"Very disturbing activities" in the Dom

Your job for today is to read and digest the Dominion's publication of the transcripts of police surveillance that were used to obtain search warrants when police suspected terrorist plots were under way.

Feel free to comment as you're reading.

UPDATE 1: Short summary (partly pinched from Liberty Scott) of bugged conversations:

• Threat to blow up John Key
  
• Calls to kill police and evict non-Maori farmers;
• Talk of using a sniper's rifle to assassinate US President Bush;
• Making nail bombs and napalm;
• How to throw Molotov cocktails;
• Live ammunition training in ambush and withdrawal;
• Interrogation training using loaded firearms pointed at trainees' heads;
  
• Blowing up power stations, gas plants, Telecom, petrol stations and the Waihopai Spy Station;
• "Kill Pakehas" for practice;
• Wanting to emulate the IRA's terror campaign;
• Using the "Al Qaeda manual" on terror tactics, and wanting to emulate Al Qaeda's horror.

UPDATE 2: Here's some talking points for you:

• This is not the full evidence, simply short and selective summaries of the 156-page affidavit used to obtain search warrants in the Manukau District Court. Should the Dom have published these few excerpts? Should they have published more? Or placed the whole document on their website?
  

And, based on these few transcripts:

• Were the police justified in their surveillance? In the level of force used in raids? Did they act too soon? Or two days too late?
• Any evidence here to justify charges of police racism?
  
• To what extent were these conversations just idle threats and throwaway remarks? How seriously should the police take "idle threats" when they're backed up with training, materiel and people motivated enough to carry them out?
• Is it obvious enough now why the defendants, their lawyers and the Minto Mob did all they can to keep all the evidence suppressed?
  
• "Peace" activists? If these were your "friends," would you be defending them?
  
• "I have nothing to hide," said Tame Iti on returning home. Really?
  
• How seriously should we take John Minto, Jane Kelsey, Nandor Tanczos et al who sat in court listening to these conversations being read out, and still insisted that there was nothing to answer for?
• How seriously should we take journalists who sat in court listening to these conversations being read out, and who still treated Tame Iti as a hero, and the rest of the rabble with kid gloves?

I'm inclined to agree with Scott's conclusion, that there's a few people who need to front up:

Go on, it's time for Keith Locke to express his view, as a self proclaimed peace campaigner now that evidence is out. It is time for the Maori Party to decide what it believes in - do you oppose political violence? Do you oppose murder? Do you oppose mass vandalism to destroy the economy? Do you oppose violent evictions of farmers from their private property? Or is your support for peace about as skin deep as your support for freedom? At least Maia inadvertently may be quite true in her post, as a friend of the fascist left.

Oh, and when you see the hikoi supporting those who support terrorism, you might tell them what you think of them. Methinks those on the hikoi might go home and reflect on who their friends are.

UPDATE 3: Lindsay Perigo praises the Dom for growing a pair:

"The Dominion Post's decision to take the 'publish and be damned' approach I yesterday urged on TV3 toward the evidence on which the police anti-terror raids were based is vindicated by the evidence thus revealed," says SOLO Principal Lindsay Perigo. "So are the raids themselves. And TV3 are exposed yet again as the abject fellow-travellers of those whom I have so rightly been calling the 'wannabe terrorists.'

Read the whole press release here.