April 19, 2004

With friends like this... Quite the storm in New Zealand over the arrest of alleged (if not terribly competant) spies trying to operate a false passport scam. The New Zealand government has hit the roof and, while their lawyer wants the case thrown out before it reaches trial, even the Aussies are making concerned noises.

Meanwhile, the Jerusalem Post alternates between suggesting paranoia, trendy leftism, and anti-Semitism as the real problem in the case. Of course, this isn't the first time the New Zealand Police have caught foreign spies behaving badly.

posted by rodgerd 20 years ago
  • This is fucked up. BTW, you can stop judging all Australians by their misbegotten and soon-to-be-voted-out government right about now, if that would be OK.
  • <derail> The funny thing is almost all of the Australians I've met claim to hate Howard, but he keeps getting elected. </derail>
  • You cannot believe the depth to which I hate that conniving little prick. /sincere
  • When Internal Affairs staff noticed an irregularity, they rang the applicant. Ian Tingey, an investigations officer with Internal Affairs, said that the applicant had a Canadian or American accent. "When I quizzed him on his accent his explanantion to me was he had not travelled or held a New Zealand passport before but had spent a lot of time in New Zealand with Canadian friends and family." For some reason, when I read that, I thought of Homer Simpson working as a Mossad agent.
  • "Trendy" leftism sounds an awful lot like 1950's style rhetoric. It's a poor subsitute for coping with a number of terrible problems, one of which is reselling weapons that may later be used against them, and others.
  • That's the problem right there. The guys who hate Howard get out and about a lot more than the guys who vote Howard. Howard's policies are a lot of the reason I headed out of the country in the first place.
  • You cannot believe the depth to which I hate that conniving little prick. 'bowled, Wolof! /Gilchrist.
  • I love John Howard, I love the way he gets all petulant when someone *dares* to ask him a question he can't answer. I love the way he pretends to be 'one of us', it's so endearing. I love it when he calls people driving $90 000 4WDs 'battlers'. He is tops, almost as good as Latham, the Tony Blair clone.