The Party - [ies] of "Law and Order"

There was a good ruling on the case of Abousfian Abdelrazik the other day. Actually, Justice Zinn was just stating the obvious, ... stuff that lots of progressive bloggers have been saying for over a year now. The difference is that Judge represents authority and power. This is what is meant by "the rule of law." Governments are not allowed to do anything they want. There are officials called "judges" who can decide if a government's actions are illegal and can order it to stop.

Now, before anyone thinks that I'm getting all misty-eyed about our political-legal system, fear not. Too much has already happened and it's a shame that it's taken this long for the moronic harpercon government to hear this news and receive this comeuppance. What Judge Zinn told the government was elementary:

One cannot prove that fairies and goblins do not exist any more than Mr. Abdelrazik or any other person can prove that they are not an Al-Qaida associate. It is a fundamental principle of Canadian and international justice that the accused does not have the burden of proving his innocence, the accuser has the burden of proving guilt. In light of these shortcomings, it is disingenuous of the respondents to submit, as they did, that if he is wrongly listed the remedy is for Mr. Abdelrazik to apply to the 1267 [U.N.]Committee for de-listing and not to engage this Court. The 1267 Committee regime is, as I observed at the hearing, a situation for a listed person not unlike that of Josef K. in Kafka’s The Trial, who awakens one morning and, for reasons never revealed to him or the reader, is arrested and prosecuted for an unspecified crime..

And there's a lot of room for improvement with our society. There are too many racist morons who have enabled this government to violate the rights of Abdelrazik, Maher Arar, Abdullah Almalki, Muayyed Nurredin, Ahmad El-Maati, Mohamed Harkat and others, and the fact of the matter remains that the harpercons are Canadians' second choice for governing this country, with the Liberal Party (which wrote the Anti-Terrorism Act and oversaw the initial incarcerations and sufferings of all these men) is their first choice.

But here's something else to chew on. Obviously CSIS and the RCMP are institutions with limited resources. It seems that they have chosen to direct these limited resources into colossal wastes of time, harassing and torturing a fairly large group of individuals who appear to be completely innocent. What do all our "security" forces have to show for all this expensive racial profiling? Currently there are about less than ten young men being charged with plotting terrorism and the details of that case show a police informant egging-on a group of young Muslim men who had been doing nothing more than blowing smoke on the internet.

This is what's known as a waste of resources. And given the enormity of this waste it's a wonder that Canada hasn't been subjected to a number of terrorist attacks while these institutions were attending meetings and reading and writing reports about the detaining and torturing of these innocent men. But then again, perhaps this threat of terrorism is pretty much NON-EXISTENT, since there haven't been any attacks and no confirmed, verifiable reports of thwarted attacks. Regardless, the "threat" is certainly not great enough to justify shredding our civil liberties.

In other "law and order" news, the idiotic, contemptibly stupid harpercons are passing mandatory sentencing legislation, presumably in some typically insane desire to ape the failed policies of USian neanderthals and authoritarians. Please note that they are being provided with crucial assistance in this plan to fill up our jails (and later, the private prisons of their corporate asshole friends) and to render more Canadians unemployable, by the federal Liberals.