Moscow: the new Camelot

The view from my front porch in Ottawa this morning.

Once again, Russia points the way--an echo of its former greatness.

Never mind light rail: for this I'd actually welcome a substantial increase in my municipal taxes.

Afghan parsing

When you torture the language enough, you can probably make it say anything, rather like an Afghan detainee. And recently we've been forced to witness a linguistic vivisection of nearly unparalleled brutality.

Begin with the word "detainee" itself. Canadian troops don't take prisoners; they apprehend detainees. The next step after "prisoner," of course, is "prisoner of war." We're fighting a war, right enough, and the Taliban certainly seem to think they're at war as well. But a "prisoner of war" has all of the rights accorded under the Geneva Conventions. The Taliban, as an irregular army, do not. "Detainees" it is, then, or if you prefer the American term, "enemy combatants."

So what happens, then, when our forces apprehend a detainee? Whoa, hold on a minute. There's many a slip, it seems, between "apprehend" and "detainee." I cite for my authority no less a figure than Gen. Walter Natynczyk.

The unfortunate man who was tortured by the Afghans--see the explosive article last Sunday by Paul Koring--wasn't actually "detained." Heavens, no, he was merely held for "questioning" and then released.

In Canada, anyone with a passing knowledge of civil liberties knows that "held for questioning" is a form of arrest. Either the man was free to go or he was detained. There's no in-between here. But plenty of room, it seems, for distinctions without differences.

And now we have what some regard as significant backpedaling by the embattled foreign affairs minister Peter MacKay. He's not simply chanting the "Not a single Taliban prisoner turned over by Canadian Forces can be proven to be abused" mantra any more. Now he's admitting that there was "credible evidence" that torture took place.

Slam-dunk, right? Not so fast. "Credible evidence," says MacKay, isn't "absolute proof." Note the word "absolute" that the wiseacre slipped in there. We don't have absolute proof of anything. But never mind the precautionary principle that "credible evidence" should invoke: it appears that the minister was waiting all along for divine revelation.

As it turns out, Bill Clinton did have sex with that woman. And our forces handed prisoners over to the Afghan authorities to be tortured. And both the military and the government have been desperately trying to cover it up ever since.

The truth will out. And it won't take the linguistic equivalent of electrical cables to make it happen.

(As an aside, the word "whistle-blower" has recently come in for a little rough handling as well. Christie Blatchford, in a now thoroughly discredited column, referred to diplomat Richard Colvin as a "so-called whistleblower." And this morning, Norman Spector is complaining that he didn't blow his whistle loudly enough.)

[H/t Montreal Simon and Aaron Wherry]

UPDATE: Whoops! It seems that the good General misspoke himself. Kady O'Malley liveblogs:

So after getting a "bad feel" off this Afghan, and subsequently searching him, and photographing him, the Canadian military handed him over to Afghan custody "in good faith." No, he doesn't know why he didn't find out about this before today -- thus causing him to inadvertently provide incorrect information in his most recent statement -- but he's going to look into it. [emphasis added]

[H/t POGGE.]

NOTE TO SELF: Try not to bury the lede next time, OK? :)

Paul Kennedy on Robert Dziekanski

The RCMP watchdog who heads up the Commission for Public Complaints Against the RCMP has issued his report on the killing of Robert Dziekanski.

Paul Kennedy didn't mince words:

"While they were in lawful execution of their duties as police officers, the four officers failed to adopt a measured, co-ordinated and appropriate response to Mr. Dziekanski's reported behaviour.

"No meaningful attempt was made to de-escalate the situation. No warning, visual or otherwise, was given to Mr. Dziekanski prior to him being Tasered by the conducted energy weapon. Use of the conducted energy weapon against Mr. Dziekanski was premature and inappropriate."

His findings, summarized:

• The senior RCMP officer on the scene failed to take charge of the situation
• Officers failed to determine whether it was necessary to Taser Dziekanski multiple times in order to subdue him
• The officers should have done more to provide first aid to Dziekanski and monitor his condition
• The officers inappropriately met alone to discuss the incident before giving their official statements about the event

"The versions of events given to investigators by the four RCMP officers involved in the Vancouver International Airport in-custody death of Robert Dziekanski are not deemed credible by my commission," Kennedy said. [Emphasis added.]

Full report here. RCMP Commissioner William "Bubbles" Elliott is unhappy with Kennedy (he's apparently been sulking about the report for six weeks). So, it seems, is the Harper government, which is showing him the door, without explanation.

Is the latter just a coincidence? Maybe. The announcement of Kennedy's departure did come a few days before the public release of his report. So let's see what if any action is taken--which will have to wait, according to Elliott, until the report of the Braidwood inquiry is issued early next year.

The officers involved cannot be disciplined because time limits have passed. The Crown laid no charges at the time, deeming the killing to be a lawful use of force. And the BC Attorney-General's office, it seems, is still cutting breaks. It's a charmed life, as usual, for the boys in red serge.

Meanwhile Zofia Cisowski, the mother of Robert Dziekanski, remains deeply traumatized. She will never work again, said her lawyer, Walter Kosteckyj, and is currently living in poverty on a small disability pension. She has sued the RCMP for the wrongful death of her son, and they are busy assembling a phalanx of lawyers. This ugly story has a few more chapters to go before it concludes.

"It wasn't me"

Who is advising the Harper government on strategy these days--Shaggy?

One journalist calls its handling of the Afghan detainee issue "parting ways with reality," although the blunter phrase 'barefaced lies' might at this point be more appropriate. Rather than absolving itself by citing authorities in its favour, it has simply managed to taint those authorities as well. For weeks now we've watched the stain spread, but its only response has been a continual variation on the "wasn't me" theme.

The latest casualty is Gen. Walter Natynczyk. Yesterday's Globe & Mail carried a story by Paul Koring that explodes the repeated statements by Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay that there is no evidence of Canadians handing over detainees to be tortured. MacKay made such statements as early as 2007, and has done so six times in the past two months alone.

Yesterday Transport Minister John Baird attempted to wave away this heavily-documented report by referring to a statement by Natynczyk in 2007:

"The vice chief of defence staff, now the chief of defence staff, had issued a statement over 2½ years ago stating that the Afghan in question was not detained, was not captured and was not transferred by the Canadian Forces," Mr. Baird said.

And then, in the sleazy fashion we have come to expect of government ministers these days, he continued:

"I hope the member opposite will stand in this place and apologize to the men and women in uniform."

The notes of soldiers on the ground at the time do not bear out Natynczyk. Nor was Richard Colvin's testimony refuted by Los Tres Generales on November 26, as a couple of over-eager partisans asserted at the time. Indeed, one careless bit of reporting in that vein was the subject of a Globe & Mail retraction on December 4. "Ludicrous," indeed.

Other witnesses have not been quite so helpful to the government's cause, either. A backlash from the diplomatic community is now building. And Colvin's personal credibility is bolstered every time a new memo leaks out, redacted or unredacted.

The gallons of squid-ink poured over those files by the government, who made them available in unredacted form to friendly witnesses while continuing to withhold them from the parliamentary committee before whom the witnesses were appearing, tells its own story. And its evasive legal manoeuvring to prevent a searching probe by the Military Police Complaints Commission, culminating in the termination of its chairman, tells a distressingly similar tale.

This is a government that has been caught out. Its brazen attempts to stonewall are bad enough, although all governments do that. Its attempted character assassination, however, first of Richard Colvin, then of its critics--alleged to be insulting "the men and women in uniform" by daring even to raise the detainee issue--is morally reprehensible. But with the spectre of The Hague on the horizon, perhaps this desperate, defensive fumbling is all it has left.

The Harper administration has given itself precious little room to manoeuvre, painting itself into a tighter and tighter corner with its rote denials and unfounded smears. Only a miracle can extricate it now. No doubt sacrificial lambs are likely already being sought to bring that about. Could one of them be Peter MacKay?

Death of a Sceptic

My father passed away last week. He was somewhat of a sceptic. I probably could have changed his mind but we found it much more interesting to discuss our jobs (his old, mine ongoing), and my children.

Dad was a financial person who seemed to lean more towards the conservative side of things, however he was always sensible and I appreciated his devotion to the truth and I loved his sense of humour. I remember during the Bush administration he said that the White House needed some Republicans. After seeing the look on my face, he continued "I mean real Republicans, not the idiots they have in the White House these days". His commitment to his work, his community and his family are all well remembered and he will be badly missed.

I think that while he was a sceptic, Dad would have appreciated the effort to see what was really happening to this world just in case he was wrong since the implications for his grandchildren are enormous.

Consequently I would like to honour Dad by dedicating the very first annual Dawg’s Blawg Climate Prediction Contest to him. Details of the contest will follow in another post.

Oh what a tangled web we weave

...when first we practise to deceive.

Paul Koring, who digs like a woodchuck, has just given the lie to Peter MacKay's brazen claims that there is no evidence that Canadian detainee transferees in Afghanistan were tortured in captivity.

"Not a single Taliban prisoner turned over by Canadian Forces can be proven to be abused. That is the crux of the issue," said MacKay, more than once.

Underbussing of subordinates is anticipated, as an alibi is being swiftly prepared by his underlings:

"He has said what he has said based on the advice of generals and senior officials in the department," said MacKay's spokesman, Dan Dugas.

Those generals? Those senior officials?

We've seen that movie before. Time for the sequel.

[H/t CC]

UPDATE: Reader and blogger JimBobby takes us down memory lane. "There has not been one single, solitary proven allegation of abuse of detainees...". That was MacKay in November, 2007. Is there an echo in here?

But I thought Muslims weren't a race

Norman Spector (and the Gazette's Janice Bagnall) beg to differ:

Consulting Marc Lépine’s entry in Wikipedia, one reads a more direct description of the murderer’s antecedents:

“Lépine was born Gamil Rodrigue Liass Gharbi, in Montreal, the son of a Canadian nurse and a Algerian-born businessman. Gharbi was a non-practicing Muslim, and Monique Lépine, a former Catholic nun who had rejected organized religion after she left the convent. Their son was baptized a Roman Catholic as an infant, but received no religious instruction during his childhood; his mother described her son as 'a confirmed atheist all his life'.

---

Also in yesterday’s Gazette, Janet Bagnall, a feminist who sits on the Gazette editorial board and I suspect wrote the editorial, writes in her column:

“Marc Lépine's deadly goal was to punish the ambitious, clever women who had taken what he thought was his rightful place in the world. Many men before him - and many after - have also turned to violence in an effort to impose male primacy.

"The Taliban are today's most notorious example, throwing acid in schoolgirls' faces, firebombing schools that dare teach girls. The men who carry out 'honour killings,' or murder young brides over their dowries are also part of a rearguard action that wants to deny women the right to be equal.

"When we commemorate the 14 young women killed by Lépine that icy cold Dec. 6 in 1989, it is a yearly reminder that the misogyny we associate today with the Taliban erupted in violence here, too, in a civilized, cosmopolitan city in a wealthy country.

"There's never been a satisfactory explanation.”

In the wake of the Fort Hood massacre, there was considerable soul-searching in the U.S. media about politically-correct reporting on the murderer. I don’t have a satisfactory explanation of these horrific multiple murders in Montréal either, but perhaps we would have been closer to one had the mainstream media done a better job reporting on this incident over the years.

(Emphases added so that the reader may more easily follow the dots that Spector and Bagnall helpfully provide.)

[H/t Matttbastard]

UPDATE: (December 7) Reader deBeauxOs has a point. Bagnall's article read in its entirety does not appear to be an exercise in Muslim-baiting at all. Spector took what he wanted, provided his own context for it, and did Bagnall no favours by so doing. I should have followed his link, I did not, and for that, mea culpa.

December 6: 20 years after...

...there's a eponymous men's rights website, no link here, conferring sainthood on Marc Lépine.

There's a gaggle of xenophobic yokels who call him Gamil Gharbi these days, as though to score some kind of point. The Montreal Massacre as a narrative about Islam? Perhaps for those whose politics are little more than a slobber of prejudice.

But there will be those who argue that the women's movement, too, has long hitched its political wagon to this rotten star. Some certainly made claims of that kind at the time. They insisted that it was "opportunistic" for a movement dedicated to advocating for the rights of women to speak out about the Montreal femicide. I continue to find this very odd. What on earth was the women's movement supposed to do about this horrific condensation of social misogyny? Be silent?

If a man had entered that polytechnic twenty years ago and ordered all the Gentiles to leave, and proceeded to murder fourteen Jews, would anyone seriously criticize the Canadian Jewish Congress for speaking out about anti-Semitism?

Mark Steyn continues to beat the drum for his "real" narrative: not sexism in society, heavens no, but the alleged wimpiness of the Canadian males who, ordered to leave by the killer, did so. Real men, one imagines, would have caught the bullets in their teeth. But who can say with certainty during those pivotal few seconds that they, unlike the men present, would have recognized what was about to happen, and taken down the gunman by force of numbers? Superhero keyboardship is cheap. Pray that you never find yourselves playing an unwilling role in a realworld splatter-flick.

Too many such deflections, excuses and strawmen are still being defensively raised. Not all males are crazed violent killers. Lépine had a Muslim father, so it wasn't Us, God forbid, it was today's fashionable minaret-building Other. Lepine was a lunatic.

The latter point is true, of course, but it's not the whole truth. The murderously insane, like it or not, are part of society, not atoms. What is it that gave shape and substance to the rage of Marc Lépine? What were the images of "feminists" that gave him focus and purpose?

In a society with no gender-based discrimination and violence, Lépine could not have committed his femicidal acts. Misogyny is part of the very fabric of the society we live in despite--and because of--the great strides that women have made in the past few decades.

But misogyny isn't an essence, it's a practice. By making ourselves aware of it, by confronting it, all of us, men and women, make alternatives possible. We men are not being asked to feel guilty for an act of horror that most of us couldn't commit. We are being asked to do something about the society in which we live, to help make it better, safer and saner for everyone.

We won't do that by trying to explain the massacre away, to distance ourselves from it, to react in denial:

I was in Vancouver 3 years ago. Outside the central train station there is a park, & in the park is a rotunda of larger-than-average stone plinths. At the base of each is an inscription of one of the names of the women 'murdered at Ecole Polytechnique' etc etc. When I saw it I wanted to vomit in disgust.

Such social Marxism is destroying the West, slowly but surely.

Such a perfect pot-pourri of political illiteracy and unrepentant misogyny would be difficult to invent. And there's plenty more where that came from.

Has anything really changed since the now-disbanded Canadian Airborne Regiment held a mess dinner to honour Marc Lépine?* I would like to believe so. I would like to think that these annual memorials and the respectful newspaper editorials and the gentle men who wear white ribbons are making a difference.

But the fact that so many still appear to have trouble with woman-hatred--trying to wish it away, reduce its significance, confine its existence to a "lone madman," blame it on a nonexistent Muslim bringing-up, or even, on the fringes, excuse it, tells me that we have much, much further to go. Violence against women continues to flourish, including mass murder. Still think Marc Lépine was alone?

Because people have pointed out so many times that his name is a household word, while few remember the names of his victims, here are the young women that he murdered in their prime of life:

Geneviève Bergeron (born 1968), civil engineering student
Hélène Colgan (born 1966), mechanical engineering student
Nathalie Croteau (born 1966), mechanical engineering student
Barbara Daigneault (born 1967), mechanical engineering student
Anne-Marie Edward (born 1968), chemical engineering student
Maud Haviernick (born 1960), materials engineering student
Maryse Laganière (born 1964), École Polytechnique budget clerk
Maryse Leclair (born 1966), materials engineering student
Anne-Marie Lemay (born 1967), mechanical engineering student
Sonia Pelletier (born 1961), mechanical engineering student
Michèle Richard (born 1968), materials engineering student
Annie St-Arneault (born 1966), mechanical engineering student
Annie Turcotte (born 1969), materials engineering student
Barbara Klucznik-Widajewicz (born 1958), nursing student

Rest in peace. And may we continue to learn the lessons.
____________________________
*"Soldier Confirms Airborne Held Massacre Party," Ottawa Citizen, November 9, 1995, A3.

The art and craft of climate debate

I confess I have been rather fascinated by blogosphere and journalistic politicos taking a stab at science over the past fortnight--and I think that metaphor, by the way, is apt.

"Look! A piece of code that looks like..."

"They tried to suppress two papers! Oh, they were published after all? OK, what about..."

"'Trick!' They said 'trick!' 'Decline!'"

"The IPCC has found nothing wrong! That proves that something is wrong!"

"Conspiracy!"

I grew up with scientists--astronomers and physicists, mostly--and they were about the most apolitical crowd I know. They were far too interested in what they were doing. I try to imagine sometimes how these gentle folk might have reacted had some discovery of theirs, and the documentation that accrued around it, led to sudden and savage public attacks from howling cranks and scientific illiterates, including threats, thefts and loony accusations.

They wouldn't even have had the survival-schooling that Galileo had in the art of dancing carefully around the powers that be. A mis-step in those days could kill you. The bold man insisted on his views to the point that he was tried for heresy and spent the rest of his life under house arrest. But he still managed to keep friends in the Church: his books were not burned, and neither was he.

The crowd that frequented my house were babes in the woods in comparison. They quite simply wouldn't have known what to do. These were uncompromising people when it came to the scientific method, and, when my father moved over to the Defence Research Board, they were uncompromising on Cold War issues as well. But if the pop press and politicians had launched an angry assault on special relativity or operations research, they would have been so many deer caught in the headlights.

The embattled folks at the CRU in East Anglia, deluged with FOI requests, excoriated by denialists (few of whom are scientists, and even fewer, scientists in the field), reacted like human beings. In other words, they did not speak among themselves in that "neutral" fashion that we have come, stereotypically, to expect of scientists. They called a spade a spade and a crank a crank, and their frustration showed. Now they're paying the price.

After two weeks, the so-called mainstream media have joined in on the feeding frenzy already bloodying the blogosphere, and they're doing nearly as badly. I read Doug Saunders' piece in the Globe this morning, in which he uses phrases like "dangerous bunker mentality" and "data-fudging scandal" as though the first was unexpected and the second, established. He quotes an excitable scientist who claims the mass theft of emails has "set the climate debate back 20 years."

On a political level, he says, the "controversy has been catastrophic." That, too, is grossly overstated, I think, but it is certainly the case that political denialists have not been slow to seize an opportunity and leverage it, as we saw just a few days ago in Australia, and then in Saudi Arabia, where it's all about oil. The latter, according to the breathless Saunders, "will argue in Copenhagen that carbon-emissions controls are pointless because the CRU scandal has nullified any evidence of human-caused atmospheric temperature increase."

"Nullified?" Did the earth stop rotating around the sun because Galileo was indiscreet enough to insult the Pope in Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems?

Says a critical climate scientist from East Anglia, Mike Hulme, "I think there is a serious problem with the way scientists are used, and they way they position themselves, in climate-policy debates. Wherever you look around climate change, people are bringing their ideologies, beliefs and values to bear on the science."

No kidding. Perhaps one positive thing that might emerge from this political tempest in a teapot is a public awareness that scientists are fallible, emotional, and anything but value-free--just like everyone else. Rather than having privileged access to some "objective" realm denied to the rest of us, they are equipped with a well-tested and productive procedure. The only ethical question is how that procedure--observation, analysis of data, tests of replication, predictability and empirical adequacy, and so on--is administered.

And thus far we simply have no smoking gun. For all of the selective interpretations, misinterpretations and deliberate skewing of bits and pieces hacked away by denialists from the body of the research as a whole, there is to date no evidence whatsoever of malfeasance. All that has really come to light is flashes of anger and frustration, and hunkering down as the frenzied attacks have persisted.

Given the now-proven propensity of denialists to seize gleefully on a phrase here or an ambiguous bit of code there, I can see why the folks at CRU have been reluctant to share their data. I don't defend that--it's time to make all of the raw data public as soon as possible, which will require a considerable number of permissions to be sought and obtained. But I can understand it.

In any case, some people, thank goodness, are getting the hint.

I need to state for the record at this point that I am not on top of the science by any means. From where I sit, refusing to take stabs or bite off chunks, I am forced to rely on second-order observations: the art and craft of debate and the politics of climate change (proxies, if you will) to help me form a judgement. I suspect I'm far from alone.

In broad strokes, a huge majority of climate scientists reckon that anthropogenic global warming (AGW) is established, is significant in scale, and endangers the planet. A handful do not, and continue to press their case. Their science can be downright shoddy, and the petroleum industry is seldom more than a few steps away. Politicians have entered the fray, and astroturf organizations like the Calgary-based Friends of Science, which received money from Talisman, have sprung up as well. (What I wouldn't give for a few thousand emails from their computers to gawk at.)

But style is also very much a part of this. Never mind the informal, flesh-and-blood conversations among irritated scientists that shouldn't really have surprised anyone. Their public utterances are sometimes harsh about denialism as well, but there's almost inevitably scientific argument behind it. Most of the time they simply publish papers. They are scientists, not politicians.

On the other side, casting themselves as latter-day Galileos, brave voices in the wilderness, are the denialists. But while Galileo moved to shift an existing paradigm, the denialists are resisting a new shift that has already taken place, like so many fossilized Newtonians grumbling about Einstein and sneering sceptically about "curved space" and "time compression."

And then there are the camp-followers: raving far-right tinfoilers, some of whom believe that oil is continually produced in unlimited quantities at the earth's core, hackers, thieves and know-nothings, oil shills and dabblers.

What is someone who once failed calculus at university supposed to do?

As I watch beleaguered scientists, spluttering and defensive, dragged from their labs by mobs with pitchforks and torches, my sympathies are certainly aroused on their behalf. They aren't very good at PR, in fact they're lousy at it, which is why some people in that game have helpfully stepped forward.

I do try to hack my way, no pun intended, through some of their papers, but I really depend upon science writers and popularisers who report the latest depressing findings. Perhaps they or the hands-on scientists are exaggerating the consequences of what is being observed, perhaps not. They differ among themselves on that, and on many other points. But they all seem to agree that there is a problem.

And none of them appears to believe that the other side is engaged in a global conspiracy. Few if any of them use a vocabulary of invective and suspicion. Most, I suspect, would just like to get back to work.

Judging on the basis of the respective art and craft employed by the two sides--the way their discourses are constructed, their style, their tone--I really have no option. I must stand with the vast majority of climate scientists and their stolid progress through the data--and with the Inuit on the front lines, currently watching the undeniable shrinking of the Arctic ice-cap, and seeing robins for the first time.

An agreement in Copenhagen to put even a mild brake on global warming would obviously be a step forward on a road we all need to travel. From denial and anger, perhaps we have now achieved a critical mass of people who have reached the point of bargaining, if not, as yet, acceptance. But given the current eruption of magical thinking and political paranoia, accelerated by a well-timed but foolish controversy that is more apparent than real, it may well be the road not taken.

Good luck, Mary Simon

A little bird tells me that a worthy replacement may have been found for Michaëlle Jean, Governor-General of Canada, now in her last year of office.

According to an influential Conservative insider, Mary Simon, currently the President of the Inuit Tapiriit Kanatami, would be an "ideal choice."

Simon was ambassador for Circumpolar Affairs at the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, 1994-2003, and also served as Canadian ambassador to Denmark, 1999-2001. She sat on the Joint Public Advisory Committee of NAFTA's Commission on Environmental Cooperation (1997-2000), and chaired the Commission from 1997-98. She was the Chancellor of Trent University from 1995 to 1999.

Simon has played many other roles in her career, including serving on the Nunavut Implementation Commission. She has been showered with honours--everything from the Order of Canada to the Gold Medal of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society. And throughout her many years of public service, she has been a powerful voice for Aboriginal rights in Canada and elsewhere.

And she blogs!

An ideal choice indeed.

It was not that long ago that Inuit, when not neglected by the Canadian government to the point of being left to starve as late as the 1950s, were treated as handy political pawns. To establish Canadian sovereignty, the government uprooted communities and relocated them to the high Arctic to act as "human flagpoles." The entire shabby history of this forced removal is recounted in Tammarniit (Mistakes) by Frank Tester and Peter Kulchyski, a book that makes grim reading.

There is something heart-warming--and not a little ironic--in the possibility of an Inuk woman of the 21st century standing in such a different way for Canada, and for Arctic sovereignty. ᐊᔪᙱᒋᐊᕐᓗᑎᑦ (Ajunngigiarlutit), Mary Simon, and I hope this indeed comes to pass. You would do us all proud.

National Post, first column

“Irony,” said the redoubtable Henry Fowler, “is a form of utterance that postulates a double audience, consisting of one party that hearing shall hear &, shall not understand, & another party that, when more is meant than meets the ear, is aware both of that more & of the outsiders' incomprehension.”

In the natural course of events, I have come to write for the National Post’s Full Comment, while continuing to blog on the leftish Progressive Bloggers aggregator. I leave it to the members of each sector of my double audience to determine into which category they might fall.

I expect that individual readers of my blog, who extend right across the political spectrum, will have certain reactions to this new development, as will NP readers. Some of my sparring partners will think that their newspaper of choice has gone utterly mad. Some of my political co-religionists will mistake a beachhead for desertion.

No matter.

Years ago, when I was first running for serious political office in my union, an ally—the then-President of the Union of National Defence Employees—gave me some good advice: “Just be yourself.” Doing so, of course, has not endeared me to some. But I shall try not to think of the fourth wall, and just deliver my lines as usual. I’m counting on my progressive friends to keep me honest if I stray inadvertently into political respectability.

The table is spread. The Harper government provides no end of good material, as its current torture squid-inkery indicates. It’s beginning to resemble comic opera: windy generals, documents with no visible writing, plenty of dirty work at the crossroads, but we all know that the fine tenor Richard Colvin, a slave to duty, is going to get the girl. There is something pleasing about the inevitability of it all, or worrying, depending of course upon your point of view.

And then there are the remains of that once-mighty behemoth, the Liberal Party of Canada, to pick over. The Natural Governing Party, a gigantic machine for divvying up the spoils of office, is now relegated to haring aimlessly after issues of the day, hoping that it might finally grab a juicy one. EI reform didn’t seize the popular imagination—what a surprise—and Torturegate didn’t work either, at least for the Leader, who stayed stubbornly out of town as the scandal broke. Once all things to all people, the Liberals are now flipping and flopping like fish on a deck. And the man at the helm just can’t seem to tear his face away from the mirror long enough to see the shoals.

The culture wars, so-called, offer continual opportunities for comment. In the latest skirmish, some brave defenders of free speech have done a sudden volte-face and cheered the banning of minarets in Switzerland. I enjoy the shower of sparks when irresistible principle meets immovable prejudice.

Finally there are the everyday bits and pieces of life on earth in the new millennium—a smorgasbord of climate change, natural and unnatural disasters, the political ergotism presently infecting America, animal news, poetry, technology, good books and better gossip.

All grist, and often good fun to run through the mill, even for humourless zealots like myself. And so a new adventure begins.

More Harper bullying

Somehow I missed this news item yesterday. Funds to a venerable faith-based overseas charitable institution, Kairos, have been terminated without explanation by the Conservative government, ending a 35-year relationship with the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA).

In March, Kairos submitted a 2009-2013 program proposal on human rights and ecological sustainability costing $9.2-million. Executive director Mary Corkery said in an interview that CIDA indicated in July that there was no problem with the proposal, that funding would be approved and needed only the minister's signature.

At the end of September, when Kairos's existing contract with CIDA expired and no new one had been signed, Ms. Corkery asked what was happening. She said she was told the minister was busy, and was offered funding for a two-month extension ending Nov. 30.

On the final day of the extension period, Ms. Corkery said that CIDA vice-president Victoria Sutherland called to tell her that all funding would be terminated because Kairos didn't fall within CIDA's priorities.

This will, I assume as planned, devastate the international human rights work in which Kairos has been engaged. The organization has in the past spoken out on global warming, mining operations abroad, aboriginal rights, immigration and international trade.

A "bad fit," says CIDA, through which funds had been channelled to the group. Very likely.

Cabinetry in Afghanistan

I reproduce, without comment, this Globe and Mail hed and deck:

Karzai set to replace most of his cabinet

Afghan President's action intended to purge corruption from government, restore his legitimacy after fraud-tainted election

Whoops!

Christie Blatchford suffers a major blow to her credibility.

This morning, the Globe and Mail formally retracted statements made in her infamous column of November 28, in which she had sneered at Richard Colvin for being outside the wire in Kandahar only once for a brief period, and had also "quoted" him as saying that Kandahar prison seemed “to be in reasonably good condition,” and that prisoners got “enough food.”

For some reason this correction does not appear to be on-line*, but here it is, from the print edition:

Comments released to a parliamentary committee this week about Afghanistan's Khandahar prison that the facility seemed "to be in reasonably good condition" and that inmates got "enough food" were misattributed to Canadian diplomat Richard Colvin. In fact, the comments were made by an unknown third party and quoted by Mr. Colvin in an e-amil. Mr. Colvin made several trips, not one, outside the military base in Khandahar. Incorrect information appeared in a column November 28.

Ouch.

UPDATE: And ouch again. [H/t Scott Tribe.]

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*It is now. [H/t reader Navvy.]

Supreme Court loses its balance

A Supreme Court of Canada ruling today (text here) expanding the definition of Internet luring will, it is claimed, protect more children from Internet predators.

If that were the only effect of the judgement, we could all rest easy and congratulate the learned judges on a job well done. But this is what Mark Hecht, of Beyond Borders, a group that lobbies against child exploitation, has to say, and it makes me very uneasy indeed:

"There's been a very clear message that in fact this is something that is an offence, and as a result, I would think that there will now be more arrests and prosecutions of adults committing these kind of crimes," he told CTV News Channel.

"If you're an adult and if you're having conversations with a child on the Internet, be warned because even if your conversations aren't sexual and even if your conversations are not for the purpose of meeting a child and committing an offence against a child, what you're doing is potentially a crime," he said. [emphasis added]

In case anyone thinks that Hecht is misrepresenting the contents of the judgement, here are three salient extracts from the latter:

Section 172.1(1)(c) creates an inchoate offence consisting of three elements: (1) an intentional communication by computer; (2) with a person whom the accused knows or believes to be under 14 years of age; (3) for the specific purpose of facilitating the commission of a specified secondary offence with respect to the underage person. The focus of s. 172.1 is on the accused’s intention at the time of communication by computer and that intention must be determined subjectively. While sexually explicit comments may suffice to establish the criminal purpose of the accused, the content of the communication is not necessarily determinative. The offender need not meet or intend to meet the victim with a view to committing any of the specified secondary offences. “Facilitating”, in this context, includes helping to bring about and making easier or more probable.

[25] It will immediately be seen that s. 172.1(1)(c) creates an incipient or “inchoate” offence, that is, a preparatory crime that captures otherwise legal conduct meant to culminate in the commission of a completed crime. It criminalizes conduct that precedes the commission of the sexual offences to which it refers, and even an attempt to commit them. Nor, indeed, must the offender meet or intend to meet the victim with a view to committing any of the specified secondary offences. This is in keeping with Parliament’s objective to close the cyberspace door before the predator gets in to prey.

[29] I hasten to add that sexually explicit language is not an essential element of the offences created by s. 172.1. Its focus is on the intention of the accused at the time of the communication by computer. Sexually explicit comments may suffice to establish the criminal purpose of the accused. But those who use their computers to lure children for sexual purposes often groom them online by first gaining their trust through conversations about their home life, their personal interests or other innocuous topics. [emphases added]

Now consider what the judges are saying here. A conversation with a child need not be sexual in nature. No intent to meet the child for the purposes of committing a sexual crime is required for a guilty verdict--because the word "facilitating" simply means (so they state) creating such a possibility, regardless of intent.

Imagine this scenario, one of many possible ones. You enter a chatroom where the topic is current movies. You discover that "shy14" really is fourteen years of age, by asking her outright. You proceed to have a good discussion about the merits of today's horror films. Just out of interest, you ask her where she lives.

Based upon today's SCC ruling, you are probably guilty of a sex crime against a minor.

Am I the only one who is concerned about this almost infinite scope-widening by the Court, and its potential misuse and abuse by over-zealous police and prosecutors?

So many smoking guns

...you'd think there'd just been a Mafia firefight.

Other bloggers have already pounced gleefully upon the clutch of heavily-redacted documents released yesterday. My favourite comment is this one: "It's all here in black and."

NDP foreign affairs critic Paul Dewar: "It's like reading tea leaves." I'd prefer another metaphor: squid-ink. An Exxon Valdez tankerful of squid-ink.

Then there are the fresh revelations from the International Red Cross, a growing list of detainees, new evidence of Colvin-muzzling...

And this amazing spectacle continues to unfold. Meanwhile, a parliamentary committee is still denied access to documents that a parade of rebuttal witnesses have had in their hands. There is something almost surreal about the way the government is carrying on.

So many leaks and breaches are occurring at the moment that at least one document has appeared in both a redacted and unredacted form, gleefully brandished by Paul Dewar. Guess which version doesn't have the word "torture" in it?

An unfortunate analogy occurs to me. The Harper government is behaving very much like a stubborn prisoner reluctant to confess. Electric cables and beatings are obviously not ours to deploy, even if by now we were to have the unpleasant urge to use such devices. Nevertheless, we--blogospherians, frustrated parliamentary committee members, bloodhound journos, various fed-up officials, human rights activists, maybe even The Hague--have ways of making you talk.

It's just a matter of time. And there's no point screaming--because we don't give a damn about your pain.

[H/t Impolitical, Far and Wide]

UPDATE: And still more recently-fired weapons.

Lt.-Col. Tom Putt: "I mean, we were basically capturing a local yokel. Detaining the local yokels and handing them off."

Torturegate: now is the time at the Dawg

...when we juxtapose:

Corrections Canada officer Linda Garwood-Filbert, February, 2007:

[I]n the months prior to public allegations of abuse and torture, there was compelling evidence of terrible conditions in Afghan prisons. In addition to routine reports by diplomats citing widespread torture and abuse, Canadian officials were also delivering first-hand accounts showing how grim the prisons were.

In one, Linda Garwood-Filbert, the newly arrived leader of a Correctional Service Canada inspections team, asked for better boots in February, 2007, months before the published reports, because she was “walking through blood and fecal matter” on the floor of cells as they toured Afghan prisons.

Corrections Officer Linda Garwood-Filbert today, at the parliamentary committee examining allegations of abuse of transferred Afghan detainees:

A Corrections Canada official who worked as a co-ordinator for prison reform in Afghanistan for two years says she never saw any physical signs that detainees had been abused or tortured.

Linda Garwood-Filbert told a special House of Commons committee investigating Afghan detainee transfers that she visited two prisons and the Afghan National Police headquarters 47 times in 2007.

The visits included 26 interviews of detainees conducted by Corrections Canada, she said Wednesday.

Garwood-Filbert said she would try to substantiate claims of abuse from inmates who recounted what they were told or heard or what had happened to them personally.

“Although I took care to look for them, there were no physical signs of abuse to validate their statements,” Garwood-Filbert said.

Dziekanski Taserman beats a rap

RCMP Cpl. Benjamin "Monty" Robinson, the man who Tasered Robert Dziekanski, will not stand trial for DUI after running into and killing a BC motorcyclist with his Jeep in October, 2008.

There was a kind of Greek inevitability to this outcome.

After the accident, according to one bystander, Robinson didn't bother checking on the man he had hit. Instead he left his licence with someone and ran home with his two children, returning to the scene a little later. He subsequently failed two breathalyzer tests. A helpful colleague began to lay down the framework of an alibi:

Delta Const. Paul Eisenzimmer said that, in general, anyone who leaves the scene could be charged under the Criminal Code.

"Leaving the scene means avoiding responsibility," Eisenzimmer said. "If someone left their identification there it is hard to say the person is avoiding responsibility.

"But if someone leaves their identification and then leaves the scene the issue is why leave and what have they done in the interim -- have they gone and drank some more?"[emphasis added]

I picked up on that at the time. But Robinson's licence was suspended for three months anyway, for impaired driving, and the local police recommended that he be criminally charged, a decision that in BC belongs to the Crown.

Lo and behold, Robinson made the very claim suggested, and fought the suspension all the way to the BC Supreme Court. He had been so shaken by the crash, he said, that he had downed two shots of vodka at home to steady his nerves.

But the BC Supreme Court wasn't buying it:

“(The) officer noted her personal observations that the petitioner had a strong odour of liquor on his breath and on his person, that his face was pale, his eyes were bloodshot and his pupils were dilated, and his speech was slurred,” said the judgment by Justice Mark McEwan.

It said Robinson told the officer he had two beers at a party at 5:30 p.m. and then took two shots of vodka after the collision during a 10-minute period in which he left the scene, walked home, and returned.

The officer didn’t believe him, noting “symptoms far more set than two shots in that time period should indicate.”

Robinson was given a 90-day driving prohibition, but he asked for a judicial review of the prohibition because his “evidence” about the vodka shots wasn’t considered.

McEwan dismissed the petition, and commented on the “inherent inconsistency” of Robinson’s statement at the scene, saying the pattern of drinking he described did not seem to account for the blood-alcohol readings.

Robinson, who was off-duty at the time of the incident, faces charges of impaired driving causing death and exceeding the legal limit. He was suspended with pay after the crash.

Those criminal charges were the ones that the BC Ministry of the Attorney-General, overriding the recommendations of the local police, dropped yesterday. Robinson will face but a single charge, "attempting to obstruct justice." A spokesperson for the ministry's criminal justice branch would say only that the charge was due to the "alleged actions" of Cpl. Robinson after the collision.

My prediction? He'll walk. Police, generally unaccountable to anyone but themselves, are veritable Houdinis when it comes to extricating themselves from a jam, as we have seen in the appalling case of Ian Bush. But in BC they do have plenty of help from the Crown as well, as indicated, for example, by the reluctance, pre-Braidwood at least, to prosecute the officers involved in the death of Robert Dziekanski.

Is the Robinson case the latest dismal instance of police impunity? Or can civilians now beat a drunk driving charge if given the opportunity to run home and gulp down a few shots? Indeed, why not carry an open bottle of liquor in your vehicle--a far lesser offence than impaired driving causing death--to keep handy for just such "emergencies?"

What's a million?

...two million? Five million dead Black Africans?

Not much to Marc Garneau, a Liberal Party star--and a host of his Liberal colleagues, set to shoot down a private member's bill today that would put AIDS-fighting antiretroviral drugs into the hands of desperately sick and poor people on another continent.

Nope. "Intellectual property rights," he sniffs. The ultra-profits of Big Pharma, if I may offer a translation. A succinct deconstruction of that line of argument may be found here. And here.

The bill, sponsored by NDP MP Judy Wasylycia-Leis, seeks to fix earlier legislation, given unanimous support in the House of Commons a mere four years ago, that would have permitted generic drug manufacturers to produce and sell lifesaving brand-name drugs relatively cheaply in impoverished parts of the world. But the legislation contained so many bureaucratic hurdles that since that time only one pharmaceutical company, Apotex, has managed to ship a single anti-AIDS drug to Rwanda--one shipment in four years, to help 21,000 people.

One expects this sort of thing from Conservatives, whose milk of human kindness, if it exists at all, does so in a curdled state. But Liberals are supposed to offer an alternative--not solely a political one, but a moral one. This is the party of inclusiveness, of unity, of human rights.

That's the story, anyway, and they're sticking to it. But it's a tall tale--arguably always has been--and the likely vote later today will simply reinforce its exaggerated, fictional quality.

The Liberals are a big business party, just like the Conservatives. They have always put profits before people. It will be interesting to see how former human rights advocate Michael Ignatieff votes on this one. These days, you pretty well have to toss a coin.

We sometimes imagine that politics is merely a game, and the issues are irrelevant abstractions. Not so, and especially not so today. Wasylycia-Leis tells it like it is:

This is about saving lives. It's as simple as that. It's about getting medication from Canada to countries that don't have the means to pay for them to help deal with HIV-AIDS, tuberculosis and other serious illnesses.

The defeat of this bill will kill people. But the Librocons--blue wing and red wing alike--don't give a damn when corporate profits are at stake. And dying Africans don't vote in Canadian elections.

UPDATE: Whew! Amazing what a media spotlight can accomplish.

And with this frank disclosure

...I welcome Charles Johnson, of Little Green Footballs, to my blogroll (under the "Intelligence on the Non-Left" rubric).

Just in time to take shelter from the "We support freedom and the compulsory abolition of minarets" mob. Help yourself to a beer, Chuck, while I pinch myself.

[H/t JJ]

The Harper government: caught in the act

The Globe and Mail today revealed--if that is the proper word--some further documents on the Afghanistan detainee transfer issue, this time ones that had been submitted to the Military Police Complaints Commission, which has been trying for more than a year to begin an inquiry.

The MPCC has encountered Harper roadblocks every step of the way--legal timewasting manoeuvres, intimidation of witnesses--culminating in Defence Minister Peter MacKay's refusal to renew the mandate of MPCC head Peter Tinsley, who was evidently getting troublesome in his search for the truth. Sneered MacKay: "I encourage you to...start your career planning as soon as possible."

This time, the Globe story is in the capable hands of Paul Koring rather than the pliable shill Christie Blatchford, and it shows.

The selective leaked documents to Blatchford, it seems, are now being matched--I would suggest--by leaks from a different source, one far more favourable to the claims of Richard Colvin. But the most interesting parts of these, in a way, are the sections that we can't read--which in some cases account for the entire document.

These heavily-redacted files, most of them drafted by embattled diplomat Richard Colvin, are only a handful--less than 200 pages--of the total number of pages of evidence now before the MPCC. There is, as Koring makes abundantly clear, no justification whatsoever for the redactions, which have rendered many of the documents unreadable. MPCC investigators, as he notes, have high security clearances, and the files themselves, for the most part, have very low-level security designations, such as "Canadian Eyes Only."

Until recently, such documents were routinely provided to the MPCC, Koring reports, but everything changed once the Commission began to investigate claims that detainees were being knowingly turned over to Afghan authorities to be tortured--a war crime.

Some documents go back to early 2006, and, unsurprisingly, are redacted in their entirety. That was the year that Colvin said that he began to send warnings to various higher-ups about the treatment of Afghan detainees, a claim challenged by Los Tres Generales* last week, and attacked by Blatchford in her two columns on the subject this past Saturday and Monday.

Even with the censor's bucket of black ink, a memo from Colvin reproduced in the print edition of the Globe today seems telling. Dated September 2006, Colvin was evidently warning senior officials in the military and the government about problems with detainee transfers: "[redacted] what can only be described as strong criticisms of the Cdn approach on detainee issues." Tantalizing: could this refer to the International Red Cross?

In any case, at this point, if it was not crystal-clear earlier, we can assert unequivocally that the "national security" excuse trotted out by the Harper government for withholding and censoring these and other documents is utterly fraudulent. The only "security" they are worried about, to be blunt, is their own political backsides. Public opinion remains unfavourable to them, despite days of frantic spinning, and the imagined spectacle of government ministers tried for war crimes in the Hague may be keeping them awake 'o nights as well.

Here's Andrew Coyne:

Coupled with the continuing refusal to release the Colvin memos and other relevant documents — or rather their selective release, to some but not others — it makes it very hard to give the government the benefit of the doubt in this affair. Their story has become more believable, but their every action suggests that they themselves don’t believe it. [emphasis added]

What we are seeing is the behavior of little kids caught doing something naughty in the woodshed. It's all red-faced denials, rage, deflection, lies, stony silence--the entire repertoire is there. But we know, as all parents know, what must inevitably follow. When will the Harper government have its "I'm sorry" moment?

[h/t CC]
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*Rick Salutin has a point.