June 2004 Archives

After I visit the polling station this morning I'll be climbing back in the car and heading out for another road trip. I'll be back some time tomorrow but it may be late in the evening and Wednesday looks to be a jam-packed, fun-filled day. What I'm saying is that while I may squeeze off a quick post or two there's not likely to be anything substantial here until Thursday.

The project I've been working on has involved as much R & D on my part as it has billable hours. Life on the edge can be interesting. This is how we learn.

When I visit the poll this morning I'll be voting NDP. I find myself in very much the same position as Ian Welsh: I'm not ecstatic about the NDP's platform or the candidate in my riding but I'm less impressed with anyone else.

A while back in a comment at the E-Group I predicted that we'd be at the polls again within eighteen months. It's looking like it may be a lot less than that but I hope the next campaign doesn't start too quickly. I'd like to see a long enough interval that we can reasonably expect the Conservatives to have a proper policy convention and revise their platform accordingly. It would go a long way to answer some of the questions from sceptics like me and it would defuse some of the accusations regarding a hidden agenda. Without that, we may end up right back where we started.

Have fun, folks. And whether you agree with me or think I'm full of crap, get out and vote. Politicians of all stripes need to know we've got our eye on them.

US hands over sovereignty in Iraq

The US has formally handed over power in Iraq, two days ahead of schedule.

At a low-key ceremony in Baghdad, US administrator Paul Bremer gave legal documents to an Iraqi judge. He later left the country by plane.

Iraq's interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, who also took part in the ceremony in the heavily-guarded Green Zone, said it was "a historic day".

But the BBC's Dan Damon in Baghdad says the handover will mean little to ordinary Iraqis.

Our correspondent says it is not clear how real the transfer of power will seem to the many Iraqis whose backing is needed to defeat insurgents.
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Another BBC correspondent in Istanbul, Jonny Dymond, says it appears that the date was brought forward to pre-empt further attacks by militants to coincide with the handover.

U.S. Edicts Curb Power Of Iraq's Leadership (via Bump)

U.S. administrator L. Paul Bremer has issued a raft of edicts revising Iraq's legal code and has appointed at least two dozen Iraqis to government jobs with multi-year terms in an attempt to promote his concepts of governance long after the planned handover of political authority on Wednesday.

Some of the orders signed by Bremer, which will remain in effect unless overturned by Iraq's interim government, restrict the power of the interim government and impose U.S.-crafted rules for the country's democratic transition. Among the most controversial orders is the enactment of an elections law that gives a seven-member commission the power to disqualify political parties and any of the candidates they support.

The effect of other regulations could last much longer. Bremer has ordered that the national security adviser and the national intelligence chief chosen by the interim prime minister he selected, Ayad Allawi, be given five-year terms, imposing Allawi's choices on the elected government that is to take over next year.

Bremer also has appointed Iraqis handpicked by his aides to influential positions in the interim government. He has installed inspectors-general for five-year terms in every ministry. He has formed and filled commissions to regulate communications, public broadcasting and securities markets. He named a public-integrity commissioner who will have the power to refer corrupt government officials for prosecution.

The orders include rules that cap tax rates at 15 percent, prohibit piracy of intellectual property, ban children younger than 15 from working, and a new traffic code that stipulates the use of a car horn in "emergency conditions only" and requires a driver to "hold the steering wheel with both hands."

Josh Marshall at TPM has a post up referring to a Financial Times article that makes "stunning new claims about alleged sales of uranium from Niger to Iraq". He doesn't exactly dispute those claims, but he leaves us to ponder this paragraph:

Let's say that certain individuals or organizations are responsible for some rather unfortunate misdeeds. And let's further postulate that such hypothetical individuals or organizations find out that some folks are on to them, that a story is in the works -- perhaps more than one -- and that it's coming right at them. Those individuals or organizations -- as shorthand, let's call them 'the bad actors' -- might well start trying to fight back, trying to gin up an alternative storyline to exculpate themselves and inculpate others. If that story made its way into the news, at a minimum, it might help the bad actors muddy the waters for when the real story comes out. You can see how such a regrettable turn of events might come to pass.

This past week saw the first testimony in the inquiry into Maher Arar's deportation and detention in Syria. The government's opening statement would suggest that the inquiry really isn't necessary since we can be assured that no one on the government side did anything the least bit inappropriate.

The attorney general's statement says ?there is an emerging understanding of the actions? taken by Canadian agencies in relation to Mr. Arar, particularly those of the RCMP and Canadian Security Intelligence Service [CSIS].

The statement suggests the government's position that its officials followed proper procedures was recently confirmed by two reports on the Mr. Arar matter.

The goal of this week's testimony was to lay the groundwork and to present some general information about how CSIS operates. Toward that end, the first witness to be called was Ward Elcock, the former head of CSIS who was in that position when Arar was detained and deported. He was questioned by Lorne Waldman, Arar's lead counsel.

Elcock assured the commission that CSIS agents are carefully chosen, highly trained and good at what they do. They carefully gather facts about the targets of their investigations and put those facts together like pieces of a puzzle. But when it comes to determining whether some of the regimes with which CSIS has information sharing arrangements commit human rights violations, apparently CSIS isn't all that good at putting the puzzle together.

"We may well have agreements with other countries we suspect engage in torture," [Elcock] told a public inquiry yesterday, adding that such information exchanges with such countries are done "very carefully."

...While he said CSIS is highly disciplined and subject to multiple levels of oversight, Mr. Elcock acknowledged it is beyond the agency's mandate to investigate how its foreign partners get particular information.

"The reality is in most cases, we would have no knowledge if it was derived from torture," said Mr. Elcock, now a special adviser to the Privy Council Office. He said that reports of torture "clearly would call into question the validity of the information."

Mr. Waldman tried hard to get the former CSIS director to say Syria tortures its suspects, by pointing to Amnesty International and U.S. State Department reports that made such findings. Mr. Elcock would concede only that those are "relatively credible" documents, but "not a determination of anything."

Elcock refused to say whether CSIS has any kind of relationship with Syria specifically, citing national security concerns. But since no one has denied the charge that CSIS agents were in Syria within a couple of months of Arar's deportation to pick up the early results of the interrogation, I have to wonder who Elcock thinks he's kidding.

Although most of Elcock's testimony was of a general nature, there was discussion of one specific piece of evidence: the lease for an Ottawa apartment bearing Arar's signature that turned up in the possession of American officials in New York when they were questioning him prior to putting him on a plane for the Middle East.

While not commenting specifically on Arar's case, Elcock said if information was given to U.S. authorities by Canadian security agencies there is an understanding that intelligence will not be passed on to a third country without Canada's consent.

1. The lease was returned to Canada and subsequently sent to Syria, which would pretty much confirm the relationship which Elcock refused to talk about.


2. The Americans sent the lease to Syria without Canadian consent, which means Canada should have raised all kinds of hell with American authorities.


3. The Americans sought, and got, permission to forward the lease to Syria. If so, the timing of that request would be extremely interesting since it would tell us how early in the proceedings CSIS knew what was going on.

The other interesting development was Stephen Harper's statement at a town hall broadcast last Tuesday that he was "briefed" about the Arar case and told at one point by Canadian authorities that Arar's deportation was "appropriate". Within a couple of days that was all a mistake -- he was never actually briefed.

Mr. Harper sought yesterday to clarify his comments by emphasizing that, in fact, he'd never received a private briefing. Conservative officials explained that Mr. Harper had been referring to more casual discussions MPs had had.

"We were told, 'there's more here than meets the eye,'." a Conservative official said yesterday. "They said, 'Leave this one alone. Don't politicize it. There's something here.'."

Mr. Waldman said Mr. Harper's comments once again raise the possibility that Canadian security agents were conducting whisper campaigns about terrorism suspects to Privy Councillors, such as Mr. Harper and possibly even Prime Minister Paul Martin.

Full transcripts of the testimony are available in pdf format at the inquiry website. I've only quickly scanned one but picked up one other interesting fact. That SIRC report in which someone blacked out every single, stinkin' word on 89 pages wasn't redacted by SIRC or CSIS. It was redacted by the government. I would assume that would be the work of minions in Anne McLellan's Department of Public Safety and Whatever (that name is too long to remember). They should be found in contempt of court. They've certainly demonstrated their contempt for the public. And since tomorrow is election day it gives me an opportunity to send a message to Ms McLellan herself: hope you lose, eh.

Here's hoping Justice Dennis O'Connor is one tough dude. It's apparent that the government is going to make it just as difficult as possible to find out anything about what really happened here. And we'll have to be patient because this looks to drag on well into September at least.

Cross-posted to the BlogsCanada E-Group Election Blog

Part of the Conservative Party platform (pdf) specifically mentions NAFTA and suggests that a Conservative government would move us further towards what has often been called "deep integration" with the United States.

Enhance our NAFTA relationship with the United States by moving towards harmonized tariffs, eliminating rules of origin, and moving beyond trade to pursue enhanced common labour, environmental, and security standards.

And it's the weakening of our sovereignty that bothers me about the NAFTA and about the possibility of extending that relationship without addressing that issue. A while back Ian Welsh wrote a good post that summarizes the effects of Chapter 11 of the agreement, which is the particular section I'm referring to. Ian aptly titled his post The Right to Profit and discusses the way Chapter 11 puts the protection of investors and their right to profit above the ability of governments to make decisions for the benefit of the public interest. While Canada has been on the losing end of Chapter 11 cases in the past, this is something Americans appear to have figured out only recently.

The subject came up briefly in the English language leaders debate when Jack Layton indicated a willingness to challenge this aspect of the treaty. In his rebuttal, Stephen Harper raised a straw man by equating Layton's position with trashing the whole agreement. In the absence of any other evidence I have to assume that Harper has no problem with Chapter 11 and its ramifications.

The Conservative platform doesn't give us much more to go on than the pull quote above but we can see a more detailed blueprint for the enhancement of the NAFTA in a report called New Frontiers (pdf) which was published this past April by the Canadian Council of Chief Executives (CCCE). Since this group, led by Tom d'Aquino, considers themselves the driving force behind the original Free Trade Agreement as well as the NAFTA, it seems a good place to start.

According to the CCCE deeper integration with the United States is inevitable -- it's a freakin' force of nature that's too powerful to resist. So we may as well get out in front of it, which d'Aquino and some of his peers did shortly after the report was issued. They went off to DC to sell American legislators on their vision.

[Aside from the fact that these people are unelected and have no mandate to represent the rest of us to another country, am I the only one who thinks that by appearing anxious to make a deal we weaken a bargaining position that's already weak by virtue of being by far the smaller partner in this transaction? Don't these captains of industry know anything about playing hard to get? But I digress.]

That vision seems to have been profoundly affected by 9/11 since it's mentioned in the report at least half a dozen times. They not only acknowledge that security is a serious concern, they seem to almost relish the prospect of being part of Fortress North America. Personal information would be shared freely among governments in the interests of keeping that border open. (Of course Anne "whatever you say, Mr. Ridge" McLellan has already laid the groundwork for that.) And in the CCCE's view, there's a biometrically equipped ID card in your future. Voluntary, of course. At first. After all, nothing must be allowed to impede the progress of trade.

When I first read the Conservative platform I noticed that it spoke of "enhancing" environmental and labour standards rather than just harmonizing them. I was puzzled at the choice of words but I see that idea reflected in the CCCE document. The authors seem confident that as part of the harmonization process, the higher standard would always be chosen. Pardon my scepticism, but I seriously doubt that.

There are two reasons why all this leaves me singing the blues. The obvious one is that I'm left to wonder how much more control we would give up over our own country. Does anyone seriously think that we bargain on an equal footing with the US? For that matter, does anyone seriously think that given recent American history the White House would cede authority to any kind of supranational body when it comes to making decisions about things like environmental and labour standards? It seems to me we would end up with even more policy decisions dictated by the corporate sector and by Washington.

And that leads me to my second concern: the nature of the policy decisions that have been coming out of Washington. In its breathless enthusiasm for deeper integration, I don't see the CCCE or the Conservative Pary acknowledging what's been happening south of the border. Harmonizing security arrangements means sharing information with the regime that passed the Patriot Act, that is in the process of passing the Son of the Patriot Act in small pieces attached as riders to other legislation and that recently decided to allow the Pentagon to spy on its own citizens. And do I even need to mention Maher Arar's name? I'm not all that comfortable with these people knowing where I live. (After this week I'm not all that comfortable with CSIS knowing where I live either, but that's a separate post.)

We've spent three and a half years watching the Bush administration all but declare war on the environment and their own working class. It seems George Bush has never met an environmental regulation he didn't want to trash. His economic management has resulted in an economy that has corporate profits rising, but working class wages remaining flat or in decline if you can find work at all. And let's not forget the massive federal deficit he's racked up while shifting the tax burden off the wealthy and on to everyone else. It appears the CCCE members would gain from deeper integration with that economy but I'm not sure anyone else would. We wouldn't be negotiating with a regime that's friendly to either the environment or labour.

I picked on the Conservatives specifically at the top of this post because of what's in their platform, but I strongly suspect that the Liberals under their current leadership would lead us in the same direction. They'd just do it a bit more gradually. Unless Martin is deposed and John Manley takes over at which point integration may happen even more quickly than under a Conservative government.

The real agenda here is being driven by the corporate sector and both of the political parties that are liable to govern this country act like they're just along for the ride. Just as it seems the NAFTA was negotiated with too little debate on some of its ramifications, so it seems deeper integration will happen without any real debate on what it means to Canadians in any terms other than the balance of trade and the GDP. In the long run the quality of life for all of us won't be measured strictly in terms of those numbers. What does it serve us to have a bigger economic pie if all that's left on the plate is crumbs by the time it's passed to us?

But what's to debate when it's a freakin' force of nature, right?

Bump and update - please see below

ABC News is reporting that experts are studying a "developing internet attack" in which web servers running MS Internet Information Server are being infected. Those servers, which may be running popular and normally trusted web sites, then try to surreptitiously install software on visitors' machines that will allow spammers to use them to do their nefarious business.

This story at ZDNet tells you what ABC doesn't: this hack takes advantage of two flaws in Internet Explorer to do it's dirty work. If you use IE get your virus definitions up to date, but be aware that at this time most anti-virus programs don't recognize this as a virus. So better yet, switch to another browser.

This has been a special bulletin which hopefully makes up for the fact that I missed Monday night geek blogging this week. We aim to please even if we're sometimes a bit tardy.

Hat tip to slashdot for the ZDNet link. And a reverse hat tip to ABC for leaving out a crucial piece of information: if you're not running IE you're in no danger.

Update:
Via Just a Bump in the Beltway, the Washington Post has an article with some additional, and not encouraging, information. Read on to see how to protect yourself if you must run IE.

The attack is more dangerous than most, according to the government's US-CERT cybersecurity center, because it affects even computers that are running updated antivirus and firewall software. Infection is possible just by visiting affected Web sites, according to US-CERT, a division of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

The attackers, whose identities are unknown, targeted a flaw in Web sites powered by Microsoft's Internet Information Server (IIS). The sites hit by the attack were programmed to redirect the Explorer browser to another Web site that contains code that hackers use to record what people type on their keyboards -- including data such as passwords, credit card and Social Security numbers. The code then e-mails that information back to the attackers.

Computers that run Microsoft's Internet Explorer browsers are vulnerable to infection, according to US-CERT. The CERT alert said Internet Explorer users can protect themselves by turning off the "javascript" function in their browsers. Javascript is a computer language often used in building Web sites. The attack takes advantage of two recently discovered security flaws in Internet Explorer. Microsoft released a patch in April to fix one of the security holes; the company is still working on a patch for the other flaw, which security researchers publicly detailed less than two weeks ago.

Cross-posted at the BlogsCanada E-Group Election Blog

This is a quick follow-up to Jim Elve's recent post on the non-responsiveness of the Conservative Party on some policy issues. Earlier in the week a reader at my own blog emailed with a suggestion for a post subject. That's also where I've drawn the title I've used here which refers to the current Conservative platform.

The reader's basic point was that the Conservatives have never had a policy convention and it's entirely possible that the current Conservative platform won't hold. When that policy convention takes place, what happens if the party rank and file come up with different ideas than are contained in the platform on which Harper is currently running? If he's formed a government in the meantime, will he stick to the policies on which he was elected? Or will he maintain that the CPC has democratically voted to change the party policies and govern in a way that contradicts the mandate he was given in this election?

Admittedly this is a variation on the 'hidden agenda' argument. And admittedly the Conservatives had no choice about the timing of this election. But a spring election was widely anticipated before the Alliance-PC merger was ever finalized so the Conservatives can't claim to have been caught by surprise.

As Jim wrote in his post, the best way to shut down speculation on Conservative intentions is to give complete answers to the questions asked. The more reticent Harper and company appear to be, the more suspicious some folks will get. And when certain individual candidates insist on going "off message" it only adds fuel to the fire. Conservative supporters may be tired of seeing this kind of suspicion continually expressed by some of us, but it's not our fault their party hasn't finalized their policies and in a lot of ways the party doesn't seem to be helping itself.

(I haven't used the reader's name because I don't have permission to but if he wants credit he's welcome to speak up. And apparently he intends to start blogging himself soon. There's a place reserved for him on my blogroll when he does. I love it when people do my work for me.)

Cross-posted to the BlogsCanada E-Group Election Blog

A couple of days ago Paul Martin was very much in favour of transparency in government. In fact he was so much in favour of it he promised that the much ballyhooed summer summit on health care reform would be televised. So maybe, if it's not too much trouble, the PM could have a word with CSIS and its civilian review agency, the Security Intelligence Review Committee (SIRC).

A report with all 89 pages blacked out is what the federal government has released to the public concerning the involvement of Canadian intelligence officials in the deportation and detention of a Canadian citizen.

Paul Cavalluzzo, counsel for the commission of inquiry probing the deportation of Maher Arar, held aloft the censored document at the start of yesterday's hearings.

"There is nothing. Not one line, one word, that this commission can release to the public without violating the law," Cavalluzzo told the inquiry.

The Security Intelligence Review Committee (SIRC), the civilian agency that reviews the actions of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), prepared the report after an investigation into the agency's involvement in the detainment and deportation of Arar.
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While unedited copies of the review were submitted to Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness Anne McLellan and Justice Dennis O'Connor, who presides over the inquiry, the government also prepared an edited public report that deletes information that may pose a risk to national security.

Not one word, however, can be read on the edited report.

Testimony in the Arar inquiry began on Monday and I expect I'll have more to say when I've digested the press reports from the last few days but one item in particular caught my eye and the headline pretty much says it all: RCMP clears itself in Arar case.

... an unidentified senior Mountie, who was brought in from another unit to probe work done by Ottawa colleagues, concluded that they ?did not improperly encourage U.S. authorities to deport a Canadian citizen, Mr. Maher Arar from U.S. territory to Syria,? and that there were ?no discussions? about this.

Further, the senior Mountie found that the RCMP ?did not provide any information about Mr. Arar to the Syrian authorities.? The report fails to clarify whether the force talked to U.S. agencies about him.

The timing of this release is interesting, isn't it? We're three days into the inquiry and here's the RCMP rushing to tell the press that they've found themselves innocent of any wrongdoing. But they won't even tell us who came to that conclusion.

Part of Justice O'Connor's mandate in the Arar inquiry is to propose a better mechanism to investigate complaints against the RCMP. Almost anything would be better than having an "unidentified senior Mountie" do it. I don't know about you, but this report means less than nothing to me. I'll wait to see what comes out of the inquiry.

My internet service was just restored after going down yesterday morning. I'm hopelessly behind as to what's going on in the world.

I'm also expecting a house full of company shortly and going out of town tomorrow for a day or two. So posting will continue to be light to non-existent for a bit until I get reorganized.

But it's sure nice to be connected again.

Last night, or more accurately early this morning, I posted a story indicating that Don Rumsfeld had been directly implicated in the case of one ghost prisoner in Iraq. Now it's at least two and counting:

Rumsfeld admits to holding `ghost detainees'

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld admitted Thursday that he ordered the secret detention of at least two prisoners captured in Iraq so that they could be interrogated by the Central Intelligence Agency, a move that some legal experts say may have violated the Geneva Conventions.

The Geneva Conventions, which outline proper treatment of prisoners of war, forbid holding prisoners incommunicado and require that their identities be registered with the International Committee of the Red Cross.

Rumsfeld said CIA Director George Tenet asked him to hold a member of the Islamic militant group Ansar al Islam without notifying the Red Cross.
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He said he remembered one other similar detention and that officials were investigating to determine whether there were more.

"It is clearly conduct in violation of international law," said Deborah Pearlstein, the director of the U.S. Law and Security Program of Human Rights First, a New York-based advocacy group formerly known as the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights.

The Stakeholder points out that Rumsfeld appears to have committed perjury when he testified under oath before the Senate that any instructions issued by his department had been checked with lawyers and "deemed to be consistent with the Geneva Conventions".

Meanwhile at a briefing today Rumsfeld blamed the press for tarnishing America's reputation in the world by reporting the news and calling the incidents of abuse what they are: torture. Right, Rummy. The guilt doesn't lie with those who commit the crimes, only with those who report them.

This is only going to get worse for the Bush administration. I'll give the last word to Christopher Hitchens (via Needlenose).

But get ready. It is going to get much worse. The graphic videos and photographs that have so far been shown only to Congress are, I have been persuaded by someone who has seen them, not likely to remain secret for very long. And, if you wonder why formerly gung-ho rightist congressmen like James Inhofe ("I'm outraged more by the outrage") have gone so quiet, it is because they have seen the stuff and you have not. There will probably be a slight difficulty about showing these scenes in prime time, but they will emerge, never fear. We may have to start using blunt words like murder and rape to describe what we see.

Poll: Few watched debate (via Andrew Coyne)

A national opinion poll conducted for Sun Media in the wake of the televised leaders debates this week is certain to confirm the worst suspicions of all right-thinking Canadians. Surprise, surprise. The vast majority of Canadians were utterly turned off by the four suits in a sandbox, and simply tuned out these embarrassing two-hour shouting matches all together.

Leger Marketing polled 895 prospective voters over the past 24 hours to test their reaction to the English-language debate Tuesday night, and assess any possible impact these televised confrontations are having on the election. The survey found only 10% who said they watched the entire two-hour debate (and surely at least half of them were lying), while another 10% confessed to tuning in for "a few minutes."

Leger reports that fully 62% were watching other sitcoms or doing anything but listening to the four political leaders talking over each other.

Another 18% professed to have watched the debates "partly." (Our guess is that means partly on "mute," and partly tuned to the football game on another channel.)

That means many have to rely on the media coverage of the debate to try and sort out whether it should have any effect on their votes. But it seems to me that if your media pundit of choice favours Harper, then he or she likely crowned Harper the winner. If the commentator you rely on likes Martin, then likely Martin was presented as coming out ahead. Now is it fair to say that people's pundits of choice tend to reflect the opinions they already hold?

Personally I learned a few things from the debates:

• Gilles Duceppe has more of a sense of humour than I thought.


• Despite his years of city council experience, Jack Layton was nervous about being on the national stage.


• Paul Martin is feeling the strain a bit more than I thought. Whether it's *gasp* age or the knowledge that he may actually lose I can't say.


• Stephen Harper is working hard to keep his temper in check. That in part explains the tightly scripted campaign.

There was one other thing I noticed that I haven't seen any comment on. In a reference to the flap surrounding Scott Reid's remarks on bilingualism, I'm sure I heard Harper say that the bilingualism policy on which the Conservatives are campaigning hasn't actually been debated within the party. Given the timing of the merger and the party leadership race, that's actually not surprising. But I wonder how much of the Conservative platform can be described that way, and how much of it will actually stand if the Conservatives end up forming a government.

WSIB audit 'disturbing:' Minister

An audit of the Workplace Safety and Insurance Board that shows there's little accountability for how the board spends its money is "disturbing," Labour Minister Chris Bentley said today.

The audit, done by an independent company, shows that regular accountability measures to approve spending by the board and its executives, to ensure contracts are tendered or to check on projects underway are sorely lacking.

In addition, the audit indicates the board has an unfunded liability that's expected to increase this year to $7.7 billion after decreasing to $7.1 billion as of Dec. 31, 2003 from $11.5 billion in 1993.

"There doesn't seem to be a culture of control and accountability here," Bentley said at a news conference to release the audit, which was ordered in February.
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Controversy over how the board spent its money surfaced in the last few months.

In March, Glen Wright resigned as chairman of the WSIB over spending concerns. Subsequently, the government signed a confidential severance agreement with Wright said to be in the six-figure range.

Wright's resignation followed revelations that the board paid $2,800 a month for his Toronto apartment, as well as for an upgrade to the alarm at his home in Kitchener. He also signed an untendered $85,000 contract with a Tory-friendly communications consultant for two days a week of media relations advice.

A Conservative government led by Stephen Harper will ask the Auditor General to conduct, on an expedited basis, an audit of all federal grant and contribution programs and contracting policies. We will act on her recommendations. We will also increase funding for the internal audit functions. We will ensure that all granting programs are reviewed every five years on an ongoing basis.

The Auditor General will be given the authority to examine the affairs of Crown Corporations and government-funded Foundations.

If you believe that government should have a larger role to play than the Conservatives do, I would argue that it's even more important to have that kind of financial oversight and control on government spending, including the crowns.

It's the kind of waste and mismanagement highlighted in that story about the WSIB that gives government programs and the civil service a bad name. It only provides ammunition for those who want to starve governments of revenue and ultimately reduce government programs.

If you want to defeat the proponents of small government, you have to beat them at their own game: fiscal responsibility. All hail the noble auditors.

Update: Edited slightly to remove the assumption of a Conservative victory.

Rumsfeld Issued an Order to Hide Detainee in Iraq

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, acting at the request of George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, ordered military officials in Iraq last November to hold a man suspected of being a senior Iraqi terrorist at a high-level detention center there but not list him on the prison's rolls, senior Pentagon and intelligence officials said Wednesday.

This prisoner and other "ghost detainees" were hidden largely to prevent the International Committee of the Red Cross from monitoring their treatment and conditions, officials said.
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This prisoner, who has not been named, is believed to be the first to have been kept off the books at the orders of Mr. Rumsfeld and Mr. Tenet. He was not held at Abu Ghraib, but at another prison, Camp Cropper, on the outskirts of Baghdad International Airport, officials said.

Pentagon and intelligence officials said the decision to hold the detainee without registering him - at least initially - was in keeping with the administration's legal opinion about the status of those viewed as an active threat in wartime.

Seven months later, however, the detainee - a reputed senior officer of Ansar al-Islam, a group the United States has linked to Al Qaeda and blames for some attacks in Iraq - is still languishing at the prison but has only been questioned once while in detention, in what government officials acknowledged was an extraordinary lapse.
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In July 2003, the man suspected of being an Ansar al-Islam official was captured in Iraq and turned over to C.I.A. officials, who took him to an undisclosed location outside of Iraq for interrogation. By that fall, however, a C.I.A. legal analysis determined that because the detainee was deemed to be an Iraqi unlawful combatant - outside the protections of the Geneva Conventions - he should be transferred back to Iraq.

Mr. Tenet made his request to Mr. Rumsfeld - that the suspect be held but not listed - in October. The request was passed down the chain of command: to Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, then to Gen. John P. Abizaid, the commander of American forces in the Middle East, and finally to Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the ground commander in Iraq. At each stage, lawyers reviewed the request and their bosses approved it.

In tonight's leaders' debate for the Canadian federal election, there was a curious comment from Conservative leader Stephen Harper. Near the beginning of the final segment on health care when Harper was doing his one-on-one session with Bloc Quebecois leader Gilles Duceppe, Harper was rhyming off "other federal responsibilities" and he ended the sentence with "the economic union, the monetary union".

Anybody else catch that? Anybody else know what it means?

When you read someone's blog every day, and link to and quote from his posts, it begins to feel like you know him even if you've never met and it's not at all clear that he knows you exist.

I'd like to add my voice to those extending condolences to Warren Kinsella and his family on the death of his father.

Pop-up toolbar spreads via IE flaws

An adware purveyor has apparently used two previously unknown security flaws in Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser to install a toolbar on victims' computers that triggers pop-up ads, researchers said this week.

One flaw lets an attacker run a program on a victim's machine, while the other enables malicious code to "cross zones," or run with privileges higher than normal. Together, the two issues allow for the creation of a website that, when visited by victims, can upload and install programs to the victim's computer, according to two analyses of the security holes.
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The flaws are apparently being used to install the I-Lookup search bar, an adware toolbar that is added to IE's other toolbars. The adware changes the Internet Explorer home page, connects to one of six advertising sites and frequently displays pop-ups ? mainly pornographic ads, according to an adware advisory on antivirus company Symantec's website.
...
The Internet address from which the adware Trojan horse was downloaded resolves to I-Lookup.com, a search engine registered in Costa Rica that antivirus firms Symantec and PestPatrol have linked to aggressive advertising software. Two of the top three searches on the site relate to removing such programs, according to I-Lookup.com's own statistics.

OK, here's the deal. I use Internet Explorer for Windows Update and when a site has something that streams in Windows Media Player format that I really want to see, and then only if it's a site I trust. And that's it. If I could do either of those things without IE, I'd never use it at all. When I run it, I have everything disabled -- ActiveX, cookies, scripts, the whole ball of wax. When I need to, I enable what I need for the job at hand and then I disable it again.

For most of my browsing I use an alternative browser partly because Microsoft's security record is so poor, and partly because IE is the target of choice for script kiddies. In the same way, Outlook Express is the email target of choice. I wouldn't use OE if you paid me. (And when I'm assisting someone who insists on using it, the first thing I do is disable the Preview Pane. The version on my machine is 5.5 and it's under View->Layout. Turn that sucker off.)

As for the full version of Outlook, it was once on my machine for about 24 hours before I ripped it back out. I know some people swear by it but I hate it.

I use Mozilla, which is available free of charge from Mozilla.org. It's a browser, email and newsgroup client, chat program and more. The email module includes Junk mail controls that work pretty well -- after a short training period, most of the spam I receive is automatically shunted to a Junk folder where I can inspect it at my leisure or just trash it.

If you'd prefer your email client in a separate program, Mozilla offers FireFox for browsing and Thunderbird for email. All of those are available for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. Mac users can also choose a browser called Camino about which I know absolutely nothing. (You've also got Safari which my Machead friends tell me is pretty good and has the added advantage that it's not Internet Explorer.)

I'm not saying that using the alternatives to MS products is absolutely safe but, as I said, IE and OE are insecure products and their dominance in the market makes them the targets of choice. Since there are alternatives that are free and are pretty stable and mature, why suffer needlessly?

And one more thing: since I've been using Mozilla I've never seen a pop-up I didn't want to see. It's heaven.

Cross-posted to the BlogsCanada E-Group Election Blog

When Jack Layton introduced the portion of the NDP platform involving taxation, the analysis of his proposals in the media was a little less than incisive. Actually it sucked. The proposed inheritance tax in particular wasn't well explained in any forum I've seen.

The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives has published a short article that explains the way the proposed tax would work and the rationale for it. It's only fair to point out that the article's author is in favour of the proposal. So am I.

Only 2.5% of Canadian families would be affected by an NDP-style inheritance tax. But secondly, even if you are in that lucky category, the actual tax is not that big - at least compared with similar taxes elsewhere -- and it's a tax that makes sense.

The average wealth of the 311,000 families in Canada that would pay the tax is $2,278,863. With the first $1 million free of tax and a 17% tax rate on the rest (what the NDP has proposed, contrary to media reports), taxes on these inheritances would average about $230,000.

As for the rationale:

... most important is the trend toward the rich getting richer and the poor poorer. Since 1984 the wealthiest 10% of the population in Canada improved their situation considerably: they now own 55.7% of everything in the country (compared with 51.8% of everything in 1984). The remaining 90% of Canadians lost ground, with the poorest loosing most. This is not only unfair, but can be directly linked to public tax policies, at both the federal and provincial levels, that favour the wealthy.

Apparently this World Tribune article (via Shotgun) is creating a bit of a stir in the blogosphere.

The United Nations has determined that Saddam Hussein shipped weapons of mass destruction components as well as medium-range ballistic missiles before, during and after the U.S.-led war against Iraq in 2003.

Equipment and material that could have been used to produce banned weapons and long-range missiles have been emptied from Iraqi sites since the war and shipped abroad, the head of the United Nations inspectors office told the Security Council today.

Demetrius Perricos, deputy to the former chief weapons inspector Hans Blix and now the acting executive chairman of the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission, told a closed-door session of the council that many of the items bear tags placed by United Nations inspectors as suspect "dual use" ones having capabilities for creating harmless consumer products as well as unconventional weapons.

It is not known whether such equipment and materials were still present at the sites during the time of coalition action in March and April of 2003. However, it is possible that some of the materials may have been removed from Iraq by looters of sites and sold as scrap.

Both media stories note that many of the items discovered still bear their UN inspection tags. The UNMOVIC report notes that the sites where they were originally found were marked for continued intensive monitoring. So what's new here isn't the existence of these items but the fact that they've gone missing. That makes this next quote perhaps the most significant part of the UNMOVIC report.

During the period [under review], no official information was made available to UNMOVIC on either the work or the results of the investigations carried out in Iraq by the Iraq Survey Group, led by the United States of America, nor did the Survey Group request any information from UNMOVIC. While the Commission has examined the publicly released portion of the testimony given by Charles Duelfer, the head of the Survey Group, on 30 March before the United States Senate?s Armed Services Committee, it has not had access to the full text. The provision of detailed supporting information relating to the public testimony would assist UNMOVIC and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in discharging their mandate to continue to assess Iraq?s weapons of mass destruction activities.

There's no conclusion drawn here as to whether any of the material in question has fallen into the hands of terrorists, but if it has I'd blame it on the chaos created by the American invasion and the subsequent American refusal to let the UN inspectors back in before the damage was done. As for the Iraq Survey Group, UNMOVIC has this to report:

In his testimony, the head of the Iraq Survey Group noted that the Group continued to look for weapons of mass destruction. He also said he did not believe that the Survey Group had sufficient information and insight at that time to make final judgements with confidence as to Iraq?s weapons of mass destruction programmes and to determine the truth of their existence.

CSIS went to Syria for confession: Arar rep

Agents from Canadian Security Intelligence Service, Canada's spy agency, secretly visited Syria in late 2002 and obtained copies of Maher Arar's confessions under torture, according to Arar's lawyers.

Lorne Waldman, part of Arar's legal team, submitted to the federal inquiry investigating Arar's arrest and deportation to Syria, where Arar says he was tortured for close to 10 months.

He also revealed that Tunisian authorities questioned Arar's wife, Monia Mazigh, about her husband.

Canadian officials want us to believe that they were entirely innocent in this affair and that all efforts were made to secure Arar's release. I don't think that passes the smell test any longer. I'd love to know if those CSIS agents actually observed Arar's condition while they were in Syria. And I'd still like to know how they could have lent any credibility to "confessions" obtained by Syrian interrogators who are notorious for using torture. Unnamed Canadian officials certainly seemed to think the information was credible when they were leaking it to reporters to try and brand the man as a terrorist.

Here's hoping Arar's lawyers are successful in getting everything out in the open. The government's desire for secrecy looks less and less like it's about national security and more and more like it's about covering somebody's butt.

Jeanne d'Arc at Body and Soul muses on the life and artistry of Ray Charles.

He was an original and he'll be missed.

Chamber of commerce says NDP ads, anti-star wars rally hurt Canada's image

Just when Americans were beginning to forget that a senior Canadian official once called their president a "moron," the Canadian Chamber of Commerce (news - web sites) says NDP Leader Jack Layton has stirred up anti-U.S. sentiment.

Thursday's anti-star-wars rally and the rhetoric in the party's TV ads, which lambaste the Liberals and Conservatives for being too cosy with Washington, are fodder for right-wing talk show hosts south of the border, said Nancy Hughes Anthony, president of the chamber.

But thanks for confirming that profit is more important to you than democracy, Ms Hughes Anthony. Thanks for confirming that as far as the business community is concerned, Canadians shouldn't exercise their right to peacefully demonstrate in support of their beliefs because it might hurt your image. Believe it or not, when it comes to our political convictions we don't all check with marketing consultants before deciding where we stand.

"People in Washington watch what goes on in Canada very closely," she said in an interview from Ottawa. "We don't like it when American politicians make unkind remarks about Canada."

Hughes Anthony admitted she hadn't seen the television spots, which were unveiled Thursday and expected to run nationally over the next few days.

While the ads don't take direct shots at the Americans, Hughes Anthony said there is implied criticism and it comes just when fences are being mended.

Combined with the anti-star wars rally in Toronto, she said, she worries Canada's already suspect image with Americans will be tarnished further.

"We were just getting past the anti-American comments of some Liberals," the chamber president said. "If Mr. Layton wants to lead this country, he can't go around insulting our biggest trading partner. People in the business community know you have to be respectful."

How about if I tell you that I'm personally offended at your attempt to prevent a legimate political party from expressing itself. Your attempt to stifle debate is not appreciated. So how about you shut up, sit down, and let us hear what the candidates have to say so we can try and make an informed decision.

Thanks in advance.

Idiot.

(If she hadn't admitted that she hadn't even seen the ads in question, I might have kept my mouth shut. Nah, I would have yelled at her anyway. All this "don't talk about the Americans during an election" is getting on my nerves. Now if she wants to express herself as a private citizen it's an entirely different matter. But then she wouldn't command the attention of the media, would she?)

12 Tories throw support behind Deputy PM Anne McLellan's re-election bid

Deputy Prime Minister Anne McLellan, facing what could be the tightest in a string of squeaker campaign victories, was to get some support Wednesday from an unlikely source.

Twelve Progressive Conservatives, including four former Alberta cabinet ministers, announced they will work to get McLellan re-elected in the re-distributed riding of Edmonton Centre.

"We have taken this unprecedented step because it is clear that Anne McLellan has been an especially strong and effective voice for Alberta," former cabinet minister Dennis Anderson said in a release.

Yesterday it was Liberals supporting an NDP candidate, today it's Tories backing a Liberal cabinet minister. At this point, I think they're all just trying to confuse us.

Or maybe they all took this Fraser Institute report to heart and they're seeing things in a different way these days.

Jim Elve at BlogsCanada notified me this morning that this blog has been named one of the Top Blogs for June. I think that's pretty cool and I'm pleased to add that image to the sidebar. It's over there now just above my tribute to Paul Cellucci's concern for our state of mind.

Aside from thanking BlogsCanada for the recognition, this is a good time to thank Jim for all the work he's done to build a blogging community here in Canada. It looks to me like he puts in a tremendous amount of time in maintaining the blog directory, news of interest, a set of resources for bloggers and the E-Group election blog where I'm also pleased to participate. And I shouldn't forget Officially Unofficial, Jim's personal blog.

Keeping bloggers organized is on a par with herding cats. I should know since I'm probably as stubborn as most. Thanks, Jim. And thanks to the judges.

And by all means check out the rest of this month's selections as well as those from previous months. Quite a few of them are on my own blogroll and I've added a couple of bookmarks from this month's list to check out.

Cross-posted to the BlogsCanada E-Group election blog.

There's a Toronto Star article that went up this morning that expands on Stephen Harper's views on the role of the courts and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. It contains one sentence that clearly frames an issue on which Harper makes a lot of people nervous.

Harper said that as prime minister, he would propose for the top bench only candidates who agree with the view that courts must defer to Parliament.

I have a serious problem with this.

It's common in a society such as ours to speak of the rule of law. Elected officials on the other hand are put in place to govern us, not to rule us. That's a distinction I'm rather fond of and one I'd like to see maintained.

Harper seems to envision a society in which anything and everything can be decided upon by free votes in Parliament. Get the requisite number of warm bodies into the benches on any given day, and MPs can do whatever they please. This isn't democracy, it's a tyranny of the majority.

The system of checks and balances that's often referred to in the context of the American system of government may not be as clearly laid out here in Canada, but the judiciary still has an important role to play as a check on the power of the legislature. If Stephen Harper thinks that legislatures are incapable of making mistakes, then he needs to read some history.

George Bush recently marked the fiftieth anniversary of a case known as Brown vs. Board of Education.

"Fifty years ago today, nine judges announced that they had looked at the Constitution and saw no justification for the segregation and humiliation of an entire race," Bush said at the opening of a national historic site at Monroe Elementary, a former all-black school in the heartland of the school desegregation effort.

Those nine judges were, of course, the Supreme Court of the United States and that decision was instrumental in ending segregation in America. No doubt many at the time who disagreed with that decision referred to the SCOTUS as activist judges. Had those judges been selected for their willingness to defer to the legislative branch, one has to wonder how they would have ruled. But they deferred to the law as represented in the Constitution.

A document such as the Charter of Rights and Freedoms is in place to provide a foundation against which the courts can judge the validity of other legislation. They should do so without deferring to anything else but the law. Harper has been quoted as saying that the Charter is flawed. If that's the case then let him explain how and propose a way to fix it. If there's a problem with the way the courts function, then fix that too. But the answer isn't to weaken the role that the courts play, to make them subservient to the legislature. The election we're engaged in right now is about selecting people to represent us, not to rule over us.

Harper seems to be looking for the easiest way to get what he wants. The path I'm suggesting may be more difficult but who promised Stephen Harper that democracy would be easy?

Not only will one of the pages in the Liberal election platform (pdf) not print, it makes my printer go stupid until I shut it down and turn it on again.

And it's the page with our illustrious Prime Minister's signature on it!

Not a good start.

I couldn't let this one go by:

Liberal riding assoc. throws support behind NDP

Rejecting the recommendation of Prime Minister Paul Martin, a Liberal riding association has decided to throw its support behind the New Democratic Party's contender.

Liberals in the Toronto-area riding of Brampton-Springdale were outraged when Martin overruled their nomination vote and decided to appoint Ruby Dhalla as the party's local candidate.

Instead of kowtowing, or arguing, the riding association executive responded by withdrawing support for Dhalla and putting it behind the NDP's Kathy Pounder instead.

"We believe that [Ms. Dhalla's] appointment is undemocratic and wrong," the 11 executive members of the riding association declared in a statement released on Monday.

The association had passed a resolution to that effect on Sunday night.
...
And, as might be expected, Pounder was pleased with the unlikely support.

I would now like to offer some incisive analysis of this startling and portentous development: it serves you right, Paulie!

Now that I have that off my chest, this should be an interesting riding to watch. The Election Prediction Project is currently calling it for the Liberals.

Don't. Just don't.

Who Got the Message? There's a Way to Know

A new service promises to pull back the curtain on anyone hiding behind the common white lie "I never got your e-mail." Users of the service, DidTheyReadIt (didtheyreadit.com), can clandestinely track when and where their e-mail is read.

The service, which has already drawn complaints from privacy advocates, offers a new and quiet way to harvest behavioral information about friends, colleagues and potential consumers.
...
E-mail programs like Eudora and Outlook have long offered an optional return-receipt feature, which prompts the recipient of a message to inform the sender that they have opened the message, and another service, Msgtag (www.msgtag.com), notifies users by e-mail when their outgoing messages have been opened. But DidTheyReadIt is the first such service to keep itself a secret from the recipient, as well as the first to report on where the message was read.

"It's a potential invasion of privacy, but it's also a potential tool for changing communication," said Alastair Rampell, whose company, Rampell Software, developed the service.

He said the software was a defense against overzealous spam filters that route legitimate messages to junk folders.

"Who knows if it gets through?" Mr. Rampell said.

Subscribers to the DidTheyReadIt service receive an e-mail message notifying them of the time, rough location and duration of the the recipient's viewing of each message the subscriber sent. The service is available in quarterly, semiannual or annual subscriptions and ranges in price from $25 for three months to $50 a year. A free account allows users to send five tracked messages a month.

"I won't deny that it has a potentially stealth purpose," Mr. Rampell said, adding that he has received more than 1,000 negative e-mail messages about the service, which became available on May 24. He said his detractors usually offer one of two criticisms. "One of them is that they think that this is evil and that I should go to jail," he said. The other is that, for all of its controversy, the product does not always work.

DidTheyReadIt depends on what are known as Web bugs, graphic files so tiny that they cannot be seen that can be embedded in an e-mail message or downloaded from a Web site. In the case of DidThey- ReadIt, a Web bug is embedded in each e-mail message sent through the service. When the recipient opens that message, the Web bug is downloaded and the DidTheyReadIt server records the circumstances of that exchange. But some e-mail programs do not automatically download Web bugs, and many can be configured so that they do not.

The article doesn't describe the process properly. It isn't the image that's embedded in the message, it's a link to the image which resides on DidTheyReadIt's server. The image is downloaded when you open the message if your email client is configured to process HTML (which is what your web browser does).

When I read this article it jogged my memory. Vicki Smith at Just in From Cowtown wrote about this last week. Through her post and the post she pointed to at John's b.l.o.g. (which links to some other stories if you're curious to learn more), you can find out here how to set your email program to defeat this new trick. Unless you use your browser to access a web-based mail account in which case it's a tougher nut to crack.

Back to the original story for a moment:

Mr. Rampell emphasized that how subscribers use the service is up to them. "If you're upset that your friend sent you an e-mail using DidTheyReadIt, then that's a problem between you and your friend," he said.

People are going to ruin email at this rate.

Posting has been a bit light for a couple of days and will probably continue to be for a couple more. It's partly a matter of recharging the batteries and partly one of stepping back from the day to day headlines to get a better look at the big picture regarding the upcoming federal election.

I do have a few thoughts, though:

The Liberals continue to flounder. As Chantal Hébert wrote yesterday, if the platform unveiled on Thursday had been put forward in the throne speech and the budget then the governing party might look like it stands for something. Instead it looks like it's flopping around in a desperate bid to maintain power.

The noxious strain of arrogance as regards social policy that marked the Alliance is still alive in the Conservative party, even if a bit less influential. There may be practical reasons why even a Conservative majority wouldn't be able to move forward with the social agenda that concerns me in the short term, but they still make me twitchy. One thing I can state for certain right now is that I won't be voting Conservative, although social policy isn't the only reason for that.

The NDP will emerge stronger from this election than they were going in. But whether they'll be strong enough to have any serious influence on the direction a new government takes is still very much up in the air.

If the criteria for a party's participation in the leaders' debates is at least one seat in the House of Commons, the Green Party will be in the next debates. And that may not be very far away since we may be looking at a very dysfunctional government coming out of this election.

RIAA wants your fingerprints

The RIAA is hoping that a new breed of music player which requires biometric authentication will put an end to file sharing.

Established biometric vendor Veritouch has teamed up with Swedish design company to produce iVue: a wireless media player that allows content producers to lock down media files with biometric security.
..
"In practical terms, VeriTouch's breakthrough in anti-piracy technology means that no delivered content to a customer may be copied, shared or otherwise distributed because each file is uniquely locked by the customer's live fingerprint scan," claims the company.

Idiots. Do I have to add that I won't be buying one of these things?

I did like the last bit in the article:

... we do forsee exciting synergies ahead, should budget cuts force the War on Terror and the War on Piracy to be consolidated into just the one unwinnable "war".

John Dean has an interesting piece up at Findlaw's Writ speculating on the meaning of George Bush's decision to consult with a private attorney regarding the Plame investigation. If, as has been suggested, this means that Bush expects an invitation to testify before the Grand Jury, Dean believes that this would be more than just a formality.

... from what I have learned from those who have been quizzed by the Fitzgerald investigators it seems unlikely that they are interviewing the President merely as a matter of completeness, or in order to be able to defend their actions in front of the public. Asking a President to testify - or even be interviewed - remains a serious, sensitive and rare occasion. It is not done lightly. Doing so raises separation of powers concerns that continue to worry many.

Instead, it seems the investigators are seeking to connect up with, and then speak with, persons who have links to and from the leaked information - and those persons, it seems, probably include the President. (I should stress, however, that I do not have access to grand jury testimony, and that grand jury proceedings are secret. But the facts that are properly public do allow some inference and commentary about what likely is occurring in the grand jury.)

Undoubtedly, those from the White House have been asked if they spoke with the president about the leak. It appears that one or more of them may indeed have done so.

Ironically, it was the fair-haired Republican stalwart Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr who decimated the attorney-client privilege for government lawyers and their clients - which, to paraphrase the authority Wigmore, applies when legal advice of any kind is sought by a client from a professional legal adviser, where the advice is sought in confidence.

Stay tuned.

Canada's major television networks have made the decision to exclude the Green Party from the upcoming leaders' debates. Green Party leader Jim Harris has decided to challenge that decision and has issued a complaint to the CRTC.

Harris points to an Ipsos-Reid poll, showing the party has about six per cent support nationally. The leader says that point alone is enough to include him in the debate.

"That is already 800,000 Canadians who are going to be voting green. In 1993, the NDP won nine seats with the same percentage of vote roughly that we're at right now," Harris said on Canada AM Thursday.

He says the decision to leave him out of the debates was made by "unelected television executives," and his party wasn't given the chance to make its case.

But Jim went one step further and invited Harris to do a guest post, an invitation Harris has accepted. And I'm pretty sure Harris wrote the post himself, setting an example that I can only hope others will live up to. Not that I'm naming names or anything. But I digress.

Hop on over to the E-Group and have a look. Harris has issued challenges to each of the other three national party leaders. Can we look forward to responses from them at the E-Group? Now that would be political blogging.

Liberal attacks were ordered by top officials, sources say

Paul Martin's senior strategists directed cabinet ministers to ambush Conservative Leader Stephen Harper and disrupt his events, according to sources, despite public statements that they dit on their own.
...
Sources say that national campaign strategists had considered sending out other ministers yesterday to attack Mr. Harper's major economic speech in Toronto. But it appears the idea was abandoned.

Many Liberals were saying yesterday that they were happy they were not cabinet ministers so they couldn't be forced to do the same. Others said they feared they may receive a call.

Some Liberals are referring to the ambushes as "Littler's commando raids." Sources say that Ontario campaign chairman Karl Littler, national campaign co-chairmen David Herle and John Webster and Steven MacKinnon, the party's deputy national director, were behind the attacks.

But Mr. MacKinnon said yesterday that "there was very little truth" to those allegations.

All the dirt is from "sources" unnamed, so I guess we should take it with a grain of salt. It may be part of the continuing internal civil war with this being an attempt by disgruntled Liberals to undermine the campaign team. On the other hand, when Herle was on with Mike Duffy on Tuesday night he didn't seem at all unhappy about these confrontations.

Either way, the Liberals continue to look bad.

Update: In comments, DonS brings it to my attention that David Herle admitted to knowing about Sgro's and McCallum's "attacks" in advance on CPAC's Primetime Politics last night. This makes two independent sources for this, since Ian Gillespie at Canuckistan has posted the same thing. So it appears the unnamed sources are right. I wonder how many more political campaigns Herle will get the opportunity to run.

A while back I challenged my readers to try and figure out which of Ahmad Chalabi's many and varied activities had prompted the raid on his home and offices in Baghdad and I offered several possibilities as outlined by various media sources. The correct answer was: none of the above.

Ahmad Chalabi, the Iraqi leader and former ally of the Bush administration, disclosed to an Iranian official that the United States had broken the secret communications code of Iran's intelligence service, betraying one of Washington's most valuable sources of information about Iran, according to United States intelligence officials.
...
American officials said that about six weeks ago, Mr. Chalabi told the Baghdad station chief of Iran's Ministry of Intelligence and Security that the United States was reading the communications traffic of the Iranian spy service, one of the most sophisticated in the Middle East.

According to American officials, the Iranian official in Baghdad, possibly not believing Mr. Chalabi's account, sent a cable to Tehran detailing his conversation with Mr. Chalabi, using the broken code. That encrypted cable, intercepted and read by the United States, tipped off American officials to the fact that Mr. Chalabi had betrayed the code-breaking operation, the American officials said.

American officials reported that in the cable to Tehran, the Iranian official recounted how Mr. Chalabi had said that one of "them" ? a reference to an American ? had revealed the code-breaking operation, the officials said. The Iranian reported that Mr. Chalabi said the American was drunk.

The Poor Man wonders whether the Iranians would be so foolish as to send a message using the very code that Chalabi had just told them was compromised. It makes them look awfully stupid.

Unless, of course, this is just what the Iranians want us to think ...

Chalabi's problems, meanwhile, continue to pile up. Newsweek reports on another accusation against him.

The Iraqi exile group headed by Ahmad Chalabi?formerly a key ally of the Bush administration?is suspected of leaking confidential information about U.S. war plans for Iraq to the government of Iran before last year?s invasion to oust Saddam Hussein, government sources told NEWSWEEK.

There will be more, I'm sure. The most interesting part of the Newsweek story was the last paragraph.

One Bush administration official said that in addition to harboring suspicions that Chalabi had been leaking sensitive U.S. information to Iran both before and after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, some U.S. officials also believe that Chalabi had collected and maintained files of potentially damaging information on U.S. officials with whom he had or was going to interact for the purpose of influencing them. Some officials said that when Iraqi authorities raided Chalabi?s offices, one of the things American officials hoped they would look for was Chalabi?s cache of information he had gathered on Americans.

Bush Consults Lawyer in CIA Leak Case

President Bush has consulted an outside lawyer in case he needs to retain him in the grand jury investigation of who leaked the name of a covert CIA operative last year, the White House said Wednesday.

There was no indication that Bush is a target of the leak investigation, but the president has decided that in the event he needs an attorney's advice, "he would retain him," White House spokeswoman Claire Buchan said.

The lawyer is Jim Sharp, Buchan said, confirming a report by CBS News.

"The president has said that everyone should cooperate in this matter and that would include himself," the spokeswoman said.

She deflected questions about whether Bush had been asked to appear before a grand jury in the case.

Cross-posted to the BlogsCanada E-Group Election Blog

We may have a new theme for our federal election campaign: the politics of confrontation. On Sunday last, Jack Layton and Olivia Chow were working the Toronto riding where Layton is running against incumbent Liberal MP Dennis Mills. Layton had left Chow on her own when Mills suddenly showed up and confronted Chow in front of the TV cameras, launching into an attack on Layton's recent public statements.

It seemed like an aberration until I read this CTV story:

Conservative leader Stephen Harper was ambushed by two Liberal cabinet ministers on the campaign trail Tuesday, suggesting the Liberals have started a new and aggressive strategy to deny the Conservatives an easy ride.

Immigration Minister Judy Sgro headed out to a Harper event to challenge him on a controversy that broke earlier in the day. She wanted to drive a verbal stake into the Conservatives' views on abortion.

... "Mr. Harper, what rights are you going to take away next?" she demanded of the party leader as he walked out of a Markham motel.

Harper had a terse reply.

"Better get out and knock on doors, Judy. You're going down," he called out to the minister and her supporters as he walked away.

Then, minutes later, as Harper was shaking hands with voters at an event reporters call "mainstreeting," another Liberal cabinet minister launched another confrontation.

This time, it was Veterans Affairs Minister John McCallum. The minister, surrounded by Liberal supporters, waved a letter in his hand as Harper walked by.

"I want to give you this letter, it's an open letter to you," McCallum called out, as reporters moved in with microphones.

"I'll give it to one of my staff," Harper replied.

From there, the event quickly dissolved into chaos. With the shouting of protesters and party supporters growing louder, Harper took refuge in a store. He told reporters he found the Liberal ambush tactic desperate.

But lest you think it's strictly a Liberal idea:

While Harper is scoffing at the tactic, in fact, it's not much different from the "truth squads" the Conservatives had talked about using.

Conservative campaign co-chair John Reynolds has said members of his party plan to attend Liberal events to ensure that everything Prim Minister Paul Martin says at campaigns events is "accurate" and to have "somebody to answer from our point of view."

Yet so far, there hasn't been a peep from the Conservatives' squads.

"Are we going to see Liberal ministers at every Stephen Harper event? Is this the Liberal version of the truth squad now?" asked Duffy.

"Well, it wouldn't be hard to do because he only has one or two a day," Herle quipped before adding, "I think we'll pick our spots, yeah."

I'm with The Middleman on this one. Even if we discount family values critic Larry Spencer's homophobic comments because it happened a while ago, and foreign affairs critic Stockwell Day's insistence that Canadian troops should have been deployed to Iraq because he hasn't said it lately (has he?), I'm still forced to wonder about the so-called moderate face of the new Conservative party.

If the comments in question were coming from back-benchers it might be easy enough to accept Stephen Harper's assurances that they don't represent party policy. But when Scott Reid talked about reducing bilingual services, he was the party's official languages critic. And since he's written a book articulating his views on the subject it would be a bit difficult to allow that Harper didn't know where Reid stood.

And when it's Rob Merrifield, the party's health care critic, voicing support for mandatory counselling for women seeking abortions, why isn't it fair to assume that it's policy? When Harper talks about going "off message" I don't find it particularly comforting. It's as if what we're seeing from him right now is the marketing, not the real agenda.

So either the Conservatives aren't as moderate as they would like to appear, or people who we would expect to see as cabinet ministers in a Conservative government don't know their own party's policies. Either way I'm concerned, to say the least.

Tristero notes a resurgence of the theory that Saddam Hussein worked closely with Al Qaeda and was even involved in the attacks on 9/11. The attempt to push this back into the public eye seems to be timed to coincide with the release of a new book by Stephen Hayes on the subject. You may recall that Hayes made some waves last November with a story in the Weekly Standard that was supposed to present new evidence of links between Saddam and bin Laden's organization.

It turned out that Hayes' story was based on a leaked memo written by Douglas Feith for presentation to the Senate Select Intelligence Committee. The memo was a collection of odd bits of intelligence, much of it raw and unsubstantiated. Bear in mind that Feith was responsible for the Office of Special Plans, the rogue "intelligence agency" set up in the White House for the sole purpose of justifying the invasion. There was nothing much that was new in the memo and the intelligence community had already reviewed most of what it contained and felt it proved nothing. Shortly after Hayes' story was published, the Department of Defense issued a terse statement saying, in the kind of bureaucratize in which the DOD specializes, pay no attention to this.

In an article at NRO, Andrew McCarthy jumps on the bandwagon and it's this piece in particular that Tristero takes apart. Much of the action centres on the alleged meeting between Mohamed Atta and Iraqi intelligence in Prague and it provides a perfect example of what you can expect to see. Read Tristero's post if you want all the gory details but the short version is this:

The supporters of the case for a connection between Saddam and 9/11 will put together a few cherry-picked facts combined with some supposition and a whole pile of circumstantial evidence. Then they'll mix it up with some rhetoric designed to put the burden on the theory's critics to prove that it's not true.

It doesn't work that way. There are thousands of dead and thousands more wounded because of the invasion of Iraq. To justify that, the burden of proof is on those who would make the claims. And the bar should be set high. McCarthy disputes this, suggesting that because National Security is involved (and I wouldn't do his tone justice if I didn't capitalize the words), a lower standard of proof is required here than would be the case in a court of law, as if a lower standard of proof can be used to justify a bloody war and its bloody aftermath than would be required to send a single man to jail.

I can't prove that there were, in fact, no connections between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda. But I don't have to. Full scale invasion was never the only option for dealing with Iraq and it was never enough to prove that Iraq was a threat, which at this point seems less and less likely. It was always necessary to prove that Iraq represented the most serious danger out there, that the threat was serious enough to justify the blood and treasure that has been expended in the last year and that war was the only option available for dealing with that threat. The burden of proof for all of those points is on those who would still try and justify this war.