In the early days after the Urewera raids I heard a radio interview with a 12-year-old girl who'd been woken up, told to put her hands over her head and get down on the floor.
The girl was, not surprisingly, terrified and complied but only after asking the masked and armed men if they could please speak English.
Apparently they had given the orders in te reo which was culturally sensitive but the girl conceded that their grasp of Maori was "pretty stink" and their pronunciation awful - hence the request for the translation.
There is a level of silliness in this particular transaction which is best described as Pythonesque.
While that part of the country is probably the closest to being bilingual we have, it would be surprising if there are many citizens under the age of 30 who speak no English at all. The 12-year-old was bilingual but the policeman obviously wasn't.
It is almost impossible to learn a language unless you have some respect for its cultural context. That you can learn just enough of a language so that you can arrest someone in it is laughable in itself. If it weren't so sad.
Now that the trial has finished and Tame-iti has gone home it is hard to know what actually happened. At a stretch it seems Tame-iti and his motley crew of bush survivalists committed offences against the firearms act.
Listening to people who hunt in Tuhoe country it seems that everyone is breaking NZ firearms laws there so no one seems too worried about it. Hard to get the idea of an armed terrorist enclave from that.
At best Tame-iti could have been charged with being involved in extremely disorganised crime. The idea that you could use the skills he endorses in a private security unit overseas is a stretch, unless of course there are opportunities opening up in the area of bum-baring, molotov cocktail-throwing, flag-shooting displays of general protest with the UN.
Even more mysterious is the organised silliness that passes for the Neo-Nazi movement in New Zealand and the fact that they haven't been busted by the police for their firearm use. Perhaps the police figure it would just encourage them.
Their Right Wing Resistance websites are full of camped up survivalist photos of skinhead arms enthusiasts in camo gear. The Urewera four look like early childhood workers compared to these guys.
The RWR emails are presumably written in English as a second language. Seriously, no one can spell this badly in their mother, or should I say father, tongue.
From last week's email: "Greetings Nationalists. Media are our enimy. Wording weapons, racist, evil, supremacists, and skinheads have all been turned into weapon words as a stratigy of war against us. The media are run by lefties while owned by capitalist. That in its self is a weird mix. Their love of multiculture and the distruction of Nationlism brings them together. Evil is what the media do, lies and deciet, plotting away in their office. So bad media with pics of inderviduals no longer scares our people. Continueing productivity are the keys to success, not slanderouse scummy evil media."
They end their missives with a call to fight for the country. If I were looking for terrorists I'd start there.
Perhaps the police are worried that a heavy handed approach would just send the seriously lunatic element underground. Which begs the question: why weren't they worried about that with the Tuhoe crew?