A bad idea

While news of SAS war crimes is breaking at home, Defence Minister Gerry Brownlee has been in Iraq, and is signalling yet more involvement for NZ troops and spies there:

Defence Minister Gerry Brownlee has just left Iraq after a secret visit to hold high-level defence meetings in Baghdad and to meet New Zealand trainers at Camp Taji north of the capital.

While there, he hinted there was a role for New Zealand in the reconstruction of Iraq.

And he suggested there could be a move to extend the mandate of the Kiwis at Taji to work on intelligence beyond any immediate threats to the camp.

[...]

Brownlee hinted that intelligence work, although still done at Taji, could extend to a wider area.

"What we are going to need to know is, as cities like Mosul fall, as pressure on some of the smaller towns that may harbour the last of the [Isis] fighters grows then they will run somewhere," Brownlee said.

"We need to be in the loop in an intelligence sense, knowing where they are going because we don't want them coming our way.

The obvious problem is that in Iraq "intelligence" inevitably means a) torture and b) drone strikes. And these are things we don't want NZDF to have anything to do with. The use of intelligence obtained by torture is prohibited under international law, and both the SIS and GCSB are now prohibited by law from handling such material (and from helping with drone strikes). With NZDF already tainted by torture and war crimes, we don't want them further tainted by torture and murder in Iraq. Instead, they should just come home.