True cost of Urewera case closer to $14 million
The cost to the taxpayer for this fiasco is utterly intolerable. Forget the visible $6 million in legal costs that eclipses any legal case before this, it's the secret $8 million in surveillance costs hidden from public view in the budgets of the GCSB and the SIS that need to be added, meaning this entire fiasco is actually closer to costing us $14 million!
They had to fly in special ops from Afghanistan for this expensive police paranoia. Was Helen Clarke more motivated by the cost of the on going surveillance and needing that to end which was an over riding decision to green light this operation? Was stopping the surveillance costs more of a motivation than any actual defined genuine risk? Because a $14 million fishing expedition that gained nothing but contempt and anger is hardly a positive measure of public spending is it?
Busting a merry militia of weekend role players is hardly terrorism is it?
BTW - Activists NEVER pick up guns. I've been an activist all my life, never needed a gun once. By picking up a gun, what are you actually saying? 'My argument is so much better than yours, I'll shoot you to prove it'? As activists we win by making better arguments, not by the threat of violence.
It isn't just this disgusting cost financially and socially that must be worn by the rest of us, we also have to accept the Police gaining the power to break into our homes and spy on us with minimal judicial oversight after the National Party passed retrospective law under urgency to put a legal fig leaf over ongoing Police surveillance tactics that were shown to be illegal.
So we pay for Police paranoia, and have our civil rights eroded at the same time?
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posted by Bomber @ 7:45 am
4 comments
4 Comments:
In the Urewera, picking up a gun probably means your family is going to eat pork or venison. Or you're going to perform a symbolic act on what you see as the occupier's flag.
"Activists NEVER pick up guns" should prolly be changed to "middle class talkers who misunderstand power and the way it is transferred never pick up guns".
Ironic Debsis is supporting people who claim they were just training to do private security in places like Afghan/Iraq representing American interests while at the same time railing against the war in Iraq/Afghanistan.
Ironic, but entirely consistent in keeping with the hypocrisy we have seen from many so-called peace activists over this matter.
I wasn't aware I was supporting any particular group. What I do know is that mobs of rightwing survivalist assholes run around the bush playing with either paintball type guns or working semi-auto carbines. If bailed up by anyone, a claim to be organisaing the protection of life and property from the 'forces of darkness' (ie lawless &/or unwhite humans) is generally sufficient to cop at worst a suggestion that they "tone it down a little".
Woe betide anyone holding anti-imperialist beliefs who should do the same. They get prosecuted even if it costs tens of millions to build an unsuccessful case.
I don't know any of the Urawera's mob and am reluctant to put words in their mouths or ascribe motives to them which I don't know are correct, but I took the comment about practising to become contract mercenaries for amerikan imperialism as irony. The fact that groups of armed kiwis (ex-military and others) have conducted training for work in Iraq/Afghanistan/Somalia within NZ, yet no attempt has been made to investigate them, much less prosecute them under existing NZ legislation that prohibits the recruitment and training of mercenaries within NZ, may have encouraged these blokes to claim they were doing the same.
In which case any successful prosecution of the "Urawera four" would have put a large kink in the business model of the fly by night mercenary neĕ security companies which appear to regularly spring up headquartered on Auckland's North Shore.
I hafta say I haven't claimed to align myself with 'peace activism' for decades. You may note my sig is "debsisdead" a nick which alludes to the reality, Gene Debs admirable and excellent human that he was, has been dead a long time now. Consequently humanists need to purue their goals utilising different strategies than those that were effective back when capitalism's control of the political process was much less sure than it is now.
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