Van Loan tries the Dolchstosslegende

You might think that the sensible reaction to a series of judicial rebukes would be a serious reassessment of government policies and practices that the courts have found wanting. You might think that, and I certainly think that, but conservative ministers of the Harper persuasion apparently can't afford to think that. Given the well-known liberal bias of facts, conservatives don't do reality checks. They do self-pity; they do paranoia; and hidden in the paranoid self-pity lies a threat:

Under a security certificate, unlike a charge under the Criminal Code, accused terrorists and their lawyers do not have a right to see the intelligence gathered against them.

Van Loan says he is puzzled about the crash of the previously successful regime.

"It held up quite well until 2006," he said. "We started getting different court decisions in the exact same facts."

It was in 2006 that the Conservatives formed the government, replacing the Liberals.

See how it's done? Nudge nudge, wink wink. Activist judges, deference deficit, and see where that leads? To the judicialization of intelligence. It's not our fault; we were stabbed in the back. (Give us a majority, and we'll get even.)

Even in that brief quotation, minister Van Loan is shaving the truth -- ok, he's lying. The judges in the recent reviews of security certificates have not been looking at "the exact same facts" set before them before 2006.They've been looking at tardy admissions from CSIS that some of the evidence -- much of the evidence? all of the evidence? -- they've been running on is tainted because it was derived from torture, or comes from unreliable sources, and in at least one case they've learned that CSIS just plain lied to a judge about a source.

In another context, minister Van Loan has recently been quoted as saying, "The safety and protection of society must come first." Well, no, actually. The basic principles and structures of democracy must come first, and then it would help those of us who are trying to think justly and logically if Van Loan and his colleagues could drop the demagoguery when it clearly flies in the face of the facts. (At that last link, see Greg Weston's nice dissection of the self-contradiction of Van Loan's department on its own website.)

Nobody is stabbing conservatives or CSIS in the back. By the courts at least they are being held to account for their own failures, now numerous enough and shocking enough in both constitutional and human terms to deserve a major inquiry. I know that won't happen any time soon, not under the Liberals either, given their own culpability in the offences to reason and justice of the last decade.

But some threats to the judiciary, to the state, and to the liberty and dignity of all Canadian citizens seem more immediate than others, and I'd say that Peter Van Loan is looming over the horizon with far too much authority for any citizen's comfort.