Murray Dobbin on the "National Security" Lie

From rabble.ca:

almost no one has commented on the totally absurd nature of the Harper government's basis for stonewalling. Indeed everyone seems to casually accept the framing of the issue that the government has relied on for months.

That framing suggests that documents relating to the detaining of suspected insurgents and their transfer to the Afghan secret police are somehow critical to national security. If any of these redacted parts of the documents were revealed to the public we are asked to believe that Canadian soldiers' lives would suddenly be in greater danger than they already are in this outrageous war and occupation.

...

There is nothing in these documents that talks about military strategy and tactics or military intelligence gathering. There is nothing that could give the Taliban an advantage in killing Canadian soldiers. There is nothing that reveals our long term policy. These documents were assembled on the basis of their specific relevance to the issue of the torturing of Canada's Afghan prisoners.

...

If the opposition parties had in the first place refused to accept the opportunistic and phony framing of the documents issue they would not now be bending themselves out of shape trying to compromise on something that should not be compromised: total, unrestricted parliamentary access to the documents that will tell us once and for all the critical question at the core of this issue:

Are Canadian senior officials, up to and including ministers of the crown, guilty of war crimes?

(Emphasis added.)

Dobbin is exactly right. This screeching about "national security" and the safety of "the troops" is the most blatant form of bullshit. Scum-bags like Ezra Levant and stephen harper would sacrifice their precious "troops" in a second if it was necessary to save their own vast expanses of skin.

ezra levant wants to bring it!!!

Ha! The pudgy stool is losing it!

I don't have a legal opinion on Speaker Peter Milliken's ruling yesterday, over the question of whether the Conservative government has to disclose every single national security document, military document and diplomatic document to MPs who want to see them.

But I do have a political opinion on it: it should spark an election.

...

I think Canadians get it. I think if they had the question of Afghanistan and terrorism put to them in those terms -- who do you trust to handle the subject, Stephen Harper or Michael Ignatieff and his two NDP premiers, Bob Rae and Ujjal Dosanjh -- I'm pretty sure I know whose side they'd come down on.

The media and the opposition, along with the official legal establishment like the Canadian Bar Association, are in love with terrorist and terrorist supporters. Omar Khadr is the CBA's poster child, and the mainstream media thinks that the liar Maher Arar is some sort of folk hero.

So let's have it out. Let's call the question. And let's not let a single Speaker of the House -- however competent -- make the decision. Let's not even put it to the nine Supreme Court judges. Why should just one Canadian vote on it, or just nine? How about all of us?

Let's all vote on whether or not the likes of Ignatieff, Malhi and Wrzesnewskyj -- and, moments later, their friends at the Toronto Star and CBC -- should have access to the most sensitive security information.

Let's all take sides -- the Liberals and NDP can side with their friends Omar Khadr, Maher Arar, and the Taliban, and the Conservatives can side with our Canadian Forces.

Bwa-ha-ha! (I can't resist pointing out that in his desperate diatribe, he refers to Arar as a liar once again, and as evidence links to his own idiotic, incoherent babbling writings on the subject!)

Ah yes, and the "honour" of the Canadian Forces! Pardon me, but I'll choose Canada's democracy over the honour of the Canadian Forces any day. You know, Canadian democracy, which is what the Canadian Forces exists to defend? Does the irony of your fascism ever register with you Ezra? (I doubt it. Levant is the sort of imbecile who carried a multi-year, intense man-crush for Stockwell Day and he wants us to believe that he was captivated by Stockwell Day's mind and not about how Day looked in a wet-suit!) But getting back to Levant's chicken-hawk concern for the "honour" of the Canadian Forces, ... it's complete bullshit. If one genuinely cares about the honour of the Canadian Forces they don't have them fighting and killing poor farmers fighting back against a corrupt, women-raping, girl-raping, boy-raping, gang of thieves and drug lords. Anyone who cared about the honour of the Canadian Forces wouldn't put them in the impossible position of fighting insurgents and either letting go every single one that they capture, or hand them over to a government that uses torture as standard operating procedure, thus subjecting our troops to war crimes charges.

Fortunately for the troops, most people would acknowledge the impossible dilemma that war-mongers like Levant, harper, and Hillier put them in and they'd pass over prosecuting the front-line fighters and go after the leaders who made complicity in torture the policy of the government of Canada. About the only people who wouldn't do that would be people like harper and Hillier, and sleazy, rat-fucking hypocrites like Levant who will instantly start trying to point the fingers at their formerly sacred troops the instant that any sort of consequences appear likely to fall on themselves.

Of course, not all the troops are innocent patsies. There are also brazen, stupid, wannabe con-artists like Major Denis Gagnon, who is trying to have us believe that the Canadian Forces are so disorganized and careless that all of their records are lying in a heap in a shipping container somewhere and that it'll take years to sort through it and give the Military Police Complaints Commission what they want to see. Besides the fact that such slipshod paperwork would be inexcusable if it were real, it's also the case that the dunderhead forgot that the goddamned harper government and its detestable legal minions like Alain Prefontaine are saying that they ALREADY HAVE the documents and that there's nothing of interest in them. You stupid fuck.

I like how the squirmy Levant mentions how the Liberals Bob Rae and Ujjal Dosanjh are former NDP members, as if that puts them outside the realm of respectable political actors. It's a testimony to the low-level of political intelligence in this country that a guy associated with Stockwell Day and stephen harper thinks he can tarnish someone by mentioning that they were associated with the NDP. It's further testimony to our decaying political culture that this moron and his party are one of the two mainstream choices and that this gang of idiots is actually the fucking government! They've got a creationist Minister of Science ("How dare you ask me about gravity!!! My religious views are none of your business!") a coke-headed beauty queen as a former cabinet minister, the aforementioned complete idiot Stockwell Day as Minister of Lawlessness, and a shameless, hypocritical lying corporate shill as their leader.

These shit-heads want to publicly scream strident warnings about how the opposition parties can't be trusted with "national security" (a bogus term for these documents in any case) when they've got a former cabinet minister who left classified documents at the apartment of a girlfriend with ties to organized crime? When they cynically leak these same documents to unstable media hacks?

Come on Ezra! Goad your fearless leader into calling an election on your government's torture polices! On a war that we've been losing since 2003! Please! Pretty please! Pretty please with sugar on top!

In all seriousness, even though it's beyond your capabilities right now Ezra, and it probably always will be, your democratic rights have been protected by Speaker Milliken, and you owe him a great vote of thanks.

Speaker Milliken pwns stephen harper's Ugly Ass!!

It's kinda one of the reasons that I'm celebrating about stuff 2nite. Maybe I'll sober-up tomorrow and write something more articulate (but hardly more suitable) but i gotta commemorate this historic event!

The Right to Secrecy and Trust Has Expired

Via HarperBizarro, Don Martin on today's expected announcement about the rights of Parliament to see detainee documents from the Afghanistan conflict:

The problem with this government is how it's become secrecy personifi ed -- witness the backlog of information access requests, it's document-starvation of the Military Police Complaints Commission and new revelations over the PMO's intensified information control strategy. It has given every sign it values protecting its political butt over legitimate areas of national security.

Yet the government correctly argues it is the designated guardian of security information that's too sensitive to be distributed to mere MPs under a "confi-dential" stamp.

Read more: http://www.calgaryherald.com/columnists/Speaker+ruling+trigger+election+nobody+wants/2954891/story.html#ixzz0mJRufdLX

Um, sorry, no.

No. NO. A thousand times NO!!!

We went into Afghanistan in 2001. It is now 2010. NATO easily destroyed the Taliban government's hold on Afghanistan. It then installed a puppet-government under Hamid Karzai and various "Northern Alliance" warlords.

NATO and the Karzai government have had almost NINE YEARS to bring stability and reconstruction to Afghanistan. They have failed. The city of Kandahar, once a secure base from which NATO (with mostly Canadian troops) tried to secure the rest of the province. Today we read that the Taliban have infiltrated the entire city and it will be a struggle to keep it:

The rumours had been circulating for weeks: Taliban insurgents were planning to attack the sprawling United Nations compound in Shar-i-nau, a relatively quiet, relatively wealthy neighbourhood in Kandahar city.

On Sunday morning, residents awoke to discover their streets scattered with “night letters.” The warnings, written on plain white paper, urged local residents to take cover and foreigners to flee.

This is only partially the fault of the Taliban insurgency. Obviously, it is difficult to build roads, schools, irrigation networks, and a functioning economy, when there are armed men planting bombs, murdering teachers, shooting at foreign aid workers and the country's police. But here's the thing; I'm going to go out on a limb here, but I think that Afghanistan is a different society from Canada, the United States, or the other NATO countries, but having said that, I don't believe that the Taliban was all that popular among Afghans.* It should not have been all that difficult to isolate them and render them irrelevant. The problem though, is that NATO, in all it's stupidity, imposed a government on the Afghans comprised of the same brutal gangsters who internecine warfare (with all the attendant rape and pillage) had alienated the population and allowed the Taliban (fanatically devout and relatively incorruptible) to rise in the first place! Furthermore, instead of leaning on the gangsters we installed into power, NATO (comprised of the world's only super-power and several former great powers) allowed them to rule over their provinces like they were their own personal fiefdoms. And, in a country where ethnicity and tribal allegiances are supposedly incredibly important, NATO allowed the former Taliban stronghold of Kandahar Province (primarily Pashtun) to be plundered and exploited by non-Pashtun warlords. It was inevitable that such a situation would produce an insurgency. And it is this insurgency, centered around the the detestable, misogynist Taliban, but given its continued strength from the hundreds of thousands of Afghans who have been abused by Karzai and his warlords, as well as by cowardly NATO air-strikes, that Canadian soldiers are killing and dying for. These Afghan fighters, responding as any human being would to tyranny, brutality, dishonour and exploitation, are the so-called "moderate Taliban" that the USA is now supposedly reaching out to.

Canadian soldiers are fighting insurgents who may not even sympathize much with the Taliban, but who are motivated by their resistance to a corrupt, brutal, thieving, rapist warlord-gangster government, and they are capturing some of these rebels and turning them over to a government that practices torture as policy. More than this, paranoid about civilian allies who might be helping the insurgency, the Canadian Forces are arresting innocent farmers and turning them over to the rapists and torturers.

Now, it was the Liberals, cocooned in their ignorance and delusion about what really motivates themselves and the US government, that stupidly took us into Afghanistan. It was under the Liberals that prisoners were first transferred to the US military (which teaches torture to Latin American officers) and did so until scandals of torture and murder at US-run facilities like Abu Ghraib and Bagram compelled them to seek an alternative. Carelessly, in the midst of an election, the Liberals allowed the cowardly stoop, General Rick Hillier, to negotiate an imbecilic prisoner transfer with the torturing government of Afghanistan. The Liberals lost power soon after the agreement was signed, and it became the harpercon government's responsibility to ensure the humane treatment of our prisoners.

The harpercon government took pride in not giving a flying-fuck about the treatment of our prisoners and so finds itself today, cravenly hiding from Parliament, asking for the powers of a despotic government, in order to avoid going to prison for war crimes.

And now, Don Martin presumes to lecture us that turning over information about PRISONER TRANSFERS from THREE YEARS AGO somehow will endanger Canadian troops today? Somehow, the movements of our troops one, two, or three years ago could be leaked by Parliamentarians and this would endanger national security?

No. Sorry, no. This is about Canada being a nation that tortures, or a nation that doesn't torture. This is about a government that routinely lies, obstructs, and cynically leaks documents supposedly vital to national security. In the first place, THERE IS NO VALID "NATIONAL SECURITY" ARGUMENT, and secondly, this government has lost the right to invoke "national security" and compel our trust that it is acting in our best interests and is defending our values in Afghanistan (or anywhere else for that matter).

*(Evidence that Afghanistan is a different country from Canada? There were Afghan women stoning other Afghan women, as both sides clashed over a law - signed by President Karzai - that said that Afghan Shiite wives were obliged to provide sexual favours for their husbands. Karzai had amended this bit of garbage by allowing wives the right to withhold these favours but giving husbands the right to withhold food. More evidence: The PBS documentary "The Dancing Boys of Afghanistan" details the practice of young boys - generally poor - being forced to dance for wealthy and powerful men and later rented out by them to other men for sex. The practice was banned by the peasant-based Taliban but is making a resurgence under the elitist, warlord-based Karzai government. These are the people we are allied with and these are the people we are fighting. This is the society our nitwit leaders willingly chose to invade and "reform." It's such a sick fucking travesty.)

Random Crap

One would think that the dearth of terrorist outrages in Canada (before and after 9-11 in the UNITED STATES) would have calmed down all the precious darlings hiding under their beds sucking their thumbs. But, sadly no. According to Alison at Creekside, the harpercons are still shitting themselves in terror at the thought of Islamic Terrorism:

A redo of the panicky now defunct Anti-terrorism Act of 2001, the new Combating Terrorism Act includes preventive arrest and forcing people to testify at secret hearings about terrorist acts that might happen in the future, and if you don't like it you can go to jail for up to a year with a judge's option to extend.

There are more safeguards included this time round - you can have a lawyer! at any time! - which will only allow the Libs to go along with it so as not to be painted as soft on terrorism. Mark Holland, Liberal critic for Public Safety and National Security, already looking to cave.

The argument in favour of anti-terrorism legislation is that criminal law only deals with crimes already committed. What to do about people who feel that crimes perpetrated by the state against their people require a response like blowing things up?

Gee whiz! I didn't know that the police could only intervene after a crime has been committed. I guess it really isn't like TV or the movies where the police bust the bad guys right before they're about to launch their dastardly plans! In reality I suppose, the judge would look at the evidence of the planning for the crime, the possession of the explosives, and everything else and say, "It's too bad you didn't wait for them to actually blow-up that building, because now I'm forced to let them go."

Given the fact that the "mastermind" of the "Toronto-18" was no more of a threat than the "Brooklyn Bridge Blow-Torcher" or the idiots who thought that they'd conquer a US military-base by posing as pizza-delivery drivers, and that the fertilizer that would have provided the explosives was only made possible by the state informant (who didn't need any Anti-Terror legislation to help him do his job), you'd think that even the harpercons would have stopped shaking in their boots by this point. But n-o-o-o-o. A lil' terror goes a long way with these dip-shits, causing them to shred centuries' worth of hard-won democratic and civil rights to keep them from screaming.

Neil Reynolds (who is this person and why should we care what he thinks?) in the Globe and Mail laments the resilience of third parties in Canada saying it "threatens democracy." (Yes, you read that right. In the age of stephen harper, it's third parties and their preventing harper from getting a majority that threatens democracy!) Reynold's blows the dust off of some book from 1946 to make his case:

He was talking of minority parties that exploit ideological or political grievances, manage to survive for a longer period and then – “like all organizations” – perpetuate themselves simply for the sake of their own self-interest.Mr. Corry cited two examples. The first, he said, might be a splinter party dedicated to socialism. The second, he said, might be a splinter party based on French-language nationalism.

A yes! A splinter party dedicated to such fringe ideas such as public health care, the single-most popular government program in the country's history is a threat to democracy. It's not clear where Reynolds wants to go with this. Should voters toss away their petty grievances in order to joyously go through the motions of voting for Tweedle-Dum or Tweedle-Dee every four or five years? Regardless, Reynolds promises us bounty uncountable should his advice be followed: Canadians will enjoy the same sort of "democracy" as exists in the USA (where a majority opposed the bail-out, a majority opposed the Iraq War for years, a majority want more "socialist" health care, all to no effect):

This is the genius of the American system. J.A. Corry: “To win the presidency, it is necessary to win a clear majority of the votes of the Electoral College in favour of one candidate. This compels each party to aim at winning a majority of the popular vote. The result is that most presidents take office with either the explicit or implied consent of a majority of the people.”
...
In most instances, though, these presidents won solid majorities in the Electoral College, that eccentric but utilitarian institution that prevents two or three densely populated states from determining the presidency by sheer force of population

I believe that it was here that I gave up reading the print version in disgust. In preparing this post I've read the whole thing. Still fucking pointless.

Lastly, it struck me that proponents of "free trade" or neo-liberalism, used to argue that with their "free market" policies, beneficiaries are diffuse, while targeted groups (unions, protected industries, etc.,) are aware of their precarious status and the dangers to them of "free markets" and so they organize to maintain their protected status and benefits whereas the beneficiaries of "free markets" aren't anywhere near as galvanized and didn't exert enough pressure to force governments to push "free market" policies through.

Thank heaven for disinterested neo-liberal economists and propagandists! If not for them, bought-and-paid-for-politicians, and their corporate pay-masters, we wouldn't be where we are today. Which is a world with a shrinking middle class and a growing under class and a smaller, but far wealthier upper class. A world with rising levels of household indebtedness, which was necessary to sustain increasingly anaemic economic growth levels, and on-and-on.

But we started out bashing the poor, the unions, the public sector, and we find that we have no defences against either corporate predation or the increasingly unsteady economies that neo-liberal buffoons create. Seems that Pastor Niemoller could be re-worked yet again 'eh?

Jeffrey Simpson Was Under the Weather Today

Or something else was responsible for today's lame-ass column: "Cracks in the bedrock of U.S. - Israel relations?" (Note: He recently wrote something with the title "When the penny drops, denial over health care stops" that must have also been written while he had the sniffles, it's such a brain-dead self-parody of his usual Chicken Little routine on public health care.)

Here's the thing about the U.S.-Israel column: Besides being weeks overdue commenting on some pretty clear signs of stresses between an increasingly belligerent and arrogant Israel and the United States which prompted General Petraeus to publicly state that Israel's behaviour was endangering the lives of US troops, Simpson's column manages to deal with the subject in a completely pointless way:

The United States carries the can, fairly or otherwise, for this stalemate in many corners of the Muslim world, because the United States is deemed to be a protector that could, if it so desired, push the Israelis toward a deal.

That the Israelis can’t be pushed is obvious to objective observers, but not to those who think grave injustices have systematically been done to Palestinians, including building settlements in the West Bank and expanding them in contested parts of Jerusalem.

Apparently, the Obama administration, exasperated by the lack of negotiations and angry at the obduracy of the Netanyahu government, is considered publishing its own blueprint for a peaceful settlement.

Good luck. Blueprints have come and gone many times before.

I mean, what is the point of a newspaper printing something like that? Does anyone able to read actually believe that the U.S. doesn't subsidize Israel to the tune of billions of dollars annually? Is there anyone really so clueless as to think that the U.S. is genuinely frustrated at the failure of one "peace plan" after another?

If Simpson genuinely believes this crapola, then he's a dimmer bulb than I thought. But if he doesn't believe this drivel, what practical use is it to write such a useless piece of sludge? I honestly think this was e-mailed as an attachment and the original e-mail said "Sorry for such a weak effort but I do need the money ... Yours, Jeffrey."

Non-Political Video Post

Sam and Dave: "Hold On, I'm Coming"