Covering Police "Terrorism" Raid

A few days after the police raids across the country the media are starting to ask the significance of the actions.

Here's Colin Espiner's views:

"Police ‘terror’ raids - blunder or brilliance?
Colin Espiner in On The House | 1:01 pm 17 October 2007

I’ve avoided posting anything on the arrests of activists around the country on Monday because - and this doesn’t happen often, I’ll admit - I’m at a bit of a loss to know what to say.Either the police have uncovered the sort of organised, militant, terrorist activity that New Zealand has so far been blessedly free from, or the cops have made a monumental blunder and trampled over the basic rights of Kiwis to protest and to speak out against authority and the government of the day.Neither answer is particularly palatable. I’ve always considered that New Zealand has its fair share of nutcases, fruit loops, and raving lunatics but that like Douglas Adams’ summation of Earth in The Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy, they were “mostly harmless”.

Indeed I’d thought people like Tame Iti, with his full moko and passionate belief in Maori self-determination, and the earnest, well-meaning, wet-behind-the-ears “activists” that inhabit the darker corners of Wellington’s Te Aro Valley actually added to the country’s social fabric rather than detracted from it. Even if they did occasionally annoy me by chaining themselves to buildings to prevent the construction of the capital’s much-needed inner-city bypass.

But police claims that these people had semi-automatic weapons and molotov cocktails, held secret training camps in the bush and planned to assassinate key public figures is another matter altogether. It’s deeply disturbing.

I don’t think I’m alone in not really knowing what to say at the moment. The media has been every which way, starting off with blazing headlines declaring police had uncovered “terror camps” and conducted “anti-terror raids” before quickly switching to sympathetic portrayals of wronged activists upset at having their door kicked in by police at 4am."

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Russell Brown gives some historical perspective:

"Te Qaeda and the God Squad | Oct 16, 2007 11:02
The Dominion Post today covers yesterday's police raids in part by harking back 30 years, to the Full Gospel Mission -- better known as the "God Squad" -- the millenarian religious sect whose apparent stockpiling of weapons at a compound in Waipara was a huge news story in 1977. It's a story with lessons for all sides of our new controversy...

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