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.