March 2010 Archives

Would you like to see an example of how officials in the Bush administration decided what constituted legal interrogation and what would be classified as torture? Here's one:

For example, one current and three former CIA officials said some videotapes showed Zubaydah being sleep deprived for more than two weeks. Contractors hired by the CIA studied how he responded psychologically and physically to being kept awake for that amount of time. By looking at videotapes, they concluded that after the 11th consecutive day of being kept awake Zubaydah started to "severely break down." So, the torture memo concluded that 11 days of sleep deprivation was legal and did not meet the definition of torture.

Close readers will of course note that the sleep deprivation that established the standard must have occurred before the memo that established the legality of the first 11 days of it was written. They will also note that it was necessary to push past 11 days in order to establish the standard. So even if you accept the entirely dubious proposition that it takes 12 days of sleep deprivation to qualify as torture, torture was committed here.

The title of the post is a quote from Barack Obama. The trail I followed to get to the truthout article started with Atrios who used that word again (and quite appropriately): monsters.

Updated on the flip.

Here's one bit of fallout from the Canada 150 conference that the Liberals hosted on the weekend that I think deserves to be noted:

Mr. Ignatieff made it clear that the next election, when it comes, will be between two clear alternatives: A Conservative government that emphasizes deficit and tax reduction, and a Liberal government that is willing to defer tax cuts and perhaps extend the deficit to target social programs.

"Do we rush ahead with further reductions to corporate tax[es] we can't afford?" he asked the 300 participants at a Montreal, "or do we use these resources" to fund new programs.

A tax freeze, he said, would prove that the Liberals had "the courage to choose, to make the choices we have to make."

Of course given Ignatieff's history, we're now in that period where we wait to see if he walks this back once he gets some criticism from the right. But if he stands by it, he's entitled to a wee bit of credit.

When my earthly trials are over, cast my body out in the sea
And save all the undertaker's bills, let the mermaids flirt with me

You might recognize the fellow on the right as Mike Mattison, vocalist with the Derek Trucks Band. The song dates back to Mississippi John Hurt. This is Let the Mermaids Flirt with Me.

Kate and Anna McGarrigle and friends, "Gentle Annie"

Over here! (Does one congratulate another on the birth of a new album? And see, he still calls them albums, too.)

This is Moreland & Arbuckle with Wrong I Do.

Shorter Jim Abbott: Even if we're complicit in torture we should get off on a technicality.

Edited to add: if Atrios ever decided to sue me for back royalties, I'd be in deep trouble. The Monsters title is another favourite of his. It fits.

Note: If you're wondering why there appears to be a change in the commenting policy, please see The spammers made me do it.

Afghan detainees still at risk: lawyer

Detainees handed over to Afghan authorities by Canadian soldiers still face a substantial risk of torture, a civil rights lawyer has told MPs.

Paul Champ, counsel for Amnesty International Canada and the B.C. Civil Liberties Association, said Wednesday he has seen no evidence to suggest torture in Afghan jails has ended.

While the Conservatives stall and the opposition sits on its hands. Why would the representative of Amnesty International Canada have any less credibility on this than government and military officials whose stories have already been undermined and contradicted?

Update:

According to Kady O'Malley the NDP's defence critic Jack Harris is going to table a motion concerning breach of parliamentary privilege this morning. O'Malley had reported in a previous post that the Bloc Québecois had already signaled support for it and we don't know about the Liberals. I guess we'll find out soon enough.

Almost instant additional up... oh the hell with it. Derek Lee beat Jack Harris to the punch. Go read Kady.

Note: If you're wondering why there appears to be a change in the commenting policy, please see The spammers made me do it.

Brian Stewart at the CBC reveals what's being kept from us by the Canadian military in Afghanistan. That includes things that the Americans and the British freely share with their citizens but in the name of operational security our military insists on keeping secret. It makes you wonder why those other countries hate their troops. Stewart concludes:

... secrecy that seems out of proportion to the actual needs of operational security is only likely to feed into the current climate of doubt and suspicion about the war.

For when people start feeling they are not getting the full picture, that is when they begin to question the pieces they do have.

I don't think the concept of "embedded" journalists was ever a good one. It turns reporters into public relations officers.

H/t M@ at Canadian Cynic.

Note: If you're wondering why there appears to be a change in the commenting policy, please see The spammers made me do it.

For the great Gaels of Ireland
Are the men that God made mad
For all their wars are merry
And all their songs are sad.

-- G.K. Chesterton

Except for blacks in North America and the Caribbean, no one has done the language that we call English greater honour than have the close cousins that the dreaded Sassenachs colonised and subjugated most cruelly, first and longest. Through the twentieth century, in literature and folk music both, the Irish taught so many how to speak and how to sing with wit and soul.

Liam Clancy, Tommy Makem, and some Clancy brothers singing one of the greatest of those sad songs, "Carrickfergus," followed by a little bit of blarney. Happy Saint Paddy's Day tae ye, and that's a Scot sayin' all this.

Note: If you're wondering why there appears to be a change in the commenting policy, please see The spammers made me do it.

There's been a fair amount of coverage of what this CTV article refers to as a "feud" between the United States and Israel. But there's a bit of background I read last night that hasn't been reported in the major media outlets as far as I've seen. This is from Foreign Policy magazine and describes a briefing prepared at the request of CENTCOM commander Gen. David Petraeus and presented to Adm. Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The 33-slide, 45-minute PowerPoint briefing stunned Mullen. The briefers reported that there was a growing perception among Arab leaders that the U.S. was incapable of standing up to Israel, that CENTCOM's mostly Arab constituency was losing faith in American promises, that Israeli intransigence on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was jeopardizing U.S. standing in the region, and that Mitchell himself was (as a senior Pentagon officer later bluntly described it) "too old, too slow ... and too late."

Perhaps that helps to explain why Vice President Biden was dispatched to the region to try and kick-start peace talks.

Federal Court asked to rule on Kenney's refugee claims

Last June, Immigration Minister Jason Kenney publicly questioned the legitimacy of refugee claims made by Roma coming from the Czech Republic, saying they faced no real risk of state persecution.

Only a few weeks earlier, Mr. Kenney had described asylum claims by US war deserters as "bogus," and accused Mexican refugee claimants of systematically abusing the Canadian refugee system.

...

... now a Toronto-based lawyer has asked a Federal Court to rule on whether the minister, by making the statements, has interfered in the Immigration and Refugee Board's independence.

The lawyer in question crunched the numbers and determined that prior to Kenney's public comments, the acceptance rate for refugee claims from the Czech Republic was 81%. In the first full quarter following Kenney's remarks that had dropped to 30%. It's true that correlation is not causation but what else has changed?

The Harper government has made a habit out of undermining agencies that are supposed to operate at arm's length and without direct ministerial interference. And at this point, Kenney could be the poster boy for the propensity of members of this government to allow their partisanship and their ideology to influence the way they do their jobs in ways that aren't appropriate. But it seems that cabinet ministers no longer resign no matter how inappropriate — or incompetent — their behaviour. Harper himself has shown no interest at all in holding his ministers to account so it should be no surprise that people are increasingly looking to the courts to do it.

I'll leave you with a quote from one Peter Showler who is a "former [Immigration and Refugee Board] chairman and director of the refugee forum at the Human Rights Research and Education Centre at the University of Ottawa."

"The minister's conduct has been outrageous," Mr. Showler said. "He has made statements that no immigration minister, either Conservative or Liberal, has made in the last 15 years."

H/t to The Jurist.

Note: If you're wondering why there appears to be a change in the commenting policy, please see The spammers made me do it.

After dying down to almost nothing, the comment spam has increased in frequency since around the first of the year. And the spammers have learned that less is more. Where they used to pack 10 or 20 links into a comment which made it easy to set a filter to catch it, now they settle for one or two links which lets it fly under the radar. Where they used to hammer you repeatedly from the same IP address and relentlessly flog the same domain, now they hit you from different addresses and promote a different domain with almost every comment. It makes it much harder to figure out which IPs to ban and which keywords to add to the blacklist.

We've had an open comment section for over six years but when someone spammed us earlier this week to promote a twitter feed and I caught myself contemplating adding twitter.com to the blacklist, I decided it was time to do something. So after I publish this, I'm going to enable comment authentication and commenter registration. Assuming it all works, I'll update this post with anything you might want to know. And I'll keep bumping this post through the weekend and into Monday. I apologize for the inconvenience. And I do hope those who regularly comment here will put up with it.

Updated on the flip.

Thou met'st with things dying, I with things newborn

-- The Winter's Tale, III.iii.112-13

I don't usually know my cats' precise birthdays, although almost all of them have been spring kittens, but I remember the day that Minerva (the all-black) and Mathilda (b+w) were born.

The phone rang very early that morning. A reporter we knew in London wanted Rik to tell him everything he could about Dunblane, a douce wee toun in Scotland that had suddenly become a very sad place. Dunblane was a family home to Rik, so on and off through the day he talked the reporter through a race to the airport and then the drive from Glasgow to Stirling and north.

It was wrenching to learn what had happened in just the sort of place you imagine everyone will always be safe.

Bring me my whiskey, I wanna get mean
Bring me my whiskey, I will tear up a scene

This is Moreland & Arbuckle with Date With the Devil.

It seems like a while since I saw a reason for optimism anywhere except Venezuela and maybe Bolivia. The bad guys keep doing worse things--ruining everything, then successfully claiming that the reason things are bad is that they weren't allowed to ruin everything thoroughly enough. I need a break from that, so I bring you positive change in India:

I remember when I first talked about the miracle brought about in village Pannukula in Andhra Pradesh, many thought I was simply trying to romanticise agriculture. How farming can be done without the use of chemical pesticides, I was repeatedly asked.

. . . more than 318,000 farmers in 21 out of the 23 districts of Andhra Pradesh have discarded the intensive chemical farming systems, and shifted to a more sustainable, economically viable and ecologically friendly agriculture. A silent revolution is in the offing. In Kharif 2009 (the monsoon season), some 1.4 million acres was covered with what is now known as Community Managed Sustainable Agriculture (CMSA).

As I write this in the first week of January 2010, the area had expanded to 2 million acres . . .

I normally like Tonda MacCharles' work in the Toronto Star but I think this one is a bit of a stinker. It reports on a poll that apparently tells us how conservative Canadians are becoming. The poll was conducted by Harris-Decima and was commissioned by the Manning Centre for Building Democracy. That would be Preston Manning's conservative think tank in case that's not clear.

The reason I'm so critical of this piece is that this poll is supposed to be news but what you won't find is any sign of the questions. Or the numbers. Instead we're presented with the interpretation by Allan Gregg and Andre Turcotte of the meaning of responses to questions that we don't know in numbers we don't know. This isn't really a news story about a poll; it's an interview with two pollsters who base their opinions on information we're denied. And who else thinks that Harris-Decima reporting to the Manning Centre that Canadians are becoming more conservative amounts to telling the customer what he wants to hear?

H/t to Greg and The Jurist.

I remarked recently that I felt our government was overly optimistic in its economic forecasts and didn't seem to be considering the possibility that something might yet cause the recovery we're all supposed to be experiencing to stall. Perhaps someone should ask Jim Flaherty what he thinks about this from the Washington Post.

The housing market is facing swelling ranks of homeowners who are seriously delinquent but have yet to lose their homes, and this is threatening a new wave of foreclosures that could hit just as the real estate market has begun to stabilize.

About 5 million to 7 million properties are potentially eligible for foreclosure but have not yet been repossessed and put up for sale. Some economists project it could take nearly three years before all these homes have been put on the market and purchased by new owners. And the number of pending foreclosures could grow much bigger over the coming year as more distressed borrowers become delinquent and then, if they can't obtain mortgage relief, wade through the foreclosure process, which often takes more than a year to complete.

Is it just me, or has Flaherty been talking as if he's either completely unaware of this or thinks that our own economy will be completely immune to a problem like this involving our largest trading partner?

H/t Atrios.

As the Conservatives prepare to re-introduce their law and order agenda, let us bear in mind that the original War on (Some) Drugs™ was a creation of the Reagan administration in the United States. Michelle Alexander in The Nation:

President Ronald Reagan officially declared the current drug war in 1982, when drug crime was declining, not rising. From the outset, the war had little to do with drug crime and nearly everything to do with racial politics. The drug war was part of a grand and highly successful Republican Party strategy of using racially coded political appeals on issues of crime and welfare to attract poor and working class white voters who were resentful of, and threatened by, desegregation, busing, and affirmative action. In the words of H.R. Haldeman, President Richard Nixon's White House chief of staff: "[T]he whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to."

Any number of people have argued — correctly — that the policies Conservatives propose have already been proven failures if the goal is really to reduce crime. That argument doesn't gain any traction with Conservatives because that isn't the goal. The situations in the two countries may not be directly comparable but this is still all about politics.

H/t John Ballard at Newshoggers.

Edited slightly for clarity.

Thomas Walkom on the government's proposal to have a third party review the documents pertaining to the Afghan detainee file:

Politically, Ottawa's decision to hand off the Afghan prisoner scandal to retired Supreme Court Justice Frank Iacobucci serves both Stephen Harper's Conservatives and Michael Ignatieff's Liberals.

Constitutionally, however, it is a disaster. It flies in the face of the bedrock Canadian principle that cabinet is responsible to Parliament and that a government - any government - must accede to the wishes of a majority of elected MPs.

What, exactly, is the opposition waiting for?

We don't usually do Disney here. (I've actually tried to make a minor career out of dissing Disney every chance I get, and I'm moderately disappointed that they haven't yet sent fearsome lawyers out after me.)

But it is so true. Nothing says love like spaghetti. I love you: I feed you spaghetti.

Twenty-five years ago tonight, he made me spaghetti. And then it was pretty much like this.

Bernie Farber, the CEO of the Canadian Jewish Congress, has a letter published in the Toronto Star in reaction to a Thomas Walkom column. This is how it's done, folks.

To falsely accuse Israel, and by extension the vast majority of the world's Jews who support the Jewish state, of "apartheid," is a form of anti-Semitic bullying.

Notice how easily he manages to imply that "the vast majority of the world's Jews" are in full support of not just the existence of Israel but everything the Israeli government does, including its treatment of Palestinians. Hand in hand with this is the implication that a criticism of the actions of the state of Israel is somehow aimed at "the vast majority of the world's Jews" which is how Farber and his fellow sophists make the leap to claiming that criticism of Israel is anti-semitism. All this in a single sentence. He's good, I'll grant him that.

Of course the people responsible for the policies of the state of Israel are those who govern Israel, whether they're Jewish or not. If I criticize those policies, I'm not criticizing the Jews who may live in my neighbourhood. For all I know, some of them may feel that Israel is practicing apartheid. In fact, there is reason to believe that some of them do since there are Jewish organizations in Canada that support Israeli Apartheid Week and the BDS movement.

The Yes! is in agreement with the Rev posting at both his own site and the Beav:

If the allegation that Afghan prisoners were purposely sent to be tortured turns out to be true, I want people sent to jail. And by jail I don't mean country club Conrad Black minimum security jail, either. I want to see them walking the yard at Millhaven. And by people I mean every single person in the chain of command that approved or did not act to stop this - right up to the Cabinet level, including the Prime Minister. If it happened under the Liberals and Paul Martin knew about it, fine, jail his retired ass, too.

And if an "arms length" inquiry, as Kevin suggests, is the right way to do it, fine. But the moment a majority of MPs in the House of Commons voted to demand the release of unredacted documents to the special committee on Afghanistan and the government refused, it raised a separate issue. The government is in contempt of parliament. If a minority government can simply shrug off the will of a majority in the Commons then our democracy is broken (even more than we already thought) and the opposition is failing in a fundamental way to do its job. Compromises involving third parties, whether it's a single retired judge reviewing documents or a full blown public inquiry, doesn't change that.

You'd think there would be one among all those opposition MPs who's prepared to argue out loud that even if voters don't currently see the importance of this, it's necessary to gamble that they can be convinced if it comes to that.

Irrational joy breaks out across a country that is really pretty big, as the Arrogant Worms sing, all things considered.

This is simply the most beautiful Canadian spring I've ever seen, and I'm not young.

I'll probably have to eat my words about the weather in a week or so, this being Canada. And we are facing some horrible moral challenges in the hints and leaks we're getting about our special ops (JTF2) transfer of Afghan prisoners to the U.S. black sites at Bagram and Kandahar.

I don't know how we calm our souls with argument when we know that such horrible things have been done in our name.

So that's why we play music, and why we wander out into the sunshine with an aging cat who needs a last chance to feel and smell the grass and soil beneath her feet.

Happy spring to you all.

George Harrison, "Here Comes the Sun"

Mississippi Fred McDowell once firmly declared "I do not play no rock and roll." Here he is, not playing rock and roll. This is Goin' Down to the River.

The Conservative government must respect the supremacy of Parliament. When they get around to it. If it's not too much trouble.

I've paid a bit more attention to today's budget than to yesterday's throne speech because budgets actually do lead to legislation, though I always try to bear in mind that our Minister of Finance has only a passing familiarity with arithmetic and an even shakier relationship with the truth. What I take from the reporting I've read is that the Conservatives aren't anxious to go to the polls right now. When you put aside the political posturing they've given us a corporate-friendly budget which makes it awkward for the Liberals to oppose it unless there's something really provocative in there. And I don't see it.

When you combine that with the conciliatory noises the Liberals have made about negotiating a solution to the standoff on the Afghan detainee file, I'm guessing that the Conservatives will be off the hook on the most potentially damaging issue they face and there won't be an election until the fall. And if the Conservatives haven't gotten their mojo back in the polls, not even then.

And I agree with the prominence The Jurist gives to this point: aside from his other failings Flaherty buys into the spin that the worst of the recent economic unpleasantness is over and we're in recovery. So he's conducting himself accordingly despite the fact that in the U.S. — the trading partner whose demand drives a big chunk of our economy — the foreclosure crisis is far from over, unemployment levels remain dangerously high and precisely nothing has been done thus far to address the fundamental causes of the recent near-collapse of the global financial system. The American economy is still being run for the benefit of the banksters and their cronies first, and everyone else second.

I don't see much to be optimistic about.

Fallujah doctors report rise in birth defects

Doctors in the Iraqi city of Fallujah are reporting a high level of birth defects, with some blaming weapons used by the US after the Iraq invasion.

The city witnessed fierce fighting in 2004 as US forces carried out a major offensive against insurgents.

Now, the level of heart defects among newborn babies is said to be 13 times higher than in Europe.

There's a companion story, also from the BBC, that reports that after the shooting was over in Fallujah the rubble was bulldozed into a bank of a river that supplies a lot of residents with drinking water.

It would seem to me that the obvious words to mention in this story are "depleted" and "uranium" but neither word appears. Given the history of claims that DU can cause these kinds of problems, I find that more than a little puzzling. There is no other specific cause mentioned — - just suspicion about "weapons." Isn't much of the DU that's used by the United States supplied by Canada?

H/t to lagatta at Bread and Roses.

Almost immediate update:

And immediately after posting this I found a much meatier post on it by Jim White at The Seminal. He definitely mentions depleted uranium. He has videos. And charts!

'Time to talk' to Afghan Taliban: UN envoy

KABUL, Afghanistan -- The head of the UN mission in Afghanistan said Thursday that it's "high time" a political solution is found with the Taliban to resolve the more than 8-year-old conflict.

"It's time to talk," Kai Eide said.

Isn't this the attitude that had politicians and pundits across the country sneering at "Taliban Jack" and questioning his patriotism?

I hear there's a big speech planned for later today. Since I think this government is both thoroughly dishonest and completely indifferent to charges of hypocrisy when they say one thing and do another, I don't see any point in trying to parse either the advance leaks or the speech itself. With this group, even their own legislation doesn't necessarily signal their true intentions since they're as likely as not to get something passed with great fanfare and then fail to implement it. I'll try and tune back in when stuff actually happens.

Meanwhile, feel free to talk amongst yourselves as long you confine yourselves to what would be considered legitimate criticism. (No, I'm not letting up on that yet. Why do you ask?)

Immigration Minister pulled gay rights from citizenship guide, documents show

Citizenship and Immigration Minister Jason Kenney blocked any reference to gay rights in a new study guide for immigrants applying for Canadian citizenship, The Canadian Press has learned.

Internal documents show an early draft of the guide contained sections noting that homosexuality was decriminalized in 1969; that the Charter of Rights and Freedoms forbids discrimination based on sexual orientation; and that same-sex marriage was legalized nationally in 2005.

But Mr. Kenney, who fought same-sex marriage when it was debated in Parliament, ordered those key sections removed when his office sent its comments to the department last June.

There's much more at the link. You'll find that it wasn't just specific mentions of same-sex marriage that Kenney had removed. It was any reference at all to equality for gays. This from a guy who boasts about standing up for what he likes to call "Canadian values."

And let's have another cheer for the Access to Information legislation.

Please note that this post is still to be reviewed and approved by the Bureau of Legitimate Criticism. It may not last.

Am I to submit my posts for approval by Michael Ignatieff personally before I publish them? Or will he be delegating that task?

Many of our "parliamentarians," provincial and federal, are contemptible for one or both of two reasons: they are profoundly ignorant and bigoted, or they are profoundly cynical.

The statement following from the leader of the Opposition is a low point in the history of democracy in Canada. It is an insult to the Charter guarantee of freedom of conscience and a shocking display of patriarchal presumption from a man famous for his obsequious paeans to imperial power, "empire lite" and "torture lite." (A little sleep deprivation here and there -- usually accomplished by mini-crucifixions of people who just happen to be Muslims -- not such a bad thing, eh, Mr Ignatieff?)

Yes, I am disgusted. This is McCarthyism come to Canada.

March 1, 2010

Statement by Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff regarding Israeli Apartheid Week

OTTAWA - Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff made the following statement today:

"On university campuses across the country this week, Israeli Apartheid Week will once again attempt to demonize and undermine the legitimacy of the Jewish state. It is part of a global campaign of calls for divestment, boycotts and proclamations, and it should be condemned unequivocally and absolutely.

Apartheid is defined, in international law, as a crime against humanity. Israeli Apartheid Week is a deliberate attempt to portray the Jewish state as criminal.

The activities planned for the week will single out Jewish and Israeli students. They will be made to feel ostracized and even physically threatened in the very place where freedom should be paramount -- on a university campus.

Let us be clear: criticism of Israeli government policy is legitimate. Wholesale condemnation of the State of Israel and the Jewish people is not legitimate. Not now, not ever.

The very premise of Israeli Apartheid Week runs counter to our shared values of mutual respect and tolerance, regardless of nationality, race or creed. It is an attempt to heighten the tensions in our communities around the tragic conflict in the Middle East.

On behalf of the Liberal party of Canada and the Parliamentary caucus, I urge all Canadians to join with us in condemning Israeli Apartheid Week, and to reject, in principle, all forms of anti-Semitism, racism and intolerance, both within this country and around the world."

H/t Antonia at Bread and Roses