Vance on terrorism scare tactics

Written By: notices and features - Date published: - 33 comments
Categories: defence, john key, spin, war - Tags: , ,

An excellent piece by Andrea Vance in the weekend, on Key’s terrorism dog and pony show:

Inflating the terrorism risk

…Key wasn’t “lying” in the strict sense of the word when he revealed to reporters on Wednesday that nine passports were revoked. … So far, the Government has cancelled only two passports and would like to make a reasoned case for greater powers to confiscate more. But Key didn’t say that. Instead, he inflated the risk because that fits with the big, scary Muslim threat that he’s been pedalling of late.

The media happily followed Key’s trail of breadcrumbs to Wednesday’s announcement. Clumsy (unsubstantiated) hints about beheadings, home-grown terrorism, and the lone-wolf attack on Canada’s parliament made for easy, dramatic headlines.
…
Ahead of the speech, exclusive access to top spies was granted to newspapers and television crews. Sold as being transparent, it was a PR snow job to tie New Zealand to the conflict raging across Syria and Iraq. The threat level was publicly raised, for added theatre. And just in case the public didn’t quite get it, Key threw up a hint about terror threats to next year’s cricket world cup.
…
Domestic action to curb terror tourism and enhance unwarranted surveillance was cynically conflated with New Zealand’s participation in the international effort to stop IS.
…
And anyone who dares to contradict him is branded naive, despite his unwillingness to engage in debate on security matters.
…
Scaremongering, twisting the facts, and ramming reforms through under urgency, is just a convenient way to bypass much-needed scrutiny of state surveillance.

There’s plenty more, go read it on Stuff…

33 comments on “Vance on terrorism scare tactics”

Comment numbers have changed to permanent references. Older quoted numbers may no longer identify the same comment.

    1. 1.1

      Since Vance had her privacy compromised by the Peter Dunne surveillance fiasco, Vance has been very good on critiquing spying issues, even during the election. She hasn’t shown the same degree of critique on most other political matters.

    1. 5.1

      That is a very good point, Minarch.

      Confiscating passports would actually only serve to send the ‘problem’ underground.

      1. 5.1.1

        he will have bought some other prisoners identity most likely

        or maybe a homeless persons identity

        as long as its someone who has never left the country before or never will it is undetectable

            1. 5.1.1.1.1.1

              Yeah, lol, funny. Am just having a conversation on twitter re why we aren’t learning fast enough that putting profit before life isn’t working (subject is the Pike River Tragedy) – yet with something like this passport issue, no doubt, the lesson will be learned very quickly.

  6. 6

    Reading the comments section of Andrea Vance’s article, I suspect John Key is on the wrong side of public opinion on this issue. It seems to me that more people are waking up to the bigger picture. This is about getting the internal security network in place to find the dissenters for when the global financial bubble finally blows and the people start demanding their assets back.

    Pretty soon our definition of terrorist will read something like Homeland Security’s and include the likes of: people who are anti-globalist, lovers of liberty, suspicious of centralised government, and those refuse to believe that John Key is the leader of the All Black pack.

    Not that it matters to John Key… even if he can’t manufacture consent, he will railroad the legislative changes through and I wouldn’t be surprised if there is an over-blown incident, as we saw in Australia, so he can say “I told you so”.

    2. 6.2

      or for data farming on behalf of corporates for their marketing and planning and providing tax payer funded subsidies for corp cyber security.

  7. 7

    So who is advising Key on how to do all this hoodwinking? Don’t tell me he thinks of all these tricks by himself; somebody is telling him what to do.

    I wonder who.

      1. 7.1.1

        Too sophisticated for Joyce or Crosby Textor I think; more likely from some organisation with a track- record of this type of manipulation. probably from the good ol’ US of A.

  8. 8

    Hard to say why the MSM are bleating about, given they seem at least in my opinion to spend a good portion of their time operating as “conduits” for right leaning political and governmental philosophy and policy.

    The kind of outcome described by Vance is to be expected from a right wing government operating pretty much anywhere. So I would ask where’s the story here? Is this yet another case of looking at the symptom without discussing the underlying cause?

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