3 years on from White Supremacist Terrorist Atrocity – what have we learned?

ByMartyn Bradbury

It is 3 years to the day when we were shaken from our complacency.

Shocked from the belief that such malevolence couldn’t burrow into our soul.

Repulsed by the mutation of thought that could justify such cruelty and vile spite.

March 15th, 2019 is etched in our history with pain and untold suffering.

Muslims going about their normal lives in Christchurch were attacked by a white supremacist Australian who had been radicalised online by a hatred against Islam.

I remember seeing the appalling violence appear on my Facebook feed.

I didn’t understand what I was watching.

At first glance I thought it was a video game or a movie trailer until I focused.

I remember recoiling in horror at what I was seeing.

I immediately started searching online and found his manifesto.

It was a mix of mutated madness and unyielding hatred.

In the 3 years since his disgusting act of violence we have struggled to comprehend what happened.

The Government whitewashed the entire Intelligence apparatus of any responsibility while pretending hate speech laws were a solution.

This is the list of NZ security apparatus, many acronyms you’ve never heard of, who are supposed to keep us safe with mass surveillance powers from this very type of terrorism…

  • The SIS (Secret Intelligence Services)
  • The GCSB (Government Communications Security Bureau)
  • The NSG (National Security Group)
  • The Police Intelligence Unit
  • The CNSN (Cabinet National Security Committee)
  • The ODESC (Officials’ Committee for Domestic and External Security Coordination)
  • The SIB (Security and Intelligence Board)
  • The CTCC (Counter-Terrorism Coordinating Committee)
  • The NICC ( National Intelligence Coordination Committee)
  • The IAD (Intelligence and Assessments Directorate)
  • The NRU (National Risk Unit)
  • The NSPD (National Security Policy Directorate)

…they collectively cost us in excess of $100million per year, and when it comes to spying on Muslims, Nicky Hager, Me, Greenpeace, Māori protesting oil drilling, environmentalists and the MANA Party, oh the State breaches our rights all the fucking time without blinking, but a white supremacist terrorist who used white supremacy keywords online, with complaints from the Muslim Community itself and complaints from other gun owners,oh no, apparently our entire Intelligence Apparatus failed and didn’t have any idea whatsoever.

You can see why they’ve slapped a 30year secrecy clause on everything.

These Departments are supposed to be the ones who are asking ‘what if’, they are supposed to be the ones with the imagination to see where the next threat is coming from and they have enormous mass surveillance powers and resourcing to do this.

And yet, nothing.

What is most egregious is that instead of flaying these fucking Departments raw for this cascade failure, the Labour Government are bewilderingly allowing their failure to be quietly eclipsed by this bullshit ‘solution’ by implementing blasphemy and heresy laws and gender identity hate speech powers???

What has protecting religion and gender identity hate speech laws got to do with the massive intelligence apparatus utterly failing?

The solutions beyond the hate speech law are all pretty underwhelming.

• Placing Minister Andrew Little in charge of co-ordinating the Government’s response to the report and implementation of its recommendations

This was a bureaucratic failure of the entire Intelligence Bureaucracy and Labour’s solution is more Bureaucracy?

• Establishing a Ministry for Ethnic Communities to support the work programme on social cohesion

Sure, but the Muslim Community had already complained about a serious rise in street violence, so how will a new Ministry fix that?

• Establishing a new agency within police called Te Raranga, The Weave which will respond to alleged hate crimes

Sure. That’s fine.

• Extending the Safer Communities Fund so communities at risk of hate crime can upgrade their security arrangements

Great.

• Creating and Ethnic Communities Graduate Programme in the public service

Good idea.

• Establishing a National Centre of Excellence to bring together academia, civil society and government to research radicalisation and violent extremism and social cohesion in New Zealand

Lovely.

• Amending the Terrorism Suppression Act to strengthen counter-terrorism legislation

Hmmm. What? What does that entail exactly?

• Creating an early intervention programme to develop wrap-around support for individuals who show early signs of radicalisation. This will be led by police

Wonderful.

But none of that answers the core issue, how did our entire Intelligence services miss this and why?

Forcing through Religious and gender hate speech laws as a response to such a terminal cascade failure of security is too Nu Zilind for words.

This tragedy deserved more than virtue signalling.

The most insightful explanation as to what actually happened was quietly released just before Christmas in 2020 when no one was noticing…

Spy partners’ focus dictated lack of Far Right intelligence, GCSB boss says

International priorities dictated a gaping hole in the collection of far-right intelligence reports, according to the lead communications spy agency.

The Royal Commission of inquiry heard that the Government Security Communications Bureau got 7526 intelligence reports about terrorism and violent fanaticism in a three-month period in late 2018-19.

But not a single one was about right-wing extremism.

This “was not the result of the GCSB’s own intelligence collection settings”, the bureau’s Director-General Andrew Hampton told RNZ in a statement.

“The intelligence reporting GCSB receives from its international Signals intelligence partners is what those agencies collect themselves based on their own priorities.”

These partners had their own legal mandates, which might also influence what intelligence they collected, Hampton said.

Let me see if I can get this completely straight.

It’s not the GCSB’s fault, that mass surveillance GCSB who gets hundreds of millions to protect us from threats, it’s not their fault that there was a massive failure in intelligence because our overseas partners only provide us with substandard intelligence that is warped by their own bias and legal blind spots?????

That’s the best they’ve come up with?

Look at how this excuse implodes later in the interview…

However, he added: “GCSB shares our intelligence and security priorities with its partners and, since the 15 March, 2019 attacks, has emphasised to them the importance to New Zealand of countering white identity extremism.”

…r-i-g-h-t.

So if the GCSB had told our partners in the first place that we were concerned about white supremacy they would have provided all they had?

See how that still comes back to the GCSB’s lack of ability to see white supremacy as a threat?

We opened ourselves to NSA mass surveillance for intelligence that can’t actually spot a legitimate threat and is so secret no one can evaluate whether or not this excuse is legitimate?

What the hell have we signed ourselves up to?

We know from Snowden that the 5 Eyes enables the NSA unfettered access to everything, Key ratified that and the GCSB received hundreds of millions to upgrade, but when challenged on why the hell they couldn’t spot a basic keyword search threat, suddenly it’s all the big guys feeding us crumbs and it wasn’t us excuses is it?

If we aren’t being protected from legitimate threats, why the hell are we in it?

How come we are less safe?

Let me be ver clear. I am in no way shape or form suggesting we give these clowns MORE powers, oh sweet Christ no, I’m merely demanding they utilise the powers they currently have!

The most dangerous mutations of white supremacy trace their narratives to certain historic events. A basic keyword search of those historic events would have had the terrorist pinging like a warning bell.

The Echelon programme that predates the Snowden revelations had basic keyword search functions, to pretend that isn’t possible now is simply not credible.

The issue here is that their own confirmation bias saw the enemy as Hager, Muslim students, Environmentalists, Māori nationals, German internet entrepreneurs and Unions.

Blaming the inability to think for themselves on biased intelligence from our Spy Lords only demands an answer to why we are beholden to those Spy Lords in the first place if they can’t spot a legitimate threat to us!

This still comes back to a cascade failure throughout the entire NZ Intelligence Apparatus to see white supremacy as a threat.

My fear is that post the Dumb Lives Matter protests where MPs have convinced themselves they survived a January 6th Washington DC attack and where the Middle Class Marxists decried everyone as Nazi Monsters that the over reaction and new Police State being forged quietly in the background will protect us or harm us.

None of that has been answered in the 3 years since that terrible Christchurch day.

 

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28 Comments

  1. “The intelligence reporting GCSB receives from its international Signals intelligence partners is what those agencies collect themselves based on their own priorities.” so sayeth DJ Kitt

    So there’s a direct link between GCSB/SIS etc.and Signals,

    https://app.companiesoffice.govt.nz/companies/app/ui/pages/companies/1593276

    and the WMO (world met office)
    https://www.google.com/search?q=ian+lisk+wmo&rlz=1C5CHFA_enNZ704NZ709&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwinmMnDzsb2AhVQzzgGHemjBzoQ_AUoAnoECAEQBA&biw=1440&bih=733&dpr=2#imgrc=Xk75f3uWVlmL_M

    and hko :https://www.hkonline.com.bd/

    strange ok

  2. In all groups there are those that are frightened of those that are different . We can see this with covid and how it has divided the unity that was in the Maori population and in the population as a whole the have and have not are getting further apart by the day

  3. It’s window dressing – the guts of it is that this jerk was issued with a gun licence within a few weeks of his arrival in the country, without his references being interviewed or his parents contacted, at a time when simple renewals were taking six months or more to process. The licence was issued out of Waikato when he lived in Dunedin. Documentation showed that within 6 weeks of his arrival he had his licence and the cops had approved is request for bulk purchase of ammunition. It stinks of corruption.

    All buried in confidentiality by the Royal Commission. Just when we needed a real investigative journalist, they all look the other way.

    1. Andrew “ It stinks of corruption”. Nah. It stinks of over-worked under-funded coppers. If you think that it was corruption, then say why.

      1. Not corruption, just incompetence. But overworked normally means longer processing times. It was the speed that the murderous bastard was given a licence, when he had not long arrived in NZ, that was hard to fathom. By the standards of the time, he shouldn’t have got that licence at all, let alone so fast.

  4. We have learned that as time goes by we have a less tolerant, less relaxed, nastier citizenry than in earlier times.
    Or maybe we have the same lacks and surpluses but those qualities are far more visible.

    1. The government has increaseed stresses on the NZ people by accepting even welcoming large numbers of investors and others who have put pressure on our systems and replaced NZs opportunities in many fields. People are upset but also annoyed.The migrants may have paid an arm and a leg to get here and are aggrieved that they are so unpopular. They may be filling highly skilled positions or doing valuable work much needed. It is time to start limiting numbers and treating migrants fairly also then citizens, and we could then increase the refugee numbers from countries where often we have fought alongside the USA instigators. Simple, get some balance.

      1. Where do we get more nurses from and doctors? And crop harvesters and truck drivers and workers for hospitality and builders and other tradespeople?
        We keep hearing about shortages for the workforce so is it time to start limiting numbers? But increase the refugee numbers?
        And where does that fit in with putting pressure on our systems and replacing opportunities for NZers in many fields?

  6. Come on Martin the state and it servants server the right.

    How dear you ask it to call out one of it’s own.

    They have left wingers to bash, and bugger up their ability to earn a living you know, you can’t be critical of that. It may impede them in their duty if you point out their failings.

  7. I’ll tell you what we’ve learnt
    That we’re all fucking idiot facebook hashtag warriors that have sourced out our critical thinking to algorithms and manipulative social media
    Slava Ukraini that Jacinda empathetically uttered on national TV is the rallying cry of the Far right movement and the Azov Battallion that Brent Tarrant the mosque murderer shares ideology with and visited in Ukraine. He had the insignia of the Azov Battallion on his sleeve
    That its become the slogan for Ukraine is a disgrrace.It is the slogan of second world war nazi collaborators who perpetrated atrocities and massacres on Jews and Poles

      1. It’s the rallying cry of all those who oppose wars of conquest. And the person who made it so is Vladimir Putin. Got a problem with that take it up with him.

        1. And we’ll just turn a blind eye to the fact the Banderas terrorists massacred jews and poles for ethnic cleansing
          Fuck that

  8. What I have learned is that Jacinda Ardern probably had as much concern for the Muslims killed in Christchurch as John Key did for the dead ‘man-slaughtered’ Pike River miners ,,,,, with both gaining a undeserved bunp in popularity at the time ,,,,,

    Subsequent actions by both showed them to be fake concern trolls…..

    …. Key by allowing money to buy your way out of serious criminal charges with possible ‘life sentence’ punishment.

    Jacinda by glorifying a group which has been part of a world-wide effort supporting the Civil war in Ukraine since 2014 ,,, when extremist volunteers were carrying the fight to those districts and people standing up against the usa’s and bio-hazerd Nulands coup regime.
    From 2019 — https://newproducts.com/the-long-term-help-of-the-charity-fund-nova-gromada-and-its-head-konstantin-nevesenko-to-the-military-in-the-east-of-ukraine-gets-commended/

    https://www.facebook.com/Ukrainian-Gromada-of-Wellington-141045912609677/ — You can note that this group calling for ‘peace’ describes Crimea, where over 90% of the population rejected being under Nuland & co’s puppet Govt ,,, as being ” Temporary occupation of Crimea by Russia” ,,, which sounds like something Stephen Bandera would say*.

    Others have recognized the hypocrisy regarding support, training and arming of Nazis ,,,, thankfully for Jacinda twitter/big tech are censoring the stark truth ,,,, https://youtu.be/UvfWjoXIIys?t=9563 helping devious pricks like LP at the The Neo-Standard pretending that the Wolfsangel and Schwarze Sonne are not Nazi icons.

    Its all such a unhappy coincidence that so many ukraine fighters and volunteers sport the christchurch killers taste in insignias ,,,, and NZ would never release the christchurch terrorist from prison to go join the fight ,,,, as Zelensky did with jail inmates in Ukraine.

      1. Cheers Francesca and you jogged my memory regarding ,,, ‘ Stehen Bandera statues ukraine ‘ ,,,,which despite pro-Nato algorithms should still display some ripper images.

        Glory to the Hero’s ,,,,,

        Zelensky was massively elected on a Pro-peace platform ,,,, the real threats of death and total lack of support from the usa for peace ,,,, sabotaged the will of the vast majority of Ukraine people who did not want the present escalation in Nulands/Porenshenko/s dirty war.

        ‘Sabotaging peace — Glory to Ukraine’

          1. cheers SPC ,,,, and I will say that your non rose tinted view and Realpolitik assessment of what peace will probably look or end up like,,, is the most realistic take on things that I’ve seen written by posters on this site ,,, you posted this up in another thread here at TDB.

            Arguments about the OUN oaths of ‘glory and hero’s’ ,,,, are a distasteful side issue compared with where we/the west must arrive at for peace to be achieved.

            More of your hard nosed realism needs to replace war jingoism in the minds of ‘the people’ ,,,,, if we are to start manufacturing consent for peace.

    2. And you are just justifying Putin’s bombing of Ukrainian civilians in their homes and hospitals ..

    1. Good lord. Did Meng Foon really say that the government has allowed hate to fester by not introducing hate speech laws ? Golly I hate people who make atrocious accusations without offering one iota of evidence.

  10. Police and security need more targeted, practical resources and enforcement of existing laws.

    We were failed because security officers, did not carry out the requirements of their jobs correctly.

    AKA Tarrent was allowed a gun license for semi automatic weapons, new to NZ and without any real references.

    The police and gun requirements were already there, but not carried out correctly.

    Our immigration allows people to come to NZ and live here without any oversight. Tarrent came to NZ to plan a terrorist attack presumably because our conditions are so good for criminal activity here. Criminals are undetected and when others complain about behaviour, nobody investigates properly.

    Existing laws carried out better was the solution, not more half baked laws that have made everything worse. AKA we already had the mall terror attack where another person who had recently arrived in NZ, was deemed so dangerous they have 2 armed defenders following them. Now people are gunned down and attacked on the streets.

    NZ government seem more interested in protecting violent offenders and keeping them in NZ to offend further, than preventing them coming to NZ or stopping people in NZ who seem to be interested in destabilising our democracy and operating criminal enterprises here.

  11. The most significant action the Government took was to spend over $120 million on compensation for firearms from licenced owners, after they hurtled through law changes. And firearms crime has largely been unaffected (https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/438377/rise-in-gun-crime-despite-government-clampdown-after-terror-attack)

    The hard stuff, that Martin alludes to, could really have done with that $120 mill. But this Govt likes the ‘reacting for appearance’ approach, not the ‘preparing for effectiveness’ way, cos that is hard work and lacks media glamour.

    Such a wasted opportunity

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