Unless you've been completely cut off from the media for the last three years or so, it would be difficult not to acknowledge that there are suspicions concerning the sincerity and good intentions of the Bush administration.
This is an administration that defied the UN and international law to stage an invasion of a sovereign country for reasons that even administration officials themselves have been forced to admit are bogus. Only now that their own chief weapons hunter, David Kay, has admitted that there are no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq has the Bush White House grudgingly admitted that they were wrong. Oops. And now we have reason to believe that they knew they were wrong months ago but didn't admit it until they couldn't do otherwise.
This is an administration that has been running a quasi-concentration camp in Guantanamo Bay where it holds people under the entirely fabricated designation of "enemy combatant" so it can deny them even the rights that would be afforded to prisoners of war under the Geneva Convention. Things there have deteriorated to a point where it's now considered a victory when they release thirteen year olds who have been held for over two years without charges, the benefit of due process or even contact with their own families. (They continue to hold sixteen and seventeen year olds.)
This is an administration that has held one of its own citizens in custody for over a year and a half without charging him, or allowing him to consult with his own lawyer. He's being held on suspicion alone and on the word of one man - George Bush. He's being held in a Navy brig entirely cut off from the outside world, even though the US Court of Appeals has ruled that he must be released.
This is an administration that has passed legislation that has American civil liberties advocates so up in arms that more than 230 cities, counties and states have passed resolutions against it. The American Supreme Court recently ruled that a portion of the Patriot Act is unconstitutional but in his State of the Union address, Bush stated that the sunset provisions attached to this legislation must be overruled and all the provisions of this legislation must be made permanent.
This is an administration that has gone to great lengths to intrude on the privacy of its own citizens with programs such as Total Information Awareness, which only died because of Congressional resistance, and with CAPPS II, an airline screening programming scheduled to be tested this spring and implemented this summer. It's already been revealed that two American airlines secretly shared passenger data with the government, in contravention of their own privacy policies, and civil rights advocates have been unable to gain any detailed information about how the CAPPS II database will be shared and how abuses of that information, or even the inevitable false positives, can be prevented and/or corrected.
And this is an administration which deported a Canadian citizen, Maher Arar, to Syria and has tried to claim that there was no problem because the Syrians promised they wouldn't mistreat him even while this same administration has publicly condemned Syria for practicing torture.
Even if you try to give the Bush White House the benefit of the doubt, surely it's difficult not to at least suspect that its intentions aren't always benign and that its relationship with the truth can be a little tenuous at times, to say the least.
But if you're Canadian Public Security Minister Anne McLellan, I guess you ignore all of this. When you contemplate creating a Canadian version of CAPPS II and sharing the resulting information freely with American officials even though the current state of our laws doesn't allow the intrusion of privacy it represents, you simply assure the Americans that we'll pass legislation that does allow it.
When concerns that the information might be abused are raised, you simply accept Tom Ridge's word that it won't happen. Even in the face of overwhelming evidence that the people Ridge works for have little enough respect for the civil liberties of their own citizens, never mind those of other countries, you smile and pledge "100 per cent committment".
And even though Canada has announced a public inquiry that will examine, among other things, the sharing of information between officials of our two countries as it relates to the unlawful imprisonment and torture of a Canadian citizen, if you're Public Security Minister Anne McLellan you prejudge the outcome of that inquiry and assure the American administration that it can't possibly affect the information-sharing arrangements between our two governments.
Wasn't that sophisticated of her?
