A follow-up to my post on the subject last month:

The Urewera 18, now down to the Urewera 4, face trial early next year on criminal conspiracy charges.

Some of the evidence against the Urewera activists that led to the original prosecution four years ago has now been released. Inculpatory? You decide.

Evidence from Detective Sergeant Aaron Pascoe was given to the hearing that film and photographs of a September 2007 camp showed a woman he said was Ms Morse holding an object believed to be a Molotov cocktail.

The person carried the object out of the view of the camera and returned a short time later without it.

I can’t help being immediately reminded of James Thurber’s political fable in which a gander is subject to ruinous gossip, including a statement from a guinea hen that “she had once seen somebody who looked very much like the gander throw something that looked a great deal like a bomb.”

Then there is the material evidence:

Two pistols later seized by police were found to be unable to discharge a shot although an attempt to modify one appeared to have been made.

Meanwhile the government is in the process of passing a so-called “fixit” law that will permit police surveillance of the type ruled unlawful in the Urewera case.

Hanging on by their fingernails, right enough. Surely those radicals and troublemakers did something illegal!