KEY POINTS:
After five years and $3 million in taxpayers' money, our secret police have now decided Ahmed Zaoui is not a sinister terrorist after all, and is in fact capable of being a good model citizen and can stay here.
This sordid episode has been a farce from start to finish. Our new SIS director, Warren Tucker, would have us believe that, as Zaoui has promised to be good, then it's all okey-dokey.
All this nonsense is just face-saving and butt-covering by our authorities and politicians who got themselves into this mess. Apparently Zaoui has promised he won't engage in any activities that are in breach of New Zealand laws, nor will he write anything promoting violence or contact any foreign secret intelligence agency - or will at least let us know if he does. He has also promised to let our secret police know about any potential terrorist information that he might get to know about.
Call me stupid, but isn't this what every New Zealander is supposed to do anyway? And if a terrorist was up to mischief he'd hardly refuse to agree to the above.
But our spy master assures us he believes Zaoui because he swore on the Koran. Apparently this solemn undertaking exonerates Zaoui. It reminds me of the silliness in the feudal era when members of the upper classes were captured in battle.
All they had to do was give their word as gentlemen they would not continue their actions and they would be released unharmed, on the basis they wouldn't break their word.
If Zaoui had ever been a terrorist, or a potential terrorist, having him swear on the Koran that he will be a good boy makes this whole episode the most outrageous nonsense I've heard in a very long time.
The truth is this week's climbdown was the only way this was going to end. Despite the constant innuendo from our politicians and our judicial rulers, there was never any evidence that Zaoui was anything more than what he claimed to be. He was an Algerian MP deposed by a coup with a death threat over him.
The Government that Zaoui was a part of was overthrown by a military coup, which killed thousands of its citizens. When the military strong men hunted down their political enemies, we, along with the rest of the western world, labelled the people who fought back as terrorists. There is no question Zaoui would have been murdered if he hadn't escaped. Because Zaoui's party was Islamic, Western Governments backed the coup.
Zaoui is on record as being against violence and political killings. The basis of the allegations was that he knew a number of the leaders of the armed resistance and may have met some of them in Europe after he had escaped from Algeria. What's so sinister about this? No one has been able to provide anything that shows he supported them, let alone joined them.
The complicity of some European countries, such as France, supporting the coup and then using information provided by these thugs against a democratically elected MP is sinister.
That our secret services used this tainted information as the basis of denying Zaoui refugee status is extraordinary.
France, as we know well, is the only country in the world that has carried out a terrorist attack in New Zealand. The SIS didn't save us from that atrocity. And it was only through the actions of the mainstream police we were able to arrest and convict the killers. Now our secret police rely on the same people who perpetrated this crime to provide confidential evidence against our so-called latest terrorist.
They would have got away with it and had us believe that Zaoui was a terrorist if they had been able to stick to their line that they had been acting in the interest of national security and had secret information which they couldn't share with us.
But it became clearer as time went on that their so-called information was a load of bollocks. They even tried to pass off right-wing nutty internet blogs from the United States as evidence. The whole thing has been an absolute scandal and reinforces my long-held view that secret police agencies are a menace to any society.
The work of protecting our country should be in the hands of the real police, not from an unaccountable and invisible shadowy force. The only time we hear from our secret police is when things have been messed up by them. Most New Zealanders won't know that the SIS was set up in the 1940s by a bundling, upper-class twit who had been sacked for incompetence in Britain. He spent the first few years in NZ looking for spies on what he claimed was iron-clad intelligence. His source was exposed as a confidence trickster and jailbird.
Not a good start and over the years we have had embarrassing instances such as an SIS agent's briefcase being found marked "Top Secret", when the contents inside were a Penthouse magazine and a pie.
Hopefully, this charade has come to an end. I have no doubt Zaoui will make an excellent citizen. After all, we have invested millions of dollars into preparing his entry into our society.
At the very least, three things need to be done immediately: First, apologise to Zaoui, and second, get his wife and his kids over here. Thirdly, cut the $3 million we spent on his case from the SIS budget.
Most of this country is made up of immigrants who have arrived in the past 100 years and their descendants.
So it's Kia Ora to you Ahmed. It's taken a while, but welcome to NZ. Oh, and get a job and start paying taxes.
