April 2005 Archives

Revealed: documents show Blair's secret plans for war

Tony Blair had resolved to send British troops into action alongside US forces eight months before the Iraq War began, despite a clear warning from the Foreign Office that the conflict could be illegal.

A damning minute leaked to a Sunday newspaper reveals that in July 2002, a few weeks after meeting George Bush at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, Mr Blair summoned his closest aides for what amounted to a council of war. The minute reveals the head of British intelligence reported that President Bush had firmly made up his mind to invade Iraq and overthrow Saddam Hussein, adding that "the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy".

The minute revealed last night was of a meeting held in Downing Street on 23 July 2002. Signed by the Prime Minister's foreign policy adviser, Matthew Rycroft. It concluded: "We should work on the assumption that the UK would take part in any military action. But we needed a fuller picture of US planning before we could take any further decisions."

The minute records that the Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, had warned that the case against Saddam was "thin". He suggested that the Iraqi dictator should be forced into a corner by demanding the return of the UN weapons inspectors: if he refused, or the inspectors found WMD, there would be good cause for war.

David Neiwert at Orcinus reports on a group of American vigilantes patriots who have been patrolling their border with Mexico and are now turning their eyes to the north.

After all, these people are whiter than white. They like hockey and curling and ice fishing and eat lots of cheese. They come sneaking here over the border in silent hordes and pretty soon, they start taking over. Nobody talks about it, but the evidence that it's happening is everywhere.

I mean, look around at all these American cities near the Canadian border: White people. Lots of white people everywhere. And way too many of them still saying, "Eh?" And why are there all those cheese shops?

They're infecting our popular culture, too, by exporting Canadian-ness over the borders. Why, exactly, are we playing hockey (when it's not on strike) in Florida and California nowadays? Doesn't that seem suspicious to you?

And then there's the music scene. For awhile Canada exported hippie subversives like Neil Young and Joni Mitchell, then homosexual subversives like k.d. lang. Now, however, they're responsible for the most insidious cultural invasion of all: Celine Dion. It doesn't get much more hair-raisingly white than that.

I sure wish someone would explain what would motivate all these climate scientists to make this stuff up.

'Smoking gun' on humans and global warming claimed

Using ocean data collected by diving floats, U.S. climate scientists released a study Thursday that they said provides the "smoking gun" that ties manmade greenhouse gas emissions to global warming.

The researchers, some of them working for NASA and the Energy Department, went a step further, implicitly criticizing President Bush for not taking stronger action to curb emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases.

They said the findings confirm that computer models of climate change are on target and that global temperatures will rise 1 degree Fahrenheit this century, even if greenhouse gases are capped tomorrow.

If emissions instead continue to grow, as expected, things could spin ?out of our control,? especially as ocean levels rise from melting Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, the NASA-led scientists said. "The climate system could reach a point where large sea level change is practically impossible to avoid."

It's generally an indication of how high Republicans think the stakes are when they start trying to dictate the language one uses to discuss an issue and throwing out accusations of liberal bias at anyone who's reluctant to go along. When they first began their campaign to fix a social security system that isn't really broken, they found that the phrase "private accounts" didn't poll well. So they quickly changed to the phrase "personal accounts" and demanded that the media play along, insisting that "private accounts" were an invention of their Democratic opponents.

So this should come as no surprise:

I was all set to write a column about the nuclear option -- the proposal to change the rules of the Senate in order to get President Bush's most questionable judicial appointments through -- when, lo, word came that there is no nuclear option anymore. It is now called "the constitutional option."

Who changed it? Why, the Republican Party, of course. Having found that "nuclear option" does not poll well, the Republicans simply decreed the rules change can no longer be described by that name. Further, the Republican Party sent media operatives around to major news organizations to inform them that anyone who fails to obey the new diktat on usage will be demonstrating the dread "liberal bias."

Since this particularly fateful rules change was first christened "the nuclear option" by Sen. Trent Lott of Mississippi in 2003, and has been called "the nuclear option" ever since -- by Republicans, along with everybody else -- I have to say this is a distinctly Orwellian development.

In fact, given the implicit threat that the Republican Party faithful will be encouraged to denounce all news outlets that do not conform to this new political correctness, I'd say it is not only ridiculous but also dangerous, quite a feat.

I shall, of course, continue to refer to the proposed change as the nuclear option out of a sense of obligation to freedom of speech. I would be shocked if anyone in the media did otherwise.

It's still worth the read, though, since it provides a brief enough summary of the issue and suggests that the GOP may yet be shy of even the simple majority they believe will allow them to make the change. This may look like a procedural squabble but the implications are serious - serious enough that a coalition of religious extremists banded together this past Sunday to try and paint Democrats, and anyone else who dares to oppose any of Bush's judicial nominees, as being "against people of faith." The propaganda campaign is in high gear. The goal for the followers of James Dobson and Tony Perkins is the end of the separation of church and state. The goal for the politicians who are pandering to them is to hobble the independence of the judiciary and solidify the Republican hold on all three branches of government.

The WaPo link is courtesy of a new blog called Judging The Future and if you're interested in following this issue, this is the blog to watch. While the venue may be new, the blogger is experienced. You can count on Melanie to follow developments closely and keep you informed.

Full disclosure: I'm associated with this site, though my involvement at this point amounts to a little advice and a lot of moral support. I'm on call for technical trouble-shooting and if needed, it's a paying proposition. But I'll be pleased to be able to support something I can support, if you know what I mean. I think this may be the defining issue of Bush's second term. Count me among those who fervently hope that he loses this one.

Cross-posted at the E-Group.

It seems Tom d'Aquino can't stop whining about that nasty Liberal government stabbing corporate Canada in the back.

"By reneging on the corporate tax cuts in the 2005 budget, the deal announced today will sacrifice Canada's ability to foster more high-paying jobs and to ensure that our economy grows fast enough to pay for the massive federal commitments to expanding social programs and equalization payments," Thomas d'Aquino, president of the Canadian Council of Chief Executives, said in a statement.

If there was an element of risk in Jack Layton's recent strategy to negotiate with the Liberals on a budget that the NDP would support, it was that the NDP would become associated in the voters' minds with "those corrupt Liberals." I didn't think the risk was all that high to begin with but I suspect Paul Martin has taken care of it with this little gambit.

Prime Minister Paul Martin says he will push ahead with tax cuts for big corporations despite his budget deal with the NDP - provided the Conservatives support the move.

It appears to be an effort to paint the Tories into a political corner so that the Liberals can blame them for blocking the tax cuts if they bring down the government.

?We have pulled the large corporate tax cuts out of this budget to be pursued in a separate piece of legislation,? Martin told The Canadian Press in an interview today.

?And that separate piece of legislation we?ll introduce as soon as the Conservatives or somebody say they will support it.

?The corporate tax cuts remain intact. It?s going to be up to the Conservatives to tell us whether or not they will support them.?

I still think Layton won on this round. And Martin looks worse than ever.

Hat-tip to Kevin Brennan writing at the E-Group.

I've been watching the ongoing controversy surrounding the Bush administration's nomination of John Bolton as the American ambassador to the UN without comment so far. For readers familiar with this space, it probably goes without saying that I think this nomination is a disaster and I could go on at length about why I feel that way. But I don't have to when The Poor Man provides reason enough in one short post.

Referring to the recent speculation that North Korea may be on the verge of testing a nuclear weapon, he writes in part:

But, still, this is an unbelievable clusterfuck we?ve let develop on the Korean penninsula, and the guy most responsible for this, apart from the President of the United States, is John Bolton. As far as I?m concerned, the question of Bolton?s fitness to be ambassador to the UN begins and ends here, with this clusterfuck. Should someone with this kind of sticky skid mark running down the middle of their resume be entrusted with representing the US in front of the world? No, he should not. He should not be allowed to work in any diplomatic position whatsoever, whether it is ambassador to the UN, negotiating with North Korea, negotiating with Chick Korea, or working the 3rd shift at the customer service window at Safeway. (Also, something needs to be done about that piece of Greg Brady?s cordoroys he has scotch-taped to his head in place of a tupee, because it is completely out of control. Also also, Sam Elliott should sue for infringement of mustache patent. But I digress.) All the rest of these complaints, credible as they may be, is just office politics as far as I?m concerned. He?s a clusterfuck specialist with a proven track record, and he needs to be prevented, as much as possible, from organizing any more clusterfucks.

Quite a number of bloggers have pointed to one version or another of this story.

The CIA's top weapons inspector in Iraq has ended his hunt for weapons of mass destruction.

Charles Duelfer posted his findings online in the form of an addendum to his October 2004 report that concluded former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction, but wanted them.

"As matters now stand, the WMD investigation has gone as far as feasible," wrote Duelfer, head of the Iraq Survey Group. "After more than 18 months, the WMD investigation and debriefing of the WMD-related detainees has been exhausted."

He concluded it was "unlikely that an official transfer" of weapons of mass destruction between Iraq and Syria occurred, but couldn't rule out shipments of "limited WMD-related materials."

Half of all Americans, exactly 50%, now say the Bush administration deliberately misled Americans about whether Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, the Gallup Organization reported this morning.

That last story shows that the percentage of Americans who now believe the administration intentionally deceived them has hit the half-way point. When do impeachment proceedings start? This is a little more serious than oral sex with an intern.

Town Was Duped into Donating to BC Liberals, Says Official

The BC Liberal Party has been funneling municipal tax dollars from B.C. towns into party coffers, according to financial reports filed with Elections BC.
...
In May 2004, the governments of several Northern B.C. towns received an invitation to a forum on economic diversification. The letterhead on the paper was from the Legislative Assembly of B.C. ? government stationary, not the Liberal Party?s.

Officials from Smithers, Stewart, Prince Rupert, Kitimat, and Terrace were invited to hear from two aluminum industry executives, and a business professor from UBC. The cost was $30 per head. Only when the bill arrived were they told to make the cheques to the BC Liberal Party.

?We didn?t think it was a Liberal Party function,? said Kitimat?s municipal manager, Trafford Hall. Later, the town found out it was.

Hall said the event was just a way for the aluminum giant Alcan Inc., whose vice president spoke at the forum, to ingratiate itself with the Liberal government.

Kitimat is involved in a bitter legal fight with the B.C. government and Alcan over Alcan?s sales of publicly subsidized electricity to the United States. The town says the aluminum company is violating a 1950 agreement that gives it access to cheap electricity in exchange for operating the smelter. Kitimat argues the Alcan is starving the city of jobs because selling the electricity is more profitable than using it to smelt aluminum.

Hall said the forum allowed Alcan to befriend the Liberals while technically not violating company guidelines against donating directly to political campaigns. ?It was just Alcan helping [local Liberal MLA] Roger Harris,? Hall said.

Kitimat taxpayers ended up helping Harris too, by donating to his party to the tune of $360.

Do you think maybe Campbell's government made it difficult for them to get face time with ministers on purpose? Naw, they wouldn't do that, would they?

It'll be interesting to see if the larger media outlets in BC pick up on this story in the middle of an election campaign.

And by the way, that's a sweet deal for Alcan, isn't it? They get publically subsidized electricity for cheap on the premise that they're going to employ local residents and they turn around and sell it to the U.S. Don't you love corporate welfare free markets?

Hat-tip to babble.

I'd missed this Guardian article from a few days ago until today. It's about the various estimates from various sources as to when oil production will reach its peak and begin to decline.

It seems a group of international bankers hired someone they thought would be an objective expert to report to them on the subject.

They called Colin Campbell, who helped to found the London-based Oil Depletion Analysis Centre because he is an industry man through and through, has no financial agenda and has spent most of a lifetime on the front line of oil exploration on three continents. He was chief geologist for Amoco, a vice-president of Fina, and has worked for BP, Texaco, Shell, ChevronTexaco and Exxon in a dozen different countries.

The US Geological Survey (USGS) states that reserves in 2000 (its latest figures) of recoverable oil were about three trillion barrels and that peak production will not come for about 30 years. The International Energy Agency (IEA) believes that oil will peak between "2013 and 2037" and Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iraq and Iran, four countries with much of the world's known reserves, report little if any depletion of reserves. Meanwhile, the oil companies - which do not make public estimates of their own "peak oil" - say there is no shortage of oil and gas for the long term. "The world holds enough proved reserves for 40 years of supply and at least 60 years of gas supply at current consumption rates," said BP this week.
...
But the business of estimating oil reserves is contentious and political. According to Campbell, companies seldom report their true findings for commercial reasons, and governments - which own 90% of the reserves - often lie. Most official figures, he says, are grossly unreliable: "Estimating reserves is a scientific business. There is a range of uncertainty but it is not impossible to get a good idea of what a field contains. Reporting [reserves], however, is a political act."

According to Campbell and other oil industry sources, the two most widely used estimates of world oil reserves, drawn up by the Oil and Gas Journal and the BP Statistical Review, both rely on reserve estimates provided to them by governments and industry and do not question their accuracy.

Companies, says Campbell, "under-report their new discoveries to comply with strict US stock exchange rules, but then revise them upwards over time", partly to boost their share prices with "good news" results. "I do not think that I ever told the truth about the size of a prospect. That was not the game we were in," he says. "As we were competing for funds with other subsidiaries around the world, we had to exaggerate."

Campbell reckons global peak production of conventional oil - the kind associated with gushing oil wells - is approaching fast, perhaps even next year. His calculations are based on historical and present production data, published reserves and discoveries of companies and governments, estimates of reserves lodged with the US Securities and Exchange Commission, speeches by oil chiefs and a deep knowledge of how the industry works.

"About 944bn barrels of oil has so far been extracted, some 764bn remains extractable in known fields, or reserves, and a further 142bn of reserves are classed as 'yet-to-find', meaning what oil is expected to be discovered. If this is so, then the overall oil peak arrives next year," he says.

... [Campbell] and other oil depletion analysts and petroleum geologists, most of whom have been in the industry for years, accuse the US of using questionable statistical probability models to calculate global reserves and Opec countries of drastically revising upwards their reserves in the 1980s.

"The estimates for the Opec countries were systematically exaggerated in the late 1980s to win a greater slice of the allocation cake. Middle East official reserves jumped 43% in just three years despite no new major finds," he says.

Just kiss your lifestyle goodbye.

...for an entirely different scandal.

When last I checked in on the Arar inquiry it was to report that the fight over the release of a ten page summary of testimony had been delayed. Now it seems the commission didn't so much drop the issue as find a way around the government's attempts to keep us in the dark. They've done a massive document dump, releasing 2300 pages of documentary evidence, and allowed the press to piece the story together for themselves. And the story isn't pretty.

It starts with a missed opportunity to intervene before Arar was ever deported.

On Oct. 2, 2002, Foreign Affairs officials were desperately trying to discover the whereabouts of Maher Arar, a Syrian-born Canadian who had been arrested the week before at New York's JFK airport.

After several U.S. officials denied a file even existed for Arar, the Canadians placed a call to a U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service superior officer named Atkinson, who told them he would try to find out.

Fifteen minutes later, he called back and warned that the case "was of a seriousness that should be taken to the highest level," suggesting the Canadian ambassador to Washington contact the Justice Department.

It never happened.

Now fast forward a bit to the early days of Arar's detention in Syria and watch how the Canadian ambassador stands up for a Canadian citizen who's being illegally detained (emphasis added).

Among the pages marked "top secret" and "for Canadian eyes only," the most provocative were authored by Franco Pillarella, Canada's ambassador to Syria at the time Arar was deported to Damascus.

Just days after Arar arrived at a Syrian military prison, Pillarella's memos back to Ottawa say his Syrian contact has told him that Arar was being interrogated and had confessed to links with terrorist organizations, alluding to groups based in Pakistan.

The Syrians, wrote Pillarella, "promised to pass on to me any information they may gather on Arar's implication in terrorist activities."

While Pillarella says the Syrians will allow Arar to have consular visits, nowhere does he note having asked about Arar's treatment or how the confessions were obtained.

Instead, on several occasions Pillarella focuses on getting Arar's statements so he can bring them back to Canada and hand them over to the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) and the RCMP.

There's no indication Pillarella knew Arar was being tortured and parts of the memos are blacked out. But Alex Neve, head of Amnesty International in Canada, says Syria might have taken Pillarella's efforts as encouragement.

"In those early, very critical days, when Mr. Arar was at the greatest risk - when he was being held incommunicado in detention, when he was being subjected to torture ? the ambassador's primary concern seemed to be to do some contract work for Canada's security agencies."

Stephen Bindman, the spokesperson for the governrment's legal team at the Arar inquiry, has a different interpretation of the documents.

"Taken as a whole the government believes these documents show the extraordinary lengths to which Foreign Affairs officials, together with other federal departments and agencies, went to provide consular officials to Mr. Arar in New York and Syria."

To return to the Montreal Gazette story for a moment, there's this:

The documents also confirm it was a letter from Prime Minister Jean Chretien that tipped the scales in Arar's favour.

In July 2003, a few months before his release, Chretien asked Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to let Arar return home to his wife and children on humanitarian and compassionate grounds.

Cross-posted at the E-Group.

I watched Dithers' address to the nation this evening on CPAC, which also broadcast the followup remarks by each of the opposition leaders.

I thought Martin's remarks were pretty much predictable. When the CPAC commentator, whose name escapes me, said he thought that the PM's commitment to call an election within thirty days of the final Gomery report was "brilliant politics", I found myself shaking my head. A few weeks ago that move might have been smart. Now it looks weak. It would never have been brilliant.

Harper's remarks, too, were predictable. He really wants to go now but obviously felt he had say that he would wait and see what "the Canadian people say." In other words he's going to watch the polls and see what the reaction to Dithers' speech is.

Duceppe removed any doubt for me about his intentions. He's rarin' to go. So if Martin's move tonight doesn't pay off, we'll be going to the polls sooner rather than later.

While Layton was speaking I noticed two things. When he spent a fair amount of time talking about what the government should be paying attention to instead of being consumed by scandal, I agreed with him. And he seems to have that big, toothy grin under control. He looked like a leader of a political party. That's not to say that I immediately decided "he won", just that I personally appreciated his performance in a way that surprised me just a bit.

I spent a little time wandering around the blogosphere this evening and came across a few other reactions. From CalgaryGrit:

Analysis of Jack: In all seriousness, he was the best of the bunch. Actually talked about the issues and making Parliament work. The NDP base soaks up stuff like that. The commentators spent as much time talking about Layton?s offer to modify the budget as they did about Martin?s offer to call an election in January. This NDP ploy could backfire, but I really like the way Layton is approaching this.

From Darren Barefoot writing at the E-Group:

I'm not crazy about Layton's party, but he's by far the best speaker, and is far succinct that his fellow speakers. It's also the best-written speech, pointed without being catty. He wins my respect by not focusing on the scandal, but on what government should be doing instead of the scandal.

And from Paul Wells:

Big, big win for Layton, within the limited ambit of his reasonably expectable electoral market: He begins by talking about what government should be doing. Among other things, it's a refreshing change from the previous three guys. If anyone's still listening...

Who'd a thunk it?

(Full disclosure: I voted NDP in the last election.)

You may have heard about the latest round of hijinks in Ottawa. The opposition parties, who are entitled to a certain number of Opposition Days in each parliamentary cycle, are enraged because the Liberal government is using every measure at its disposal to put those days off until late in the session, meaning June. Since one of those days would provide the perfect opportunity to put forward a non-confidence motion that would bring the government down, if that doesn't happen until June it would mean a summer election. No one wants that.

You can get a fuller explanation, including quotes from an expert in parliamentary procedure, here (at least until the link goes dark which should be in a week or so).

The CBC has a late evening update on the story that ends with this paragraph.

The House of Commons is now at a stalemate. Either the Liberals will have to back down and restore the cancelled Opposition Days, or the Conservatives and the BQ will do everything they can to keep the Liberals from actually governing.

You may have noticed that I haven't given any time to recent polls purporting to show whether the CPC would win a minority or a majority if an election were called tomorrow, or whether the Liberals would be wiped out or merely wounded. The reason is simple: an election hasn't been called yet. There seem to be a lot of bloggers out there who smell blood in the water and think the campaign will start any moment now but I don't think that's a fair assumption.

I may have suggested recently that the Liberals should be prepared to pull the plug on their own government, but that doesn't mean I think they will. I think they'll hang on as long they can. So it's up to the opposition to force the issue.

Robert at MyBlahg has gone as far as predicting that it won't happen this year. He's suggesting that even if Harper's Conservatives want to go now, rather than later, there's no real incentive for the Bloc or the NDP to go along with that.

While each of these parties could pick up some seats, it would be a poor trade-off for the leverage they now have with the minority Liberal government who now needs their support to remain in power. The NDP and the Bloc must also be wary of the CP's rising support which has put them within striking distance of a majority government. This would be disastrous for these two parties since it's doubtful a Conservative majority government would be in much of a mood to compromise with either of them.

If Robert's right, the CPC doesn't have the votes in the House of Commons to bring the government down which means we may as well all calm down. I don't know that Robert's right, but I don't know that he's wrong either. So while I may glance at the polls that are being reported in the media, I doubt I'll find them blogworthy when there are already more subjects to blog about than I can find time for.

But as long I've brought up the subject of polls, Declan has an interesting post on the ins and outs of polling in the 21st century and just how much salt one should consume when trying to interpret them. It's worth a read. He's also added a dropdown list of Canadian pollsters to his sidebar. That should be a pretty useful feature once the writ is actually dropped.

This is from a Democratic member of the House of Representatives named James McGovern who wrote about a recent visit to Iraq for The Nation.

One military leader told us they can tell that things are changing for the better because when US helicopters fly over certain areas of Iraq, Iraqis wave. Well, I took a helicopter ride (it's too dangerous to drive) from the Baghdad airport to the Green Zone wearing an armored vest and sandwiched between two heavily armed American soldiers who were pointing their guns down at the ground. I suggested to the military leader that perhaps he was confusing a wave with a plea not to shoot.

Hat-tip to Stageleft.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a post called Playing chicken with China in which I pointed to increasing calls from both corporate leaders and legislators for an American tariff on Chinese goods. Since then, a group of legislators led by Senators Lindsay Graham (R-S.C.) and Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) succeeded in having their proposal for a 27.5% surcharge on all Chinese imports attached as an ammendment to a foreign policy bill. They expected resistance. They got anything but.

The bill not only survived, it survived by a large margin. Republicans and Democrats, 67-33, voted to keep debate on the tariff alive.

Nobody looked more shocked than Graham, who had, in offering the bill earlier this year, said it was mostly to highlight the harm China?s undervalued currency inflicts on the U.S. trade balance.

After the vote, Graham turned to Schumer and asked, ?What do we do now??

The solution, brokered with the Senate leadership, assures that the tariff will come before the Senate as a free-standing bill before July 27.

Graham still isn?t predicting passage. But he says the measure, as intended, has put China and Bush administration officials on the alert. He calls China?s talk on its currency as cheap as the yuan itself. He accuses the administration of being slow to act.

Treasury Secretary John Snow spoke out against the tariff before the Senate Banking Committee on Thursday, calling it ?a bad mistake? and asking Congress to leave the problem to ?financial diplomacy.?

The Group of Seven leading industrialised countries this weekend put China on notice that it must shift to a more flexible currency regime, with finance ministers demanding it take action immediately.

The G7's communique repeated its call for "more flexibility in exchange rates" where it was lacking, to help promote more balanced global growth, and added a demand that "vigorous action is needed to address global imbalances".

Officials said there was no discussion of singling out China because in the statement the language was already clearly aimed at Beijing - and because of the difficulty of getting Japan to agree a formal declaration.

But ministers from all the countries apart from Japan backed a US demand that China should act immediately.

The vigorous action that's needed is to address the record American current account deficit. The logic operating here seems to be that allowing the yuan to float will effectively lower the American dollar and thus shrink American trade deficits. And cooling off the Chinese economy will cool off Chinese demand for energy thus allowing oil prices to drop.

But what exactly is supposed to compel the Chinese to comply? And if they decide to turn this into a real trade war and stop buying up American T-Bills and thereby financing American debt, will the greenback drop in value a lot faster than anyone really wants?

The Bush administration has had a free ride for the last five years. Between massive tax cuts and two wars, they've turned a surplus into a massive deficit and magnified a trade deficit that already existed. They've gotten away with it because China, Japan and S. Korea, among others, have been buying up the debt. But things that can't go on forever, generally don't. The U.S. is now looking for a solution to the problem that won't involve putting a crimp in their own style and they seem to have settled on China as a likely patsy while the rest of the G7 seems to be going along for the ride.

Here's oldman at BOP News, (who gets a hat-tip for both these links):

If the Chinese were to move away from dollar and debt purchases to a free currency float it would be disasterous for the world economic system and possibly incite the end of the petro-dollar standard overnight. Both the Bank of Japan and South Korea's central bank have recently made statements indicating that they were already moving away from the dollar as a reserve currency. A sudden politically pressured departure by China could easily incite a devaluation of the American currency as other countries moved to follow suit.

It did not of course have to be like this, and the majority of the blame lies upon the utter incompetence of the Bush Administration coupled with the completely irresponsible policies of Greenspan that are now threatening to destroy the global financial consensus.

Clearly China is being pressured politically to accept unilaterally the costs of addressing the conflicts and tensions within the system. Just as vigorously however the Chinese government is signaling back that it has no intention of being the scape-goat and bearing solely the costs of global economic adjustment. Given that the Western world in general can do basically nothing directly to China to force it to cooperate and China has multiple means of spreading the pain or externalizing it back to the United States this is a recipe for disaster.

Bush administration eliminating 19-year-old international terrorism report

The State Department decided to stop publishing an annual report on international terrorism after the government's top terrorism center concluded that there were more terrorist attacks in 2004 than in any year since 1985, the first year the publication covered.

Several U.S. officials defended the abrupt decision, saying the methodology the National Counterterrorism Center used to generate statistics for the report may have been faulty, such as the inclusion of incidents that may not have been terrorism.

Last year, the number of incidents in 2003 was undercounted, forcing a revision of the report, "Patterns of Global Terrorism."

But other current and former officials charged that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's office ordered "Patterns of Global Terrorism" eliminated several weeks ago because the 2004 statistics raised disturbing questions about the Bush's administration's frequent claims of progress in the war against terrorism.

If you follow the link at the top of the post to the Knight Ridder story you'll find that one of the sources quoted is Larry C. Johnson, formerly of the CIA among other things. In a post at The Counterterrorism Blog he provides a bit more nuance to the story.

This move has been prompted by the Department's discovery that the new methodology used by the recently formed National Counter Terrorism Center has produced statistics that shows an enormous jump in the number of international terrorist attacks. For example, in 2003 there were about 172 significant attacks. The numbers for 2004 have jumped to at least 655. At least 300 of those incidents occurred in India in the Kashmir region. NCTC, I'm told, is still tweaking the numbers. For Secretary of State Rice these numbers are a disaster. It is tough to argue we are winning the war on terrorism when the numbers in the official Government report will show the largest number of incidents ever recorded since the State Department started reporting on terrorist incidents. In the Secretary's defense, however, the sharp jump in numbers has more to do with a change in methodololgy of counting rather that an actual surge in Islamic extremist activity. In fact, if you take time to parse the numbers, the actual scope of terrorism by Islamic extremists in 2004 appeared to decline relative to the attacks during 2003 (except for Iraq). Rather than run from the numbers the State Department and the Intelligence Community should seize the opportunity to really get their hands around the issue and provide Congress and the American people with a clear, apolitical assessment about the reality of the terrorist threat we face.

I'm off shortly on a road trip. It always takes me a day or two to get reorganized after one of these adventures so don't be surprised if there's nothing new here until mid-week.

Behave yourselves. Like that'll happen.

Using the legislature to try and control what people learn seems to be all the rage these days. So does pretending that torture didn't happen.

Pupils must be taught a cleaner side of France's 'dirty war'

FRENCH historians are protesting against a new law that obliges schools to present the country?s colonial exploits in a favourable light, especially in Algeria, where hundreds of thousands were killed in the fight for independence.

The row, which moved yesterday from academia to the tabloid newspapers, once again shows how deeply France still suffers from the trauma of the eight-year ?dirty war? that led to the 1962 withdrawal from a land that was deemed part of French national territory.
...
Eminent historians said this week that the law ?imposes an official lie about past crimes and massacres that sometimes went as far as genocide?.

Benjamin Stora, a leading historian of France?s 132-year rule in Algeria, said yesterday: ?France has not tackled its colonial history head-on. This contrasts with the ?AngloSaxons?, who have introduced post-colonial studies in their universities. We have fallen phenomenally far behind.?

The law, passed on February 23, orders schools to teach ?the positive role of the French presence overseas, especially in North Africa?. They must also ?give an eminent place . . . to the sacrifices of the combatants of the French Army raised from these territories?.
...
M Stora said that there was no longer silence over the Algerian war because historians had exposed the reality. Among the politically correct thinking classes it is rare to hear a positive word on the French Empire. However, M Stora said that the State was still in ?denial? and schools did not relate the truth. Among the officially disputed aspects of the war is the use of torture.

The State continues to deny that it was systematically used against insurgents, while a mountain of evidence to the contrary has emerged.

Some days it seems like we haven't really learned anything at all, doesn't it?

[Aside: Yes, it's popular in certain circles these days to bash France at every opportunity. Yes, this post bashes France. No, that doesn't mean I'm buying into the way the other guy is framing the issue.]

Hat-tip to Steve Gilliard.

The Sudden Sage catches Stephen Harper being cute:

Harper is using an old orator trick, in which you taint one item by superceding it with another item known to be tainted. Bush & co. did this all the time in the lead up to the Iraq war by first mentioning 9/11 and then Sadam right after. I don't believe Bush ever claimed Sadam was involved with 9/11, but the juxtaposition implied that. Here we have implied: People who support SSM equals people who support corrupt Liberals.

It's all so predictable, isn't it? If some voters note these kinds of tricks and decide that they still want to support the Liberals because this kind of smear by association turns their stomachs even more, then when Harper isn't crowned king in the next election there will be an outcry that "Liberal voters are a bunch of sheep!" Which would ignore the possibility that some have decided the Conservatives might be even worse.

Allow me to repeat the incisive and carefully thought out conclusion to my last post.

Aaaargh! (Did I spell that right?)

Over a year ago, in response to a particularly ridiculous op-ed by William Thorsell in which he suggested that we should just forget about the sponsorship scandal and move on, I wrote the following:

Do you want people to lose some of their cynicism about politics and to feel that their government is actually responsible to them? Then you demonstrate that, at least as much as possible, corruption won't be tolerated and criminal activity will be investigated and punished. That might just convince people that government works, that their tax dollars are being managed by people who at least try and take the responsibility seriously and that there's some point to being involved in the whole messy business other than looking for opportunities to line your own pockets.

Do you want to increase the cynicism people feel about politics and government? Then when confronted with obvious corruption, you shrug your shoulders, say "What are you gonna do, eh?" and "move on".

There's been a variety of reactions to my last post but the consensus seems to be that I'm wrong to suggest that the Martin government should step down on its own initiative if the evidence to corroborate Jean Brault's testimony continues to pile up. And for those who point out that all we have is Brault's testimony, I was saying that myself a few days ago. Since then we've learned that there is documentary evidence and corroborating testimony to support at least some of it. It's true it hasn't yet reached the standard sufficient to convict someone of a crime but I wasn't talking about sending Paul Martin and his government to jail. I was talking about losing confidence in their ability to govern. Not that I had much to begin with.

The reason this hits so close to home is because it isn't just a matter of embezzlement and money laundering, though that's bad enough. It's a matter of embezzlement and money laundering in the service of subverting the electoral process. The evidence we're seeing suggests that the Liberals, who were quite proud of their efforts to limit corporate and union donations to political parties and to prevent those with deep pockets from drowning out the rest of us during election campaigns, were illegally siphoning our tax dollars into the party coffers to fund their own campaign efforts. It appears they were trumpeting their accomplishments in improving our democracy while marketing themselves to us using our own money.

Anyone who, in the last decade, has voted against the Liberals in good faith has a right to be outraged. Anyone who has given of his or her time to work on behalf of the NDP, the Green Party, the Bloc and yes, the Conservatives in their several incarnations, has a right to feel cheated.

I've certainly argued in the past that elections and voting aren't all there is to democracy. But the electoral process is a fundamental part of democracy and its integrity should be protected at all costs. We may never be able to keep it free from all impropriety but that doesn't mean we stop trying. I'm frankly not interested in being told I'm na?ve for thinking this kind of corruption is new. I don't. I'm aware that it's probably only because of an internal schism in the Liberal party that we've had an opportunity to look under this particular rock. But now that it's been overturned we'd better confront what's been hiding under it or stop pretending that we're trying to be a real democracy.

Whether the amount of money that went astray is $2 million, $20 million or $200 million makes no difference. Any public servant who doesn't want to be held to a high standard and who won't, above all, protect the integrity of the electoral process itself, shouldn't be in the public service. I have that on the authority of Paul Martin himself. And how can I write a blog called Peace, order and good government, eh? and not dig my heels in and defend the integrity of the process that selects those who govern us?

In comments to that last post, keving wrote:

...to relinquish your government means that you don't believe you're vision of Canada is better than the other guys.

The only valid reason to abandon your obligation to govern is if it is clear that you no longer have a mandate and it's the job of the opposition -- particularly in a minority government -- to prove you don't.

It's pretty damn unpleasant, but the process we're going through is the right process.

Aaarrrgh!

Today's Globe and Mail reports that the Liberals are asking Stephen Harper to hold off on bringing the government down until the Gomery inquiry issues its final report. Representing Paul Martin is Scott Reid:

Mr. Reid insisted that the Prime Minister has no relationship to the scandal and is the best man to deal with it.

?Paul Martin is the wire brush that will scrub clean this stain on Canadian politics,? Mr. Reid said.

I agree that we shouldn't go to the polls tomorrow. Some of Jean Brault's testimony is confirmed by documentary evidence but it would be a good idea to see how much of it is borne out by other witnesses.

Assuming that Brault's allegations about the depth of Liberal corruption turn out to be essentially accurate, I'm sure there will be a lot of spinning similar to what Scott Reid is attempting to do here. I can see the "few bad apples" defence coming to the surface already and I'm not buying it. Whether or not any of this can be tied directly to Jean Chrétien, Paul Martin or other senior, elected Liberals doesn't really matter anymore.

This isn't the pork and patronage that the more jaded among us have become accustomed to. Kevin Brennan at Tilting at Windmills gets it right when he calls it embezzlement. When you're in senior management and something like this happens on your watch, you own it. You wear it. If there was any honour in Martin's Liberal party, any class at all, instead of clinging to power by their fingernails and pleading with Stephen Harper not to pull the trigger, they would themselves be planning on submitting their resignation and offering to work with the opposition to ensure a smooth transition.

But I'm not holding my breath. (And I'm beginning to think that's what I should have called this blog.)

DeLay Says Federal Judiciary Has 'Run Amok,' Adding Congress Is Partly to Blame

Representative Tom DeLay, the House majority leader, escalated his talk of a battle between the legislative and judicial branches of government on Thursday, saying federal courts had "run amok," in large part because of the failure of Congress to confront them.

"Judicial independence does not equal judicial supremacy," Mr. DeLay said in a videotaped speech delivered to a conservative conference in Washington entitled "Confronting the Judicial War on Faith."

Mr. DeLay faulted courts for what he said was their invention of rights to abortion and prohibitions on school prayer, saying courts had ignored the intent of Congress and improperly cited international standards and precedents. "These are not examples of a mature society," he said, "but of a judiciary run amok."
...
"Judicial independence does not equal judicial supremacy," Mr. DeLay said in a videotaped speech delivered to a conservative conference in Washington entitled "Confronting the Judicial War on Faith."

Mr. DeLay faulted courts for what he said was their invention of rights to abortion and prohibitions on school prayer, saying courts had ignored the intent of Congress and improperly cited international standards and precedents. "These are not examples of a mature society," he said, "but of a judiciary run amok."
...
The organizers of the conference and Congressional staff members who spoke there called for several specific steps: impeaching judges deemed to have ignored the will of Congress or to have followed foreign laws; passing bills to remove court jurisdiction from certain social issues or the place of God in public life; changing Senate rules that allow the Democratic minority to filibuster Mr. Bush's appeals court nominees; and using Congress's authority over court budgets to punish judges whom it considers to have overstepped their authority.

"I am in favor of impeachment," Michael Schwartz, chief of staff to Senator Tom Coburn, Republican of Oklahoma, said in a panel discussion on abortion, suggesting "mass impeachment" might be needed.

This, in large part, is what the Terry Shiavo case was about. It provided demagogues like DeLay with an opportunity to cast the judiciary as a "gathering threat" to the American way of life.

The extremists in the Republican party already control the executive and legislative branches and now they have their sights set on the judicial branch. They mean to control it through a combination of tactics: packing it with right wing ideologues and hobbling its independence.

At the close of the Constitutional Convention in 1787 when Ben Franklin was asked whether the American people had a republic or a monarchy, he famously replied "A republic if you can keep it." What happens over the next few months may well determine whether the United States remains a republic or becomes a one party state.

Earlier today I wrote that I had no trouble finding things to become righteously angry about if I was looking for reasons to get excited. Case in point.

A nuclear safety inspector discovered only by chance last fall that Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd. had continued to dump tens of thousands of gallons of hazardous radioactive waste into the ground for a decade after promising to stop, federal regulators were told yesterday.

Officials at the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission admitted "losing track" of the problem for the last seven years because of staff turnover and poor record keeping.

Commission president Linda Keen told a public hearing here yesterday that the incidents raised questions about the competence of both AECL and the safety commission's officials and that more explanations were needed to get to the bottom of what went wrong.

"We want to be significantly reassured," Keen said.

The problem arose from a laundry used to wash the protective clothing of lab employees who work with radioactive materials.

The laundry discharge was mixed in with human sewage that was pumped into a primary treatment plant.

Liquid sludge from the plant was dumped about 15 times a year on sandy soil less than three kilometres from the Ottawa River.

The publication ban on Jean Brault's testimony at the Gomery inquiry has been partially lifted. The Globe and Mail has four pages on it starting here and it's not behind the subscription wall (yet). Knock yourselves out.

I'm not even going to try and comment yet. I haven't read it all myself.

Update:

Sean at PolSpy has a whole list o' links for your reading pleasure. It follows the spanking he delivers to Jean Chrétien.

You may recall that last December when the Arar inquiry wanted to make public a summary of testimony up to that point, the government stepped in to block it. That summary is largely concerned with the role of CSIS in Maher Arar's imprisonment. At the time Paul Cavalluzzo, lead counsel for the commission, indicated that they would take the feds to court in order to release it. Last Friday it was announced that the showdown, while not cancelled, has been delayed.

The Maher Arar inquiry agreed Friday not to immediately release details of a summary that contains secret testimony about the Canadian Security Intelligence Service's role in the Arar affair.

The agreement follows Ottawa's decision not to seek legal recourse to keep the summary from being released.
...
The inquiry commissioner, Justice Denis O'Connor, wants the complete text released, and according to the inquiry's lead counsel, Paul Cavalluzzo, that will eventually happen.

The federal government argues that if certain details contained in the summary are made public, Canada's national security could be harmed, said a spokesman for the federal legal team.

"We are going to be submitting a report which we feel can be disclosed to the public and we're hoping the government will release it," Cavalluzzo told Canadian Press.

"If the government disagrees with us, then, yes, we will have a judicial battle on our hands."

I've posted about this previously and as I recall, it didn't get a lot of reaction or create a lot of controversy. There was certainly nothing like the uproar over the current publication ban on testimony at the Gomery inquiry.

Which leaves me more than a bit puzzled. In this case we have an apparently innocent Canadian citizen who was tortured and imprisoned for a year and the possibility that Canadian intelligence and law enforcement agencies were complicit in that. We have a public inquiry that was formed with the understanding at the outset that matters of national security would have to be carefully handled. Much of the proceedings have been conducted in camera for precisely that reason. And a former head of SIRC, Ron Atkey, was appointed as a friend of the court to assist Justice O'Connor precisely so that the commission would have expert advice on the matter.

So it seems fair to say that careful consideration was given to that summary of testimony that the commission wanted to release. But the government dragged its feet about even acknowledging the summary's existence for as long as possible and then took a black felt marker to much of it and insisted that a public inquiry wasn't allowed to communicate with the public. And no uproar.

But when a temporary publication ban is put into place to protect the rights of three individuals who are accused of criminal offences, rather than to cover up possible complicity by a government agency in the torture and imprisonment of an innocent man, all hell breaks loose.

I don't get it.

Cross-posted at the E-Group.

Let's review:

1. The publication ban on testimony at the Gomery inquiry wasn't requested by the Liberal Party of Canada. It was requested by the lawyers representing three individuals who are facing criminal charges.


2. The publication ban wasn't implemented to protect the Liberal Party of Canada. It was implemented to protect the rights of those accused to a fair trial. The last time I checked, protecting the right of an accused to a fair trial is actually a good thing. It's one of your basic features in a properly functioning democracy. The fact that this particular ban was implemented in a way that was clumsy and ineffective and may have done more harm than good is a separate issue.


3. The publication ban is temporary. With the opposition parties indicating that they have no intention of pulling the trigger on an immediate vote of non-confidence, there is every reason to believe that we, the voters, will have all the pertinent information when the time comes for us to vote.


4. The individual who's been testifying is himself facing criminal charges. He may have motive to deflect blame, spread it around as widely as possible or otherwise misrepresent what happened. The information that's roaring around the internet was relayed to a second party who relayed it to a third party who published it on a blog. The technical term for that is gossip.

It means I'm reserving the right to be sceptical and not raise my blood pressure until I'm sure there's a good reason for it and there might actually be a point to it.

The fact that I'm not defying the publication ban doesn't mean that I don't think there is a time when civil disobedience is called for because the government has gone too far.

It means I don't think this is one of those times for the reasons outlined above.

Judge postpones fraud trial of 2 key sponsorship figures

A judge in Quebec has agreed to postpone the criminal trial of two key figures in the federal sponsorship scandal by one month, a decision that could keep in place a publication ban on potentially explosive testimony heard at the Gomery inquiry.

Jury selection was scheduled to begin May 2 in the joint trial of advertising executive Jean Brault and retired bureaucrat Chuck Guit?, who was responsible for running the sponsorship program in the 1990s. Lawyers for the two men had asked that the criminal proceedings be put off until September.

But Quebec Superior Court Justice Lise C?t? ruled Wednesday that the criminal proceedings be put off until June 6.

A delay in the trial until September could have prompted Justice John Gomery, head of the sponsorship inquiry, to remove the ban on publishing the testimony Brault has given at the inquiry. But it's not clear what effect a delay of one month will have on Gomery's decision.

Gomery is expected to rule on the ban on Wednesday afternoon.

So instead the trials have been delayed for only a month and we'll have to wait and see whether Gomery decides to leave the ban in place until then or give up and lift it immediately.

I would have thought that a key issue in the War on Terror™ would be controlling nuclear proliferation. But it seems all the interested parties are only interested in seeing everyone else's proliferation controlled.

US and Iran oppose plan for nuclear moratorium

The US has rejected a proposal by the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) for a five-year, global moratorium on the construction of new facilities for enriching uranium and reprocessing plutonium.

One month before a conference to review the nuclear weapons non-proliferation treaty (NPT), the US and Iran find themselves in uncommon agreement in their joint opposition to the plan put forward by Mohamed ElBaradei.

According to diplomats in Vienna, where the United Nations nuclear watchdog agency is based, the US wants to expand its private civilian nuclear power industry, while Iran insists it should not be denied access to such technology.

Mr ElBaradei argues that the world already has more than enough capacity to fuel its nuclear power plants and research facilities. His proposed moratorium is intended to give the international community a breathing space to work out revisions to the treaty, widely acknowledged to be in danger of collapse.
...
One diplomat in Vienna said the White House had agreed to the proposed moratorium on condition that it did not apply to the US. France and Japan also oppose the plan. ?The moratorium is going nowhere,? the diplomat said. The US State Department declined to comment.
...
Controversy over the moratorium idea is symptomatic of serious differences among the five nuclear weapons states that are signatories to the treaty and many other states that accuse them of not living up to their disarmament commitments. A senior UN official said the conference was headed for a ?train wreck?. A preparatory committee has failed to agree on an agenda.

It's just after dinner here at Chez Pogge and I've already seen about two and half times the normal daily traffic. Much of that is courtesy of G'n'G. That would be Google 'n' Gomery.

And I'm torn. On the one hand it's nice to see so much interest in Canadian politics. On the other hand, Mark at Section 15 pretty much nailed it when he called it a feeding frenzy in a comment that's around here somewhere. And that comment was made on Saturday before the feeding got as frenzied as it's been.

If you're interested in some relatively sane commentary on the whole affair you can do some one-stop shopping over at the E-Group where James Bow, Kevin Brennan and Ian Welsh have all weighed in.

But consider the possibility that there are other issues worth thinking about. Some of them may actually have more profound consequences on your life than the depth of the corruption in the Quebec wing of the Liberal Party of Canada. Mahigan at True North has posted the first part of what promises to be an interesting and in-depth look at peak oil and what it may mean to our collective future. It makes the Gomery Commission look like small beer. Go read.

Now if you'll excuse me I'm going to try and get some more work done. I might manage a couple more billable hours before my brain locks up. I gassed up the car today and it hurt. And it's going to get worse.

CTV News is reporting that they know who the next American ambassador to Canada will be. David Wilkins is a close friend of the Bush family, a major fund-raiser for Dubya and is currently Republican Speaker of the House in South Carolina.

Wilkins himself is apparently playing it pretty close to the vest. Bush has previously considered him for ambassador to Chile and a federal judgeship and both times Wilkins has withdrawn his name. He's not saying much about this either but that could be because he's trying to work out who's going to take over his current position. There are four other Republicans who want the job and if they all go for it and split the GOP vote while the Dems stick together, South Carolina could end up with a Democratic Speaker.

So at least the Democrats would get something out of this.

Even if Wilkins is Bush's choice he still has to be confirmed. But with a battle looming on the choice of John Bolton to represent the U.S. at the U.N. and judicial nominations coming up soon after that, I don't imagine the federal Democrats are in much of a mood to fight over who the ambassador to Canada will be.

I haven't heard anything yet on how, um, outspoken Wilkins might be but since he's a long time speaker of a state legislature I'm figuring I should keep my ear plugs handy. Either that or put Bert back up on the sidebar.

Dear stooly:

You know who you are. You're the individual who just left a comment here that consisted of information that is currently subject to a publication ban in this country. Your comment has been deleted and your IP has been banned.

If you disagree with the publication ban, that's an opinion you're entitled to. It's an opinion I don't share and there might be a worthwhile debate to be had around that. But you don't have the right to leave me open to the possiblity of being charged for violation of that ban. If you want to take that risk, do it yourself. Don't use me to further your own agenda.

You're no longer welcome here.

pogge

To every other Canadian blogger:

Watch your comments. If you want to take the risk it's your own decision. But it's one that someone else shouldn't take on your behalf and without your permission.

Update:

Or maybe I should call it a postscript. Yes, I do have a temper. Certain things set me off. In this case it's some fool who thinks it's OK to put someone else's neck on the line. If he wants to use a blog to serve his agenda, let him get his own.

One of the trackbacks to this post is from Ghost of a flea who has pre-emptively banned the same IP address and has this to say:

This is a private publication and nothing is printed here without my permission. Anyone attempting to circumvent a court order and in so doing placing others in the way of criminal prosecution is not welcome here whatever I may or may not think of the merits of the court order.

In almost a year and a half of blogging this is only the second commentor I've banned. I don't do it simply because someone has an opinion that differs from my own, but I'll certainly do it if I think someone is abusing the ability to comment here. My house, my rules.

The American media may be quite happy to try and distract everyone with wall-to-wall coverage of things like the Terri Shiavo affair or the Michael Jackson trial, but organizations like the ACLU just keep digging. Since the original revelations of torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib it's seemed like this was the story that wasn't going to die.

Green light for Iraqi prison abuse came right from the top

America's leading civil liberties group has demanded an investigation into the former US military commander Iraq after a formerly classified memo revealed that he personally sanctioned a series of coercive interrogation techniques outlawed by the Geneva Conventions. The group claims that his directives were directly linked to the sort of abuses that took place at Abu Ghraib.

Documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) reveal that Lt General Ricardo Sanchez authorised techniques such as the use of dogs to intimidate prisoners, stress positions and disorientation. In the documents, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, Gen Sanchez admits that some of the techniques would not be tolerated by other countries.

When he appeared last year before a Congressional committee, Gen Sanchez denied authorising such techniques. He has now been accused of perjury.

The ACLU says the documents reveal that the abuse of prisoners in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere was the result of an organised and co-ordinated plan for dealing with prisoners captured during the so-called war on terror that originates at the highest levels of the chain of command. It says that far from being isolated incident, the shocking abuse at Abu Ghraib that was revealed last year was part of a pattern.

"We think that the techniques authorised by Gen Sanchez were certainly responsible for putting into play the sort of abuses that we saw at Abu Ghraib," Amirit Singh, an ACLU lawyer, told The Independent on Sunday. "And it does not just stop with Sanchez. It goes to [Defence Secretary Donald] Rumsfeld, who wrote memos authorising these sorts of techniques at Guantanamo Bay."
...
The Pentagon originally refused to release the memo on national security grounds, but passed it to the ACLU after the group challenged it in court. Mr Rumsfeld last week dismissed suggestions that it had been withheld to save the Pentagon's embarrassment.

But the ACLU said the reason for the delay in delivering the more than 1,200 pages of documents in which the memo was contained was "evident in the contents", which included reports of brutal beatings and sworn statements that soldiers were told to "beat the fuck out of" prisoners.

If you're cruising the Canadian blogs looking for reactions on the big story of the weekend, you can cruise on over to Bound by Gravity where Andrew has had* a post with links to comments from a wide variety of bloggers. All I have to add is this:

What people are reacting to is hearsay and anonymous second-hand reporting on testimony from someone who's facing criminal charges and apparently decided to sing like a bird. He may have told the truth and he may have tried to spread the blame as widely as possible. I'm inclined to reserve judgement until things settle down and we get some decent, sourced reporting on what's going on.

That should in no way be taken as a defence of the Liberals. When the sponsorship story first broke I made a strong statement in favour of a public inquiry and despite Gomery's occasional missteps, my opinion hasn't changed. We need to get to the bottom of what happened and if the corruption in the governing party goes as deep as it appears to it wouldn't surprise me too much.

But I've also seen how the grapevine can work. Everyone loves a nice, juicy scandal and when a story like this spreads by word of mouth, details have a tendency to get either overlooked or embellished depending on who's doing the talking.

Update:

* Andrew had second thoughts and that post is no longer available. As of this writing the feds are exploring ways to plug the leaks and considering whether or not to charge bloggers who have linked to reports on the testimony in question with contempt of court. I actually doubt it will come to that.

In an article in today's Toronto Star, Michelle Shephard alerts us to the fact there are a growing number of security agencies in Canada -- so many that it seems even the good folks in government aren't sure who they all are. While Shephard throws out some of the "dizzying" array of acronyms she doesn't bother to spell out what very many of them stand for.

So here, for those playing along at home, is a list of acronyms along with their full names and a comment here or there. (Note that these are just the national organizations or agencies. Ontario, for example, has its own provincial police force which includes its own anti-terrorism unit.)

• CATSA: Canadian Air Transport Security Authority


• CBSA: Canadian Border Services Agency


• CPC: Commission for Public Complaints Against the RCMP - it's pretty much what the name suggests. Note that it would be inaccurate to say it's responsible for oversight and review since it can only act on specific complaints. That's an issue that I'm sure will be raised when Justice O'Connor submits his final report.


• CSE: Communications Security Establishment - this agency is part of the Department of National Defence and is responsible for foreign intelligence. That's signals intelligence, not humint.


• CSIS: Canadian Security Intelligence Service - an agency created following the recommendation by the McDonald Commission in the 80's that the intelligence function should be removed from the purview of the RCMP. The mandate of CSIS is to collect and analyze intelligence relating to threats to national security and to advise the government. It has no law enforcement authority and I mention that because I've lately run into more than a few people who think it does.


• FinTRAC: Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada - this agency is concerned with money laundering and terrorist financing.


• IBET: Integrated Border Enforcement Team - in order to fully describe these I'd have to include not only two acronyms listed here but three others for American agencies. I'm not going there. Follow the link if you really want to know.


• IIET: Integrated Immigration Enforcement Team - I think these only involve the RCMP and the CBSA.


• INSET: Integrated National Security Enforcement Team - these, along with a couple of others listed here, are the little numbers I'm sure will give the O'Connor Commission fits because they're composed of agents and officers from the RCMP and CSIS as well as provincial and municipal law enforcement. The individual members answer to the review mechanisms for their individual agencies so there is no one standard of behaviour and no single agency to enforce it.


• ISI: I have no idea other than what is contained in the article linked to at the top of the post: it's part of the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade and is involved in foreign intelligence. That would raise the question of who this agency is accountable to and what kind of review and oversight mechanism exists. Good question, eh?


• ITAC: Integrated Threat Assessment Centre - a recent creation which is nominally part of CSIS but is also staffed with members of the RCMP, DND, CSE and PSEPC.


• PSEPC: Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness Canada - this is the department that Landslide Annie, er, I mean, Anne McLellan is responsible for. This is why we no longer call her the Solicitor General. I put this one in for my own benefit because I can never remember the whole damn name.


• RCMP: Royal Canadian Mounted Police - yeah, I know you know but how could I leave them out?


• SIRC: Security Intelligence Review Committee - the agency responsible for oversight and review of the activities of CSIS.

... maybe the Liberals really have been thrashing about looking as if they're almost daring the opposition to defeat them because of this.

Explosive new testimony before the sponsorship inquiry had political parties banging their election drums today and discussing the possible collapse of the minority Liberal government.

The new testimony at the Gomery inquiry cannot be revealed because of a publication ban but is considered so devastating to the Liberal government that it has all parties looking at election scenarios.

Meanwhile, the CTV News version of the story includes speculation that the Bloc may take advantage of privilege on the floor of the House of Commons to reveal information that would otherwise be subject to the publication ban.

The media love to play the game of speculating on how soon the government will fall. It means they don't have to think about any real issues. So it remains to be seen how "explosive" and "devastating" this information really is.

Don't you just love parliamentary democracy?

The American Street has been invaded by ravenous hordes of right wing pundits. It has to be seen to be believed!