Not in my name.

Candlelit vigil outside NZ PM John Key's house this evening in protest against NZ's complicity, via the 5 Eyes agreement, in the USA's drone programme and extrajudicial killings.

As I said on my blog, Ragdoll Parade the other day, in response to John Key saying he was 'comfortable' with NZ'z involvement:

There’s the problem with drones - that they’re not as ‘targeted’ as we’d like to think. Then there’s the problem with extrajudicial assassination.

Drones: (assuming extrajudicial assassinations are ok, for the sake of argument) if your aim is surgical removal of a threat, a basic understanding of psychology tells us drones are a really bad idea. For the people living there it’s not so ‘surgical’, it’s unpredictable, & it is - in a word - terrifying. You want to kill the terrorists because they’re killing innocent people? Yeah, they want to kill the people who terrorise them because they’re killing innocent people. Tell me again how these targeted strikes eliminate the ‘threat’? They’re either a dumb idea, that we shouldn’t be ‘comfortable’ with, or they’re not about eliminating a threat, they’re about terrorising people, which we - assuming we’re opposed to terror - shouldn’t be ‘comfortable’ with.

Extrajudicial assassination: bad idea. We have built our society, structured our legal and political systems around key ethical concepts. One of which is ‘innocent until proven guilty’, another is ‘right to a fair trial - by peers & with representation’. When we disregard these core concepts outside our nation, because Scary People in Foreign Country, we undermine them within our nation. If we think it’s abhorrent within our borders, we cannot be ‘comfortable’ with it outside them.