New Zealand Herald debate: Was justice done in the Waihopai spy base verdict?

Three peace protesters have been found not guilty of an attack on a top-secret South Island spy base, despite freely admitting causing damage put at $1 million.
Otaki schoolteacher Adrian Leason, Auckland Catholic priest Peter Murnane and Hokianga farmer Sam Land were cleared by a Wellington District Court jury yesterday evening of burglary and wilful damage.
The charges stemmed from the April 2008 raid on the Government Communications Security Bureau facility at Waihopai, near Blenheim.
Was justice done in Waihopai spy base verdict? Here is the latest selection of Your Views:


Dr Lech Janczewski:
Modern day organized terrorists and criminals are happy to use modern digital technologies to accomplish their objectives. National borders do not exists for them, they communicate with their members spread over the whole world.

To fight them security forces of the developed world cooperate with each other both in collection and evaluation of information related to crime. The Waihopai communication facility is a part of such arrangements.

It is not a "US spy base in our midst". Yes, the captured data is processed in the US (NZ lack such processing capabilities) but they share the results with us. By attacking this satellite station and then acquitting the protestors we have shown to the world that our society does not understand the crime problems of the modern world.

Dr Lech Janczewski
The University of Auckland


Nick (Auckland City)
02:15PM Monday, 22 Mar 2010
Lech Janczewski, you say, "By attacking this satellite station and then acquitting the protestors we have shown to the world that our society does not understand the crime problems of the modern world."

I believe the opposite is true, given that the US is currently engaged in illegal wars described by international law specialist Richard Falk as a "Crime against Peace of the sort for which surviving German leaders were indicted, prosecuted, and punished at the Nuremberg trials."

In addition, the US people were duped, in the words of political analyst Anatol Lieven, into supporting an illegal war of aggression "by a propaganda programme which for systematic mendacity has few parallels in peacetime democracies."

Moreover, Britain and the US used WMD against Iraqi civilians in the form of DU weaponry (a crime against humanity), in the interests of gaining profitable control of the last reserves of the earth’s dwindling fossil fuel supply, and planting US military bases and military power into still more regions of the world.

By attacking this satellite station and then acquitting the protestors, New Zealand has shown that our society understands the crime problems of the modern world significantly better than you do.

Lloyd (United Kingdom)
02:21PM Monday, 22 Mar 2010
Nick - Auckland City.

Finally someone is able to put it in words, in such a way as make it understandable to the many simple folk here.

So quickly people forget, or don't want to know.

This so-called protection we the people receive, in so many cases during "peace time" is the result of lies and aggression by govts from the west.

The world was sold a load of BS over Iraq, and the rest of us have to live with the threat that has resulted from it. Add the lingering Middle East problems, building tension with Iran and the death of hundreds of thousands innocent people in that area.

But oh yeah that's ok, because western democracy is always right, and hey, it didn't happen to our family members right!

Put your heads back in the sand people. It's much safer in there.

Rodney (Howick)
08:30AM Tuesday, 23 Mar 2010
To Lloyd and Nick. Maybe if the US spies were smarter, there wouldn't have been a 911attack . Maybe Pearl Harbour wouldn't have happened. Maybe the more recently Bali bombing etc.etc wouldn't have happened. We have no idea just how much violence has already been thwarted, but then maybe you don't care what the enemy wants to do to you until it's too late.

Nick (Auckland City)
02:10PM Monday, 23 Mar 2010
Rodney, thwarting violence is certainly a worthy cause and if the Waihopai spy base was utilised for such a noble end then we would be all the better for it. Unfortunately this base is part of a global spying network that is accountable to its own agencies, not governments, and certainly not to citizens. This is deeply concerning given that it operates in the service of narrow sectors of private power that have proven themselves corrupt.

The US has violated the Geneva Convention, operating outside the dictates of international law and democratic process as established by the United Nations, and has adopted a doctrine of "resort to force at will" accompanied by what Noam Chomsky describes as a "dismissal of elementary human rights and a display of contempt for democracy for which no parallel comes easily to mind." This has increased the long-term threat of international terrorism and the proliferation of WMD.

I have no confidence in a security network that is unaccountable to the public and that operates in the interests of the military industrial complex who distort and falsify the intelligence they gather to serve the interests of rapacious corporate greed.

You might like to reconsider the wisdom of giving away your power of discernment to a corrupt agency that allows the public, in your own words, “no idea” of what it is doing.

"States are not moral agents, people are, and can impose moral standards on powerful institutions." Noam Chomsky