A Heretical Dispatch from by a dissident journalist exposing the 2007 Operation Eight Raids that saved the Crown losing sole sovereign power over New Zealand
One month after terrorist-accused Algerian academic and asylum seeker, Ahmed Zaoui, was released in mid-September 2007, the same terrorist guerilla leader casting was applied to Tūhoe’s most visible figure – Tame Iti. Tūhoe, had a strong case for a return of their stolen and swindled ancestral lands.
Such an outcome would have been catastrophic for the New Zealand Crown, because every other iwi (tribe) and hapū (family group) would have demanded the return of mountains, lakes and rivers, unencumbered by Crown jurisdiction – regardless of whether they had settled or not.
Indeed, the 2007 Operation Eight Raids saved the Western Empire Syndicate from losing control of its treasured experimental test-lab archipelago – New Zealand.
By Steve ‘Snoopman’ Edwards
➼ Transposing the Guerilla Terrorist Leader Legend
In mid-2007, the Clark Administration’s efforts to bring the anti-Muslim Global War on Terror zeitgeist to New Zealand fell apart with the collapse of a four and a half-year persecution of Algerian-born Muslim asylum seeker Ahmed Zaoui, who the SIS claimed was a terrorist guerilla leader — as the documentary Behind the Shroud Juxtapositioning Truth, Intelligence and Tradecraft showed.
This collapse converged with a looming governance crisis facing the New Zealand Crown because a Bay of Plenty tribe, Tūhoe, had a strong case for a return of their stolen and swindled ancestral lands, especially as the tribe never signed the 1840 Waitangi Treaty with the British Crown. Also, the Crown knew the iwi had staunchly held to this view in the intervening years following land confiscations by various incarnations of the Crown.
Such an outcome would have been catastrophic for the Crown, because every other iwi (tribe) and hapū (family group) would have demanded the return of mountains, lakes and rivers, unencumbered by Crown jurisdiction — regardless of whether they had settled or not.
To this nefarious end, on October 15 2007, paramilitary raids involving 300 heavily Police were inflicted on 60 homes around New Zealand, including in Auckland, Hamilton, Taupo, Wellington, Christchurch and two small rural Tūhoe Māori communities, Tāneatua and Rūātoki, which bore the brunt of the intimidating intrusions. Although no-one was killed or physically maimed during the encounters, the logic of terror was inherent to the decision to deploy heavily-armed STG and AOS squads based on poorly analysed intelligence — as the documentary titled, Operation 8: Deep in the Forest,.
Moreover, the decision to inflict paramilitary raids — with squads armed with hollow-nosed rounds designed to shred flesh when they explode — means the National Security State authorized operations that could have resulted in a body-count. Mayhem could have ensued if ‘the natives’ had resisted such incursions by drawing firearms. The National Security State, including the Police, deployed propaganda through the news media, while the accused were locked up without bail – some for a month, including the prime target for character assassination — Tame Wairere Iti — Tūhoe’s most visible face.
To fulfill the psy-op objective of the Operation Eight Raids, the National Security State ruthlessly targetted Tūhoe’s most visible face, Tame Iti, for character assassination by tracing ‘Global War on Terror’ template, with interlinked cells of terrorists throughout the North Island — complete with fabricated accusations of explosive suggestions of napalm, Molitov Cocktails and secret arms caches.
It turns out, New Zealand’s National Security State essentially transposed the same terrorist guerilla leader legend that had been created by Algeria’s equivalent to the CIA, the Département du Renseignement et de la Sécurité — or DRS — to frame the Algerian-born Muslim asylum seeker, Ahmed Zaoui, onto Tame Iti to scapegoat.
At an early press conference, the Police Commissioner Howard Broad admitted that there had been noplanning, and he deployed the justification of ‘nipping it in the bud’ — which was an encoded semantic description that signalled Iti’s little so-called terrorism 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, and redeployed to prison, 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.”
In the immediate aftermath of the Operation Eight Raids, then-Police Commissioner Howard Broad stated it was over to the Solicitor General to make a decision on whether or not charges could be laid under the Terrorism Suppression Act 2002, as the documentary The Fifth Eye showed. Subsequently, Solicitor-General D. B. Collins QC pointed out that no planning for terrorism had occurred, as the 2012 documentary, Operation 8: Deep in the Forest — Aotearoa, recounted.
The Operation Eight Raids were inflicted, in part, because N.Z. Crown needed a new cause celébré to legitimize the National Security State’s expansion of powers at a time when the Terrorism Suppression Amendment Act 2007 was before Parliament. This Terrorism Suppression Amendment Act was written to broaden to criteria of agents, associations, and activities that could be defined or construed as terrorist in nature.
In other words, the Crown was seeking to broaden the definition of terrorism at the time of the raids in the Urewera wilderness. Solicitor General Collins was called upon by Police Commissioner Broad to make a determination about whether or not the agents, associations, activities were by their nature within the then-current definition of terrorism. In short, Broad sent a ‘Morse Code’ signal to Collins to check his dictionary. The weaponized irony humour becomes apparent when it is recalled that the Collins publishing house produces its own brand of dictionary.
Although David Collins had declined permission to allow the Crown prosecutions to proceed under the Terrorism Suppression Act 2002 due to the lack of evidence, and advised the media to report with caution — he failed to call out the National Security State, including the Police for inflicting the politically motivated raids.
The Terrorism Suppression Amendment Act 2007 was passed one month after the Operation Eight Raids, on November 19th 2007.
➼ Fore-shadowing by Riffing off Lange’s ‘Whiff of Uranium’
Curiously, when Clark delivered a speech at Oxford Union, City of Oxford, England her performance was at about the half-way point between Zaoui’s release and the Operation Eight Raids. By performing this speech, Clark was not only riffing off former Labour Party Prime Minister David Lange’s famous debate on nuclear terror with President Reagan’s friend Rev. Falwell, since Clark even recalled Lange’s quip that he could smell the uranium on his opponent’s breath at Oxford Union on March 1st 1985. Clark was also foreshadowing N.Z.’s next homegrown deep state operation, designed to terrorize Tūhoe.
In following David Lange’s footsteps, New Zealand’s then-Minister of the Security Intelligence Service (SIS), appears to have been cast in the Starter Pistol role to signal initiation to the termination phase of Operation Eight. In this apparent hostage posting ritual, Clark bragged that as New Zealand’s Prime Minister, she drew “great pleasure” from the nation’s second-placed ranking, after Norway, in The Economist magazine’s Intelligence Unit’s Global Peace Index. This is the same Economist Intelligence Unit that would later perform the research for the Global Health Security Index of pandemic preparedness, that was co-developed by the John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Health Security together with the Nuclear Threat Initiative.
When it is learned that New Zealand’s Security Intelligence Service (SIS) had ‘relied’ on planted intelligence from Belgium, France and Switzerland in the framing of Zaoui, and these were the same three intelligence agencies involved in the 1985 Rainbow Warrior Bombing, and that Clark was a key political player in the Labour Party’s anti-nuclear faction that pushed for shutting out American ship visits in January 1985 — Clark’s foreign policy posturing at Oxford two weeks before the Operation Eight Raids becomes spooky. After-all, Clark was the minister in charge of New Zealand spook central, the SIS throughout the persecution of Ahmed Zaoui and at the time of the Operation Raids.
Especially spooky, because the Inspector General for Security & Intelligence, Justice Paul Neazor, had suppressed half of the report with the evidence supplied by former-DRS agent Lieutenant Colonel Mohamed Samraoui, about how he had framed Algerian academic Ahmed Zaoui as a terrorist — as journalist Selwyn Manning proved in his 2012 documentary, Behind the Shroud: Juxtapositioning Truth, Intelligence and Tradecraft showed.
And Clark’s role is particularly spooky when it is learned that it was the very same Paul Neazor — in his role as Solicitor-General at the time Rainbow Warrior Bombing trial — who dropped the charges of conspiracy and reduced the murder charges to manslaughter for the death of Rainbow Warrior photographer Fernando Pereira was killed when became trapped under a stairwell that was collapsed by a second bomb located on the propeller shaft.
In the Rainbow Warrior Bombing plot, the two French DGSE agents, Major Alain Mafart and Captain Dominique Prieur — whom were caught before they could skip the country — were found to have transported the explosives, diving equipment and the Zodiac from the Ouvéa yacht to the French attack team, whom were staying at motel accommodation in Parakai owned by Prime Minister David Lange.
Deputy Prime Minister, Geoffrey Palmer, was also the Attorney General and Minister of Justice at the time, which meant he was complicit in the damage control underway. On Palmer’s watch, New Zealand’s Solicitor-General, Paul Neazor, made the logically fallacious presentation to the Auckland High Court on November 4 1985 to justify dropping the charges of conspiracy and murder.
In any other country — bar New Zealand — the act of being two French Secret Service agents traveling to the territory of an Allied Nation, delivering explosives, diving equipment and a Zodiac and picking up the divers after the target has been bombed is clear evidence of conspiracy to commit terrorism, murder and arson. Because bombs are indiscriminate, murder was a risk of the operation, no matter the factors to mitigate the loss of life.
Disturbingly, a secret 1996 report authored by a New Zealand Security Intelligence Service (SIS) executive, stated that as the intrigue unravelled an attitude to limit the scope of the investigation developed once Mafart and Prieur were in custody. The SIS executive, who represented the NZ Security Intelligence Service at the meetings, said the Officials Terrorism Committee decided to merely to seek their prosecution, rather coordinate efforts to uncover the dimensions of the attack to catch other DGSE agents in New Zealand, as well as probe the extent of the French state’s involvement.
The head of the Prime Minister’s Office, Gerald Hensley, who also just happened to be the Chairman of the Officials Terrorism Committee, as well as the chairman of New Zealand’s Intelligence Council, controlled the scope of investigations while the French frogmen skied in the Southern Alps. Such constraint meant the DGSE combat dive team were able to ski at Mt Cook/Aoraki, and fly out of Auckland on July 26th 1985, without the SIS, the Police or the Aviation Security Service catching them in spite of the PM’s assurance that no effort would be spared.
And, because it was Clark who’d stirred up Labour Party’s anti-nuclear faction in January 1985, while Lange was overseas, it seems Clark’s early October 2007 Oxford Union speech was a codified communication.
Indeed, Clark looks like she performed a Starter Pistol Ritual, as game theory predicts, to signal where New Zealand’s National Security State was heading, by following in Lange’s footsteps when he debated Nuclear terror politics at Oxford Union in 1985. Clark seemed to be signalling she comprehended the purpose of the Rainbow Warrior Bombing was to send a ‘price of power’ warning signal to the Western Empire’s ruling élites to get their domestic grassroots movements — including anti-nuclear activists – back under control lest the people develop autonomous self-determining communities. Western élites perform such speeches as ‘Hostage Posting Rituals’ to signal ‘cooperation’, as game theory predicts.
Game theory strategies such as ‘Hostage Exchanges’ are used by nation states, international syndicates and monopolistic cartels to stabilize power structures while aggressive colluding rivals seek to construct new areas of market dominance by illegal, fraudulent and repugnant means that harm their more dynamic, innovative smaller and peaceful competitors.
➼ The Logic of Terror
In his chapter “The Logic of Terror” for a 2008 book about the Operation Eight Raids called, Terror in our Midst: Searching for Terror in Aotearoa New Zealand, Brendan Hokowhitu, among others, located the paramilitary raids on Māori communities within the context of the so-called War on Terror. The senior lecturer at Otago University argued this global war was really aimed at undermining native sovereignty everywhere to consolidate the American Empire.
The key finding of The Snoopman’s investigation, “Tame Iti as the Crown’s new scapegoat to resolve multiple crises” is that New Zealand’s Deep State deftly scripted a successful B-Grade multi-season News Special psy-op – Operation Eight.
The wilderness of Te Urewera was re-framed 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 wilderness with a terror news frame, a perennial fixture in the Neo-Colonial Realm of New Zealand was activated by the national security state apparatus through the news media, the courts and the executive branch of government: the propagandist scapegoat mechanism.
Instead of fessing up to the public, SIS Director Warren Tucker issued a deceptive communiqué on September 13th 2007 insinuating that Zaoui participated in and led terrorist networks in France and Belgium, and claimed he was deported from Switzerland for making statements to incite violence. With this deceitful, malicious communiqué spread over the news wires, the SIS director was telegraphing the direction where the National Security State was taking. The Crown faced a looming catastrophic collapse of its sole sovereign power because if Tūhoe had gained the sovereign Māori title to the Ureweras, the state would have likely been overwhelmed with demands from other iwi and hapu for the return of tracts of land, regardless of whether or not they had signed the 1840 Waitangi Treaty or had already settled.
Therefore, because the collapse of the Clark Ministry’s efforts to bring the anti-Muslim Global War on Terror zeitgeist to New Zealand converged with a looming governance crisis, the New Zealand Crown fell back to its perennial default position: casting Māori as the enemy of the state since 1840.
This crisis of legitimacy converged with the Crown’s need to lower expectations among Tūhoe about the return of lands stolen in the process of state formation.
The raids – which involved the Police Special Investigation Group (SIG), the Armed Offenders Squads, the counter-terrorism units Special Tactics Group, the Security Intelligence Service (SIS) — were signed off by the Officials Committee for Domestic and External Security Co-ordination (ODESC). This Officials Committee comprises the chief executives of the Defence Force, the Ministry of Defence, the Security Intelligence Service, the Government Communications Security Bureau, the Police, the Ministry of Civil Defence and Emergency Management, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade, the Treasury and others. The head of the Prime Minister’s Department, Maarten Wevers, heads the group, while Prime Minister Helen Clark and other senior ministers were briefed on the impending raids.
The task to ‘apologize’ to the Rūātoki and Taneatua communities over the raids for alleged military training camps in the highly symbolic Te Urewera Ranges, fell to new-Crown Police Commissioner Mike Bush. 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. After all, the purpose of the raids being disproportionate to any threat, was to inflict a nationwide B-Grade scripted psy-op to de-risk the Crown losing sovereign title over large tracts of land.
The scale of the Operation Eight Raids was inherent to the psy-op, which was designed to manufacture consent from ‘Kiwis’ for a consolidation of Crown power over Tūhoe territory.
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. Those broader objectives involved re-framing the wilderness as the location of paramilitary terrorist training camps, under the watch of Bush’s predecessor, Crown Police Commissioner Broad.
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!
For historical wrongs perpetrated by the Crown, Tūhoe received a mere $170 million in compensation for land lost. I believe this chain of events adds weight to my argument that the objective of the raids on Rūātoki had been achieved.
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.” That is to say, “no one owns Te Urewera”. These rhetorical statements were semantic descriptions that pulled at the heart-strings of The New York Times’ readership and even fooled the Māori Law Review journal.
Te Urewera is now ‘co-governed’ by Tūhoe and the Crown. This sounds like a nice grown-ups 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.
To be super-clear, I am not saying that Tāmati Kruger and Kirsty Luke were stooges for the Crown when they negotiated a settlement. 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 Tāmati 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.
Therefore, N.Z.’s Deep State displayed a comprehension of statecraft in the form of low-grade psychological warfare designed to achieve the same result as the NATO states low-grade war using false flag terrorism, wherein communist groups were blamed for bombings to shift the political center of gravity away from socialism and associating peace and freedom with liberal democracy that masks stealthy Neo-Colonial Capitalism. In the case of Operation Eight, a succession faction of Tūhoe were deemed to be associated with a supposedly radical, violent ‘fringe group’ because their most visible personality — Tame Iti — had been cast with the guerilla terrorist legend by the Deep State faction of N.Z.’s national security, whom needed to justify their existence, justify bigger budgets and consolidate power for the New Zealand Crown.
More crucially, the 2007 Operation Eight Raids saved the Western Empire Syndicate from losing control of its treasured experimental test-lab archipelago — New Zealand.
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Steve ‘Snoopman’ Edwards is a dissident journalist, who worked at indigenous broadcaster, Māori Television, for 14 years as an editor of news, current affairs and general programs. He graduated with First Class Honours in a Master in Communication Studies at AUT University after writing his ground-breaking thesis on the Global Financial Crisis (GFC), titled — “It’s the financial oligarchy, stupid” — to figure out the means, modus operandi and motives of the Anglo-American Oligarchy.
Editor’s Note: If we have made any errors, please contact our administrator, Steve ‘Snoopman’ Edwards, with your counter-evidence. e: steveedwards108[at]protonmail.com
See also: Deep History of Waitangi: The Queen Victoria Connection
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Lt. Colonel Samraoui’s character assassination of Ahmed Zaoui
Tame Iti as the Crown’s new scapegoat to resolve multiple crises
Hollywood’s make-believe villain, Kim Dotcom (alias Kim Kimble)
‘Price of Power’ Themed-Terrorism: Rainbow Warrior Bombing Inflicted to Save the Western Empire from Losing N.Z. (snoopman.net.nz)
