaction among the groups, with common threads being found and ideas being shared. This did not amount to an endorsement of each others’ ideologies or approaches – far from it. One No, but many Yeses, as the saying goes.
So you have a secret group of the police usual suspects having secret meetings in their remote location. Moreover, it’s a location in deepest Tuhoe country, where lots of Tuhoe carry guns as a matter of course, and perhaps where young Tuhoe men train to be security guards for private firms in Iraq. I can see this causing legitimate concern among the police.
On investigation, bugging the group and following them, they find weapons training, They find Jamie Lockett and a few other big mouths talking about shooting people, about assassinating the next prime minister, about taking the struggle into violence, about how to make napalm. I can see why that would cause concern as well.
But wait. This isn’t evidence of a secret terrorist cell. This is (and I remind you this is my personal best guess theory, not anything proven) just a small subset of a group of activists who are talking big and playing Zapatista in the bush, and who, maybe, one day, might do something big.
And all the other activists are not part of this. At worst, they tacitly condone this vicious talk by hearing it and saying nothing about it. More likely, they disapprove and indicate this disapproval without actually confronting the big-talkers or forcing a scene. One No, many Yeses can only work if there is a willingness to let people talk about stuff you find obnoxious, after all.
The police don’t perceive this distinction because they’re expecting to find terrorists. Because everything they hear they take seriously. And the secrecy, the sneaking around, the codenames and hidden meetings in the bush, that all implies a conspiracy, and if they’re all in on the conspiracy, they’re all part of it… and so on.
That’s my theory. It is just a theory, but it’s the best way I’ve found to fit together everything that I know has happened into a picture that makes sense to me.
So… should the police have made their raids? No. After a year, if that’s all they had, they didn’t have a case and despite what the Solicitor General said about their diligence and the failings of the act, they should have known it. They didn’t have a case because there just wasn’t much there to be found. Now, if they’d maintained their surveillance for another year, perhaps the talk would have got more serious, perhaps the preparations would have become more intense. Long before any civilian would be threatened there would be ample proof that something was going badly astray up in the hills. Of course, that surveillance would cost many millions more to carry out. Would it be worth gambling the money on it? Not as far as I’m concerned.