The dawn raids of 15 October 2007 were a B-Grade psychological operation to avert a threat to the New Zealand Crown’s power: Tūhoe sovereignty over Te Urewera.
The Deep State’s motives, means and modus operandi for orchestrating a B-Grade mass character assassination via the transmission mechanism of the armed dawn raids across the North Island are revealed as a coordinated, calculated deceptive strategy that required ‘buy-in’ across multiple public and private sector institutions, key leading actors and assorted bit-part characters. The Police played a leading role, by exploiting Tama Iti’s fantasy of an uprising – which he did ironically call for at the Parihaka Peace Festival – and blew this implausible scenario up into a sensational threat by feeding the commercialized Establishment Media’s profit autism with a cover-story of ‘nipping a terror plot in the bud’.
This ‘nipping it in the bud’ terror narrative – as deployed by Police Commissioner Howard Broad – was an encoded euphemistic description that signalled the ‘Tame Iti’ terror plot narrative was fake. Commissioner Broad was commissioning subterfuge that communicated Iti was a little thorny rose bush who had embedded himself in the Neo-Colonial State’s Crown. The Deep State needed to de-risk the situation because he could easily inspire Tūhoe to regain sovereignty over Te Urewera. Therefore, Police Commissioner Howard Broad’s omissions of evidence about the Crown’s real objectives represented a local manifestation of U.S. President Bush II’s illegal, unlawful and unjustified Pre-emptive Strike Doctrine that was applied to the permanent ‘Global War on Terror’.
Just as the justifications for Operation Enduring Freedom were proven to be bogus – the Hussein Regime of Iraq had no links to Al Qaeda, had no weapons of mass destruction, and had no capacity to attack USA America – the justifications for Operation Eight were also a ‘work of fiction’. Both trigger events, 9/11 and Operation Eight, were based on devious reasoning, shoddy evidence and the absence of a serious investigation that factored in the possibility that the accused were framed as scapegoats in psy-ops designed to exhibit the Deep States’ spectacular power.
Operation Eight was authored by New Zealand’s Deep State Easter Bunnies. The rag-tag suspects targeted in the Operation Eight’s paramilitary raids had no capacity for orchestrating an uprising – whether violent or peaceful. The Police intelligence apparatus framed them in a non-existent terror plot with detectable traces of the Sleeping Dogs screenplay as part of a broader agenda to prevent Conversation Estate and Crown Minerals Estate lands reverting to the Native Estate o Ngāi Tūhoe.
The state needed to undermine Tūhoe’s mana ahead of negotiating a settlement, because there was a risk that if Tūhoe played its cards well, the tribe could have wrested sovereign ownership and control of their former territorial possessions from the Crown. If this had occurred, all other iwi would likely have followed suit, leading to rapidly diminished Crown power and catastrophic collapse. Ironically, in pursuing this case for almost seven years – from the day of the dawn raids to the early release of the prime target, Tame Iti – the Police, the Crown’s Solicitor General’s Office, Her Majesty’s judiciary and two Government Administration’s have participated terrorist acts to intimidate the populations of Rūātoki, Tūhoe, various activist groups and the wider New Zealand population – in breach of the Terrorism Suppression Act of 2002. Furthermore, the crises created for the communities of Rūātoki, Taneatua and Tūhoe, in general, drew resources, time and thoughts away from fighting the Crown for the return of stolen and swindled lands to supporting the victims, and in particular, to battling court cases over Police charges.
My key finding is that New Zealand’s Deep State deftly scripted a successful B-Grade multi-season News Special psy-op – Operation Eight – that re-framed Te Urewera wilderness as a place where para-military terrorism training camps were being conducted. The vicious intention in this re-framing exercise was to shift the political center of gravity away from the very real possibility that Tūhoe would gain substantive sovereignty through the return of their native estate. To re-frame Te Urewera widerness with a terror news frame, the Crown’s national security state apparatus activated a propagandist scapegoat mechanism through the news media, the courts and the executive. The prime target of the exclusionary blackballing stratagem was the leading and most visible proponent in the Tūhoe iwi for ‘succession’ from Crown – Tame Iti. The Crown, for its own self-preservation and the Neo-Colonial Super-rich Oligarchy it serves, needed the most visible colourful, creative and courageous of the succession faction of Tūhoe that aspired to gain the full and unencumbered return of native lands – to be slyly dragged into the Crown’s court jurisdictions through vexatious criminal proceedings. This nefarious scheme was commissioned to position a weakened, discredited and worn-down Tūhoe within a law and order terror news frame, thereby undermining its credibility, mana and resolve ahead of Treaty negotiations.
The state craft on display belies the Neo-Colonial Deep State’s sloppiness in hurried circumstances. The messiness, brazenness and obviousness of the plot also reveals facts and evidence of their deceptive stratagem that actually breaches of section 240 of the Crimes Act of 1961, which deals with crimes of deceit. This deceptive exclusionary blackballing stratagem involved the activation of a perennial fixture in the New Zealand political-economy, the scape-goat mechanism, which is regularly applied to Māori groups to resolve the frequent crises of the Pākehā-dominated ruling class. The primary objective for the deployment of the scape-goat mechanism was to de-risk Tūhoe’s lawful right to re-acquire the customary Native Estate of Te Urewera, cause division among Tūhoe ahead of negotiating with the Crown, and to inflict stresses on its capacity to win substantive sovereignty over other former Tūhoe territory. This objective, along with a reassertion of state dominance, was achieved – despite any rhetoric to the contrary – as I shall show. The key perpetrators have been left to remain at large, thereby showing that the Crown condones criminal conspiracies that defend its power to remain the sole sovereign protector for the Neo-Colonial Oligarchy, chief regulator of native affairs and their strategic resources.
The Crown signed off on this political conspiracy, and through its enjoinable conduct with the Police’s Operation Eight, embroiled more participants in a furtherance of conspiracy that can be traced to the multi-season psy-war to frame Nigerian-born political asylum seeker, Ahmed Zaoui. The Crown’s case against Zaoui collapsed following the secret witness testimony given by Algeria’s former head of intelligence and counter-espionage for northern Europe, Lieutenant Colonel Mohamed Samraoui. A former assassin, Lieutenant Colonel Samraoui produced his evidence in classified hearings that showed the asylum seeker had been framed for character assassination. This potential bombshell meant the national security state had lost their ‘poster boy’ for the ‘Global War on Terror’ in New Zealand. By being forced to free their ‘poster boy’, the national security state faced a looming crisis of legitimacy at a time when amendments to the terrorism Suppression Act were before a parliamentary select committee. This credibility crisis converged with the Crown’s looming crisis that it had zero legitimacy to deny Tūhoe the return of the Urewera wilderness. To confront this convergence of crises, the Crown’s Deep State deftly deployed its scripted B-Grade multi-season News Special psy-op – Operation Eight and was effective enough to achieve its broad objective: to save the realm from a catastrophic collapse of Crown credibility.
This exquisite example of a Neo-Colonial Deep State plot came packaged with Easter Bunnies, ‘Easter Eggs’ and a tin-foil conspiracy wrapping that became more crinkled as the facts and evidence were scrutinized. These packaged elements were embedded as the events unfolded as the key actors posted themselves as hostages to signal they were advancing the game together. These Easter Eggs involved the scripting, improvising and recalibrating events with encoded symbolism, such as riffs off dystopian movies and novels, the casting of characters whose names epitomized their roles, and the deployment of the prime number 13 – that made cameo appearances as the character Thirteen and its cloned selves. Like all criminal plots, not everything went according to plan. In such circumstances the Deep State’s Easter Bunnies shit themselves, leave a trail of bunny droppings that lead to their rabbit holes, and down into the Deep States’ rabbit warrens. One consequence of this Operation Eight conspiratorial plot, as meted out by the Neo-Colonial Crown, means that the key Crown actors that have behaved criminally, in breach of section 240 of the Crimes Act, which deals with crimes of deceit, have left themselves wide open for facing prosecution for breaches of the Crimes Act, a statute law that binds the Crown.
By Steve ‘Snoopman’ Edwards
The Lens: Game theory as a theoretical framework to detect power crimes
To examine the role of key deep state players who advanced the plot to inflict a Shock Doctrine psychological warfare, game theory has been applied. In game theory, ‘posting a hostage’ is a mechanism to construct stability and is predicated on a provisional promise to cooperate if other players post hostages too. The game requires an implied threat, which amounts to defection on the next move if the other player does not post a hostage too. Without such hostage postings, there would be defections on the next move – in keeping with game theory. In their paper, “Resolving social conflicts through hostage posting: theoretical and empirical considerations,” Gideon Keren and Werner Raub noted that “tacit communications of threats and promises are two major message strategies used to influence the behaviours of others”. Deep state actors embed events with Easter Eggs’ – as they have been termed – like signature droppings to signal the work of deep state rabbits.
These often self—referential Easter Eggs not only signal solidarity. They also communicate caution to key insiders to not investigate too hard, to take the cues of who is scripted for scape-goating to resolve the underlying deep structural crisis the Deep State Overlords face, and above all – emotionally hijack the secondary targets of propaganda: news audiences.
In playing their subterfuge roles to deploy, deepen and ‘darken’ the Shock Doctrine psychological warfare framework – with straight faces – the deep state actors created a copy of reality by setting an over-simplistic narrative, emotionally hijacking news audiences and scape-goating to manufacture an enemy image.
One such recurring Easter Egg is the curious prime number ‘Thirteen’ that masquerades in mundane data in dates, quantities and locations like an aggressive attention-seeking teenager who has not yet worked out that the essence of ‘being cool’ is kindness. To a secret New Zealand fraternity, dominated by men, whom are aligned with their international counterparts, the recurrence of the number 13, and its multiples, works as a way for members of this hidden network to find, communicate and work with each other – as conspiracy theory as its sounds.
The practice of embedding events with the number 13 came to my attention when I read Simon Johnson and James Kwak’s book, 13 Bankers: The Wall Street Takeover and the Next Financial Meltdown. Johnson and Kwak did not explicitly state why exactly elites embed events with this curious prime number, just noted its curious recurrence and hence the title of their excellent book. The phenomena of the number 13 used to symbolize a financial oligarchy is more explicitly explored in a groundbreaking thesis, “It’s the Financial Oligarchy, Stupid”. The appearances of number 13 in institutional data does not necessarily mean that the nominal head of the institution is a member of a Fraternity, or that everyone who reproduces such data belongs to a Brotherhood. It signifies a Brotherhood’s hand.
The New Zealand Deep State’s mission creep in switching from one poster-boy of their derivative Global War on Terror multi-season news special – Ahmed Zaoui – to another – Tame Iti – is entirely predictable by scholarly conspiracy law theory, pertaining to political conspiracies and economic collusion.
In his Yale Law Journal paper “Conspiracy Theory”, Neal Katyal argued that a “sunk cost trap” dynamic is created when people commit to a specific course of action that binds them and “escalates previous behaviour”. Consequently, corrective action by colluding players to serve their secret goals, or “enjoinable conduct,” can be expected to surface in the news. Enjoinable conduct can take the form of direct communications such as meetings and conference calls, confidentiality agreements between political parties or players, out-sourced political assets and encoded messaging to communicate threats and promises to stabilize a crisis. It is in the fusion between the commissioning of a conspiracy furthers an elite criminal group’s identify and the omission of true facts and un-sanitized evidence that produces the social harm – that public institutions need to focus on. Elite groups construct criminogenic environments to orchestrate power crimes by exploiting the speed of fast-moving constructed events they are to develop their investigative modelling tools, information extraction strategies and disruptive mechanisms to mitigate their power criminal group formation, visibly prosecute and contain in facilities. Indeed, in a 1993 Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management paper, crisis management expert Paul ’t Hart observed powerful groups use the media to relay information to “crisis stakeholders”. In his article entitled – “Symbols, rituals and power: The lost dimensions of crisis management” – ’t Hart explained that a ‘crisis’ “creates a self-binding dynamic,” since the act of characterization is rhetorical and lends itself to semantic descriptions.
Woven Facts
When I saw Tame Iti say he was “making quilts” in response to Fairfax journalist Tony Wall’s Twitter wall question asking what he was really doing in the Urewera mountains to warrant the October 15 2007 Police raid on Rūātoki, I could see the Tūhoe activist and artist was not only being characteristically cute.
I also knew Iti was offering woven facts.
That’s because I was among 300 people in the political forum tent at a Parihaka International Peace and Music Festival when Tame Iti called for an “uprising”, prior to the North Island-wide dawn raids of the New Zealand Tax Farm.
Iti justified his call for an uprising because the New Zealand Crown was returning little of the stolen and swindled lands to Māori in the Treaty Settlements and it was blocking Māori from forming self-determining communities with fiat cheques for a fraction of the property lost.
The Tūhoe activist and artist made this call when he commandeered the mic at the end of a session in the political forum tent.
The tent at Parihaka was packed and I was near the back. The audience was either shocked or thought Tame Iti was blowing hot air due to frustration. I thought that his B-Grade uprising idea was unlikely to find backers. Iti invited people who were interested in an uprising to join him in an adjacent marquee at the January festival.
I searched for Iti afterward, but by the time I managed to get out of the political forum tent, he had vanished. I intended to persuade Iti not to pursue such a course because the state would respond in only one way, with overwhelming force and so more creative, non-violent ways were needed to shift the political ground around the state. I thought Iti had been talked out of it by kaumatua or some of the speakers.
We were, after all, at Parihaka.
In the mid-1860s, under the leadership of Te Whiti o Rongomai and Tohu Kākahi, a pacifist community of Māori from Taranaki and around the country was created to resist the invasion of their estates and to protect Māori independence. On 5 November 1881, the Parihaka village was invaded by 1600 Armed Constabulary troops and a volunteer militia. The village was destroyed, men were imprisoned in caves in the South Island – where many died of exposure – and women and girls were raped, molested and beaten.[1]
Like the whanau groups of hapu and iwi of Taranaki who lost land during and following the New Zealand Wars, Tūhoe also had land confiscated by the Crown, swindled by settlers and stealthily taken by legislative processes.
In this research essay, a hidden layer to New Zealand’s colonial past is revealed, specifically that a secret network of Freemasons dominated the political, military and commercial institutions. This revelation provides a sharpened lens through which to see that the Crown’s so-called ‘full and final’ Treaty settlement processes lack full disclosure – because the fraud underpinning the British Empire’s dealings with Māori would be laid bare. The dark legacy of colonization, the Crown’s unwillingness to concede territory and fess up to New Zealanders that the Treaty Settlements resolution processes are really about corporatizing Māori as part of a broader global project identified as Neo-Colonialism, a project driven by the Western Alliance to construct a New World Order Utopia.
The Operation Eight raids are explored as a fraudulent B-Grade psy-op designed to besmirch and stifle dissent, de-risk the possibility of Tūhoe gaining the return of substantial lands confiscated or swindled, forging some kind of new constitutional arrangements or secession, and were part of broader, longer historical Deep State processes to inch the political centre of gravity upward toward authoritarianism, by equating freedom, democracy and lawfulness with the paternalistic state. The Establishment Media, Political Elite, and Criminal Justice System are shown to have played key parts in casting yet another Māori group for scapegoating, which is the unwritten perennial role of Māori to resolve the frequent crises of the Pākehā-dominated ruling class since the early days of colonization. The legacy of the Operation Eight B-Grade Psy-op is that it worked successfully to weaken Tūhoe’s negotiating power with the Crown. This resulted in another miniscule settlement pay-out with fiat currency, a sleight of hand in the form of a fee simple feudal title for the Te Urewera forest, lakes and streams and park ranger status for a few dozen Tūhoe. The whānau, hapū, marae and rohe of Tūhoe were manipulated into thinking that Te Urewera’s legal personhood status is a win, when it means the entity is a corporate British subject required to pay tribute to the Crown Overlord, administrate over permits and aspire to becoming a carbon sink, earning carbon credits and off-setting the economy’s polluters. Indeed, the Crown’s Deep State fraudulent blackballing strategy to coerce and undermine Tūhoe is laid bare, and shows that colonial era Doctrine of Discovery is alive and kicking its imperial boot – with the help of sophisticated Neo-Colonial era spin-doctoring to brain-wash people into thinking that a largely unspoiled reserve now ‘owns itself’.
Operation 8: Boundary Issues of the Neo-Colonial Deep State
The ‘Operation Eight’ police raids of October 15 2007 unleashed 300 police officers breaking into and searching 60 homes around New Zealand, including in Wellington, Auckland and a small rural community, Rūātoki, that is comprised of mostly Māori of the Tūhoe iwi. Rūātoki bore the brunt of Police intimidation. It was locked down by masked heavily armed members of the Police Armed Offenders Squad (AOS) and the Northern Special Tactics Group (STG), who detained people at gunpoint, including men, women and children who were not even suspects. Police arrested 17 indigenous, anarchist, environmental and anti-war activists and took into custody people from Tūhoe, Te Atiawa, Maniapoto and Ngā Puhi, along with a few token Pākehā to share in the Deep State’s vindictive need for politically correct subterfuge.
Only two people in Rūātoki were arrested with Terrorism charges. Not two hundred.
Two.
The news shooting location at Rūātoki, which was given extra special treatment by being locked down in paramilitary-style raids complete with helicopters thwacking overhead, was where this B-Grade News Special psy-op had a Sleeping Dogs feel the most. In Sleeping Dogs, the plot is propelled by a conspiracy of false flag terrorism, wherein masked gunmen shoot army soldiers from a building, a sinister act that is orchestrated by Prime Minister Volkner and Special Force Commissioner Jesperson to scare the duped population into unwittingly authorizing by referendum a fascist Police State.
False Flag Terrorism: Special Force henchmen shoot the army as they clash with protesters, before being shot by an assassin who draws fire from the army to cover his tracks [Sleeping Dogs, 1977].
The Sleeping Dogs audience is privy to who is behind the inciting incident of false flag terrorism, whereas the inciting incident in the ‘Operation Eight News Special’ relied on tricking the audience that the ‘Termination Phase’, or the paramilitary-style raids, were necessary to stop terrorism before it could happen, or Minority Report pre-crime.
The Operation Eight ‘Termination Phase’ was carried out in the absence of full profiling of the principle actors, before a full intelligence analysis was conducted to determine what the suspects were actually planning, and excluded Māori police such as Superintendent Wallace Haumaha from the investigation, who would have provided a more nuanced picture, skepticism and sanity. The investigation was coordinated by the Special Investigations Group (SIG) within Auckland Metro Crime and Operations Support (AMCOS). Brazenly, the ‘Termination Phase’ included 20-page omnibus search and seizure ‘fishing expedition’ warrants to find the evidence they needed to justify the raids!
In other words, the false flag terrorism element of the Operation Eight News Special can be likened to a Make-Believe sketch copied on tracing paper from the ‘Global War on Terror’ template. The resultant terror narrative came packaged with terror cells interlinked by poor network analysis gleaned from telecommunications, illegal surveillance recordings and omnibus ‘fishing expedition’ search warrants, all for presentation to the Make-Real World of Bubble-Gum TV News, without exploring the spooky Minority Report implications of accusing human beings for alleged ‘future crimes’.
In her review of Errol Wright’s and Abi King-Jones’ Operation 8 – Deep in the Forest documentary published in the State Crime Journal, Stéphanie Bürgenmeier noted that Massey University counter-insurgency expert, Dr Jeff Sluka, had told the Operation 8 filmmakers that since the rise of the ‘New Right’, the New Zealand government had pursued a course to suppress dissent by criminalizing it. The state’s goal was, “to redefine essentially political opposition and resistance as terrorism”, Sluka said.
Indeed, indigenous rights lawyer Moana Jackson underlines the political conspiracy against the Rūātoki community and Tūhoe ahead of negotiating with the Crown:
“Of all the areas that were raided by the police on that day, Ruatoki was the only one that was locked down, Rūātoki was the only one where helicopters flew overhead, Rūātoki was the only one where innocent people were stopped on their way to work, where buses carrying pre-school children were stopped and so on.
“Tūhoe were at the time [of the raids] engaged in negotiations over the return of raupatu [confiscated) land. I think a clear part of the strategy behind the raids was to send a message that there were limits to what the Crown was prepared to do.”[23]
Tūhoe leader Tamati Kruger stated in Operation 8: Deep in the Forest, that the police raid on Rūātoki:
“was a show of force. It was literally at gunpoint … at gunpoint, reminding Tuhoe who was in charge here.”
The Constabulary had sought to have 12 tried with “participation in a terrorist group”, framed those arrested with a non-existent conspiracy to commit acts of terrorism and attempted to have the accused convicted under the Terrorism Suppression Act of 2002. At an early press conference, the Police Commissioner Howard Broad admitted that there had been no planning, deployed the justification of ‘nipping it in the bud’ – which was an encoded semantic description that signalled Iti’s little plot was fake. Police Commissioner Broad was, therefore, deploying subterfuge to communicate Iti was a thorn in the Neo-Colonial Establishment’s be-jewelled Crown and if Iti the Little Thorn was not removed from Tūhoe, his continued presence would likely be catastrophic to the Neo-Colonial Oligarchy, the Government and the security state apparatus. Tellingly, when asked by a reporter if there was any suggestion from the group that they were taking any action, Police Commissioner Broad glibly said “No.” Therefore, Police Commissioner Broad major omission at the first Operation Eight press conference was the broad objective to save the realm from a catastrophic collapse of Crown credibility in the face of Tūhoe standing strong to insist on the unencumbered return of their ancestral lands. In this way, Police Commissioner Broad visibly performed a Hostage Posting Ritual for a conspiracy to harm Tūhoe mana that he had co-commissioned.
By applying the terrorism narrative traced from the ‘Global War on Terror’ template, with interlinked cells of terrorists throughout the North Island – the explosive suggestions of napalm, Molitov Cocktails and secret arms caches, were B-Grade riffs from Sleeping Dogs. In this 1977 movie directed by Roger Donaldson, the Police Special Force is led by Commissioner Jesperson, whom – it can be seen – has control over the Royal Air Force, Army and a US Special Forces unit to counter domestic civil dissent, unrest and the predictable armed uprising – given the concentration of power.
As I show, the Police – in effect – also operationalized riffs off the premise depicted in the Hollywood movie Minority Report, by asserting an unlawful right to raid, arrest and prosecute human beings on the basis of crimes not yet committed but supposedly predicted on the basis of profiling, selection of surveillance data and records of past behaviours: pre-crime.
In the Operation Eight era, Howard Broad, who was promoted to the role of Police Commissioner in April 2006, and became the most visible face of the Police Force. In 2003, Broad had been seconded to London for a six-month stint to receive counter-terrorism training at the Home Office’s Police Standards Unit. In “Top copper on counter-terrorism beat”, the New Zealand Herald reported at the time that Broad said, “Obviously, we are concerned about the possibility of terrorism being planned here.”
Operation Eight operated under the direction of the Police Strategic Intelligence Unit (SIU), which was approved by Cabinet in January 2002 on the justification from officials that it was needed to “focus on terrorism and transnational activity such as people smuggling, identity fraud and money laundering.” In 2004, then-Defence Minister Phil Goff announced funding for a police Special Investigation Groups (or SIG units), that were improve New Zealand’s counter-terrorism capacity and would be “deployed for specific national security duties” by the Strategic Intelligence Unit at Police National Headquarters. Three SIG units were set up, one apiece in the three biggest cities, Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch. The New Zealand Police, who at the time of the Operation Eight raids were charged with developing a National Security Strategy – were positioned in a central role as intelligence gatherers on internal security threats – whether real or perceived. The NZ Police led the Joint Strategic Intelligence Group – which was tasked with controlling the flow of information during a ‘terrorist incident’ across multiple Police agencies, and therefore was the Department of Pre-Crime.
Despite the obvious breaches to human rights inherent to the Operation Eight raids, Prime Minister Helen Clark and Police Minister Annette King both avoided conducting an inquiry into the over-the-top operation to examine what lay beneath. Instead, and with exquisite Shakespearean timing, Clark’s politically correct te reo Māori greeting, “Tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou katoa-” to the well-healed Pākehā conservative liberals at a 2008 election year Labour Party Conference in Wellington that was hilariously interrupted by a fire alarm set off by activists protesting the Police raids. With her deep voice gone wooden, Clark said, “And I’m going to need some advice” when the unscripted emergency bells abruptly cut into her culturally P.C. greeting. For her dirty bit-part, King deployed a diversionary argument in the parliamentary debating chamber, when replying to a question about the trauma suffered by those targeted by the raids. King downplayed the trauma, by deflecting to violence people frequently consume from television, which is not the same thing as having your family held at gunpoint for hours by hyped-up Police accusing you of being a terrorist during a ‘Termination Phase’ of a conspiratorial operation to save the state from having its own unlawful claims to sovereignty diminished. In other words, King as the Minister of Police was mocking the victims because the in-joke was that the Police B-Grade psy-op was making a Minority Report scenario ‘go live’.
An early set-back for the élite Deep State criminal group examined here, occurred on 8 November 2007, when the Solicitor-General David Collins declined permission to allow the Crown prosecutions to proceed under the Terrorism Suppression Act due to the lack of evidence, and advised the media to report with caution. Collins added, “The police have successfully brought to an end what were very disturbing activities”. As I shall show, Collins’ opinion of “disturbing activities” were based on the deceptive frame-up job, as presented in Pascoe’s affidavit, and that his opinion was based – at best – on a disturbing gullibility.
The Neo-Colonial Deep State’s panic following Solicitor-General’s block to exploit the Terrorism Suppression Act is detectable in their subsequent moves, because it immediately made the raids look over the top to those segments of New Zealand society who are susceptible to propaganda. The Crown and Police were sensitive about controlling the propaganda. Evidently, one of accused’s lawyers leaked lengthy Police file to the news media.
The Crown’s Solicitor General’s Office warned TV3‘s Campbell Live that if they broadcast their program revealing parts of a leaked copy of the 156-page affidavit authored by Detective Aaron Pascoe – they would be prosecuted.
On 14 November 2007, the Dominion Post ran a lead story headlined The Terrorism Files, which the Solicitor-General viewed as a serious breach of the court suppression orders, arguing that the publication had been “deliberately inflammatory”.[2] The High Court found that Fairfax and the Dominion Post had breached the suppression orders by publishing parts of Detective Pascoe’s 156-page affidavit, but the Police declined to press charges against the press, in particular Dominion Post Pākehā editor, Tim Pankhurst. Fascinatingly, Fairfax’s proximity to the Police investigation goes along way to explaining why it brazenly defied the Crown’s Solicitor General’s warning. A former Detective Dean Winter who left the force in 2002, gained employment as head of security at Fairfax‘s online auction property, TradeMe. While at this post, Detective Pascoe’s SIG unit made requests for trading information as part of Operation Eight, as reporter David Fisher partially disclosed in an article titled, “Raid Me”, about thousands of Trade Me documents that one of the defendants, Jamie Lockett, received while in prison.
In one edition, The Dominion Post led with a headline, “IRA style war plans”, and led the article stating:
“TAME ITI was preparing to declare an IRA-style war on New Zealand in a bid to establish his long standing dream of an independent Tuhoe nation, according to police documents.”
Otago University media studies lecturer Dr Vijay Devas was critical of the news media’s lack of skepticism in their coverage. Tame Iti was framed as the face of terrorism against the backdrop of the broader ‘Global War on Terrorism’. Dr Devas added:
“The media practice of selection, framing, both image and narrative, sought to purposefully link the claim for sovereignty with terrorism.”
Indigenous rights lawyer Annette Sykes recalled that it was her hunch that an orchestrated propaganda campaign had been deployed for uncritical uptake by the news media, by the volume of phone calls and texts she got from reporters the day of the raids.
The uncritical dissemination by the news media of propaganda from Deep State actors can be detected in Operation 8: Deep in the Forest. For example, Hadyn Jones in a live cross on 3News stated that a “security source” wanted to make it clear that one of the camps was using napalm. Indeed, OneNews obliged by playing archive footage of a bush-fire in place of non-existent evidence of napalm fires. 3News reporter Hadyn Jones added that his “security source” emphasized “we are not dealing with harmless fringe elements”. The in-joke of this statement is its double meaning. One meaning is that the Deep State was saying they consider political dissenters as fringe groups that the Deep State will not negotiate with or recognize as legitimate. The overt meaning is to make the idea of a fake terrorist group seem larger and more threatening than the reality.
Interlinked Cells Nipped in the Bud? In spring 2007, NZ’s Deep State fed the Establishment Media sensational propaganda to create the spectacle of a terror network sprung before dawn.
In the contempt of court case against Fairfax and the Dominion Post, Solicitor-General Collins pointed out that no planning for terrorism had occurred. It is fascinating to note that in this media court case, one of the judge’s acknowledged that some of the most sensational quotes published without context by the newspaper – such as that the accused spoke of catapulting a bus onto then-US president George Bush’s head – was simply “hot air”.[7]
After the bad publicity that the Police, Crown Law Office, and Clark’s Government received, the Deep State’s Easter Bunnies moved onward making more arrests to support their B-Grade psy-op. One such arrest was generously laden with Easter Eggs, in the form of the number Thirteen and its clones making cameo appearances. So generously laden with Easter Eggs, in fact, that the Easter Bunnies left rabbit droppings that led from the court to the Police Station, their homes and all the way to the Strategic Intelligence Unit at Police National Headquarters, in Wellington. On February 19 2008, Raunatiri Hunt was arrested at Maketu in the Bay of Plenty for unlawfully possessing firearms. Fascinatingly, the Deep State Bunnies left their Easter Eggs in the data to signal to insiders that the case against was part of the broader psy-war to save the realm from a catastrophic succession of the terrorist-harboring Tūhoe nation. Hunt’s lawyers, Nicholas Dutch, had been lumped with 13,000 pages of ‘evidence’ from the Constabulary, which included 13 witnesses against Hunt, who all happened to be Police, who claimed Hunt was identified from surveillance footage of the alleged terrorism training camps in the Urewera. A big omission by Deep State Detective Pascoe & Co was that in their overzealous hunt for evidence of terror plot, the Police forgot to mention that the video surveillance occurred on private property, which was an illegal spying activity. The case was adjourned on the 26th of February, or 26th of the 2nd month, as seen through a numerology lens to render, 26 ÷ 2 = 13. The repetition of 13 in the data was deployed in order that the judiciary could not mistake it as an accident. Thus, the ‘Dutch lawyer’ was flooded with documents, and when the hearing re-adjourned, he appealed on behalf of his client to have Hunt’s case heard in the low-lying Tauranga District Court, closer to home rather than in the elevated court in Auckland District. This was a pity, because having 13 Easter Bunny Police called as witnesses against Hunt in a depositions hearing in Tauranga District Court would have yielded more Easter Bunny data, including Easter Eggs and rabbit droppings.
In December 2010, or more than three years after the raids, Justice Winkelmann denied a trial by jury for 15 of the 18 defendants. A three month trial by judge was set to start in May 2011, requiring the accused to move to Auckland. On 6 September 2011, charges against 13 of the 18 accused were dropped. The Crown dropped charges against: Ira Bailey, Marama Mayrick, Rawiri Iti, Omar Hamed, Raunatiri Hunt, Jamie Lockett, Watene McClutchie, Tekaumarua Wharepouri, Moana Winitana, Maraki Teepa, Phillip Purewa, Trudi Paraha and Valerie Morse. One of the accused, Tuhoe Lambert, died on July 8 2011 waiting for the trial, which was delayed – in part – because the case was primarily a psy-warfare News Special that would have been competing for news audience attention amid the Rugby World Cup. And partly because “patches” to law needed to made to authorize the Crown to retrospectively exploit Police evidence gained through illegal search and surveillance of private property. After a failed attempt in the Supreme Court to have the case acquitted, the Crown was forced to hold a trial by jury. The case that eventuated against the ‘Urewera Four’ – THE QUEEN v TAME WAIRERE ITI, TE RANGIKAIWHIRIA KEMARA, URS PETER SIGNER & EMILY FELICITY BAILEY – was presided over by only one judge, which commenced on 13 February 2012, signalling that the Deep State Brotherhood that dominates New Zealand were advancing the game together, by the choice of date February the 13th.
The planting of Thirteen and its multiples as mundane data into events, signifies the presence of an oligarchic ‘Fraternity’, and their Deep State operatives – for whom the number 13 signals ‘unity and love’ – as weird as it sounds.[12] (This occult practice was embedded in New Zealand during the colonial era).[13] This, I contend, was why charges against 13 of the 18 accused were dropped on 6 September 2011, rather than dropping the whole B-Grade framing psy-op. In the ‘Urewera Four Trial’, it was found again that Police knew that no terrorism planning had taken place and that there was no immediate threat. Justice Hansen remarked in a paternalistic tone that violent means to achieve the laudable ends is not justifiable.
One-Eyed Trial: In the case of Queen v Urewera Four, Judge Hansen was unwilling to reflect on the state’s legitimacy to govern.
Despite these acknowledged facts, the High Court Justice Rodney Hansen sentenced Tame Iti and co-defendant Te Rangikaiwhiria Kemara for two and a half years jail-time, and Urs Signer and Emily Bailey for nine months home detention at Parihaka, for firearms possession on 24 May 2012. Pākehā Justice Hansen viewed the Urewera Four’s activities as the root cause of the consternation in the Tūhoe region and wider community nationally.
Only in New Zealand: Deputy Prime Minister Michael Cullen and National Party leader John Key meet political actor Tame Iti (31 July 2007 and 5 February 2008, respectively)
When Operation Eight was terminated, seventeen firearms were found in Rūātoki. That’s not unusual in a country where hunting is a staple feature of rural communities. In total, 26 firearms were found in Rūātoki, Auckland, Wellington and Whakatāne, including semi-automatic weapons and shotguns. By March 20 2012, the jury was unable to reach a verdict on the charges of participation in a criminal group. On May 9 2012, Justice Brewer granted a ‘stay of proceedings’ on the charge of participation in an organised criminal group, meaning the four would not be retried. As the Fairfax Media consortium reported,
“Crown Prosecutor Ross Burns gave a number of reasons for not continuing with the prosecution including that any sentence from the organised criminal charge was unlikely to change the end result, five years had elapsed since the charges were laid and that the chance of a fair retrial had been jeopardised by the media coverage to date.”
In other words, Burns was saying the proceedings had had the desired effect. Iti’s credibility was so sufficiently diminished with his people, and while he was painting artworks in jail, the Crown – meanwhile – negotiated with Tamati Kruger and Kirsty Luke, who could be relied upon to capitulate to the Crown’s paternalistic hand, in the absence of the Māori leadership of Aotearoa uniting with grassroots Māori, and Pākehā to back Tūhoe to mount a counter-offensive in the Auckland High Court to challenge the obvious B-Grade subversion, and invoke the 1835 Declaration of Independence of the Confederate Tribes of Aotearoa. Indeed, on 11 September 2012, and while Tame Iti was doing time, Tūhoe representatives settled with the Crown for $170 million in compensation for land lost and historical wrongs perpetrated by the Crown.
To be super-clear, I am not saying that Tamati Kruger and Kirsty Luke were stooges for the Crown. What I am saying is, Kruger and Luke were negotiating from a weakened position, as an intended in-built consequence of the so-called anti-terror raids. Even though Tame Iti and Tamati Kruger resolved after the raids not to let the court cases that were running parallel to the Ngāi Tūhoe and Crown settlement negotiations affect the iwi’s capacity to negotiate – it did, hugely.
The Crown’s propaganda was only modified on the aspect that the raids were over-the-top, the result of widespread condemnation. There was no official acknowledgement that this over-the-topness was done deliberately to undermine Ngāi Tūhoe’s mana to get sovereign ownership, control and possession of customary territories back. Justice Hansen’s view was that a “private militia was in formation”. Justice Hansen quoted alleged surveillance intercepts and accounts, stating that Mr Iti described the group as, “a revolutionary military wing o Aotearoa … to smash the system”. In journalist Kim Webby’s documentary, The Price of Peace, Tame Iti said that the Crown prosecutions’ assertions of intentions for murder, kidnapping and arson were “serious allegations”. Iti also said:
“We had no intention of hurting people. This is something they invented. This is a lie.”
I believe Iti did fantasize about an armed rebellion – like the others in mid-banter, bonding, venting, or when boozed. But fantasizing is a far leap from the imaginary Make-Believe World to stratagizing, mobilizing and operationalizing in the Make-Real World where Crown jurisdiction collides with its pirate past and its psy-spook present.
Iti was not a mean-spirited person to actually plan, mobilize and implement an uprising, if the violent form was what he meant. He may have meant non-violent, direction action-type uprising when he spoke at Parihaka. Iti neglected to define his terms. I believe Iti was just frustrated – blowing hot air – in the same way that world leaders do. Except, that Iti did not have the resources of the likes of George Bush II to order even a low-grade war of terror – of the likes of Operation Gladio in Western Europe for 40 years. Historian Daniele Ganser found the NATO countries had perpetrated a “Strategy of Tension” designed to frighten the mass populaces of Europe and thereby shift the political gravity to the ‘right’ by blaming ‘left’ wing communist groups for the carnage of Operation Gladio that involved ‘false flag’ bombings of trains, planes, automobiles, buses, and buildings. Key insiders that involved the CIA, MI6 and the Coordination and Planning Committee (CPC) of NATO’s Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) manipulated people with the subtle propaganda that a ‘free world’ equated with capitalism. (SEE full resolution version here: Terror Network Chart).[3] It is these same NATO powers that New Zealand’s Defence, Intelligence and Security apparatus are aligned with. Therefore, it is deeply ironic that the Police Special Investigation Group (SIG) knew Iti did not have the talents, means or ill-will to carry out a terrorism plot and instead opted for maximum character assassination via an orchestrated B-Grade propaganda campaign, that required an over-the-top raid on Rūātoki – for effect.
In other words, Police Special Investigation Group (SIG) at Auckland Metro Crime Services could not wait for bomb or assassination plots that would never eventuate.
The only dangerous device ticking was the Crown’s clock and the only assassination plot was a mass character type aimed at ‘left-wing’ causes, Tūhoe – who wanted the Ureweras back – with Tame Iti as the prime target – and Māori in general via a not-too-subtle conflation of sovereignty aspirations with terrorism.
This is why the cover-story of nipping a terrorist plot in the bud was so tenuously clung to throughout the hearings, trials and propaganda campaigns that were dragged out over for almost seven years. As crisis management expert Paul ’t Hart wrote in his white paper, “Symbols, rituals and power: The lost dimensions of crisis management” published in the Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management in 1993, those crisis actors who can control the ritualized symbolic actions in the midst of a crisis can constrain its meanings and thereby gain from a crisis.
Indeed, ironies abound as New Zealand’s Deep State advanced their B-Grade strategy of tension-lite and, in effect, re-activated the perennial scape-goat mechanism to resolve yet another crisis of the Pākehā-dominated Ruling Class: casting Māori as rebels in need of discipline.
When B-Grade Uprising Ideas find Unintended Backers
What started with an old-school Tūhoe political actor’s call for an uprising – likely envisioned as a campaign of peaceful non-violent direct action – at the Parihaka Peace Festival culminated in the New Zealand state operationalizing Shock Doctrine methods of terror, pursuing a program of mass character assassination and using the subsequent drawn-out cases against the accused as a psy-op to besmirch left-wing causes, Tūhoe aspirations of sovereignty and re-legitimize the Police State.
Indeed, the Police-Intelligence-Surveillance-Security-State apparatus faced an imminent threat to its credibility following the collapse of its case against political asylum seeker, Ahmed Zaoui. If classified evidence leaked about why the Crown was forced to let Zaoui go after almost five years, the reputation of New Zealand’s security-intelligence-surveillance services would have been severely diminished. At this time, amendments to the Terrorism Suppression Act of 2002 were going through parliamentary select committee processes. Parliamentary lawmakers such as Keith Locke, who had first raised concerns over Zaoui’s case, needed to be overwhelmed with fast-moving deep state conjured events, or speed politics, where the spectacle presented in news sheets, screens and scripts is the evidence for framing targeted scape-goats.
Elite criminals who practice fraud, corruption and terrorism, argues Monash University senior lecturer of international law Eric Wilson, “optimize” their power and prestige through the construction of networks that work to minimize the risks of detection and maximize the payoffs [62]. By exploiting speed, criminal elites and oligarchs are able distort perceptions about the facts of events and why they occur. Thus, “low velocity political deliberation and public accountability” is overtaken by high-velocity events created by highly-networked private interests. It is in this way, that “politics ‘disappears into aesthetics’ ” – as Eric Wilson puts it. In this process, the splicing of space and time and kinetic image sequences mask “speed-politics” with a copy of reality. Thus, the Establishment Media, acting as ‘vectors’ or transmitters of ‘emotional contagion’, assist the ‘speed-politics’ that underpin such ‘crises,’ amid an ‘atmosphere of catastrophe.’
It turns out that New Zealand’s Security Intelligence Service (SIS) had relied on intelligence from Belgium, France and Switzerland based on a black flag operation produced by Algeria’s military intelligence agency, the DRS, to discredit Zaoui.
In mid-2007, the Crown’s case against Algerian refugee Ahmed Zaoui collapsed because the secret witness testimony given by Algeria’s former head of intelligence and counter-espionage for northern Europe, showed the asylum seeker had been framed for character assassination. The Crown’s case against Zaoui had already been damaged when it became public knowledge that the the director of the NZSIS, Richard Woods, had been the New Zealand ambassador to Algeria based in Paris at the time when Zaoui was in Algeria, a former colony of France that appeared to independence after a Revolutionary War from 1954-1962, but was drawn into a system identified as Neo-Colonialism by former President of Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah. Woods was replaced by Warren Tucker.
This collapse of the Crown’s case created a political crisis for the Clark Ministry, which had stubbornly stuck to its guns for nearly five years, asserting Zaoui was a terrorist. Because that crisis coincided with the amendments to the Terrorism Suppression Act passing through parliamentary processes at the time, the standing of New Zealand’s intelligence apparatus was particularly in question. The Security Intelligence Service (SIS) had relied on false information maliciously planted with their NATO counterparts by the secret witness, a former assassin Lieutenant Colonel Mohamed Samraoui, who produced his evidence in classified hearings held by New Zealand’s Inspector General of Intelligence and Security, Justice Paul Neazor. Therefore, by having the spectacle of a live terror plot nipped in the bud, the raids proceeded with a B-Grade cover story – complete with the Police Special Intelligence Group at Auckland Metro Crime Services stipulating the Terrorism Suppression Act in the search warrants – for effect.
The Ahmed Zaoui case is pertinent here because it is a lesson in how intelligence and security services can frame people to justify pre-emptory and peremptory actions on a spectrum from character assassination to actual assassination. Where a pre-emptory strike – as popularized by Bush II – is perpetrated before law can be established in a jurisdiction, a peremptory action is designed to stymie debate on important issues and admit no contradiction.
Due to the lack of light shining on this scandalous behaviour, the task to explain why the Clark Government simply released Ahmed Zaoui with little explanation in 2007 was left to independent journalist and documentary-maker Selwyn Manning, who travelled to Europe to interview former assassin Lieutenant Colonel Mohamed Samraoui – by himself! Algeria’s former head of intelligence and counter-espionage for northern Europe admitted to framing Zaoui.[4] This crime was done because Zaoui and others were speaking out against the Algerian regime to audiences in Europe, as Manning showed in his documentary, Behind the Shroud. Lieutenant Colonel Samraoui said it was standard procedure in security risk assessments to decide the suitably for action against a political target on a spectrum from character assassination to actual assassination – weighing up the risks with the threats the targets were perceived to pose to the structures of power.[5]
The record shows that a statement from then-Director of the NZ Security Intelligence Service, Warren Tucker, on the Deep State Easter Bunnies’ favourite day of any month, the 1September 13th 2007, failed to satisfactorily clarify that Ahmed Zaoui had been framed for character assassination.[6] Because Warren Tucker left Lieutenant Colonel Mohamed Samraoui’s part in framing Ahmed Zaoui classified, the SIS chief was able to get away with insinuating that Zaoui had been guilty of “participating in and leading terrorist networks” in France and Belgium, and that his deportation from “Switzerland for issuing statements supporting violence in Algeria and attracting extremists” were legitimate records of Zaoui’s life. Therefore, the SIS-SIG rabbit warren was left-free to double-down in their efforts to flex New Zealand’s Deep State muscle.
Just one month later, New Zealand’s Deep State would mete-out a mass character assassination that relied in part on the intelligence gathering of private investigation firms, as journalist Nicky Hager’s investigations in late 2007 and early 2008 showed.
Official Censorship vs Corporate Propaganda: The Solicitor General’s Office warned Campbell Live it would prosecute if it aired its report, but then failed to charge Dominion Post editor Tim Pankhurst & Fairfax executives for breaches of court suppression orders.
Despite a directive from then-Prime Minister Helen Clark to Solid Energy and all other state-owned enterprises and departments to desist from using private sector spies to infiltrate activist groups with informants, the Operation Eight dawn raids had relied – in part – on information supplied by a paid-police informant, Rob Gilchrist, who lived a double-life as an ‘activist’ for nearly 10 years. Following journalist Nicky Hager’s scoop of the Gilchrist story, “Crossing the Line – The activist who turned police informer”,[7] activist and author Valerie Morse told 3News in mid-December 2007,[8] Gilchrist had informed on at least three of the Operation Eight accused and had tried to get her to commit burglary and make bomb threats. Hager’s “Crossing the Line” story followed on from three prior stories: “I was paid to betray protestors” (May 27, 2007),[9] which he followed up with, “Private Investigators still digging on West Coast” (April 20 2008),[10] and “Coal mine spies return despite govt ban” (April 20 2008)[11] – that showed private investigators Thompson and Clark had sought to infiltrate left-wing activist groups. As former intelligence and defense policy analyst Dr. Paul Buchanan said in the Operation 8 documentary, Gilchrist was acting as an agent provocateur.
It is particularly fascinating, then, to identify who Rob Gilchrist’s bosses were. Gilchrist’s main handler was Detective Peter Gilroy, and the officer in charge of SIG in Christchurch, Detective Sergeant John Sjoberg. Detective Gilroy was a member of the Armed Offenders Squad and then with the Special Tactics Group from 1975-1999, and from then onward, he seems to have joined Police ‘intelligence’. Therefore, Gilchrist role was a dual one – a spy and agent provocateur – for the Police who had the lead role for controlling information flows on internal security threats and terrorism incidents.
From Persons of Interest to Personhood: or How the Occult Doctrine of Discovery was re-applied to Te Urewera
Meanwhile, a darkly satirical sense of humour was encoded in the Operation Eight dawn raids.
One suspect who was arrested on October 15 2007 was Valerie Morse, a Wellington-based anti-war/pro peace activist, who published her book, Against Freedom: The War on Terrorism in Everyday New Zealand Life, in 2007 prior to the raids. I contend Morse was Black-Listed for being a Thoughtcriminal – in the Orwellian sense. The ‘war on terrorism’ – Morse argued in Against Freedom – is the Deep State’s code for advancing the construction of a global corporate superstructure under the guise of security, trade, development, aid and democracy. Morse had also dared to criticize the Clark government for getting New Zealand embroiled in the ‘war on terrorism’, bringing it to the Pacific and enlarging the state’s capacity to undermine dissent in New Zealand.
I think Morse made the Deep State Easter Bunnies’ funny bones go numb.
After-all, Morse did make numerous filings to the Ministry of Information Retrieval, also known as the ‘security-intelligence community’, who declined her requests, as she notes in her book, Against Freedom. In February and March of 2007, Morse was observed at anti-war protests in Wellington, that were also attended by Police informant Gilchrist, and Morse’s Thoughtcrimes were added to the Operation Eight log.
Morse cited numerous reasons underpinning the Constabulary raids of October 2007. These were: (1) create an event that justified the imminent passage of the Terrorism Suppression Act Amendment; (2) advance the game of the war on terrorism and justify the surveillance technologies, personnel and budgets; (3) undermine Tūhoe sovereignty aspirations through character assassination; and (4) attack the legitimacy of dissenting groups. Thus, Morse decoded the logic underpinning the raids, saying they telegraphed a continuum of state-making whereby the incursions into communities, households and workplaces “expanded the boundaries of sovereignty and reinforced white supremacist hegemonic power” of the ‘patriarchal state’. When the Crown Law Office dropped charges against 13 of the accused on September 6 2011, a news article “Urewera raid case a ‘house of cards’, reported Morse had read 30,000 documents presented by the Constabulary. Morse found the Police were in possession of “a very distorted picture of the aspirations of Maori for sovereignty”, and that the concept and customary law practice of tino rangatiratanga, or indigenous self-determination, was presented “as if that was a criminal idea”.
Like the others who were arrested and charged, the manufactured ‘global war on terrorism’[12] became an everyday life fact for years for Morse,[13] until finally in late February 2013 the prime target for character assassination – Wairere Tame Iti – who most symbolized Tūhoe, was released from prison after nine months.
On 23 March 2013, less than a month after Iti was ‘set free’ to range around this dirty little country, following the Parole Board’s announcement on 26 February, Tūhoe hosted a settlement ceremony with the Crown for $170 million in compensation for land lost and historical wrongs perpetrated by the Crown. However, the ownership of the Ureweras was not transferred to Tūhoe as an iwi in its pre-1840 state superior to Māori customary land title (that hardly any Māori land is classified as), and is therefore technically alienable.[14]
A neat trick has occurred.
In 2014, with the passage of Te Urewera Act, the 821-square-mile Te Urewera national park ceased its legal life begun in 1958, and was granted the status of ‘personhood’ – like that of a corporation – with Royal Accent under British law. Attorney General, Chris Finlayson, claimed the issues over guardianship and ownership were resolved by working with the Māori paradigm. “In their worldview, ‘I am the river and the river is me,’” he said. “Their geographic region is part and parcel of who they are.”[15] That is to say, “no one owns Te Urewera”.[16] These rhetorical statements are mere semantics that pull at heart-strings.
Legal Personhood: Te Urewera has been granted a fee simple title, and is subject to taxation and the Crown’s claims to supreme authority, despite the rhetoric.
Te Urewera is now ‘co-governed’ by Tūhoe and the Crown. This sounds like a nice adult compromise. Although the Act says Te Urewera is inalienable, it also states an exception if authorized by an Act of Parliament, meaning Te Urewera as a legal person is subordinate to the Crown Overlord. For instance, Te Urewera is subject to the Crown Minerals Act. As a 1992 Law Commission discussion paper, “Tenure and Estates in Land” states:
“All land ultimately belongs to the State, as personified by the Crown. The fact that only the Crown can be the absolute owner of land is a basic concept of English law and New Zealand law. The only exception is land still held under Māori customary title … and [e]ven in that case the Crown has paramount (or “radical”) title. It is a fundamental principle of [English] law that all lands are holden of some superior lord”.
Te Urewera ‘establishment land’ title is merely fee simple, which confers estate rights to land-holders to use and profit from the land provided the tenure obligations to the Crown are met. Te Urewera is subject to tax, meaning Te Urewera as a legal entity has been incorporated into the Queen in Right of New Zealand’s Tax Farm. The Board and Te Urewera are deemed to be the “same person”, meaning that Te Urewera and the Board have been granted a “feud” or “fee”, essentially as tenants to pay tax revenues to the Crown and supply services on behalf of the Crown, meaning the Te Urewera Act observes the doctrine of feudal tenure. Whereas in feudal Britain, the aristocracy was expected to supply knights to defend the realm and pay tribute on land ultimately owned by the sovereign, today in New Zealand, Tūhoe customary practices of Te Urewera are now subject to statute law overseen by a small Neo-Colonial board that has equal Crown representation, and takes advice from the Department of Conservation. In short, the Te Urewera Board have been cast as high-ranking park rangers – obligated to pay tributes.
Crucially, the Law Commission noted in regard to customary laws:
“the Crown did not always acquire title to land as well as sovereignty when it acquired territories from non-European rulers. It has been said that the Crown’s rights are no greater than those of the local sovereign from whom it acquired the territory unless it proceeds to abrogate or diminish private property rights.”
To deal with this problem, the Native Land Court Act 1865 recited that it was:
“expedient to amend the laws relating to lands … which are still subject to Maori proprietary customs, and to encourage the extinction of such proprietary customs and provide for the conversion of such modes of ownership into titles derived from the Crown”.
To this criminal end, Premier and Freemason Bro. Richard Seddon performed a ‘Sending in the Surveyors Ritual’ to go to the Ureweras, 1893. Predictably, in response to Premiere Seddon’s brazen act of structural entrapment, Tūhoe pulled up Her Majesty’s survey pegs, thereby giving Seddon a pretext to deploy troops to the ‘crime scene’. Seddon denied what he was doing in Parliament when he said he was not making “a threat”, but claimed he was:
“say[ing] in all kindness” [that the] “natives … are … retarding the progress of European settlement [and] every year that condition of things continues … the greater is the likelihood of a remedy being applied by Parliament that may not be in the interests of the native race”.[3]
With the passage of the Native Land Purchase and Acquisition Act of 1893, 1.3 million acres were acquired by small Pākehā farmers between 1893 and 1912 across the North Island, with cheap loans provided by the Advances to Settlers Act of 1894 – credit that Māori were not privileged to access. As such, the dawn raids of 15 October 2007 at Rūātoki need to be seen as a dirty political attack upon Tūhoe in a longer continuum of Discovery Doctrine state formation, the maintenance of Crown power and subjugation of indigenous peoples to an occult Fraternity.
Conquest by Paper: Following the passage of the Native Land Purchase and Acquisition Act of 1893, 1.3 million acres were acquired by small Pākehā farmers between 1893 and 1912.
As a legal entity, Te Urewera is not even classified as Māori customary land, which is technically inalienable – although Māori know all too bitterly even inalienable rights can be lost by swindle, struggle and stealth, as I show in my illustrated essay, The Masonic New Zealand Wars: Freemasonry as a Secret Mechanism of Imperial Conquest During the ‘Native Troubles’.
New Zealand’s First Gang: A secret network of Freemasons conspired to transform New Zealand into a Masonic territory through a revolutionary war designed to smash the Maori communal economy.
Indeed, the Law Commission report notes the “Crown’s power to take land” including “requisition[ing] land in time of war.” Here, we get to the nub of the issue regarding the Crown’s approach to settling with the Tūhoe tribe – rather than with hapū – since tribes are a construct of larger groupings that can be easily played off against one another in the grand Roman tradition of divide and conquer, and a handful of representatives can be elevated by discrediting radical factions through subversive means – as I am showing here. Ngai Tūhoe whānau, hapū, marae and rohe hold as a matter of pride, identity and latent sovereignty that their forebears never signed any of the 1840 Waitangi treaty sheets. Vietnam veteran Ross Nepia Himona states that Tuhoe:
“have been quite brilliant in their image making and have portrayed themselves as the last holdout against colonialism and the last repository of traditional ways of life and values. It finds expression in “Te Mana Motuhake o Tuhoe” the ongoing never ending cause for some form of political autonomy. It is a compelling narrative that has created an aura around Ngai Tuhoe of the Urewera, that draws in the romantics and the idealists to support the Ngai Tuhoe cause. It’s the narrative that has been brilliantly portrayed in academic publications, on film and in the media. It’s the narrative that would have drawn all of those activists to the wananga once invited.”
But Himona also points out that some activists refused to take part in the ‘war games’, and that in his view, these were fantasies. Himona viewed all the video evidence and concluded that one of the participants, Rau Hunt, was simply demonstrating the tactics of vehicle, convoy and personal protection used by civilian contractors in ambush situations in locations such as Iraq and Afghanistan. Himona said the police construed the video recordings as evidence of hostage-taking exercises.
The rub for Crown officials was that they could not deny Te Urewera National Park and the flat-lowlands stretching to the coast at Whakatane had been acquired by swindle, struggle and stealth. These unwoven facts – together with the Tūhoe tribe’s fairly well-known aspirations for secession – posed such a threat to the Crown that the situation needed careful, coordinated crisis management. If Tūhoe re-gained full sovereignty over Te Urewera, other lands and coastal areas, then other iwi, whānau, hapū, marae and rohe would follow suit – and not just those whose forebears never signed the 1840 Treaty. Because Māori legitimately hold the view that their forebears never signed away sovereignty with signing Te Tiriti o Waitangi in 1840 – as the Waitangi Tribunal has shown – the Crown’s whare is built on lurching foundations of unlawful sand.
Indeed, the Treaty of Waitangi represented one element – Preemption/European title – of what has been identified by indigenous scholars as the Doctrine of Discovery. This secret piece of international law was reached between European nations at a time when they were forming empires since the 15th Century, and was designed to mitigate the chances of competing nations making expensive war with each other. It was thought it would be easier to gain territory off indigenous peoples’ cast as ’savages’ rather than from their more technologically even European competitors. Through the application of another international law doctrine – terra nullius – the natives’ of the ‘New World’ were considered to lack full political rights because they were not Christians busy cutting vast swathes of forests for sheep and cattle to graze and therefore they were deemed too ‘primitive’ to be considered ‘sovereign’.[11] Not surprisingly, ‘colour prejudice’ as a “conscience-salving colonial doctrine” surfaced around 500 years ago, coinciding with the emergence of the European empires.[12] Crucial unwoven facts were omitted from both versions of the Treaty.
For instance, Britain was an empire. Or more precisely, two empires. There was the Christian British Empire, complete with missionaries exercising ‘soft-power’ to civilize ‘the natives’. And there was the hidden British Masonic Empire hell-bent on world domination, as Nicholas Hagger found in his epic study, The Secret History of the West. This hell-bent vision competed with a rival Brotherhood, French Templar Freemasonry. British Freemasonry was Sionist Rosicrucian Freemasonry, which formed a United Grand Lodge in 1717 to unify English resistance to Jabcobite Templar Freemasonry, formed around the Scottish Stuart dynasty, who were formally and permanently banished the same year from the British Isles. It was at this point, in 1717, when Sionist Rosicrucian Freemasonry came to rule over the British Monarchy and the Church of England, after having successfully achieved a political and business merger with the Dutch in 1688. More specifically, the ‘Glorious Revolution of 1688’ – which saw Prince William of Orange and his consort Mary wrest control of the British throne from King James II after they landed at Torbay, near Brixham, Devon, on November 5 with 250 ships – was secretly bankrolled by English Rosicrucian Freemasons, the Bank of Amsterdam, and Amsterdam Jews, and was part of a two-hundred year Venetian project to takeover Britain. Sionist Rosicrucian Freemasonry is a revolutionary force committed to forging a universal empire under the rule of one monarch, while French Templar Freemasonry developed into a revolutionary force committed to forge a universal empire under the rule of one federal republic.
Invisible Brotherhood: Freemasonry ensured their secret role in the New Zealand Wars vanished by omission in the early reports, records and recollections of the Colonial Pakeha ruling class.
Naturally, these secret Utopian objectives that underpinned the real English and French Empires were not mentioned to rangatira in the discussions that took place around the signings of the Treaty of Waitangi. The British were playing for time, knowing that at some point conflict would occur. The fraudulent English version of the Treaty would serve its propagandist purpose because it could be construed that Māori chiefs voluntarily surrendered sovereignty without battle, even though the Māori language version retained rangatira sovereignty over Māori, lands and other resources that Māori did not sell. Māori would be cast as savage rebels for resisting incursions, pressures to sell and destruction of crops and other incessant acts of Masonic subversion. A secret network of Freemasons conspired to transform New Zealand into a Masonic territory through a revolutionary war designed to smash the Māori communal economy, thereby making the fraudulent 1840 Treaty null and void.
Civilizations only become empires when they turn aggressively expansionist and engage in imperial wars to support an oligarchy’s insatiable appetite for wealth accumulation, control of technologies and other resources to out-compete the empires of rival oligarchies.[13] In New Zealand’s case, the Lords of the Admiralty were very clear in their secret instructions to Captain James Cook, which were not published until 1928, that the British Empire had to beat other rival powers seizing any new great territories. Captain Cook viewed Maoriland as a resource-rich base for the British Masonic Empire in the South Pacific Ocean. Indeed, the British navy had obtained kauri spars from New Zealand in 1820 for His Majesty’s Ships.
Discovery Rituals: Captain Cook proclaims possession in the name of King George III at Queen Charlotte Sound 1769, and Captain Hobson swindles rangatira into signing the 1840 Waitangi Treaty.
Not surprisingly – given the epic rort with which the British Crown exploited the fraudulent English language version of the Treaty of Waitangi – the Conquest stage of empire (also a Discovery Doctrine element) manifested into what I call The Masonic New Zealand Wars. As I have shown in my illustrated essay, Freemasons dominated key positions in the political, military and commercial apparatus of Colonial New Zealand and conspired in the crucial 1858 to 1868 period to destroy the Māori communal economy, with which the colonists could not compete. As Jessica Harlands-Jacobs showed in her book, Builders of Empire: Freemasonry and British Imperialism, 1717-1927, the primary secret mechanism by which the British Empire spread throughout the ‘New World’ was through the secret society of Freemasonry, and in turn, Freemasonry was spread mostly through the military regiments, including the navy. However, as a study of British Masonic Imperialism, Harlands-Jacobs’ work does not reveal the network of the secret brotherhood and, therefore, their roles in the British Empire remain obscure to the reader.
However, other accounts such as John Daniel’s, Scarlet and the Beast. Vol. 1: A History of the War between English and French Freemasonry, Webster Tarpley’s The British Empire Bid for Undisputed World Domination, 1850-1870, and Nicholas Hagger’s aforementioned, The Secret History of the West, and rare books published privately by Freemason Lodges in New Zealand – reveal a sharper lens through which to review New Zealand’s colonial history. For instance, the British Prime Minister throughout the peak period of the New Zealand Wars was Lord Bro. Palmerston (1859-1865), who appointed Freemason Bro. George Frederick Samuel Robinson, 3rd Earl de Grey, as Secretary of War on April 13 1863, meaning Freemason Governor Bro. George Grey – the Commander-in-Chief – was taking war orders from the secret network of Freemasonry that ruled the British Masonic Empire.
Masonic Records: The privately published accounts of Freemasonary read like a ‘Who’s Who’ meets a ‘Who Dunnit?’ of New Zealand’s Colonial era.
The Masonic-dominated New Zealand Colonial Oligarchy pursued an imperialist vision to construct a British Masonic Utopia that envisioned Māori as a race of savages who were to be recast as a workforce of landless labourers to help build-out the new Masonic territories before they were meant to quietly die out. This is the hidden layer of New Zealand history that Queen Elizabeth II neglected to mention when she co-signed the Tainui settlement with then-Māori Queen Dame Te Ātairangikaahu in 1995, a history that the British Monarch is well aware of. (After-all, ‘Her Majesty’ gave Harland-Jacobs access to the records of British Freemasonry in the Royal Archives). Therefore, the so-called full and final Treaty Settlements have proceeded without full disclosure, because an unsanitized account would set in motion a full restoration sovereignty necessitating the forfeiture of the Crown’s fraudulent presence in New Zealand.
Even without these unwoven facts of Masonic intrigue being widely known, the Crown was still vulnerable to a Ngāi Tūhoe secession – or, at the very least, winning the full customary land sovereignty, ownership, and title over Te Urewera. Therefore, the Crown needed to divide, distract and defeat Tūhoe – again.
Tame Iti’s B-Grade ‘freedom-fighter’ uprising idea provided the opportunity for the Crown’s Deep State to construe his bush wananga as a “private militia in formation” – in Judge Hansen’s words. This view was arrived at, through circumstantial evidence and illegal surveillance recordings re-constructed out of context by the Police SIG unit, and without consideration for the underbelly of machinations that had already been partially exposed by Abi King Jones’ and Errol Wright’s documentary, Operation 8: Deep in the Forest. Justice Hansen’s view was so predictably inadequate – it was as if it were conceived by a B-Grade psy-op script-writer.
In other words, the Crown has brazenly granted a concession – a fee simple feudal estate title supposedly in perpetuity for ‘the natives’ of Tūhoe to have board positions. Tūhoe have essentially been conferred limited neo-feudal rights as park rangers over lands the Crown stole!
This brazen act of deception by means of a carefully orchestrated B-Grade psy-op breached section 240 of the Crimes Act of 1961, which deals with deception. Section 240 states that every one is guilty of obtaining by deception or causing loss by deception who: by any deception and without claim of right, obtains ownership or possession of; or control over, any property, or any privilege, service, pecuniary advantage, benefit, or valuable consideration, directly or indirectly; or induces or causes any other person to deliver over, or thing capable of being used to derive a pecuniary advantage; or causes loss to any other person.
Indeed, the one-eyed scape-goat casting of Māori as rebels has become such a cliché in the New Zealand Tax Farm, that the Crown Solicitor General’s Office – which is charged with overseeing the legitimacy of cases – showed it was ‘incapable’ of apprehending the State’s own subversive actors whose obvious coercion underpinned the dawn raids. Not only had the Crown deployed a fraudulent stratagem to trick the New Zealand people through the device of hundreds of charges – including the Terrorism Suppression Act – for effect. Inherent to this B-Grade psy-op plot was coercion through blackmail. The Deep State actors and script writers behind this scheme sought to coerce Tūhoe into lowering their expectations with reference to negotiating with the Crown, and diminish its mana among the tribes of New Zealand.
As can be seen from section 237 of the Crimes Act of 1961, the over-the-top dawn raids – in particular at Rūātoki – amounted to blackmail because the heavily armed police threatened the safety of people for the pecuniary advantage, privilege and valuable consideration of the Crown to exercise its unlawful and fraudulent right to be sovereign. The implied threat was that if those assailed by the police did not submit, then they would be harmed, since the heavily armed police entered properties either by force or threat of force. The dawn raids were designed to spread fear throughout the Rūātoki community, the wider New Zealand activist communities, and the mass populace. This spreading of a fake threat of an armed militia training to use violence to coerce the Crown to return Tūhoe lands, including Te Urewera, threatened the safety of the Rūātoki community, the homes of other activists arrested and the wider New Zealand society. If these malicious disproportionate events had have gone wrong, say with people putting up a legitimate fight to defend their homes from such unlawful incursions, then people could have died or been seriously injured by the police gang’s gunfire. Furthermore, the Police actions – sanctioned by the Crown – have undermined the safety and legitimacy of New Zealand’s activists, by making false accusations with the spectacle of forced entries to homes. Through this coercion, the police have blackmailed New Zealanders with a demonstration of surveillance, armed dawn raids and the lock-down of a rural community – in order to undermine so-called left-wing causes, Tūhoe‘s right of undisturbed possession of lands, dwellings and businesses, and the lawful customary right of he tangata Māori to exercise sovereignty.
The Crown’s process to settle with Tūhoe was concurrent with the Queen’s case against the ‘Urewera Four’. Conjuring the spectacle of a Māori rebellion was as much about undermining Tūhoe’s credibility going into the process of negotiating with the Crown, as it was about signalling to the Pākehā-dominated ruling class – who are attuned to dog-whistling – that the fix was in. The Pākehā-dominated Establishment Media – for the most part – could be relied upon to act as vectors for the transmission of emotional contagion. The Liberal Class could be relied upon make some muffled noises about the racism inherent to the raids. And the judicial system could be relied upon to focus on the wrong-doing of the accused – because this ‘Switzerland of the South Pacific’ is a hollow society.
It was really only the activist community, committed lawyers and dissident academics, musicians and journalists and grassroots Tūhoe and Māori from other iwi, and assorted Pākehā – that stuck by those arrested, or caught up in the state’s B-Grade psy-op.
A Legal Person to Trade Carbon Credits?
The Board of Te Urewera will seek to have Te Urewera registered as a UNESCO biosphere reserve. Te Urewera Act says the Board will take advice from the Department of Conservation (DOC). In a briefing paper to the incoming National Government’s Minister of Conservation prepared in 2008, DOC stated it had been studying carbon sinks, carbon reservoirs and carbon sequestration on conservation lands and estimated that carbon stock on lands managed by the department was about 2400 million tonnes. This work was undertaken to develop a framework “to help New Zealand meet its commitments under the Kyoto Protocol.” In others words, a stock-take had been carried out with the view of exploiting opportunities in the emerging carbon markets by surevyors, scientists and other technicians. (Many of whom would not have understand the purpose, and therefore the political, economic and cultural ramifications). Since then, Landcare Research has studied carbon sequestration rates in Te Urewera to better understand Kyoto Protocol compliance, which was published in the New Zealand Journal of Ecology in 2014. While it is laudable to plan for restoration, reforestation and reserves, linking these activities to the establishment of carbon markets is a disturbing development.
A carbon credits market, widely promoted to deal with carbon emissions, is a crucial component to build-out a ‘Smart Green Global Economy’. Some environmental organizations seem to promote a ‘Smart Green Economy’ as if it were the best and only way to address the impacts of human plunder and to deliver a sustainable world.[42] A ‘Smart Green Economy’ is actually a means to establish carbon-based technocracy, as former financial analyst Patrick Wood argued in “Carbon Currency: A New Beginning for Technocracy?”[43] A technocracy is an economic system that exploits technology as a means of social control through the allocation of energy and resources rather than the market price system of global capitalism, which is a system of social control that uses economic means to limit as many people as possible from access to resources.
This means that a carbon credit financial trading market is a mechanism for big corporate producers to pollute, extract, plunder and privatize not only the atmosphere, but also the entire planet – through a backdoor approach.[44]
Under the rubric of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, every stage of the extraction-production-distribution-consumption-pollution chain is being quantified with complex algorithms to measure the resources consumed. These calculations are quantified into a single measure, known as carbon equivalence units that relate all compounds to an equivalent amount based on the carbon atom. By gaining the means to measure every material, process and exchange with a single metric, the financial industry will be able to combine these carbon equivalent values with financial derivatives. Because derivatives can price risk into a single unit (of whatever currency is stipulated to settle transactions), banking consortiums will gain the capacity to fuse the quanta of resources underpinning every transaction with carbon financial derivatives, so that wealthy investors can earn income off the biosphere. In other words, the biosphere is being recast as the collateral for the emerging carbon-based digital currencies and carbon taxes on every imaginable process, relationship and object will fuel a speculative boom.
The plan is to make a sickly slick hi-tech, futures’ market out of carbon credit derivatives linked to the carbon tax securities and Smart Grid tolls on consumable RFID-chipped products bought with privacy-extinguishing digital carbon credit-backed money. The objective of resetting the world on a trajectory of a carbon-based technocratic political-economic system is the reason why carbon dioxide emissions have been so emphasized in the climate change debate, as I have argued in my illustrated essay, The Thin Green Line: How Geo-Engineering is the ‘Invisible Hand’ of Climate Change. Instead of emphasizing soil erosion, de-forestation and resource plunder as major accelerators of ecological collapse. And, instead of emphasizing the contradiction of state-condoned outsourcing of taxes as practiced by huge transnational consortiums, such as Apple, which is not a fruit, but a computer brand that outsources production to sweatshops.
If the glorified park rangers make the mistake of registering the land, forest, lake and rivers as a bio-reserve with UNESCO, the provision for Te Urewera to be taxed could position its Board to administrate over carbon taxes and could recast the legal person of Te Urewera as a monetized carbon sink. It is not simply that entangling Te Urewera in a global carbon credits bubble will help the super-wealthy get richer. Such an entanglement could expose Te Urewera to the contractual obligations of the carbon derivatives. When the boom of the carbon credits bubble busts, the collateral underpinning the carbon derivatives – the bio-reserves – will represent an epic transfer of wealth to private interests. Indeed, recent developments in the Western banking system have cast derivatives with super-senior status, meaning derivatives holders have higher claims over other classes of creditors. Even though financial derivatives holders were not meant to have claims to owning the underlying assets, this move to jump the cue over shareholders when institutions become insolvent, appears to recast financial derivatives as stealthy capital sucking devices akin to a giant octopus that has engulfed the globe. The logic underpinning the exponential expansion of the $1.5 quadrillion derivatives bubble may be partially explained as a blackballing mechanism, wherein shareholders may find themselves excluded from their commercial rights to capital, as bigger players suck liquidity up the blood funnels of the global financial derivatives octopus.
In a future ‘Wolf of Wall Street’ carbon markets bust, little legal person-hoods like Te Urewera could easily find themselves in the red and financially wiped out, as the book value of their assets plummet amid a crashing global carbon economy. Meanwhile, the Crown, with its own financial woes – presently at $90 billion in ‘national debt’ – could succumb to austerity pressure from foreign creditors, take back ownership and either sell Te Urewera under crisis. Or, make Te Urewera earn its keep as a legal person, like a good half-caste corporation, by harvesting parts of its mineral wealth – doubtless already surveyed – to pay its way, since Te Urewera is part of the Crown Minerals Estate and is, therefore, subject to the Crown Minerals Act. UNESCO would be left to write strongly-worded, expletive-free reports.
The Crown’s Deep State dark satirical humour is evident in the unwritten logic and unspoken subtext in-built into the B-Grade-Dawn Raid-Court Room-Bubble Gum News Psy-War, the casting of less than a handful of Tūhoe representatives in this settlement as as bio-reserve park rangers on a Neo-Colonial board, and the eventual re-casting of Tuhoe’s ancestral lands as a carbon sink for earning carbon credits and charging carbon tax tolls.
Tuhoe Territory: This Map shows the Tuhoe lands including those the Crown confiscated, or were lost through swindle and stealth.
UNESCO is a body of the United Nations, which is not all that it seems. Indeed, there are – like most major and significant institutions, two UN’s. It will be shocking to many to find that the United Nations was created out of the vision of an International Fascist Fraternity to forge a New World Order Utopia through military violence, financial crises and economic warfare.[17] Toward this sci-fi dystopian end, coalitions of super-rich people are in a mutual race to accumulate as much control over infrastructure, technologies, territories, institutions, ideas and natural resources. The big picture is that the secret rule of Transnational Neo-Colonial Oligarchies, or Rich-Listers, and their obedient ruling class elites that comprise a Transnational Capitalist Class, together oversee the construction of a corporatized supranational system of Neo-Colonial super-states. The construction of Neo-Colonial super-states is designed to take away meaningful democratic participation of nation-based citizenries and indigenous peoples. The nation-state apparatus is being aligned to fit into an emerging super-state framework under a coming world super-government. In short, globalization is the accumulation of sovereignty.
The intention underpinning the investor rights treaties – also known as ‘free trade’ deals – spread through globalization is to permanently lock in the property rights of a Transnational Capitalist Class at an international (or supranational) level, so that ‘governance’ is taken beyond the reach of nation state-based citizens. This anti-democratic framework qualifies as a black-balling strategy known as ‘new constitutionalism’, which was identified by law scholar Stephen Gill in 1998.[i] The ‘New Constitutionalism’ framework is conferring the Transnational Capitalist Class with a status that amounts to ‘commercialized sovereignty’ as the world’s leading scholars on tax havenry, Ronen Palan, Richard Murphy, and Christian Chavagneux argued more generally in their book, Tax Havens: How Globalization Really Works.[ii] What is promoted as ‘free market’ competition is actually structural coercion through ‘free trade’ policies, in which countries are organized into servicing the global production chains of transnational corporations.
A corporatized totalitarianism is driving the construction of a worldwide technocratic system, which is a hi-tech totalitarian form of government administered by a technorati that includes scientists, engineers and technicians. Key insiders manage the technocratic system in service of super-rich people, or oligarchs, who use their vast economic resources to steer the trajectory of whole societies, as I have mentioned previously.[i] In short, technocracy is the privatization of government. Democracy is being shelled-out by stealth, and institutions from boards, councils and departments are becoming stealthily controlled by contractually-driven technocratic mechanisms.
The Westminster Parliamentary Tax Farming system is a globalized franchise developed by the privately-owned municipality, the City of London Corporation. This is but one of the many facts left off the seven Treaty of Waitangi parchments. Indeed, as readers of my popular illustrated essay – “The Masonic New Zealand Wars: Freemasonry as a Secret Mechanism of Imperial Conquest During the Native Troubles” – can now see, through a sharper, triangulated lens an unsanitized Aotearoan history emerges and that shows us that a Tax Cattle debt-enslavement monetary system was formalized during the ‘Maori Wars’ by the royally chartered Bank of New Zealand. We are yet to emancipate ourselves from this hidden structural bondage, even as it transforms into a dystopian Neo-Colonial technocratic carbon-based tax enslavement system.
Furthermore, it is fascinating to find that the former Detective Dean Winter who had been head of security at Fairfax‘s TradeMe between 2006 and 2008 – when Detective Pascoe’s SIG unit sought information to link the Operation Eight suspects with gun-trading – suddenly developed an enthusiasm for offsetting industrial pollution. In October 2008, following the exposure of Operation Eight defendant Jamie Lockett’s treasure trove of Trade Me account holders that he received while in prison as part of his official information request, Winter filled a new role overseeing “the development and implementation of the compliance strategy for the forestry sector to enter the Forestry Emissions Trading Scheme” at the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry (MAF).
Carbon Sink? If Lake Waikaremoana were registered with UNESCO as a bio-reserve, the Te Urewera Board could unwittingly be exposing this natural ecosystem to an epic carbon credit market bubble.
I find that Tūhoe have been played as pawns in a geo-political chess game. Particularly, because New Zealand is the world’s premiere test lab for political strategies, social engineering and technologies, and is used to pilot new models.
Legal Blindness in the ‘Switzerland of the South Pacific’
Through the subversive mechanism of the Operation Eight raids, the Deep State sought to maintain its broad sovereign powers. In the Rūātoki raids, the Deep State’s sought to achieve its broader objectives of coercing Tūhoe to settle with diminished aspirations and reduced mana to de-risk the possibility of Tūhoe setting an example for forging some degree of sovereign independence either through succession, some kind of new constitutional arrangement, or substantial returns of confiscated and swindled lands. As Claudia Orange pointed out in her imaginatively titled book, The Treaty of Waitangi, in the Māori worldview, a rangatira’s mana was akin to rangatiratanga, or chiefly authority.
In an entertaining, crisply-scripted TedTalk in Auckland in 2015, Tame Iti described mana this way:
“In our language we have this word that is very important. You might have heard it before. This word is mana. Everyone – everyone in this room has some form of mana.
Your mana comes from knowing who you are, where you come from, and your connection to your land, whenua. Mana grounds you. Mana makes you sovereign. Mana roots you to your past, present and future.
Outplayed by the Crown: Tame Iti’s appearance at the 2015 TEDTalk to speak about mana, in effect, provided the mostly Pākehā, open-minded audience with a security blanket that race relations had improved.
We don’t always have to agree. Mana can be tested, challenged. But with respect and understanding of one another’s mana. We are all equal, on the same level.
Kanohi ki te kanohi, tangata ki te tangata.
Eye to eye.
At home, I learned about my tipuna – ancestor – mountain, the river. Why these things are important to the mana of Tūhoe.
Don’t be afraid to challenge someone trying to assert authority over you. Just because someone has authority does not mean they have more mana. If someone is asserting authority, they have to let go of respect and understanding, to get their way. And you are no longer equal.
The mana of the people is equal to that of any authority.”
I think it was Iti’s way of saying Rūātoki was not a hot-spot for interlinked cells of terrorists, but that it is his god-spot. In this instance, Iti had defined his terms.
It does not help the Māori cause for sovereignty, or the return of substantial lands, when that cause has been besmirched with a contrived narrative about terrorism. I contend the Crown had acted subversively to undermine the mana of Tūhoe’s leaders, and send an encoded message to all other iwi, that the state will not entertain the return of substantial parcels of lands, a restoration of sovereignty, or substantive co-governance. But, the Deep State reserves the right to entertain themselves with dark humour encoded into B-Grade psy-ops – when it is deemed necessary.
Treaty Settlements Minister and Attorney General Chris Finlayson would have to be legally blind not to see the B-Grade movie narrative of these Deep State schemes. I am saying that once he became Attorney-General, Chris Finlayson failed to order an inquiry into the Rūātoki raids, that could have laid bare a bigger nuanced picture. Tame Iti was also teaching tikanga Māori, such as the traditional use of the taiaha, bush-craft, and waiata. These aspects of the wananga did not fit the terrorism narrative, so the Crown prosecution ignored those aspects. Detective Sargeant Pascoe admitted in court that he did not know much about tikanga Māori, but that he did know it would be insensitive to set-up a roadblock on the Confiscation Line. His message evidently did not make it through to the top brass.
Former Vietnam veteran Ross Nepia Himona drew on his expertize in intelligence analysis to make a study of the Detective Pascoe’s 156-page affadavit, the evidence, and the court transcripts. Himona, who presented his findings in a series of articles on his blog, Te Putatara, stated the Police also ‘failed’ in the final stage of intelligence analysis to find out what the suspects were really planning. Himona also said the Police neglected to do thorough profiling of the principle actors that would have helped them understand ‘the suspects’ better, and therefore make sense of the data gathered. Moreover, Pascoe’s affadavit contained numerous redacted paragraphs justified because they evidently referred to “Police Surveillance Techniques”.
The Parnell-based businessman, who premises were also raided on 15 October 2007, said the illegal video recordings that appear to show hostage-taking scenarios were pivotal to the Urewera Four Trial. He said that what the Police perceived or portrayed as the most damning parts of conversations was ‘trash talk’, meaning that if they had bothered to understand the principle characters, their cultural backgrounds and pasts, and get expert opinions, they would have realized they had happened upon a group running on the smell of an oily, led by physically unfit men who shot off at the mouth while bonding. He said the conversations deserved to be the most intensely analyzed, but were were simply accepted at face value. Himona wrote:
“This korero was about going to war, about a revolution, about doing robberies to raise funds, about Tuhoe freedom fighters, about studying IRA and Al Qaeda manuals, creating chaos, bombing strategic facilities, urban warfare, obtaining weapons and ammunition, and assassinating the next prime minister (John Key).”
Himona said his expert eye could see that Iraq War veteran Rau Hunt was demonstrating anti-ambush convoy protection techniques as a part of the mid-October 2007 wananga, adding that it did not make sense for him to put his civilian war-zone contracting business in jeopardy by knowingly participating in a terrorist group.
Likewise, Himona said his own accused employee, Rangi Kemara, an IT specialist, had taken to collecting guns, and that his main sin was co-developing an encrypted Māori activism chat forum, AoCafe, that Police seemed to think would contain the motherload of conspiratorial communications. This association made Himona’s business the target of a raid on October 15 2007. His at times hilarious ‘only in New Zealand’ account reveals the Police raid was a fishing expedition for evidence. This was also the only raid where Māori Police were put in charge. When Himona realized their intention was to seize all computing equipment, he stopped their incursion with a swift High Court injunction to save his business upon which numerous people relied for employment.
Operation Eight was formally launched in May 2006, and appeared to be focussed on a handful of individuals, mostly on serial police antagonist, Jamie Lockett, and millionaire used car trader, John Murphy, among a few others; which Himona termed a ‘right wing revolutionary plot’ narrative. On 13 September 2006, the profiles of all of Tame Iti’s known associates were logged as evidence into the Operation Eight case file. Two days later, on 15 September 2006, the nationwide search for a terrorist network, in effect, began with the first of numerous call data warrants to obtain telephone metadata and text messages. This was exactly 13 months before the activation of the ‘Termination Phase’ of Operation Eight. From May to October 2007 the warrants were issued under the Crimes Act 1961 and the Suppression of Terrorism Act 2002. This indicates that the Police had formed their terrorism narrative by early May 2007.
What started as an alleged criminal network comprising of Pākehā with Tame Iti on the periphery, and morphed into an alleged terrorist group with Tame Iti at its core.
Evidently, a parallel construction of evidence had occurred because Himona thinks the Operation Eight database shows the investigation targeted Jamie Lockett, who was logged as the first person of interest in the Operation Eight database on 24th September 2005. Lockett cast himself as an activist, but wasn’t in Himona’s opinion. Lockett’s track record of provoking Police at protests to arrest him, seems to lay bare that he was really a man with a deep-seated loathing for Police. A violent encounter with Detective Sergeant Phil Le Compte, who evidently came off second-best, appears to have set Lockett on a trajectory to get framed for something bigger, because Le Compte worked at AMCOS, co-located with SIG, the special intelligence unit that ran Operation Eight.
The Northern SIG unit, headed by Detective Sergeant Aaron Pascoe, were interested in finding out what Lockett was doing with Murphy. To this end, the SIG unit turned a friend of theirs, Keith Madden, into an informant. Madden approached Ross Himona’s IT specialist, Rangi Kemara, through Jamie Lockett and offered Kemara an automatic shotgun in January 2007, which are illegal. This offer set off alarm bells, and Lockett and Kemara became suspicious. Shortly after, Lockett came into possession of a copy of a letter that Madden had sent to his Police handler. Locket showed Kemara and then took it to Tame Iti on 3 June 2007, which was the same day that Iti received text messages telling him that the activities in the Urewera were mentioned at Police HQ in Wellington. The letter discusses Madden’s understanding of what his informant role was:
“to link probable multiple individual agendas with the commonality of a mutually shared proven criminal theme of agenda. A hard ask albeit even with the affront to operate a terrorist training facility in our summer playground backyard, the Bay of Plenty.”
In Himona’s thoughtful and scathing assessment, this intercepted letter showed that Detective Sergeant Aaron Pascoe,
“didn’t have the evidence he needed to prove his terrorism narrative. He never did get it. The Solicitor General’s refusal to allow terrorism charges to proceed proved that.”
In my assessment, Commissioner Howard Broad knew that the Police SIG unit’s standard of evidence was deficient. Broad’s face said it all when he said “No”, in answer to a reporter who asked him that great question – “was there any suggestion from the group that they were planning to take any action?” – at an early press conference!
I think the Police Commissioner was coerced into authorizing the ‘Termination Phase’ of Operation Eight, and seeking sign-off from the Cabinet. This coercion may have come from within the SIG unit, higher up in the Police in Auckland, and Wellington, from the SIS, or perhaps other elements of the Deep State such as the Political Elite or New Zealand’s Ruling Families. In any case, the ‘Termination Phase’ appears to have been ‘brought forward’ to fulfill the multiple agendas outlined.
By Collins’ Dictionary! The Solicitor General applied the definitions in the Terrorism Suppression Act to Detective Aaron Pascoe’s 156-page affidavit, finding insufficient evidence of a terrorist
The frame-up could well have been inspired by Sleeping Dogs, or any other political thriller movie, since its flimsy ACT I narrative elements show parallel construction, wherein multiple institutions, players and technologies are engaged to advance the ‘case’ and fix ‘the evidence’ of an enemy image to the hapless cast of scapegoats. But like all criminal plots, matters go awry for Deep State Bunnies, and when they do go wrong, the crises escalate prior behaviours and become pretty transparent on the surface as messy Deep State rabbit droppings. When Sam Neill’s character Smith in Sleeping Dogs is arrested by the Special Police, he asks Police Commissioner Jesperson what it is he is supposed to have done wrong. Commissioner Jesperson replies:
“Well Smith, there really are quite a few things aren’t there, when you haven’t registered? You had in your possession an illegal weapon and ammunition. You had an illegal radio transmitter. You’re an associate of two known saboteurs. On various parts of your island were explosives and a variety of weapons. Under present law, just the items in your possession – a military court could have you executed.”
Fascist Coercion: Police Special Force Commissioner Jesperson attempts to frighten Smith into making a ‘voluntary’ confession that he is an anti-democratic violent revolutionary, and offers ‘freedom’ – abroad.
Commissioner Jesperson attempts to coerce Smith into making a ‘voluntary confession’ that he is a revolutionary, providing details of who supports the resistence, where all the arms and supplies come from, and that the aim is the overthrow of established democratic values. For this confession, Commissioner Jesperson promises Smith safe passage out of the country to avert certain conviction and excution by firing squad. At this point in the film, Smith knows little about the resistance to the Police State.
Sleeping Dogs New Special: PM Volkner’s tough stance on dissent against a backdrop of economic warfare waged by international fascists delivered with an encoded rainbow future horizon above a prison planet.
In a parallel universe to the Sleeping Dogs plot, the Auckland SIG unit’s informant Keith Madden also knew little about the Tame Iti’s wananga in the Urewera ranges. In circumstances that are simultaneously spooky-silly and tragically pathetic, Madden, who was turned against his friends, appears to have been instructed to lure Rangi Kemara into buying an illegal automatic shotgun. Kemara, a known associate of others in Detective Sargeant Aaron Pascoe’s sights, it would appear – was being ensnared as part of the ‘revolutionary group’ narrative that the Special Investigation Group perceived it needed to justify its existent in this dirty little country – where most of the dirt is claimed by the Deep State – with a quislings’ attempt at entrapment. In the documentary Operation 8: Deep in the Forest, it is left to Valerie Morse to explain that under the Crimes Act, you don’t have to own a gun, or have touched a gun or even seen a gun, to be accused of being in possession of a gun. It is not Pascoe, or Burns, Broad or Gilroy explaining on the multi-season long Operation Eight News Special how a weapons possession charge works. It turns out, you only have to be linked to people who own a gun, or be located at a property where a gun is claimed to be, for the Crown Prosecution to widen the net of those caught up in a Deep State psy-op.
When it is recalled that Morse stated that Police informant and agent provocateur Rob Gilchrist had unsuccessfully encouraged her to commit burglaries in Wellington and Auckland and to make bomb threats, a pattern of Police attempts at entrapment is revealed. This pattern shows the SIG Units, that were set up under the command of Strategic Intelligence Unit headquartered at Police HQ in Wellington, itself founded for the purposes of counter-terrorism, were not only contracting individuals to be informants infiltrating dissident groups. The SIG units were paying their spies to encourage their targets to breach the Crimes Act and Terrorism Suppression Act, by either luring people loosely-linked in the orbit of Tame Iti and Jamie Lockett – the make bomb threats, or purchase illegal weapons or commit burglaries. Thus, by attempted entrapment, the Police SIG Units were seeking to construct the evidence they needed to advance the terrorism narrative.
Ironically, Tame Iti’s positive assessment of the result of this Deep State episode in coordinated subversion is a weird form of Stockholm Syndrome. At his TedTalk presentation, Iti said:
“After one hundred and seventy years of struggle, of fighting for the mana o Tūhoe, we finally got respect and understanding from the Crown.”
Iti played a clip in which Attorney General and Treaty Negotiations Minister, Chris Finlayson, performed the clichéd Meā Maxima Culpā Ritual, claiming:
“The Crown unreservedly apologizes for not having honoured its obligations to Tūhoe under Ti Titiri o Waitangi, and profoundly regrets its failure to appropriately acknowledge and respect te mana o te Motuhake O Tūhoe for many generations.”
Finlayson’s quisling avoidance from investigating Operation Eight would appear to be a dereliction of his duty as Attorney General, since the Solicitor General’s Office is under his authority, and therefore the Crown Prosecution is answerable to the Attorney General. Therefore, Finlayson’s ‘apology’ on behalf of the Crown during the Treaty settlement was insincere. But, it was not simply a dereliction of duty. The undermining of Tūhoe’s mana through the Operation Eight psy-op worked hand-in-glove with the Tūhoe-Crown negotiation process. Pertinently, in October 2012, former Detective Dean Winter was ‘helicoptered’ into the Crown Law Office – out of which operates the Attorney General’s Office and the Solicitor General’s Office – to lead a new prosecutions unit formed after a review of prosecution services in 2011!
This move occurred while Tame Iti was behind bars painting artworks and just after Tūhoe reached its ‘Treaty settlement’ agreement with the Crown. As Maori Television reported, the settlement agreement included concessions liking changing the names of permits. This is incredibly ironic given that Tūhoe Lambert stated sarcastically in Operation 8: Deep in the Forest:
“You can’t just go up to the lake and say ‘shit, I’ll just go catch me a fish.’ No, we have to go get a license first from the ranger.”
Moreover, the ‘Treaty settlement’ was a brazen robbery because the Crown had reached an agreement for a ‘co-governed’ Tūhoe board to pay tribute for incomes derived off Te Urewera (which is being set up to become a carbon sink), for lands stolen by the Crown that have now been given a fraudulent fee simple feudal title under the delusion that the land owns itself! Furthermore, Tūhoe accepted the Crown’s debt-based taxpayer-backed fiat currency, meaning the the transaction has cost the Crown nothing, and has defrayed the $170 million cost to the New Zealand Tax Herd.
Numerous political elites at the time, such as Prime Minister John Key parroted the justification that the police genuinely believed there was a criminal group intent on violence. This politically expedient scripted line let the Crown Solicitor General’s Office, the Attorney General and the judiciary off the hook, for failing to quash the ‘case’.
Tame Iti’s early release was needed for the Crown to exploit the catharsis, and his presence at the settlement was required to help the Crown pass the political hygiene test.[18] Ironically, this catharsis was the expected ending that Kim Webby had in mind for her documentary, The Price of Peace. In many ways, the B-Grade narrative of Operation Eight –produced by Metro Crime Services, the Crown Solicitor General’s Office and Private Investigators Thompson and Clark – that played out on the Bubble Gum News, in Her Majesty’s Court Theatres and among the Professional Commentariat shows us that this dirty little country lacks institutions with the capacity, willingness and imagination to counter a nationally-distributed B-Grade psychological operation.
Just how B-Grade this psy-op was is clear from a simple truth. None of this would have happened if the Neo-Colonial Crown gave back the land it stole.
Instead, the quisling New Zealand Police Brass stayed true to their Colonial forebears – the Constabulary – authorizing the raiding of Rūātoki at dawn by invoking the Terrorism Suppression Act. In 1869, the Colonial Constabulary burned through Te Urewera in its relentless hunt for Te Kooti, who waged a guerrilla war against Colonial militia. This incursion followed the 1863 Suppression of Rebellion Act, in-which its authors Freemason Premiere Bro. Frederick Whitaker and his law-firm partner, the Minister of Colonial Defence, Thomas Russell, framed Māori communities that did not submit to Queen Victoria as ‘rebels’, thereby constructing a mechanism of structural entrapment for the Crown to confiscate large tracts of Māori land, including tens of thousands of acres belonging to Tūhoe. Then, in 1893, Freemason Bro. Richard Seddon performed a ‘Sending in the Surveyors Ritual’ to the Ureweras. Predictably, in response to this brazen act of structural entrapment, Tūhoe pulled up Her Majesty’s survey pegs, thereby giving Seddon a pretext to deployed troops to the ‘crime scene’. Then, in 1916, armed police invaded Maungapōhatu to arrest ‘prophet of peace’ Rua Kenana, who appealed to his people not to enlist for the conflict that became known as World War I. [19] The intent of these incursions into Tūhoe territory was to smash a living example of Māori independence.
Therefore, Crown Prosecutor Mr. Burns was not interested in the Colonial Constabulary’s scorched earth policy of 1869 because the Solicitor General’s office was unwilling to consider the historical violence inherent to state formation. Police Commissioner Howard Broad was not interested in admitting how the quest to gather ‘evidence’ of ‘military style’ training camps using the full range of surveillance capabilities was ironically about a political contest to defend the Crown’s stolen treasure – Te Urewera – because the Police Brass lack the political courage, integrity and heart to stop being a criminogenic environment for the Crown’s power crimes. Special Investigation Group Detective Sergeant Aaron Pascoe was not interested in hearing that the nuggets and gems his squad had gathered, added up to overblown politically motivated character assassinations – or verbalizing in police parlance –because he already knew it to be true.
I find the position taken by the Police – that they did not know about the Confiscation Line, its historical significance and why exactly Tūhoe’s staunch stance about independence was justified – to be at best willful ignorance – which is no excuse! It is pertinent to recall that Police charged Tame Iti for shooting a flag on January 16 2005 on a Rūātoki marae – some two weeks after the incident – despite Police presence there at the time. Iti, who theatrically fired shotgun rounds at the flag, which was on the grass of the paepae during a powhiri, had earlier bared his buttocks to the Waitangi Tribunal delegation on the Confiscation Line, marked as it is with paint on the road, signs and – at the time – burning vehicles. The footage of the political theatre at the Confiscation Line was in the news stories of Tame Iti’s flag shooting. The Court of Appeal overturned the convictions for firearms offences in 2007. Ironically, when the Police came to Māori Television in 2005 with an order for copies of stories and footage of Tame Iti firing the shotgun, they were not interested in learning from staff about tikanga Māori, getting an education about the Crown’s theft of Tūhoe territory, or Māori jurisdiction over marae. In other words, if the Police Constabulary had have had an epiphany at the time it was pursuing its politically-motivated shotgun case against Tame Iti, about the Constabulary’s participation in these historical crimes, it might have taken a public stance that these long-standing crimes against Tūhoe needed to be resolved without well-resourced publicity. Moreover, the Police Constabulary’s active participation in terrorism, confiscation and murder in Tūhoe territory are among the many historical crimes that need to be taught in Police training camps.
Burns, Broad and Pascoe were not interested in opening these cans of historical film and video tape worms because they would have precipitated the collapse of the Crown’s fragile power. After-all, it is an Art of War strategy to appear strong when you are weak. Therefore, I think New Zealand Deep State succeeded in their dirty political attack on Tūhoe by controlling most of the symbolic ritualized actions.
The Constabulary exploited known fault-lines of the staunch Tūhoe rangatiratanga worldview and numerous grassroots causes, to open race and status divides. Thus, Howard Broad’s claims that the Operation Eight raid on Rūātoki was not racist because elsewhere they had targeted Pākehā – did not hold up to scrutiny.
The task to apologize to the Rūātoki community over the raids for alleged military training camps in the highly symbolic Te Urewera Ranges, fell to new-Police Commissioner Mike Bush. His predecessor, Peter Marshall, was forced to accept the Independent Police Conduct Authority’s findings that aspects of the Rūātoki raids and roadblocks were an unlawful marshalling.[20] The 13th of August 2014 apology was limited to causing trauma to innocent people caught up in the raids and the loss of credibility to the Tūhoe people, but not for the actual raids.[21] It was ironic that Mike Bush did not acknowledge the Deep State’s purpose for the over-the-top raids on Rūātoki as he spoke his scripted lines into the media microphones. Mike Bush’s limited concession before the microphones was ironic, given that by then a documentary titled, Operation 8: Deep in the Forest, had exposed that those accused of seeking to regain the bushy Ureweras through violent coercion had become pawns in an imperial chess game with far broader objectives.
Mike Bush also failed to acknowledge that Peter Marshall – with his Catholic Christian name and his law enforcement-sounding family name – in effect, embodied a Confession Ritual that set-up Mike Bush’s Cathartic Apology Ritual. In other words, the Deep State was continuing the defence of the British Masonic Empire’s deployment of the Discovery Doctrine, a Doctrine that the Roman Catholic Church had set in motion for European powers to conquer the New World in the 15th Century, as I have shown in my illustrated essay, “The Masonic New Zealand Wars”.[22] Thus, by dividing New Zealand into two predictable emotively charged camps – pity and fear – the Deep State exploited a complicit Pākehā-dominated media as a vector for emotional contagion.
Therefore, the Police Special Investigation Group at Auckland’s Metro Crime Services provided the service of framing 17 people in a criminal plot, terrorizing hundreds in dawn raids and orchestrating a nationwide B-Grade scripted psy-op to justify the budgets, power and legitimacy of Police State formation against a background of similar incursions around the world. Indeed, in Operation 8: Deep in the Forest, former Police Inspector Ross Meurant likened the Police Force to a “forest” with paranoid élite Police squads that frequently construct cases for prosecution based on “bullshit” deductions from deep in that forest. Meurant mockingly said the special investigation squads think they are the CIA of New Zealand.
The foregoing phenomena of a well-resourced B-Grade scripted pre-emptory and peremptory actions neatly captures the recalcitrance, repugnance, and recidivism of the Pākehā ruling class and the Neo-Colonial Crown towards political moves by Māori to make Māori sovereignty aspirations materialize. Occasionally those moves by Māori political actors are B-Grade movie ideas, like Tame Iti’s.
But, because large sectors of the New Zealand people are naïve, rely far too much on the Establishment Media to inform them and know little about Māori culture, they are also vulnerable to falling for the B-Grade narratives concocted by Deep State operatives of New Zealand’s Police-Intelligence-Surveillance-Security State apparatus. Therefore, New Zealand’s Deep State actors framed Tame Iti, other activists and persons of interest in their orbit, to justify a pre-emptory strike in the form of simultaneous dawn raids. But the raids, the subsequent hearings, trials and incarcerations and the concurrent propaganda campaign were also peremptory actions designed to stymie debate on important issues and admit no contradiction.
It is, therefore, epically ironic that the Police set-up Special Investigations Groups (SIG) in 2005 with the justification given by the Minister of Defence, Phil Goff, that they would boost New Zealand’s counter-terrorism capacity because of perceived threats after post-9/11. This 9/11 justification assumes that the official B-Grade 9/11 narrative of Jihadi Al Qaeda terrorists hating America’s infidel freedoms is taken to be true. Which means the New Zealand state is either a dunce when it comes to 20th Century history and its intelligence apparatus is naïve. Or, it means the SIS and the New Zealand state do know that the US-UK-NATO Alliance have their own Deep State terrorist networks. In their accounts of the post-World War II order, journalists such as John Pilger and Naomi Klein, and documentary filmmaker Eugene Jarecki, along with US foreign policy critic Noam Chomsky, have shown that the US-UK-NATO Alliance has routinely conducted acts of terror.[16] These Black Operations, as they are called, have occurred in over 50 countries and were often conducted to topple democratic socialist governments or communist states in Europe, Central and South America, South East Asia, the Middle East and Africa. After World War II, the Atlantic Alliance covertly formed a secret ‘stay behind’ army by recruiting fascists, including former Nazis, to conduct terrorism operations codenamed ‘Gladio’ (Latin for Roman sword). As I mentioned earlier, Operation Gladio was a low-grade war that exploited a “Strategy of Tension” designed to frighten the mass populaces of Europe and thereby shift the political gravity to the ‘right’.[17]
These clandestine ‘false flag’ operations were continued by all NATO countries after its formation in 1949, and were carried out by their intelligence services, militaries, and paramilitaries, with dominant participation from the Anglo-American membership of NATO, as Daniele Ganser found in his book, NATO’s Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe; Richard Cottrell shows in his book GLADIO: NATO’S Dagger at the Heart of Europe – The Pengtagon-Nazi-Mafia Terror Axis; and Madhi Darius Nazemroaya reports in his book The Globalization of NATO. These studies of GLADIO found that occult secret societies were entwined into the Gladio network. Therefore, New Zealand’s Police-Intelligence-Surveillance-Security State apparatus is aligned with the US-UK-NATO Alliance, who have augmented their power through terrorism. As Dr Vijay Devas said, keeping the ‘war on terror’ going endlessly suits the interests of the state, because it maintains a “state of Exceptionalism”, wherein the normal rule of law is suspended to a crisis operational matrix.
Clandestine Special Services?
The accumulation of Police powers explored in this essay not only sheds new insight into how and why the Operation Eight raids occurred. It also may sheds light on a mystery that goes back to November 2004, at a time when the Crown’s moves to confiscate the Foreshore and Seabed through legislation was a hot political issue. In November 2004, Scoop and the Sunday Star-Times published a series of articles on a supposed SIS spy project, called Operation Leaf; evidently a top secret assignment mandated to infiltrate Māori groups. Operation Leaf, which supposedly had been carried on since early 2000, was found by Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security, Justice Paul Neazor, to be a “tale … fabricated by ‘sources’ that had no credibility”, as the National Business Review cheerfully reported. The NBR added,
“It’s always a shame when a few stubborn facts get in the way of a great yarn but “Operation Leaf” was a story that required a suspension of disbelief on even its basic premises.”
The same can be said of Operation Eight.
It’s fascinating that the neither the Clark Ministry nor the Key Ministry ordered an investigation into Operation Eight that was visible to scrutiny, with open public hearing – contemporaneous to the numerous court proceedings. Like the official investigation into Operation Leaf, the Operation Eight inquiry was controlled by restrictive constitutional monarchy legislation. In Operation Eight’s case, the framework for the so-called ‘Independent’ Police Conduct Authority (IPCA) is the Independent Police Conduct Authority Act 1988. Because it does not question the court’s findings, the IPCA repeated the fictional slur of the court that military-style training camps were being conducted in the Urewera, despite the Independent Police Conduct Authority also making the politically correct claim it had taken into consideration cultural contexts of Tūhoe. Like the Operation Leaf inquiry, the Operation Eight inquiry failed to consider the ulterior motives of the ‘intelligence community’ – in particular the Special Investigations Groups (SIG), the Auckland Metro Crime and Operations Support (AMCOS), the Strategic Intelligence Unit at Police National Headquarters, the Joint Strategic Intelligence Group, Police Armed Offenders Squad (AOS) and the Northern Special Tactics Group (STG), and possibly the SIS and the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB). Like the Operation Leaf inquiry – which failed to investigate whether the ‘work of fiction’ was ultimately authored by the SIS – the Operation Eight inquiry failed to ask critical questions such as whether there was a conspiracy within the ‘intelligence community’ to frame those targeted for arrest with a violent uprising terrorism narrative?
Some of the story behind Operation Leaf has emerged, and it sheds light on the murkiness of the Deep State.
Ross Himona recounts an episode from 1987, when he found out that the the SIS did actually have a secret program called Operation Leaf that was established to spy on Māori groups. Himona says he had a meeting with the SIS director at the time, Brigadier Lin Smith, whom he had worked with in the Army, to discuss the matter of a young Māori Army officer who had evidently been wrongly accused by two SIS officers of attending a meeting with “Maori radicals”. Brigadier Smith had evidently already told the SIS officers to desist from their spying on Māori. Himona says that a defence issues reporter, Roger Foley, for the Wellington daily newspaper, The Evening Post, was an ex-Royal New Zealand Air Force Officer, whom wrote about the SIS and Operation Leaf and figured his intelligent sources were one or both of the disaffected SIS officers that were subsequently fired. According to Himona, on 14 June 1988, Foley reported:
“SIS previously took a close interest in Maori activists, in particular Waitangi Day celebrations. But according to one source field surveillance of activists stopped in 1984 because Brigadier Smith regarded Maori activism as legitimate dissent and protest and it was too sensitive an issue in which to involve the SIS. For information on this subject the service was told to rely on newspaper accounts”.
It is fascinating to note that the supposed Operation Leaf of the early 2000s, which caused a short-lived ‘news war’ between rival news outlets that left few unscathed, was alleged to have recruited of six IT techies hired to infiltrate Māori organizations and install bugging equipment and spyware for remote access. The Sunday Star-Times reported:
“The six included three in the Auckland region, two in the Wellington region and one in Christchurch. They met about every two months with their handlers at a secure facility near Wellington for training, technical support and to solve problems.”
Fascinating because the cities that the techies were said to be in were Auckland, Wellington and Christchurch, were the same cities the Police Special Investigation Groups (or SIG units) were due to be located following Defence Minister Phil Goff’s 2004 budget announcement. Following an official investigation into Operation Leaf by Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security, Justice Paul Neazor, one of the three ‘intelligence sources’ named as sources for the Scoop and Sunday-Star-Times stories – Gerald Thorns – issued a statement to Scoop News. Thorns claimed to have been a Labour Party insider privy to its thinking dating back to February 1977, when he alleged he worked as a researcher, and privy to cabinet papers of the Lange Ministry, and claimed he was a ‘Labor Attache’ at the US Embassy, which he said meant he was a CIA spy. Thorns’s disclosure in effect, was a rant that said he had the credibility that the Clark Ministry denied he had, without clearly explaining what his purpose had been in corroborating the allegations that there was a secret Operation Leaf spy program of the early 2000s. Thorn did say that the “truth … sometimes gets re-discovered because it is the truth”. Given the logical fallacy of this statement for its circular argument, it may be that Thorns was signalling to journalists to see that in the SIS’s report was itself a cover-up of an SIS-authored ‘work of fiction’. Rather than the whole affair being a ‘work of fiction’ of the three subsequently named sources. After-all, the second part of Neazor’s report included 52 classified paragraphs (a multiple of 13) at the back-end, that was suppressed because it contained SIS “operational matters and some other material regarded by the Inspector-General as confidential”.
Or, Thorn may have been signalling that an Operation Leaf-type program was occurring under the auspices of the Police Strategic Intelligence Unit, since the original Operation Leaf may have migrated to the Police after the program was evidently shut-down by then-SIS Director Brigadier Lin Smith in 1987. And, it may have also been signalling to the rest of the Deep State that the ‘intelligence community’ were reasserting their capacity to author ‘works of fiction’, and in this they were conducting a field trial that simultaneously mocked key dissident journalists that dared to expose their clandestine activities. Journalist Selwyn Manning, who broke the story with the country’s first comprehensive online news-site Scoop Media, had written a piece “The Man Who Spooked The Spooks” on the case of the SIS’s bungled break-in of dissident Aziz Choudry Christchurch home. Manning’s exclusive report, which was with the man the government was forced to apologize to, was published in in September 1999 just ahead of the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation summit (APEC) hosted in the Auckland CBD’s “militarized zone”. Crucially, Choudry said he never received a “satisfactory” explanation as to why the SIS were in his house or what they were looking for. Choudry added:
“What we do know is that they [SIS] and other state agencies such as the Land Transport Safety Authority and the police were working quite closely together in their operation. There is a web of organisations that pull together when called on to complete certain operations.”
This multi-agency cooperation was disturbing.
Another key dissident journalist that the intelligence community would have loved to have embarrassed was Nicky Hager, who broke the spy story of Operation Leaf for a national audience with the Sunday Star-Times Times in cooperation with Scoop News. Among Hager’s secular heretical sins in the eyes of the Deep State was his 1996 book Secret Power that exposed New Zealand’s Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) and its role in ‘Five Eyes’ Echelon surveillance network. Hager’s next book, Secrets and Lies, published in 1999, exposed the under-handed tactics of a state-owned enterprise, Timberlands West Coast Limited, that had hired a global public relations firm, Shandwick, to undermine environmental groups such as Native Forest Action, that sought to save old growth beech forests from being harvested. But it was Hager’s third book, Seeds of Distrust, published in 2002, that exposed that GE-contaminated corn had been accidentally released in New Zealand, and officials in the Clark Ministry opted to cover-up the GE-contamination. This exposure, which embarrassed Prime Minister Helen Clark amid a snap election campaign, demonstrated Hager would expose wrong-doing in a left-Government too.
Given that Manning and Hager were thorns in the side of the Crown, it may be that the ‘intelligence community’ had cast Gerald Thorns as the man to rework Operation Leaf of the 1980s into a scripted ‘work of fiction’. It seems to signal that the Deep State can outlive the occasional SIS Director that had the ‘wrong-headed view’ of Māori dissident voices, such as Brigadier Lin Thomas, who evidently said the SIS was to rely on newspaper accounts for what was going on in Māoridom. If this interpretation is true, it would mean Gerald Thorns was effectively scapegoated, discredited and cast out of the Crown’s inner fold, and might explain his scathing communiqué to Scoop News following Paul Neazor’s two Inspector General of Intelligence and Security reports into ‘Operation Leaf’. When it is recalled that it was the same Paul Neazor who participated in the cover-up of how and why Algerian political asylum seeker, Ahmed Zaoui, had been framed by Algeria’s military intelligence agency, the DRS, and that this cover-up occurred to save the SIS from public embarrassment about its competency, or willful ignorance or active complicity, then the Deep State’s commitment to advancing the Global War on Terror narrative with Operation Eight as a B-Grade Psy-op becomes all the more starkly darker.
In any case, Te Pututara had established that someone was using IT contractors to gain access to Māori computers, that a male Māori IT person had also revealed that while working at an internet provider he had worked with the police to monitor internet activity by Māori, and that he had also been involved in monitoring activity related to the Seabed & Foreshore hikoi, as ex-Army veteran Ross Himona asserted. Himona concluded that it:
“was well established that the police had since 1984 assumed responsibility for surveillance of Maori.”
The apparent motivation behind the so-called spies breaking ranks with the Operation Leaf story was over an alleged rift within the the Security Intelligence Service regarding its over-reliance on Western intelligence, such as the prolonged detainment of Ahmed Zaoui, and also conflating security concerns with the domestic political of the current government, and being seen to be proactive about counter-terrorism in the eyes of the Five Eyes spy partners, particularly the United States. It is striking how these very reasons became apparent to many during the multi-season Operation Eight New Special, and were laid bare in Operation 8: Deep in the Forest, The Price of Peace, and Behind the Shroud.
It is curious, therefore, to note that Paul Neazor made the point so categorically that the Director of Security’s initial reaction that the whole story was a ‘work of fiction’ of the newspaper’s sources – was the correct view, at the beginning of his report on Operation Leaf. Given that we now know the SIS had an Operation Leaf in the 1980s, and that this fact remained hidden, it is a reasonable to doubt that the report of the Inspector General of Intelligence and Security is the whole truth and nothing but the truth. It is a reasonable question to ask, Did the SIS have another covert operation, say ‘Operation Obedience’, in which the SIS itself scripted the scenario that unfolded in order to regain control over dissent within the rank and file of the Security Intelligence Service? Did they use a cut-out to feed information to the likes of Gerald Thorn? And in the process, show news organizations who had supremacy over the control of the flow of information, and therefore a not-so subtle signal to those who would linger long enough to decode the message, that the only way to truly understand what is going on in the ‘Switzerland of the South Pacific’ is to stand under the boot of its unacknowledged Deep State. In other words, when the authorities ask the scripted line, ‘Do you understand?’ at the moment of serving search and seizure warrants, of the ‘fishing expedition’ kind served during Operation Eight, there is a definite Inner Temple encoded occult meaning.
Therefore, it may be that ‘Operation Leaf’ was a pilot episode that telegraphed the direction the Deep State was taking the Police-Intelligence-Security-Surveillance apparatus. In what is clearly a dysfunctional and toxic environment, any remaining skeptical voices that might have remained before Operation Eight went live as a multi-season B-Grade psy-op, were to be marginalized. That, I believe, was one of the occult purposes underpinning the ‘Operation Leaf’ of the early 2000s.
The appearance of New Zealand Police’s South East Asian attaché detective inspector Mike Bush in the Operation Leaf story is fascinating too. In an interview for Scoop News, Bush offered his personal opinion to Manning that two of the sources for the Operation Leaf had “zero credibility”. Bush, who was New Zealand Police’s liaison officer based at the New Zealand Embassy in Bangkok, said his reasons for such a poor credibility rating were subject to privacy issues. It turns out that Gerald Thorns and his associate Jack Sanders operated Global-PAC (Protect All Children), a non-government organization whose stated purpose was to track down paedophile rings. The New Zealand Herald reported that Thorns had told several journalists Global-PAC was a cover and that the pair are involved in the spy world.
It may be that the clumsy bugging of Māori Party co-leader Tariana Turia’s room was the work of the SIS or a Police SIG unit. Turia had related how the kitchen phone in her ministerial house had been bugged around March 2004, because she said the whole conversation “would come through the radio in the bedroom’’. It reads like the work of ‘kitchen cabinet‘ within the security-intelligence apparatus, whose job it is to cook up scenarios to manipulate political actors to help get the desired results of a Deep State recipe. Is it possible that this supposedly amateur job was done to prime Turia for triggering an official inquiry into Operation Leaf that would ultimately exonerate the SIS, deflect attention from the Police and embarrass Fairfax, the Sunday Star-Times, Scoop News and the journalists? Did the classified 52 paragraphs of the second report that was withheld by the Inspector General of Intelligence and Security Paul Neazor show that the SIS were authors of a psy-op that communicated to insiders, that the newspapers were now no longer the most reliable sources of information on what was going on within Māori organizations?
Operation Eight: A New Zealand COINTELPRO Program?
The Operation Eight assignment was, in effect, the equivalent of the FBI’s seven COINTELPRO programs that operated in the 1960s and early 1970s to undermine dissent. Evidence of the CONINTPRO programs were discovered as a result of official information requests following the 1971 break-in of a FBI field office in Media, Philadelphia by nine people who sought documents proving FBI infiltration of dissident groups.
The Prime Minister at the time of the Operation Eight raids, Helen Clark, framed the raids for her own political ends to bolster her credibility in the aftermath of the other ‘security issue’ – the Ahmed Zaoui case and heading into election year. Clark said in a speech at a Labour Party conference, “The mere thought of paramilitary training in the Ureweras by disaffected people of many ethnicities is distressing and abhorrent to our people.”[24] Clark’s predominantly Pākehā audience applauded her over-simplifications and brazen deflection from the structural dispossession of land endured by Tūhoe and other Māori iwi and hapu. This propaganda line from a prime minister and the political head of New Zealand intelligence services was all the more brazenly manipulative, given that under her watch former Algerian politician and political asylum seeker Ahmed Zaoui had been wrongly jailed. Indeed, Clark’s failure as the country’s top lawmaker at the time to be skeptical, belies a ‘meeting of minds’ that the raids would be a good psy-op to augment more power.
Indeed, questions remain.
What were the exact roles of private investigator firms, such as Thompson and Clark, police informant Rob Gilchrist and the Auckland Metro Crime Services Special Intelligence Group? Did anyone act as an agent provocateur, to encourage Tame Iti that an uprising was good idea – so that it could be construed that he was planning a violent rebellion? Why all the subsequent resignations of heads at Police HQ, the Solicitor Generals’ Office and at the SIS?
Justice Hansen and Justice Brewer failed to rebuke the Crown for failing to fess up to New Zealanders about its refusal to hand-back Crown held-Tūhoe land, the Deep State’s daily structural violence of Shock Doctrine economic warfare,[26] and its incessant brainwashing psychological warfare. Justice Hansen’s remarked that violent means to achieve the laudable ends is not justifiable. What I find troubling is that Justice Hansen, Justice Winkleman and Justice Brewer failed to call out Pākehā Special Investigation Group Detective Sergeant Aaron Pascoe, Police Commissioner Howard Broad and Crown Prosecutor Ross Burns for conspiracy to frame so many for a non-existent terrorist plot, when the forgoing Crown plots to pervert the pursuit of a just society were real, vicious and systemic. It is fascinating to see in Operation 8 that then-NBR editor Neville Gibson state in the aftermath of Hager’s Gilchrist police informant scoop of late 2007, that such infiltration tactics were needed to protect commerce because unless there were consequences, activists would get carried away with their “Jihadist” worldview. Therefore, the nexus of the Police ‘forest’, its ties to private investigator firms, such as Thompson and Clark, the corporate world and the Crown’s links to the British Civil Oligarchy – including the Monarchy – remained unexamined.
Thorny Cover-Story Narrator: Commissioner Broad claimed the raids were nipping terrorism in the bud.
Even though the Crown’s Solicitor General’s Office, two courts and, indeed, the Police Special Investigations Group knew no planning had occurred and therefore there was no immediate threat, the judiciary entertained this B-Grade psy-op. It was in this way, the Crown pursued a deceptive strategy that breached section 240 of the Crimes Act of 1961 to attack Tame Iti’s credibility. While Iti was out of the way, the Crown gained a ‘compromise’ agreement that gave Tūhoe the impression that their more moderate negotiators had got the best deal they could wrangle: a fee simple title for Te Urewera that is subject to tax.
In the aftermath, the standing of Tame Iti, Tūhoe, and left-wing political activism were diminished. These attacks are located in a sharpened historical context, specifically that the raids and confiscations of Tūhoe lands occurred as part of violent state formation processes that included the application of a little known piece of international law known as the Doctrine of Discovery. New Zealand in the colonial era became a Masonic territory of the British Masonic Empire. This missing piece of the puzzle of New Zealand’s history shows that the Crown’s claims as sovereign are not only epically fraudulent. It also shows that the violent processes of state formation are ongoing, as New Zealand’s political, economic and cultural trajectory is steered along to entangle institutions. communities and families into a Global Smart Grid Green Economy, where even Te Urewera ancestral lands of Tūhoe are expected to pay tax. I detect that the Tūhoe members of Te Urewera’s board have been unwittingly cast as carbon sink bio-reserve park rangers expected to pay carbon taxes and collect carbon credits. I conclude that New Zealand can expect more B-Grade terror psy-ops when – not if – New Zealand’s Deep State perceives the need to attack the credibility of its perennial scapegoat – Māori – to resolve more crises that threaten Pākehā ruling class power.
Indeed, concerns have been raised about the New Zealand ‘Defense Forces’ bi-annual miltary exercises, Southern Katipo, with 13 other countries. Fairfax reported that the Exercise Southern Katipo 2015 was, “designed to simulate a real crisis situation either in New Zealand or one of our Pacific neighbours.” The military exercise involves scenarios including dealing with protests over an offshore oil-drilling operation that takes place in a South West Pacific island countries called Becara and Alpira. This scenario bears an uncanny resemblance to plans in the pipeline to create ‘special economic zones’ for mining and oil drilling concessions off the southern West Coast of the South Island. Evidently, Forest and Bird chief executive Kevin Hague said in July 2017 that documents released under the Official Information Act indicated that “the scope of law and regulation that the government is proposing to suspend, to facilitate these developments, is breath-taking.” The new scenario, wrote Barbara Creswell in a guestpost on The Daily Blog,
“bears an uncanny resemblance to the southern West Coast, where the former National Government was working hard to implement ‘special economic zones’ which would allow them to bypass existing regulations in order to speed up the issuance of mining and oil exploration permits.”
The state’s attitude toward political dissent is clear. As political analyst and political science lecturer at Auckland University Dr Paul Buchanan said in Operation 8: Deep in the Forest, the raids were designed to stifle dissent by dragging the costly cases on for years, thereby acting a deterrent to would-be activists, all for charges found to be contrived.
In effect, the Auckland Crime Metro Crime Services had recast itself as Oceania’s Fiction Department in a Ninety Eighty-Four universe, its SIG unit as the Rewrite Squad authoring a frame-up job. Operation Eight was a News Special that ran for five seasons. In a country where the television industry is starved of resources to make the kind of B-Grade darkly satirical political thriller that was marketed as ‘based on a true story’, the plot, sub-plots and web of characters of Operation Eight show that NZ Deep State Inc. maintains a monopoly hold over ‘entertainment’ on behalf of National Security Interests. In the warped logic of Deep State power, Morse’s secular sin – daring to write her thesis Against Freedom: The War on Terrorism in Everyday New Zealand Life – had to be countered with a fictional work, too. It is poignant to note that in the chapter “Dissent”, Morse quoted Randolph Bourne who wrote just after the so-called First World War ended:
“War is the health of the state. It automatically sets in motion throughout society those irresistible forces for uniformity, for passionate co-operation with the government in coercing into obedience minority groups and individuals. The machinery of government sets and enforces the drastic penalties, the minorities are either intimidated into silence, or brought slowly around by a subtle process of persuasion …”
Morse followed this quote from the 1977 edition of Anarchist Reader with her own thoughtcrimes:
“Thoughout history, one of the most debated and struggled for rights in any society has been the right to disagree with, or dissent from, the majority view. This is particularly true in times of war. Government has long worked to control, manage and suppress dissent. Dissenters have been cast as violent, crazy or exceptionally rare. In the post-September 11th environment, dissent is portrayed as a form of terrorism.”
The Rūātoki raids were part of a longer continuum to “homogenize” Tūhoe, this time by brainwashing New Zealanders with an unbalanced enemy image that lacked a proportional, level-headed and historically-honest response. Instead, New Zealanders were dished the Neo-Colonial State’s calculated subversive political conspiracy, a re-enactment of historical incursions into Tūhoe territory. The unwillingness of the New Zealand Neo-Colonial State to educate the populace about it’s own acts of terror against so-called rebellious Maoris, its subjugation of pacifist Māori communities and its exploitation of Māori in the ongoing ‘Global War of Terrorism’ waged by the Fascist Internationale Deep State – and instead opted to wage a nationwide B-Grade psy-war, shouts loud like an Orwellian Two Minutes Hate session in the story of the Operation Eight raids.
Meanwhile, prior to the Urewera Four trial commencing on February 13 2012, Crown Prosecutor Ross Burns was ‘helicoptered in’ to save capitalism from an Occupy protest camped below the Auckland City Council’s HQ in December 2011. The news media reported Mr Burns, who was representing the council at the Auckland District Court, expressing concern that the anti-capitalist encampment from causing the grassroots to die. The Deep State darkly satirical humour appeared to go over the heads of the activists. The Deep State’s flavour of the month prosecutor Mr Burns, who ignores the Crown’s scorched earth policy toward Tuhoe, is ‘helicoptered in’ from the Urewera trial, to tell the court that the Council is concerned the grassroots are dying off due to a small number of activists exercising their Bill of Rights to protest in solidarity with the global Occupy Movement. In short, the Council was signalling it too was advancing the game in solidarity with the Deep State, by ‘helicoptering in’ Mr Burns. The encoded symbolism was communicating that even peaceful demonstrations – with not a hint of violence – were under attack, and that it was intention of New Zealand’s Pākehā-dominated ruling class to kill off grassroots movements, against a backdrop of a multi-season psy-op complete with a fake napalm defoliant threat scripted by the Department of Pre-Crime.
Another hallmark of a Deep State black operation is the recurrent appearance of the number 13. As I stated earlier, the planting of Thirteen and its multiples as mundane data into events, signifies the presence of a ‘Fraternity’, for whom the number 13 signals ‘unity and love’.[12] This occult practice, which was embedded in New Zealand during the colonial era,[13] telegraphs where the Deep State have been and the direction they are taking. To this criminal end, on 13 September 2007, the Director of the NZ Security Intelligence Service, Warren Tucker, suppressed Lieutenant Colonel Mohamed Samraoui’s part in framing Ahmed Zaoui classified, insinuated that Zaoui had been guilty of “participating in and leading terrorist networks” in France and Belgium, and claimed that his deportation from “Switzerland for issuing statements supporting violence in Algeria and attracting extremists” were legitimate records of Zaoui’s life. Thus, on 13 September 2007, the SIS telegraphed where they had been, and the direction the NZ Deep State were taking, by making a public statement exactly one year after the profiles of all of Tame Iti’s associates had been logged as evidence into the Operation Eight case file, on 13 September 2006.
Approximately one month later, on 15 October 2007, the commencement of the ‘Termination Phase’ occurred, exactly 13 months after the first of numerous call data warrants were sought to obtain telephone metadata and text messages, which was, in essence, the date – 15 September 2006 – when the nationwide search for a terrorist network began. On 6 September 2011, charges against 13 of the 18 accused were dropped. In the case that eventuated against the ‘Urewera Four’ which commenced on 13 February 2012, the judge permitted the use of the illegally gained video, audio and photographic surveillance recordings, even though the Supreme Court has suppressed their use. On February 26 2013, the Parole Board announced it was releasing Tame Iti from prison, with the 26th being a multiple of 13 in the second month of the year, 2013. (In numerology, the zeroes are dropped to yield occult numbers). On the 13th of August 2014, new-Police Commissioner Mike Bush gave his limited apology for the Police causing trauma to innocent people caught up in the raids and the loss of credibility to the Tūhoe people, but not for the actual raids.[21] Thus, Commissioner Bush was, in effect, signalling that the Deep State had camouflagued its covert role to maintain substance of possession over Tūhoe territory, including Te Urewera, and telegraphing the direction of the Deep State: more black operations on the horizon.
It is, therefore, no accident that the New Zealand Defence Force hosts its bi-annual Southern Katipo military exercise with 13 other countries – Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Fiji, New Caledonia, Malaysia, Papua New Guinea, Singapore, Tonga, Timor Leste, the United Kingdom and the United States. One scenario involves military intervention due to political instability in a dispute over offshore oil reserves. It is not only disturbing to recall that Fairfax reported on in 2015 that Southern Katipo scenarios could be used on Pacific neighbours as well as New Zealand. It is also troubling to note that plans in the pipeline to designate ‘special economic zones’ to circumvent nationwide laws, thereby activating areas where the Doctrine of Exceptionalism can be triggered to defend transnational’s exploiting resources. When it is recalled that former Energy and Resources Minister Simon Bridges rammed a 500-metre exclusion zone to protect oil rigs in the offshore economy otherwise known as the 200-nautical-mile (370km) Exclusive Economic Zone, the undermining of dissent is endemic to ongoing statecraft. In other words, the New Zealand’s Deep State is engaging in structural entrapment through a coordinated program of statute making, black operations, subterfuge, sabotage and training exercises designed to protect Pākehā-dominated ruling class interests.
The Crown’s own lack of frankness about its motives, history and crimes – was reflected by Tame Iti. Indeed, as Kim Webby reflected after making her documentary, The Price of Peace, the journalist said she felt she did not get a totally straight answer from the Tūhoe activist and artist.[25]
Curiously, few New Zealanders across the political spectrum, including those with public profiles – who supposedly value freedom, free speech and fairness – spoke out about the obvious ulterior motives, inconvenient truths and callousness exacted by the state apparatus.
Maybe if they felt if they heard an honest answer from Tame Iti, they might have been more empathetic about Māori frustrations over the lack of land returned.
The reason Tame Iti neglected to mention his call for an uprising at the Parihaka Peace Festival was because house lights flatten the theatrical aesthetics.
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Steve ‘Snoopman’ Edwards is a dissident Pākehā journalist.
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Sources:
[1] Tony Simpson (1979). Te Riri Pakeha: The White Man’s Anger, p.207-214. Auckland, NZ: Hodder and Stoughton; Tears as Crown apologises for Parihaka atrocities | Radio New Zealand News http://www.radionz.co.nz/news/te-manu-korihi/332613/tears-as-crown-apologises-for-parihaka-atrocities
[2] THE TERRORIST FILES http://www.nzcpr.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/TheTerrorismFiles_DomPost141107.pdf; The Urewera raids: Breaking the story http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/64348692/the-urewera-raids-breaking-the-story; Patrick Gower. (September 16, 2008). Media chiefs appear in ‘terror files’ case. Retirved from: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10532377
[3] Dr. Daniele Ganser (2005). NATO’s Secret Armies: Operation Gladio and Terrorism in Western Europe. New York: Frank Cass; Bureau d´Études (2009). Bureau d´Études publishes new network map: Administration of Terror. Operation Gladio: Studies of NATO stay-behind networks and other clandestine resurgence operations. Retrieved from http://operation-gladio.net/bureau-d%C2%B4%C3%A9tudes-publishes-new-network-map-administration-terror; Nazemroaya, Madhi Darius (2012). The Globalization of NATO. Atlanta, Georgia, USA: Clarity Press; Peter Dale Scott. (27 April 2013). 9/11, the JFK Assassination, and the Oklahoma City Bombing as a Strategy of Tension. Retrieved from: http://www.voltairenet.org/article178312.html
[4] MIL OSI. (December 5, 2012). Behind The Shroud Director Selwyn Manning Talks To Karyn Hay & Andrew Fagin About His New Feature Doco. https://lonewolffilms.nz/2012/12/05/behind-the-shroud-director-selwyn-manning-talks-to-karyn-hay-andrew-fagin-about-his-new-feature-doco/
[5] MIL OSI. (4 December 2012). Decade Since Zaoui Sought Asylum In NZ – Have We Learned From SIS’s Mistakes? https://lonewolffilms.nz/2012/12/04/decade-since-zaoui-sought-asylum-in-nz-have-we-learned-from-siss-mistakes/
[6] NZ Security Intelligence Service 13 September 2007 NZSIS Statement Concerning Mr Ahmed Zaoui. http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/PO0709/S00194/nzsis-statement-concerning-mr-ahmed-zaoui.htm; See also: Gordon Campbell. (16 July 2007). The Zaoui Case – Injustice On The Cheap. http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0707/S00175.htm; Scoop Media. (16 July 2007). The Ahmed Zaoui Case – The Gordon Campbell Series. Scoop.co.nz. http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/HL0707/S00174.htm
[7] Nicky Hager. (14 December, 2008). “Crossing the Line – The activist who turned police informer”. Sunday Star-Times.
[8] Errol Wright and Abi King-Jones (2012). Operation 8 – Deep in the forest – Aotearoa (New Zealand). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKksGWyB24g
[9] Nicky Hager » I was paid to betray protesters www.nickyhager.info/i-was-paid-to-betray-protesters/
[10] Nicky Hager Private Investigators still digging on West Coast www.stuff.co.nz/national/377237
[11] Nicky Hager. Coal mine spies return despite govt ban. www.nickyhager.info/coal-mine-spies-return-despite-govt-ban/
[12] Jarecki, Eugene (2006). Why We Fight. [Motion Picture]. Sony Pictures Classics. Retrieved from https://thoughtmaybe.com/why-we-fight/; Peter Dale Scott. (27 April 2013). 9/11, the JFK Assassination, and the Oklahoma City Bombing as a Strategy of Tension. Retrieved from: http://www.voltairenet.org/article178312.html; Ruppert, Michael C. (2004). Crossing the Rubicon – The Decline of the American Empire. New Society Publishers; Ryan, Kevin. (2013). Another Nineteen: Investigating Legitimate 9/11 Suspects. USA: Microbloom; Scott, Peter Dale. (2012, September 24). “Systemic Destabilization in Recent American History: 9/11, the JFK Assassination, and the Oklahoma City Bombing.” The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol 10 Issue 39, No. 2. Retrieved from http://japanfocus.org/-Peter_Dale-Scott/3835; Scott, Peter Dale. (2014, April 6). “The American Deep State, Deep Events, and Off-the-Books Financing,” The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 12, Issue 14, No. 3. Retrieved from http://www.japanfocus.org/-Peter_Dale-Scott/4104; Tarpley, Webster Griffin. (2007). 9/11 Synthetic Terror: Made in USA. Joshua Tree, CAL: Progressive Press; Scott, Peter Dale. (2013, April 27). 9/11, the JFK Assassination, and the Oklahoma City Bombing as a Strategy of Tension. Voltaire Network. Retrieved from http://www.voltairenet.org/article178312.html; Unwelcome Guests Radio. (2013, December 10). Peter Dale Scott on The US War Machine (Deep Politics and the CIA Global Drug Connection). Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDUByvD25HI
[13] Morse said in the documentary Operation 8 that she would likely have to mortgage her house to finance the legal battle. Other are still struggling with the legal bills, trauma and broken trust. See: Cleo Fraser and The Hui Staff. (15/10/2017). Urewera Raid arrestees still struggling with legal bills/ http://www.newshub.co.nz/home/new-zealand/2017/10/urewera-raid-arrestees-still-struggling-with-legal-bills.html
[14] Talisa Kupenga. (19 May 2017). Te Urewera management plan future of conservation – Kruger. http://www.maoritelevision.com/news/national/te-urewera-management-plan-future-conservation–kruger
[15] New York Times. (13 July 2016). In New Zealand, Lands and Rivers Can Be People. http://www.ngaituhoe.iwi.nz/In-New-Zealand-Lands-and-Rivers-Can-Be-People
[16] Māori Law Review (October 2012). Crown offer to settle the historical claims of Ngāi Tūhoe http://maorilawreview.co.nz/2012/10/crown-offer-to-settle-the-historical-claims-of-ngai-tuhoe/
[17] Peter D. Hutchison and Kelly Nyks. (2015). Requiem for the American Dream. Retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9asVtLFxpU; Jason Bermas (2010). Invisible Empire: A New World Order Defined. Retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uIH4jUIK5zs; Whitecross, M & Winterbottom, A. (Directors) & Eaton, A. (Producer). The Shock Doctrine 2009 [Motion picture]. A Renegade Pictures/Revolution Films Production. Retrieved from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7iW1SHPgUAQ; Francis Richard Conolly. (2014). JFK to 911 Everything Is A Rich Man’s Trick. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U1Qt6a-vaNM
[18] Maiki Sherman. (23 March 2013). Tūhoe sign Deed of Settlement. http://www.maoritelevision.com/news/regional/tuhoe-sign-deed-settlement
[19] TangataWhenua.com. (May 24, 2010). Te Urewera – an Historical Account of how the Crown Stole Tuhoe Land. http://news.tangatawhenua.com/2010/05/te-urewera-an-historical-account-of-how-the-crown-stole-tuhoe-land/
[20] AlJazeera. (23 May 2013). New Zealand police ‘terrorism raids unlawful’. Asia Pacific News. http://www.aljazeera.com/news/asia-pacific/2013/05/201352271849185636.html
[21] Mere McLean 13 August 2014 Police Commissioner apologises to Tūhoe. http://www.maoritelevision.com/news/regional/police-commissioner-apologises-tuhoe; Natalie Mankelow. (13 August 2014). Police apologise to Tuhoe over raids. http://www.radionz.co.nz/news/national/251999/police-apologise-to-tuhoe-over-raids
[22] Steve Edwards. (25 April 2017). The Masonic New Zealand Wars: Freemasonry as a Secret Mechanism of Imperial Conquest During the ‘Native Troubles’. Snoopman News. Retrieved from: http://snoopman.net.nz/2017/04/25/the-masonic-new-zealand-wars/
[23] Stéphanie Bürgenmeier (Autumn 2013) Review: Operation 8: Deep in the Forest by E. Wright and A. King-Jones State Crime Journal, Vol. 2, No. 2 pp. 205-209. Retrieved from: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.13169/statecrime.2.2.0205
[24] Errol Wright and Abi King-Jones (2012). Operation 8 – Deep in the forest – Aotearoa (New Zealand). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKksGWyB24g
[25] New documentary gives fresh side to Tame Iti story (PMC) Pacific Media Centre (AUT) Jul 22, 2015. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0jDmknMVXW
[26] Barry, Alistair. (1995). Someone Else’s Country. [Motion Picture]. Vanguard Films. Retrieved from http://www.nzonscreen.com/title/someone-elses-country-1996; Barry, Alistair. (2002). In a Land of Plenty. [Motion Picture]. Vanguard Films. Retrieved from http://www.nzonscreen.com/title/in-a-land-of-plenty-2002 [In 5-part video segments]; Bruce, B. (Director & Writer). (2013). Mind The Gap: A Special Report on Inequality [Motion Picture]. Red Sky Television. Retrieved from http://www.tv3.co.nz/INSIDE-NEW-ZEALAND-Mind-The-Gap/tabid/3692/articleID/94816/MCat/3061/Default.aspx; Klein, Naomi. (2007). The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, p.7. Camberwell, Australia: Penguin Books; Whitecross, M & Winterbottom, A. (Directors) & Eaton, A. (Producer). The Shock Doctrine 2009 [Motion picture] Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6yceBTf_Vs