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

It is 4 years this week when we were shaken from our complacency.

Shocked from the belief that such malevolence could 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 and who had gamed the incompetent Police into gaining domestic terrorist weapons of mass destruction.

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. His fixation on certain White Supremacist symbolic historical conflicts to construct a replacement narrative was evident throughout his manifesto and his clear devotion to being a foot soldier for this movement was verbalised repeatedly.

He knew exactly what he was doing and was arguing for his cause via extreme violence.

To pretend he was not a white supremacist with a very clear philosophy of terrorism to promote his white supremacy neurosis allows this mutation of a human being off the hook.

Tarrant knew exactly what he was doing. We should feel no remorse, no sympathy and no confusion over what he is and what he was trying to do.

He is as close to evil as one gets.

In the 4 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 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

That sounds underwhelming.

• 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 4 years since that terrible Christchurch day.

 

 

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