Home Grown Jihad

Raggle Taggle Cowards

Chris Trotter has written a helpful piece on the Urewera 17, providing background and context.  The upshot: the Crown has had to drop charges against all but four of the "17" on technical legal grounds. 

For benefit of our overseas readers, the Urewera 17 episode involved secretive bush camps in the Urewera forest four years ago with a bunch of Tuhoe Maori and a raggle taggle assortment of fair weather, left wing extremists.  The camps were styled as "training camps" and involved practising with guns and explosives.  Four years ago, the NZ Police raided the area and arrested a gaggle of the raggle taggles. 

They were charged under the Terrorism Suppression Act--a hastily drafted, knee-jerk piece of legislation that Trotter describes as having "many and serious inadequacies".