Category: Crime

Posted on

A presidential crypto pump-and-dump.

This may be rhetorical but here the question goes: did any of you invest in the $Libra memecoin endorsed and backed by Argentine president and darling of the global Right Javier Milei (who admitted to being paid a fee for his promotion of the token)? You know, the one that soared above $4 billion in worth after his Friday night announcement and then collapsed entirely within 24 hours after the original memecoin sponsors (3-4 in number on a cryptocurrency web site) cashed in their stake, leaving dozens of investors with unsecured million dollar losses in what was basically a crypto Ponzi scheme? Hmm.

When confronted Milei said that investment is about risk and people should have gauged the level of risk exposure that they could sustain. He would not say what his fee was or whether he was part of the original memecoin sponsor group (others in the know suggest that he was). He disavowed any responsibility for pumping up investor interest on Fridaay night via social media (you can imagine whose platform was used) before the token was dumped by the sponsors, in what is known in the crypto world as a rug-pull.

In his defence some have pointed to the fact that memecoins are like figurines or troll dolls: they have no intrinsic value and are purchased just for fun. But Milei pushed $Libra as a genuine investment, one that could presumably help small and medium sized Argentine businesses by allowing them to raise funds at low investment costs (the buy-in of $Libra started at USD$.1.00). Less than 12 hours later he deleted his original post on social media.

The fact that the sitting Argentine president was promoting a crypto currency of any sort–or any other financial asset or scheme–seems dodgy at the very least. That he was promoting a rug-pull pump-and-dump as a legitimate investment opportunity is Trump-level criminally audacious.

But maybe that was the play all along? Phrased differently and to pervert an honorable saying, the NZ Special Air Services (SAS) have as a motto “he who dares, wins.” Perhaps Trump, Musk and Miley have their own version of that. Does it not occur to anyone that the moral character of all of these people playing on the public trust is the same–that they are a kinship of immoral miscreant sociopaths? In NZ, is not David Seymour not the same?

Milei îs now being investigated for financial crimes and is facing the possibility of impeachment (juicio politico) over the scheme. But this is Argentina we are talking about so it is anyone’s guess how justice will be served.

When he said that he was going to take a chainsaw to public finances and remove “the caste” from politics perhaps he meant something a bit different than cleaning up the public sector under conditions of austerity. Maybe he just meant that the nature of official mendacity and corruption, and the beneficiaries of it, would simply change with him in office, not that it would go away entirely. I tend to believe, having been raised and socialized in that country, that the latter is the case.

You can read up on the scam details here.

Posted on

On the DOGE data sweep.

Among the many other problems associated with Musk/DOGE sending a fleet of teenage and twenty-something cultists to remove, copy and appropriate federal records like social security, medicaid and other supposedly protected data is the fact that the youngsters doing the data-removal, copying and security protocol and filter code over-writing have not been properly security vetted and have at best been temporarily deputised into public service to do the retrieval tasks. They are loyal to Musk first, second and third and MAGA/Trump fourth. They are not loyal to the US public whose data they have now appropriated. This means that all that data collected is potentially being compromised or at risk of wider exposure and can even be data-mined, gifted or sold off to third parties for purposes other than public sector auditing or transparency.

That is pretty mind-boggling. As someone who held a S/TS/SCI clearance before leaving the US for a better life overseas, I had to undergo two polygraph and background checks conducted by the Defence Intelligence Agency before being granted the clearances, and upon leaving the security community I was placed under a 20 year gag order on what I had seen/done, with any material that I wanted to use after the 20 year gag window period ended subject to DoD censoring and editing (should I have decided to write or speak about topics that included using classified materials). I say this because I handled material that was just pertinent to my official duties, not wide swathes of data about everything under the sun, so the lack of security vetting of Musk’s minions is, again, astonishingly wrong.

This has the potential to end very badly, not just for the US government or what will be left of it after this reckless DOGE wrecking ball is done with it, but for the millions of people whose data can now be manipulated and used for untoward ends. We must remember that Musk is a dishonest and unscrupulous person, his cult minions and other “techbros” subscribe to variant of an anti-democratic and Social Darwinistic ideology known as “neoreactionism,” and MAGA acolytes like Stephen Miller, Pete Hegseth, Tulsi Gabbard, Pam Biondi and the authors of Project 2025 now installed in the corridors of power are all too happy to use any means to pursue the Trump/Musk agenda. Since all of these people are disreputable curs, none can be trusted to prevent misuse of personal confidential data for revenge, profit or other non-accountable purposes.

The questions then become: who benefits from the data-grabbing move? The GOP? Putin? The techbro oligarchy? What is the end game?

Whatever it is, it is a disaster in the making.

Posted on

About boot camps.

I am not a criminologist or organisational sociologist, so I cannot offer a data-driven opinion on the effectiveness of military-syle so-called ‘boot camps” when it comes to rehabilitating juvenile delinquents and youth offenders. They are popular in the US and other cultures where a premium is placed on using institutionalised discipline and punishment in order to enforce compliance with social norms, even at an early age (needless to say, Michel Foucault has much to say on this subject-he has a book on the subject–so I shall refer readers to his work). Now they have been resurrected in NZ by the ruling coalition, with the first ten inmates–all considered to be “serious youth offenders” convicted of at least two major crimes–scheduled to begin their 12 month rehabilitation trial starting early next week. It will be interesting to see how that works out for them.

I must admit to being unfamiliar with the specifics of the program that is about to be trialed, so am happy to be educated about it. I should also note that the NZDF declined to participate in the program, so whatever it is modelled on may not reflect current NZDF “boot camp” practices. Perhaps it is modeled on foreign juvenile delinquent “boot camp” programs and/or staffed by ex-NZDF or NZ police or a private security company that has expertise in such matters. Again, I am all ears on the who/what/how of the project (since it is just a trial according to the government). But for the moment and whatever the relative merits, I find the whole concept of using boot camps as models for rehabilitating miscreants somewhat perplexing.

Allow me to explain why.

“Boot camp” is a euphemism for military basic training. In basic training, which lasts approximately six weeks in most countries, followed by assignment to other military units, civilian recruits are isolated from civil society and psychologically “broken down” in order to install in them new military values and technical skills. The emphasis is reducing the individual’s notion of “self” and subordinating it to the notion of “service” via the harsh inculcation of rote obedience to authority, reflexive adherence to orders and submission of the ego to the collective good of a larger whole that is united by its common training in the skills of armed combat, i.e., the military unit. The purpose of this is to turn former civilians, with all of their notions of individuality, community and the fluid relationship between them, into soldiers, that is, a cohesive group of anonymous members of a larger hierarchical entity (the armed forces) dedicated via specialised training and political purpose to destroying designated enemies of the State.

Put bluntly, boot camps turn civilian recruits into sociopathic killing machines aimed at State-designated enemies in which their psychological reorientation and education in the techniques and instruments of organised murder serve the interests of the State and the society from which they came and which the State purports to defend. Loyalty is to the in-group above all else (hence the saying that soldiers fight for each other and have “espirit d’corps”), and their collective murderous intent is fixated on designated ‘others” by the powers that be, as expressed by the military chain of command.

One might say that if anything basic training boot camps are exercises in learning the ultimate form of mass anti-social behaviour (collective violence), but with organised features and specific targets. They are anything but rehabilitative in orientation.They simply replace the “looseness” of civilian life with the discipline and technical skills required to kill and be killed in battle.

In fact, when soldiers near the end of the service careers they are put through re-orientation programs designed to prepare them for the return to civilian life. These involve de-programming soldiers of most of what was learned in basic training boot camps and re-programming them with a more social-oriented ethos conducive to their better reintegration into civil society. In other words, they are taught to unlearn the sociopathic traits learned in boot camps in order to become contributing members of society.

It therefore strikes me as odd that anyone would think that it is a good idea to give youth offenders boot camp-style training. It seems that–not to be frivolous about the issue–it would only make them better (more disciplined, organised and prepared) criminals down the road. On the other hand, if the emphasis is on the non-sociopathic aspects of basic training–service to a higher good, sense of shared community, adherence to universal norms and values, subsuming of self to society, etc.–then perhaps the “tough love” approach might work, especially if it emphasises the re-integration aspects of military end of service separation programs.

But if the emphasis is on scary drill sergeants barking orders and enforcing physical compliance, 5AM wake-up calls and 8PM lights out rules, cold showers, detention mandates, forced schooling routines, hard physical exercise and endless drills and chores interrupted by short meal breaks, then it seems that is as much about punishment as it is about discipline and consequently not conducive to the individual’s comfortable transition into being a contributing member of the community (unless one believes that punishment itself is a form of rehabilitation. That appears to be the view of those responsible for the abuse in care atrocities recently detailed in a Royal Commission Report on the treatment of minors under state care in postwar NZ. Let’s just say that when it came to rehabilitation and social reintegration of the abused children, the results were not positive, so the irony of introducing the boot camp scheme shortly after the Royal Commission’s Report should not be lost on anyone).

In any event, the emphasis on military basic training as a model for young criminal rehabilitation seems suspect given the nature of military basic training. Perhaps the emphasis should be on offering a strong hand that helps and a firm shoulder on which to lean rather than on using the boot.

Posted on

Still the 5 Eyes Achilles Heel?

The National Cyber Security Centre (NZSC), a unit in the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) dedicated to cyber-security, has released a Review of its response to the 2021 email hacking of NZ members of the Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China (IPAC, a global organization of parliamentarians) and Professor Anne-Marie Brady, the well known China expert and critic. A number of problems were identified, both operational and (yet again) with regard to accountability and transparency, so I thought I would briefly summarise them.

The Review states that too much focus was placed by the NCSC on “technical” solutions to the email phishing probes instead of considering the “wider” context in which the hacking occurred. In layman’s terms that is akin to saying that the NCSC got busy plugging holes in the parliamentary server firewalls after breaches were detected without considering who was being targeted and what purpose the hacking may have served. This is remarkable because the hacking came from ATP-31, a unit linked to PRC military intelligence well known for having engaged in that sort of activity previously, in NZ and elsewhere. Moreover, the NCSC had to be alerted by a foreign partner that the email phishing efforts were part of a progressive hacking strategy whereby the ultimate target was not the emails of MPs but of the IP addresses that were being used by those MPs. In fact, the NCSC currently does not have procedures for how to respond to reports that foreign, including state-sponsored, actors are targeting New Zealanders. The NCSC found out about the parliamentary email servers hacking from Parliamentary Services in the first instance, and then from foreign partner intelligence that was passed on to it by the NZSIS.

This is of concern for several reasons, not the least of which is that it took a foreign 5 Eyes partner to alert the NCSC to something that it should have been well aware of itself (progressive hacking), and because the NCSC initially assumed, for whatever reason, that the phishing was done by ordinary criminals rather than foreign intelligence units. It also assumed that MPs were already engaged in providing their own security, even after Parliamentary Services flagged potential breaches of its email servers to the NCSC. In fact MPs were apparently told more by Parliamentary Services than the NCSC about their being targeted (albeit after the fact), and the University of Canterbury, Professor Brady’s employer, apparently was never contacted about potential security breaches of their servers.

Since MPs may have sent and received emails from multiple IP addresses attached to their official and personal devices, the security breach implications of the email hacks could be considerable given the potential cross-over between personal and official MP communications. Put bluntly, it is incredible that a dedicated cyber-security unit that is an integral part of the GCSB and through it the Anglophone 5 Eyes signals/technical intelligence network did not consider the membership of the targeted MPs in IPAC and that the phishing occurred at the same time that Professor Brady’s emails were targeted (Brady is known to have close contacts with IPAC). This is basic 1+1 contextual stuff when it comes to operational security in cyberspace, so one gets the sense that the NCSC is made up of computer nerds who have little training in geopolitics, foreign policy, international relations or how the world works outside of WAN and LAN (hint: these are basic computer terms). They simply approached the hacking attacks as if they were plugging a leaking dike rather than consider what may be prompting the leaks and red-flagging them accordingly.

The advice given by the Review was for the NCSC to engage more with the targeted individuals in real time, who only found out about their exposure long after the fact. Moreover, the Minister of Intelligence and Security was not briefed on these intrusions, much like the targeted MPs and Professor Brady were not. Again, this defies the notion of democratic oversight, transparency and accountability within NZ intelligence agencies. Worse yet, it follows on the heels of revelations that for a few years a decade ago the GCSB hosted a foreign partner “asset,” presumably a signals or technical intelligence collection platform, at GCSB headquarters in Wellington without the knowledge of the then Minister or even the GCSB Director-General. Operational control of that platform, including specific taskings and targets, were done by the foreign partner. Imagine if one of the taskings was to geotrack a foreign human target in order to eliminate that target. If word was leaked about GCSB’s hosting of the tracking platform, it might cause some diplomatic tensions for NZ. At a minimum it is a violation of both NZ’s sovereignty as well as basic notions of intelligence agency accountability in a democracy. It seems that, almost a decade later, the much vaunted reforms designed to increase intelligence community accountability embedded the 2017 Security and Intelligence Act had not filtered down to the NCSC dike-plugging level.

This is a very bad look for the GCSB, both in the eyes of its domestic clients as well as those of its 5 Eyes partners. NZ already had a reputation for being the “Achilles heel” or “weak link” of the 5 Eyes network due to its lax security protocols and counter-intelligence capabilities. This may only confirm that belief in spite fo significant efforts to upgrade GCSB capabilities and toughen up its defences, including in cyberspace. And, judging from the reactions of the targeted MPs and Professor Brady, domestic clients of the NCSC, who are both private and public in nature, may not feel too reassured by the Review and its recommendations.

It is known that the GCSB is made up of an assortment of engineers, translators and computing specialists. It has a remit that includes domestic as well as foreign signals and technical gathering and analysis, the former operating under the framework of NZ law under the 2017 Act (most often in a partnership with a domestic security agency).This brings up a question of note. If the staff are all of a “technical” persuasion as described above, then it follows that they simply adhere to directives from their managers and foreign partners, collect and assess signals and technical intelligence data as directed by others, and do not have an in-house capacity to provide geopolitical context to the data being analyzed. It is like plugging leaks without knowing about the hydraulics causing them.

In that light it just might do good to incorporate a few foreign policy and comparative political analysts into the GCSB/NCSC mix given that most of NZ’s threat environment is not only “intermestic” (domestic<–>international) but “glocal” (global and local) as well as hybrid (involving state and non-state actors) in nature. Threats are multidimensional and complex, so after the fact “plugging” solutions are temporary at best.

Given their diversity, complexity and sophistication, there are no “technical” solutions that can counter contemporary threats alone. Factoring in the broader context in which specific threats materialise will require broadening the knowledge base of those charged with defending against them or at a minimum better coordinating with other elements in the NZ intelligence community in order to get a better look at the bigger picture involved in NZ’s threat environment.

The NCSC in-house Review is silent on that.

Posted on

Setting things straight.

Seeing that, in order to discredit the figures and achieve moral superiority while attempting to deflect attention away from the military assault on Rafa, Israel supporters in NZ have seized on reports that casualty numbers in Gaza may be inflated by Hamas (even if corroborated by international agencies), I thought I would recap the truth behind this spin game.

On October 7 Hamas fighters attacked Southern Israel from the Gaza Strip. They were initially said to have killed more than 1500 people (mostly civilians), but after scrutiny that figure was reduced to below 1200 (including military personnel). At least some of the deaths attributed to Hamas were later found to be the result of friendly fire from responding Israeli (IDF) forces. Israeli sources claimed that babies were cooked in microwaves, women were sexually tortured and mutilated and that mass rapes were carried out, but that has not been independently substantiated. Scores of hostages (closest reliable count is 250) were supposedly taken back into Gaza, presumably to serve as human leverage in subsequent negotiations with Israel. A few have been released but many of those have died, not just at Hamas’s hands but as a result of IDF assaults on the places that they were being held captive.

Here are some facts. The killing of IDF soldiers by Hamas is not a crime, as it can be classified as the product of clashes between an armed resistance to an illegal occupying force on Palestinian land (one look at the 1947, 1967, 1973 and recent maps of Palestine/Israel demonstrates the steady annexation of Palestinian land regardless of the formal agreements in place). In other. words, as ugly as that sounds, in a fight with an armed opponent IDF soldiers were fair game.

What is a war crime is if Hamas tortured, raped or murdered soldiers after they surrendered. But in order to prosecute the Hamas individuals or units involved would require international recognition of Hamas as a legitimate fighting force acting on behalf of a recognised State or political community. Although Hamas has a political wing that is related to but separate from the armed wing and has been the de facto government of Gaza since its victory in the 2006 Palestinian elections, leading to the 2007 Hamas-Fatah war that resulted in Hamas gaining control of Gaza while Fatah and other Palestinian Authority factions retreated to the West Bank, the International community (read: the West) does not recognise it as a State or government and instead has designated it a terrorist entity because of the irregular warfare operations, including terrorist attacks, conducted by its armed wing. That may be convenient for Israel and its Western supporters, but it makes it more difficult to hold Hamas accountable for the actions of its members, armed and unarmed (because not all Palestinians, or Hamas supporters for that matter, are fighters). So, in spite of the obvious fact that Hamas was a governing entity in Gaza at the time the war started, charging Hamas fighters with war crimes is difficult because they are not seen as representative of any duly constituted political organisation. They are just terrorists, and if one is to believe the Israel apologists, so are the people they are ostensibly fighting for.

Here I must pause for a brief aside about non-recognition. There is irony in non-recognition of Hamas as a legitimate representative of at least some Palestine people. Hamas exists as a political movement with an ideology (nationalist-religious in this case), as well as a physical presence that extends beyond its armed wing. It will not go away just because it is not recognised abroad, is not liked by many, or if its armed cadres are decimated. And it holds equal if not more legitimacy than the Palestinian Authority of which Fatah is part, which is a corrupt gerontocracy that serves as a laptop of the Israelis in the West Bank. Moreover, Israel itself is not like in many quarters and is not recognised by a number of Muslim-majority States, but it certainly exists and is not going anywhere no matter what other’s may wish or think. In addition, the State of Israel was created in part due to the “terrorist” operations of the likes of the Irgun (which was designated as a terrorist organization by the British), so not recognising Hamas because of its irregular warfare activities in the contemporary era is a hypocritical specious reasoning.

The bottom line is this. Non-recognition may be an attempt at de-legitimation and ostracism, but it is more akin to closing ones eyes and putting fingers in one’s ears while shouting “you are not there” to someone you dislike. The reality says otherwise, and in the international arena non-recognition only serves to absolve political actors from assuming full legal responsibility for their actions. Not recognising Hamas as having a legitimate claim when it comes to representing Palestinians is therefore an own-goal (remember, Hamas won the largest plurality in the parliamentary elections of 2006 and would have been required to form a coalition government before Israel, the US and other Western states backed Fatah’s rejection of the results and subsequent armed assault on Hamas in Gaza. This only played into the hands of the hardline Hamas cadres and strengthened their resolve to prevail in the fight against Fatah, which they did. That set up the subsequent chain of events that has led to the current disaster).

In any event, killing, raping and abducting civilians are crimes against humanity even if the actions of the Hamas fighters are not technically classified as war crimes when it comes to their treatment of IDF soldiers. Remember that it is not the method or instrument of violence that defines a war crime or a crime against humanity. Nor is it the number of victims. Instead, it is who commits atrocities (war crimes are committed by military forces) and who is targeted. Regardless of who the material authors may be, for there to be war crimes or crimes against humanity, the victims must be defenceless. In the case of Israelis attacked by Hamas on October 7, most but not all of them were, so the scale of the atrocities was significant and cannot be downplayed.

In response, Israel unleashed a scorched earth collective punishment approach to the residents of Gaza, and has meted out come collateral punishment to Palestinians in the West Bank as well. Some see the IDF military campaign in Gaza as genocidal in intent–and it may well be–but at a minimum it is ethnic cleansing in effect: entire swathes of Gaza have been cleansed of their inhabitants. The NZ apologists for the IDF approach want to make it seem that 15,000 or 20,000 Palestinian dead is significantly different than 30,000 or 40,000 dead claimed by Hamas (never mind the wounded and maimed or those now enduring mass starvation due to Israeli (including Jewish settlers!)) interference with aid convoys. But at the same time they use the malleable 1200+/- Israeli body count to argue that the IDF response is proportionate to the October 7 attacks. They also clamour for the release of the Israeli hostages but are silent about the thousands of Palestinians detained by Israel since October 7. It seems that Israel also understands the hostage-taking-as-leverage game. Perversely, for the Israel supporters scale and scope of dehumanisation only matters when the numbers favour a particular victimisation narrative. In other words, 1200 Israeli dead is comparable with 20,00 rather than 40,000 Palestinian dead, so moral equivalence applies. That is not a winning argument.

That is in large part due to the fact that collective punishment is illegal under international law and classified as a war crime, most specifically Convention 4, Article 33 of the Geneva Convention. The same convention, article 34, notes that the taking of hostages is prohibited, even if it does not specify the means by which hostages are taken by belligerents (presumably the 3,000 or so Palestinians held in “administrative detention” without charge by the Israelis since October 7 would fit into this category regardless of the institutional/legal facade used to cloak their real status). So although only Israel is guilty of violating the convention when it comes to collective punishment, both sides are in violation of the Geneva Conventions when it comes to hostage taking.

That brings up the truth of the matter. Both Hamas and the IDF have committed war crimes and/or crimes against humanity. Both have committed serious breaches of international law. Fiddling with and sniping about numbers do not alter this fact. Moral relativism does not alter this fact. Trying to comparatively scale and scope the atrocities does not alter this fact. No amount of spin alters this fact.

Most of all, both Israel and Hamas apologists cannot escape this fact.

Posted on

Again, hate crimes are not necessarily terrorism.

Having written, taught and worked for government agencies on issues involving unconventional warfare and terrorism for 30-odd years, two things irritate me the most when the subject is discussed in public. The first is the Johnny-come-lately commentators who have zero practical or academic experiences with the subject but who, in an effort get their “brand” out in the public eye will pontificate ad nauseum about things that they do not know about. In NZ this an especially acute problem because people with real knowledge of what terrorism is and is not are few and far between, so the “look at me” opinionators are way too prominent in discussions of acts of mass violence.

The second source of irritation is the abuse of the words “terrorist” and “terrorism” in order to generate headlines, clickbait or to pursue other agendas. Rightwing corporate and social media are full of this egregious mis-application of a very specific concept to any number violent incidents carried about by by a variety of perpetrators. The latest example of this is the coverage of the stabbings in Sydney this past week.

I wrote a series of social media posts clarifying my objection to the coverage and have aggregated and edited them here. I have also linked to a couple of previous essays on the subject in order to give recent readers of KP some idea of the basis for my concerns about this particular type of conceptual stretching.

Let’s begin with the bad news. Since 9/11 the words “terrorist” and “terrorism” have been rendered meaningless. Terrorism has a target (victims), subject (wider audiences) and object (to bend the audiences to the terrorist will, say, by altering government policy). The three aspects are not one and the same. If these three aspects or conditions do not apply to a specific violent incident, then it might be a hate crime inspired by bigotry or other form of animus (say, homophobia, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism), (mass) murder due to mental impairment, or criminal murder (e.g. mob hit, domestic violence or in a bar brawl). None of these fatal incidents are terrorism even if victims are terrified in the moment. For it to be terrorism there has to be an audience beyond the victims, and the object is not just the act of violence itself.

Terrorism is about more than the terror inflicted on targets. It is about ulterior motive/intent, the wider audience and specific messaging, which is collective in focus, not personal. Labelling every act of public violence as terroristic confuses the issue and allows for bad-minded or deliberately hateful manipulations of coverage to suit ideological agendas. Witness the initial coverage and reaction to the Bondi mall attack. It was a case of a white male with violent schizophrenia acting out of incel hate, but was immediately deemed a terrorist attack. That allowed racists to jump on the Islamophobic bandwagon and claim the attacks was done by a jihadist (because he had a beard!), which in turn brought out calls for revenge, deportations of Muslims, cultural stereotyping and other types of violent trolling. The real cause was lost in the xenophobic, bigoted din.

The attack on the bishop at a Sydney church was motivated by religious animosity, but the attacker’s target, subject and object were the same, a preacher who disparages other religions and their leaders. Motive did not extend beyond that. That is a hate crime, not terrorism. But it does not stop malignant narcissistic charlatans like Brain Tamaki from using it to urge for the mass deportation of Muslims from NZ, something that has reverberated around the NZ rightwing echo chamber.

Unfortunately, NZ has bad form when it comes to misidentifying violent crimes and perpetrators as “terrorists”. Here is a post that I wrote after the supermarket stabbing in New Lynn in 2021.

And yet, this time around NZ media outlets again initially jumped on the terrorism bandwagon, only to back off once the Australian authorities identified the Bondi attacker as someone with a history of mental illness but who was allowed to circulate in public. That is a public security failure, not anything related to terrorism.. Even so, both the Australian police and NZ media continue to refer to the church attack as terrorism, which shows that even security experts as well as media talking heads do not have their conceptual ducks in a row when it comes to this type of violence. Perhaps they know but choose not to do so because, well…

I also wrote an academic article a while back about how a specific type of terrorism–state terrorism–can be used to reinforce a particular social and economic project. It is long but you can find it here. I link to it here because terrorism not only has many varieties, but it also has ulterior motives. Neither incident in Sydney this past week meet that criteria.

This may seem tedious and repetitive, but so long as the concept of terrorism is stretched out of all context and meaning, I will have to be pedantic about its real significance and permutations.

Posted on

Two offenders, different treatments.

See if you can spot the difference.

An Iranian born female MP from a progressive party is accused of serial shoplifting. Her name is leaked to the media, which goes into a pack frenzy even before the Police launch an investigation. She resigns from parliament, declines to seek name suppression (what was the point?) and eventually pleads guilty to several charges of non-violent property crime involving goods worth less than $9,000 (which is a cut-off standard for sentencing purposes). Her court appearance is the lead story in most media even though there are a couple of major wars and several famines occurring, to say nothing of a number of developments in NZ politics and society that are a bit more significant than the travails of a troubled individual. She and her disgrace are headline news in NZ.

On the other hand there is a male Pakeha “senior political figure” in a rightwing party who during the course of a fraud investigation had someone come forth accusing him of serial sexual offending. Eventually the number of charges grew to nine involving at least two victims. He resigned his senior party position once the fraud investigation heated up, and then he was charged with the sex offences. The offending is historical and related to a well known volunteer service organization in which he held senior leadership roles and was involved with young people in a mentoring role. The judge assigned to the case granted him and his party name suppression in 2023 because, among other things, disclosure of their identities might have a negative impact on his party’s chances in the 2023 election. The judge ordered that the suppression order be reviewed after the election.

The election happened six months ago. No review of the suppression order has been undertaken. The trial of this person has been put off until August 2024. As far as I can tell (am happy to be proven wrong), the media have done nothing to find out why his name suppression continues. The Leader of his party has been asked directly about the case and answers by talking about contempt of court. Worst yet, the media has not asked questions as to why a judge would introduce explicitly political criteria into a decision to grant name suppression in light of the seriousness of the charges, which involve physical sexual assaults on minors. During the build up to an election.

I asked these questions in a series of social media posts. I respected the name suppression order but spoke about the background of the case. Although I received many positive responses I also received a number of veiled threats that I was violating the suppression order by alluding to this man, even obliquely. That is besides the fact that his offending is an open secret in the volunteer circles in which he was a prominent figure, his party affiliation and former role is common knowledge in political circles, and his name has been disclosed in a number of social media outlets and even mentioned in parliament (which even if done under parliamentary privilege and struck from the written record, lives on in the video archive of the debates at the time of his mention). I am told by these critics that it does not matter if others have previously spoken of him in direct terms and that I am liable for up to six months in jail for my “criminal offending” (exact words). If so, I am going to have to get in the back of a long que of criminal offenders and the taxpayers are gong to have to fork out a fair amount of public money having the Crown prosecute us. Selective prosecution, say of me, would only worsen the situation when it comes to the appearance of (at a minimum) Crown bias and (at worst) judicial integrity and neutrality.

I suspect that the threats of legal retribution are coming from within this fellow’s political party. The concern is more about protecting him and the Party rather than seeking justice for his alleged victims or adhering to judicial standards about protecting victims and presumptions of innocence. Plus, the threats have a sort of finger-in-the-dike quality to them, as there will be a flood of coverage once the legal circus hits the road. That is, assuming that things ever get to trial and some sort of pre-trial agreement in not reached (which I think is possible at this point. The trouble with any such deal is that it will likely include some form of permanent name suppression in exchange for a guilty plea to some of the charges).

However things end up, there remains a deeply troubling aspect to this study in contrasts. The first is the media’s behaviour. It involves the hounding the former MP-turned private citizen on the one hand, and the ignoring of the other case almost entirely. This follows a media pattern of going after female progressive politicians for their indiscretions while largely soft-peddling similar behaviour from male politicians. Moreover, it is not as if name suppression prevents intrepid reporters from digging into the larger story of the male senior political figure in more depth, even if as background to the coverage of the trial when it happens (there is plenty of coverage from 2021 to last year). The media double-standard is stark: young female progressive gets the full “cameras in the face and shouted questions” treatment, whereas when it comes to this alleged Pakeha male serial sexual predator, there are nothing but crickets.

Even so, the worst part of this sorry dichotomy is the use by a judge in a criminal case of overtly political criteria as a factor in granting name suppression for a defendant–specifically the possible impact on a political party’s election chances if one of its senior member’s name is released before the election after being charged with sex offences. In my view political considerations simply should not be a criteria for name suppression, ever, and even more so if it involves a senior leader of a party about to contest a national election. That the ruling went unchallenged (as far as I know) and that the media did not question the rationale behind it is a disgrace. It brings the neutrality and/or judgement of that judge into question and opens the door to doubts about equal standards of justice in NZ. Even the appearance of anything other than impartiality and neutrality is a stain on NZ’s judicial good name, and this decision does not look good.

I understand that name suppression orders are designed to protect victims as well as the reputations and livelihoods of people accused of crimes (the sex charge defendant’s name was also suppressed because it was accepted by the court that he could not find a job if his name were revealed and he could therefore lose his house). But in this case the victims are now adults, at least some have come forward already, the defendant has been identified in a fraud investigation involving that voluntary organisation as well as in parliament, multiple face-blurred photos of him have been published that are no impediment to identifying him (especially the ones in which he appears more than once in a distinctive shirt at the fraud and sex charge hearings), and the elections are over and done with (his party did well in them and is now part of government). None of what I have said here or in other fora adds any new light on his identity. It is out there for those who are interested in finding out.

What I have done in this and the other posts is pose an open question about media double standards and judicial neutrality in his case. As I said elsewhere, something smells, and it is not the aroma of purloined boutique shop designer brand merchandise.

Posted on

Article Link. “South America’s Strategic Paradox” in MINGA.

The Latin American multidisciplinary journal MINGA just published my article on “South America’s Strategic Paradox.” I was surprised that they wanted to do so because they have a very clear left-leaning orientation and my article was pretty much a straight-forward geopolitical analysis. This was the article that an editor of the New Zealand International Review felt was too broad in scope to publish. Go figure. Judge for yourself (the article is in English, with translation pending).

Posted on

Social Media Link: 36th Parallel on South America’s “Strategic Paradox.”

I was asked to write a commissioned essay for a special issue on Latin America of a NZ international affairs magazine. I was told by the editor I could write on a specific subject of my choice. I decided to write about what I see as South America’s “Strategic Paradox:” increased overall (macroeconomic) regional prosperity largely brought about by the growth in trade with the PRC (rather than with the US or EU) did not translate into increased domestic social equality, security and stability (as most Western developmental economists and sociologists would believe). Instead, increasing income inequalities caused by limited domestic job growth, few wage improvements and negligible distribution of tax revenues from the expanding import-export sector exacerbated social tensions, leading to more domestic insecurity. To this is added an assortment of pathologies such as public and private sector corruption and negative collaterals like environmental degradation in the emerging primary goods sector (such as in lithium extraction). All of this is set against the backdrop of increasing US hostility to the PRC presence in the region, which it sees as a growing security threat that must be countered.

The result is that South America may be more prosperous than ever in aggregate terms (say, GDP per capita), but it is not more peaceful, stable or secure as a result. My conclusion is that with a few notable exceptions it is a lack of good corporate and public governance that explains the paradox. Meanwhile the great power rivalry in the region has taken on a pernicious dynamic of its own that if left unmitigated will only add fuel to the fire.

Unfortunately, the editor, who is not a political scientist or international relations specialist (she says that she specialises in propaganda and authoritarianism, although from her limited bibliography she shows little knowledge of the extensive literature on each!) decided that the essay was too generalised and lacking in data to be publishable as is (after asking me to limit the essay to 3500 words and write it for a general, not specialist audience). She challenged my mention of the ongoing use of the Monroe Doctrine by US security officials, even though I provided citations for both data and comments when pertinent (15 in all, including Congressional testimony from US military officials and data from the Economic Commission Latin America (ECLA)). I got the distinct impression that she wanted a puff piece, got a critical analysis instead, and decided to condescendingly ask for unreasonable revisions in order to reject the piece without seriously reading it. In other words, she did not like it, but not because of its lack of scholarship but because it did meet her expected editorial slant. In fact. from her tone it appears that she had no idea who I am before she commissioned the essay and then assumed that I am some ignoramus when it comes to discussing South American politics, geopolitics and social dynamics. Y bueno, que le vas a hacer?

The good part of this story is that since I am not paid for the work, am not an academic who needs it on my c.v. for promotion purposes, and have a couple of social media platforms on which to publish and disseminate it without editorial interference from uninformed non-specialists, I told her that I would not do as told, would not do the demanded revisions and instead would publish the piece elsewhere.

KP is one such elsewhere: https://36th-parallel.com/2024/01/05/south-americas-strategic-paradox/

Tell me what you think about it.