Forgive me, but my deference deficit, CSIS Director Jim Judd's way of caricaturing and condescending to the independent thought of Canadian citizens, is likely to be showing all the way through this post.
Geoffrey O'Brian, a CSIS lawyer and adviser on operations and legislation, put on an absolutely outrageousperformance today before the Public Safety Committee as he and representatives of the RCMP and CBSA testified about their agencies' responses to the findings of the O'Connor and Iacobucci inquiries. According to the Star report, O'Brian claimed that
... there is no absolute ban on using intelligence that may have been obtained from countries with questionable human rights records on torture.
Really, Mr O'Brian? Where is there no absolute ban on pretending that you didn't know about the torture part? Within CSIS, apparently (and I'd like to see the text and subsequent history of that House of Lords decision O'Brian referred to -- notice that he didn't refer to the now-rotting faux-legal corpse of the Bush torture regime).
It's not as though the behaviour of our members of parliament when they're "at the office" had always been what you would call exemplary. But in this, as in so many other ways, the Conservative Party of Canada has managed to show contempt for our democracy and for our democratic traditions. Perhaps they're finally going to be shown that there's a limit, of sorts.
Commons Speaker Peter Milliken has threatened to suspend a Conservative MP if he continues making personal attacks against Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff.
The Conservatives have been using the period alloted for members' statements that precedes question period to launch personal attacks against the opposition and usually against the Liberal leader. When Speaker Milliken recently began cutting them off, they decided that rather than actually grow up and act like adults it would be more fun to see if they could once again game the system.
To avoid being silenced, Kramp and other Tory MPs have taken to issuing scathing assessments of an unidentified politician, whom they identify as Ignatieff only at the very end of their statements -- when it's too late for Milliken to cut them off.
Milliken's warning suggests he's willing to take more drastic measures to put a stop to the personal attacks.
Here's hoping Milliken follows through. The only thing wrong with this story is that CTV tucked it down in the politics section instead of leading with it.
H/t to life in moderation. And my apologies to children everywhere. Most of them behave better in public than Conservative MPs do.
Northwestern_lad and the Jurist are already on this but I have to get my two cents worth in. The Globe and Mail is reporting that the Climate Change Accountability Act, a collaborative effort of the three opposition parties that died on the order paper when Harper called that last election and has been re-introduced as a private member's bill by an NDP MP, will not be supported by the Liberals because, you know, things have changed. Here's the Liberal environmental critic:
In an interview, Mr. McGuinty said a lot has changed since the last Parliament. His list of new factors includes the election of Barack Obama as U.S. president, the change in Liberal leadership and the fact that his party was defeated in the last election after releasing a detailed environmental plan centered around a carbon tax.
"I think we've learned from that," he said.
He said Mr. Ignatieff will announce a new environmental policy in time, but that it won't be rushed simply because of the upcoming vote on Mr. Layton's bill, which is now sponsored by NDP MP Bruce Hyer.
I can't help but notice that missing from the list of things that have changed is a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions or a lessening of the urgency represented by catastrophic climate change. But as far as those whose policy is now to have no policy are concerned, there's really no rush. Apparently the same Liberals who signed us up for Kyoto in the first place and then sat on their hands doing nothing for over a decade are uninterested in being part of any effort to deal with the problem that doesn't have Product of the Liberal Party stamped on it.
The Ottawa Citizenreports that Justice Luc Martineau is effectively staying out of any confrontation between George Galloway and the Canadian Border Services Agency for the moment. If Galloway were to appear at the border seeking entry to the country as he was originally scheduled to do, it remains likely that he would be turned away. And while I understand the ruling and don't fault Justice Martineau given the situation he had to deal with, I think the real point of this whole exercise is laid out quite nicely here:
Meanwhile, the Canadian wing of the Jewish Defence League said Monday that Galloway's planned visit to Canada was not just a speaking junket, but a fundraising tour that would benefit Hamas, an outlawed terrorist group.
The JDL cited a news release from Solidarity for Palestinian Human Rights, one of Galloway's hosts, that said a Montreal event on Wednesday "will aim to raise additional funds for Galloway's Gaza aid caravan."
Hamas is on Canada's official list of terrorist organizations, making it an offence to "contribute" to Hamas activities, even indirectly.
By the JDL's argument, providing aid and support to Gaza is effectively criminalized. The Israelis can do whatever they want to the residents of Gaza and any attempt to help mitigate the damage — at least any attempt by Canadians — is against the law because it aids Hamas, even if "indirectly." The Palestinians had the temerity to think that democracy meant they could actually vote the way they wanted to in their own elections and they have to continue paying for it.
I doubt that the Jewish Defence League will care when I suggest that this is collective punishment and that it's criminal. They've gotten what they wanted and all they did was write a letter. The Hapless Government™, meanwhile, has also gotten what it wanted while hiding behind an overly broad definition of terrorism and a bureaucracy.
Is this what they meant about finding our proper place on the world stage?
I distinctly recall our own skdadl suggesting recently that someone really ought to sue our federal government. So I wonder if she's behind this:
A British MP barred from Canada is considering suing the federal government for having branded him a terrorist.
Lawyers for George Galloway say he has contacted civil litigation attorneys and been advised that he could win financial damages in a defamation suit.
The Harper government says the five-time MP is inadmissible to Canada because he engaged in terrorism and was a member of a group that engaged in terrorism.
That charge is apparently based on the fact that Galloway delivered humanitarian goods to war-torn Gaza and gave $45,000 to the Hamas government.
I'm sure Stephen Harper would understand given his own predilection for taking people to court. Unlike Harper, though, Galloway actually follows through when he sues someone and according to the article his track record is pretty good. So what I really want to know is whether skdadl is in for a cut of the settlement.
One gets the impression that Peter J. Tinsley, the chair of the Military Police Complaints Commission, doesn't give up easily.
The watchdog responsible for overseeing military police has rejected the federal government's call to delay independent public hearings into the Canadian transfer of prisoners to Afghan authorities.
The Military Police Complaints Commission said in a decision released Thursday that it's important the hearings proceed quickly, given the seriousness of the allegations.
Tinsley announced over a year ago that he intended to hold public hearings because he wanted the subpoena power that would come with that. Ever since, the government has been trying to delay or prevent the hearings and ever since, Tinsley has dug his heels in and insisted.
His battle may not be over yet:
The lead lawyer for the commission, Freya Kristjanson, conceded the federal government could still try to get the courts to stop the proceedings, but said the commission believed it was important to go ahead.
"There are allegations that members of the military police transferred detainees to the risk of torture," Kristjanson said Thursday.
"The military police are the front-lines policing mechanism in the Canadian Forces, so compliance with law obviously is something of importance."
But if nothing else it's good to see someone stand up to this government. I wonder if Tinsley has ever contemplated a career in politics.
No, that's not a good thing. For some time now, I've been watching the US dollar and marvelling at the apparent antigravity holding it up. They go deeper in debt and print tons of money and yet the dollar remains strong. The worse the American economy gets and the more insolvent its government looks, the more panicked investors become. Panicked investors "flee to quality", and it has become knee-jerk tradition that "quality" means US Treasury bills. No matter how bizarre the notion of US Treasury bills as "quality" becomes, this reflex has not so far weakened. Perhaps everyone figures that the T-bills can't weaken because everyone else will be panic-buying them. Say, when everyone keeps buying because they think everyone will keep buying instead of because what they're buying is worth something, don't they call that a "bubble""?
But this speculative activity isn't the real foundation of the T-bills' continued high price. The more solid base has been the continued action by various central banks buying the things up, particularly China. Up until now, it's been a merry go round where the US buys stuff from China using, of course, US dollars and then China uses the dollars to buy US Treasury bills, giving the US the financial room to keep buying things from China. It's been thought that this may be able to continue far longer than would seem sane, because China knows that if it lets the US economy die its own export-led economy will be in trouble, and also its massive US dollar/T-bill holdings will become worthless.
So the question is, will China ever decide that the time has come to step off the merry-go-round? And if so, when? If they do, the game is pretty much up for the US dollar.
Well, there is some evidence that they are now getting ready for that step.
Only three weeks ago, Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff insisted he would never support the fund without some advance idea of how it would be spent. He was adamant despite Prime Minister Stephen Harper's warning that the fund constituted a confidence matter and that opposition parties would "find themselves in an election" if they blocked it.
"I am not writing a blank cheque on $3-billion. No Canadian would respect me if I did," Mr. Ignatieff said at the time.
Yet Liberals supported the fund Tuesday even though the government had not provided any of the details they'd demanded.
I can hear y'all asking about that Liberal motion that demanded information on how the $3 billion would be spent:
Yes, I realize it's unlikely that Jason Kenney suggested or authorized the appearance on a British television network of Meir Weinstein as the Canadian voice defending Kenney's decision to bar George Galloway from speaking in Canada later this month.
In one sense, Kenney cannot be that stupid. He must know that organizations like the Canadian Jewish Congress have distanced themselves from the local spawn of the Jewish Defence League (JDL), which the FBI called "a violent extremist Jewish organization" in their report Terrorism 2000/2001 and whose activities have since been described in congressional testimony by FBI agents as terrorist. Kenney may or may not know that Weinstein, under his pseudonym Meir Halevi, spoke in 1994 as the Canadian representative of the banned Israeli party Kach, refusing to condemn Baruch Goldstein's massacre of dozens of Palestinians at prayer in the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron.
What any schoolboy should have known, though, is that Kenney's own shifty and shifting explanations of his reasons for barring Galloway (Afghanistan? Hamas? whatever?) and then the adolescent, subliterate performance of his spokesperson, Alykhan "pee on the carpet" Velshi, were going to lead to something like this:
On the turn, I'll transcribe a couple of Weinstein's closing remarks, just so you can savour the full chilling effect of his claims.
Please be advised that the management here at Peace, order and good government, eh? cannot be held responsible for any injuries sustained while leaping about the room during this performance of Got My Mojo Workin' by Junior Wells.
As part of a "zero tolerance approach towards anti-Semitism," the federal government is reviewing all its public service grants to remove state support from groups that advocate hatred or express support for terrorism.
I believe supporting terrorism is a criminal offence. But since the justice system works so slowly it seems a much more efficient use of resources for the government to simply identify the guilty parties without benefit of a trial. As Kenney puts it:
We don't necessarily all subscribe to Canadian values, and we should be willing to recognize those that don't.
Yes, and who better to determine what does or doesn't qualify as being representative of Canadian values than the Minister of Immigration for a government that got less than 38% of the vote in the last election?
Well not really. At least not without being totally facetious.
We all know that our beloved Conservative Party and its leaders current and future are the backbone of the democratic tradition, right? Eh, maybe not so much.
Wikileaks has obtained a number of files, including audio tapes, photos, etc. from Ontario Progressive Conservative Campus Association workshops on how to infiltrate and subvert campus organizations.
Leaked Tape Exposes Tories Sponsoring Student Government Takeovers And Attacks On Non-Profit Organizations at campuses across Ontario
Audio files, photos and transcripts leaked to the website http://Wikileaks.org has exposed the Ontario Progressive Conservative Campus Association (OPCCA) as hosting workshops dedicated to teaching Campus Conservatives how to take over student governments and defeat perceived enemies including the Ontario Public Interest Research Group (OPIRG) and the Canadian Federation of Students (CFS).
These files and photos, gathered from a series of workshops occurring in early 2009 on campuses across Ontario, provide evidence that, with the apparent support of representatives from both the Ontario Progressive Conservatives and the Conservative Party of Canada, the OPCCA is attempting to covertly influence the political climate of Ontario's university campuses.
Presenters and participants are caught on tape advocating for the creation of front groups for the Conservative Party to masquerade as non-partisan grassroots organizations, influencing the political discourse on campus, stacking student elections with Party members, and conspiring to defeat non-profit organizations because of political differences, all with the intention of hiding their affiliations to the Party in the process.
This apparent attempt by the Conservative to interfere with student governance and undermine non-profit organizations is ethically troubling. We urge students, journalists, and citizens alike to take action on this issue and keep our campuses free from influence-peddling by political parties so as to uphold a strong and healthy forum for democracy.
This is 53meg of files and I'm still stuck on dial-up so I haven't had the chance to download them yet so knock yourselves out.
Nice to know the democratic tradition is safe in such upstanding and capable hands.
BTW - This is a drive by post. Busy season has started here at The Gopher Ranch so play nicely.
Since at least June 2008, the Justice Department has been investigating (sub. req.) whether AIG intentionally -- and criminally -- overstated the value of its credit default swaps, hiding its dire position from investors and government regulators. Joseph Cassano -- who during the period at issue ran AIG's financial products unit, AIGFP, which made those disastrous swaps, out of a London office -- has reportedly hired a lawyer in connection with that investigation. Britain's Serious Fraud Office is said to be on the case as well.
That's from the muck rakers at Talking Points Memo who are busy digging into the last five years of AIG's history. They've assembled some interesting information at that link. Those bonuses might soon be a distant memory.
Mohammad Momin Khawaja was the first person to be charged under Canada's Anti-Terrorism Act. In October of 2006, before Khawaja's trial had even begun, Ontario Superior Court Justice Douglas Rutherford severed part of the act — the motive clause — and declared that it was a violation of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
Rutherford decided to sever a section in the law that defines ideological, religious or political motivations for criminal acts. The rest of the law remains in place.
"Motive, used as an essential element for a crime, is foreign to criminal law, humanitarian law, and the law regarding crimes against humanity," Rutherford said in his judgment.
When I posted on this at the time I really thought it would send our legislators back to the drawing board. And I wasn't the only one. The next day I drew attention to a column by Thomas Walkom in which he suggested that this was a step in the right direction: away from the hyped up War on Terror™ and towards the proper treatment of acts of terrorism as criminal offences.
New York state attorney general Andrew Cuomo has details on those bonuses at A. I. G. that have been causing such a fuss. He's sharing what he knows and it's not pretty. Unless you're one of the seventy-three.
"A.I.G. made more than 73 millionaires in the unit which lost so much money that it brought the firm to its knees, forcing a taxpayer bailout," Mr. Cuomo wrote in the letter. "Something is deeply wrong with this outcome."
Apparently both the Globe and Mail and the Toronto Star refused to publish the following statement. I'm joining otherbloggerswho don't think that should be allowed to stand.
Over 150 Jewish Canadians signed a statement expressing their concerns about the campaign to suppress criticism of Israel that is being carried on within Canada. The signatories include many prominent Canadians, including Ursula Franklin O.C., Anton Kuerti O.C., Naomi Klein, Dr. Gabor Mate, and professors Meyer Brownstone (recipient of Pearson Peace Medal), Natalie Zemon Davis, Michael Neumann, and Judy Rebick.
As you can see, the first video credits Texas Guitar Women with the performance. As far as I can tell that's actually a larger collection of performers that includes these two: Sue Foley and Cindy Cashdollar. The latter may be from Texas but Foley is from Ottawa, though certainly both are women and both play guitar. This is Big Road Blues.
On the flip we leave Texas behind but there are more women and more guitars.
I understand that today and tomorrow the brightest lights in Canadian movement conservatism will all be in attendance at the same event. Perhaps while they're all together in one room, one of them will suggest that they all go Galt and the rest will agree.
More than 100 supporters of a Canadian citizen stranded in Sudan have flouted Canadian law by purchasing an airline ticket home for the one-time terrorism suspect.
The activists, including former solicitor general Warren Allmand, bought the ticket for travel April 3 and put it in the hands of Abousfian Abdelrazik. It's now up to the government to issue Mr. Abdelrazik travel documents, said his lawyer, Yavar Hameed.
...
He's been stuck in travel limbo since 2003, when he was arrested and tortured for suspicion of terrorism activities while visiting his sick mother in Sudan.
Ottawa has since put up a series of shifting technical hurdles ahead of his return. The Canadian government first required an airline reservation, then an actual ticket before it would issue a temporary passport to allow him to travel.
As that last paragraph suggests, the government has been moving the goalposts on Abdelrazik. And now the government's bluff has been called. They have until April 3rd to come up with some new trick but it should be obvious to them by now that people are watching and won't let go of this.
Last October, Seymour Hersh told Guardian reporter Rachel Cooke:
"You cannot believe how many people have told me to call them on 20 January [the date of the next president's inauguration],' he says, with relish. '[They say:] "You wanna know about abuses and violations? Call me then."
Presumably, Hersh has been having some good conversations lately, although he's probably not ready to report most of them yet. Last night, though, he had a fine conversation in public with former vice-president Walter Mondale at the University of Minnesota, reported very neatly here.
Mostly they were exchanging informed reflections about the temptations of executive power through a number of administrations, temptations that have led presidents to exceed their constitutional powers repeatedly, particularly by authorizing covert actions abroad (and, just as bad, domestically) that are subject to no control or oversight independent of the president's will. At one point the moderator asked Hersh whether some such improper conduct continues today.
Here is Hersh's answer:
"Yuh. After 9/11, I haven't written about this yet, but the Central Intelligence Agency was very deeply involved in domestic activities against people they thought to be enemies of the state. Without any legal authority for it. They haven't been called on it yet. That does happen.
"Right now, today, there was a story in the New York Times that if you read it carefully mentioned something known as the Joint Special Operations Command -- JSOC it's called. It is a special wing of our special operations community that is set up independently. They do not report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days, they reported directly to the Cheney office. They did not report to the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff or to Mr. [Robert] Gates, the secretary of defense. They reported directly to him. ...
"Congress has no oversight of it. It's an executive assassination ring essentially, and it's been going on and on and on. Just today in the Times there was a story that its leaders, a three star admiral named [William H.] McRaven, ordered a stop to it because there were so many collateral deaths.
"Under President Bush's authority, they've been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving. That's been going on, in the name of all of us.
"It's complicated because the guys doing it are not murderers, and yet they are committing what we would normally call murder. It's a very complicated issue. Because they are young men that went into the Special Forces. The Delta Forces you've heard about. Navy Seal teams. Highly specialized.
"In many cases, they were the best and the brightest. Really, no exaggerations. Really fine guys that went in to do the kind of necessary jobs that they think you need to do to protect America. And then they find themselves torturing people.
"I've had people say to me -- five years ago, I had one say: 'What do you call it when you interrogate somebody and you leave them bleeding and they don't get any medical committee and two days later he dies. Is that murder? What happens if I get before a committee.?'
It's time to drag out the heavy duty thread titles. I guess Al Franken may yet want to reclaim that to throw at Norm Coleman but I'm going to borrow it in the meantime. David Akin does a little fisking on a speech Stephen Harper delivered today. I'm only going to repeat one of the quotes Akin supplies and you can follow the link for a few additional points. I couldn't let this pass:
As we know, the opposition formed a coalition to try and prevent us from even bringing our Budget forward.
If we had a smiley library here I'd be looking for the one that snorts derisively. The economic statement Jim Flaherty tried to pass in November — aka Flaherty's Folly — wasn't a budget, contained no stimulus measures and didn't even acknowledge the looming financial crisis. When the opposition pointed out that there was no there there, the government replied that it would be happy to consider methods to stimulate the economy and incorporate them into a budget. To be delivered in March on the normal schedule.
The threat of a coalition is the only reason Harper's government presented a budget on Jan. 28th and the only reason it contains something approaching a serious attempt to stimulate the economy, as haphazard and inadequate as those measures are.
It'll be interesting to see how many of the Serious People who kept trying to behave as though coalition and coup are synonyms will bother to note how blatantly our prime minister is lying to us.
Dr. Dawg has taken a close look at the proposed changes to pay equity buried in the Conservative government's recent budget and he demonstrates what a fraud this government is. This is ideology at work, pure and simple. The intent here is to cripple the effort to achieve pay equity while simultaneously making life more difficult for unions, and for civil service unions in particular. It's a twofer! Go read.
Eat your heart out, Barack Obama. Sorry: I don't mean to be ungenerous, and I was grateful for the lovely scenes of midwinter joy breaking out in Iowa Ottawa a couple of weeks ago too.
But the Viva Palestina convoy is a phenomenon of an entirely different order, a meta-motorcade that has been lifting hearts and hopes internationally for almost three weeks now. It was a mile long when it left London on Valentine's Day to drive all the way to Gaza, south through France and Spain and then across North Africa; it was three miles long as it crossed the border into Egypt yesterday, supplemented by convoys organized in Libya.
The hundred-plus vehicles that originally headed out of London are all independently community-supported, and most of them will be left in Gaza once they deliver their supplies. They are led by a splendid fire engine donated by the UK Fire Brigades Union (or they were; not sure how the fire engine has been doing in the desert), and they include two dozen ambulances, a flatbed with a ginormous generator, another with a fishing boat, and buses and lorries filled with medicines, cash and clothes and blankets and tools, and best of all (we know what really counts), toys for the traumatized children of Gaza.
George Galloway, MP, who inspired and organized this convoy, is a canny Scot who knows how to work more than a room. To do that entire drive across the Maghreb, to talk the Moroccans and Algerians into opening their long-disputed border to allow the convoy through, to convince the dreaded Mubarak to allow the convoy to travel through Egypt and pass through the Rafah crossing into Gaza -- that takes some serious back-room chatting-up and maybe some arm-twisting.
It would be interesting to know how Galloway does it, but for the moment it is just so inspiring to read day by day of the effect Viva Palestina has already had, especially on the people of North Africa, country by country, who have welcomed the convoy with flowers and the greatest food in teh world (imho) and then cheered them on, who have had a chance to see that the rest of us are often a lot more like them than they thought (or than our governments have given us reason to believe).
On the turn, the links to follow as the convoy approaches the Rafah crossing.
The Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary defines sophistry as:
subtly deceptive reasoning or argumentation
I don't think this particular example is all that subtle but I do think it qualifies as sophistry.
Michael Ignatieff has an op-ed in today's National Post in which he registers his disapproval of Israel Apartheid Week, a recent CUPE resolution and the larger movement in favour of boycotts and divestments that are intended to pressure Israel into changing its policies regarding the occupied territories. If you're thinking that Ignatieff's long background as an academic specializing in human rights means that you can expect a reasoned and detailed argument designed to make people actually rethink their positions, you'll be disappointed. Strip away the rhetoric and this looks like nothing so much as another attempt to simply shut people up. The critical part of Ignatieff's argument, such as it is, is this:
International law defines "apartheid" as a crime against humanity. Labelling Israel as an "apartheid" state is a deliberate attempt to undermine the legitimacy of the Jewish state itself.
No, it's not. And there's nothing in the article that provides any further argument in support of that assertion than the assertion itself. But the entire op-ed piece really turns on this premise. Iggy gives us the usual disclaimer:
Criticism of Israel is legitimate.
But whenever you see that disclaimer in articles like this, it's accompanied by some bit of rhetoric designed to explain why the particular criticism of Israel at hand crosses some line and becomes illegitimate. Even if the line that's crossed was just made up out of whole cloth.
Last July I wrote a post called My new favorite American about a Democratic candidate for Congress named Alan Grayson. Today Mr. Grayson is the Representative for Florida's 8th district. And on the subject of apologies and Rush Limbaugh, he's very quotable (by way of DownWithTyranny!):
"I'm sorry Limbaugh called for harsh sentences for drug addicts while he was a drug addict. I'm also sorry that he's bent on seeing America fail. And I'm sorry that Limbaugh is one sorry excuse for a human being."
John Ibbitson tries to do his best impression of David Broder in this column in today's Globe and Mail in which he argues against the proposed commission to investigate the Bush administration's bad behaviour. There are two points in particular that I want to draw attention to. The first is this:
Because the Republicans sicced Mr. Starr on the Clinton administration, the Democrats forced the appointment of Patrick Fitzgerald to investigate the Valerie Plame affair. (If you've forgotten it, let it stay forgotten.)
Excuse me? In 2003, when Fitzgerald was appointed, the Republicans controlled both houses of congress in addition to the executive. Democrats weren't in a position to force anything on anyone. The Deputy Attorney General appointed Fitzgerald when the Attorney General, John Ashcroft, recused himself. This is the kind of nonsense that the Washington press corps makes up so they can draw a false equivalence between phony, GOP-inspired scandals and serious crimes. They have to prove that both sides are equally guilty in order to justify letting bygones be bygones, even if it means revising history to do it.
And let it stay forgotten? A senior White House official blew the cover of a CIA operative whose area of specialty was tracking the flow of weapons material into Iran, damaging the agency's ability to continue doing so. If Iran is the threat that those same Republicans claim it is then that caused serious damage to national security. I always thought Americans took that kind of thing seriously. The CIA certainly did. If Comey, the Deputy AG, felt pressured to appoint someone like Fitzgerald maybe it was because the CIA had formally requested an investigation into the leak.
The historical revisionism and false equivalence is bad enough but in the last paragraph we get to the real point.
When the United States invaded Iraq on what turned out to be faulty or false pretenses, suspicion turned to anger. Mr. Bush ultimately lost all credibility in the eyes of the American people, the highest price a politician can pay.
Wow. When regular people commit crimes, they go to jail. But when a politician commits a crime, incarceration isn't necessary. If he lives the rest of his life in comfort and ease, earning five or six figures for giving a speech whenever he needs some pocket money, we can still be secure in the knowledge that he's actually suffering horribly and in a way the rest of us couldn't possibly fathom. Because he's lost his credibility.
The Jurist points out yet another example of our transparent and accountable government doing its best to keep as much as possible under cover.
The federal government is secretly planning an overhaul of the rules governing Canada's reserves that is far more sweeping than what Ottawa is telling Canada's chiefs and native leaders.
Documents show the government wants to address concerns over the way native leaders are selected, including the fact that not all communities use secret ballots, have clear term limits or written rules for picking leaders.
But addressing these very issues triggered widespread protests from native leaders six years ago when the Liberal government brought in its doomed First Nations Governance Act.
There's a fair bit of irony in this next bit not just because the proposed changes are supposed to improve governance but because Stephen Harper continues to champion the idea of an elected Senate (which is getting some attention elsewhere in the blogosphere today).
Because the changes will be brought in as new policy rather than a new law, they can be implemented without triggering a debate in Parliament over legislation.
It seems to me these champions of democracy in the Conservative party have made a habit out of doing as much as they can in ways that avoid debate by our elected representatives. So aside from the PR value, what's the point of an elected Senate if the 21st century way of governing is to avoid legislation as much as possible and simply have the PMO decide everything?
Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D - RI), on the floor of the U.S. Senate, 25 February 2009
This remarkable speech rises to its main purpose at about 6.15, after Senator Whitehouse has paid his respects to the financial crisis that preoccupies president and citizens alike. Early on you will hear him say that Americans cannot emerge from any of their current crises without inspecting "the damage below the waterline," and you will know that he is turning to stare at the iceberg when you hear him say "We also have to brace ourselves."
"No, please, tell us that we did not do that."
In the three minutes or so that follow, Senator Whitehouse speaks to the two greatest nightmares of the last eight years in the U.S. and internationally, the torture regime and the attempt to usurp the U.S. constitution, led from within the executive branch and still poisoning their government, their culture, and everyone else's culture and government in so far as we have been either complicit or victims.
It's a speech to remember for its genuine passion and sadness, even though for me, as for many who have commented on it already, it was made in support of a proposal that I think is just not good enough to end anyone's nightmares. I love Senator Leahy too -- who doesn't love Senator Leahy? -- but there are too many ways that a truth and reconciliation commission is likely to fail this historic challenge to democracy in the U.S., learned analyses of which I crib from smarter people on the turn.
The headline of this CTV news story reads "Iran close to building nuke, says U.S. official" which goes along well with the comments from Stephen Harper that the story picks up and repeats:
"It concerns me that we have a regime with both an ideology that is obviously evil, combined with a desire to procure technology to act on that ideology," Harper told the newspaper on Saturday.
But the headline could as easily have read "Iran still not close to building a nuke, says other US official" which you find out if you read far enough into the story:
Still, the IAEA said that further purification would be necessary for Iran to successfully manufacture a nuclear weapon.
That sentiment was echoed by U.S. Defence Secretary Robert Gates, who said that Iran still has major hurdles to cross before any nuclear bomb could be built.
"They're not close to a stockpile," Gates told NBC's Meet the Press Sunday. "They're not close to a weapon at this point. And so, there is some time."
Emphasis added.
The IAEA continues to closely monitor Iran and so far has seen no proof of a nuclear weapons program. So I suppose the headline should actually read "IAEA continues to monitor Iran and has no proof of a weapons program while politicians continue to overstate a threat that may or not exist." I guess that's a little long for a CTV headline though.
To pass on a recommendation from Atrios: the next time someone claims that the only reason for this economic mess is stupid poor people who bought houses they couldn't afford, direct them to this New York Times article which explains how AIG got itself into trouble. It provides a pretty good explanation of credit default swaps and a couple of other terms. And it explains why AIG is considered to be "too big to fail."
