The shame isn't only Obama's

Andy Worthington writes about the kangaroo court that is dealing with Omar Khadr in Guantánamo Bay.


Prosecuting a Tortured Child: Obama's Guantánamo Legacy

From the most important thing - that he was fifteen years old at the time - to his untreated injuries, torture, evidence that was revisionist, to say the least, retroactive laws drawn up after to cover what happened before and the attempts at a plea deal to subject him to even more time for a crime he was not old enough to, or no one is even sure he did, commit, the whole shameful episode is all there.

But the shame isn't only Obama's. There was not a peep out of the Canadian government either, which follows a deplorable trend under Stephen Harper's Conservative minority government to simply abandon Canadian citizens abroad if they happen to be the wrong colour (anything but white), the wrong sex (anything but male), the wrong religion (only Judaeo-Christians need apply) or less than stunningly wealthy. If you have one or more of these marks against you, you're out of luck.

On second thought, being stunningly wealthy will go a long way towards having the other drawbacks ignored. 

A small sample here:

Abousfian Abdelrazik

Brenda Martin

Suaad Mohamud Haji

Harper insists that the U.S. government has a right to continue to do what it does, in spite or our laws, our constitution, or that Canada is a signatory to the Geneva Conventions and to the U.N. Declaration on the rights of the child. The law seems to be of no concern to him except when it applies to someone else's supposed violations of it.

Seeing the world

Prime Minister Stephen Harper is setting his attack dogs on Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff for the unforgivable crime of actually having lived and worked somewhere else in the world besides Canada.

Harper, like George W. Bush, had hardly traveled outside the boundaries of his country before assuming the minority leadership - and it shows.

Arrogance, ignorance of other cultures, speaking and understanding only one language, and entrenched provincialism have suddenly been raised to the status of virtues.

Thus we have the spectacle of such narrow minded people attacking civilizations thousands of years old and telling them how things should be done.

Canada is only 142 years old, the U.S. only 233 and yet they trumpet their superiority wherever they go as if it was divinely granted and sanctioned by providence as a beacon to the rest of the world.

What fools they make us look and how these other people must snigger to watch these little puffed-up dictators strut around the world leaving disaster wherever they go.

Scott Horton, a constitutional lawyer based in Washington DC has been watching successive administrations in the U.S. destroy the basis of their society. Canada is no better. Harper's neo-Cons ignore laws they don't like, spread misinformation about legally acceptable procedures (e.g. formation of a coalition government), and hide themselves behind a wall of secrecy. Their hypocrisy in the last few years has been breathtaking.

From Scott Horton's blog at Harper's (what an unfortunate coincidence with the name), a quote from John Stuart Mill about learning from the unfamiliar.

"It is hardly possible to overstate the value, in the present low state of human improvement, of placing human beings in contact with persons dissimilar to themselves, and with modes of thought and action dissimilar to themselves, and with modes of thought and action unlike those with which they are familiar…. Such communication has always been, and is particularly in the present age, one of the primary sources of progress."

–John Stuart Mill, The Principles of Political Economy: With Some of Their Applications to Social Philosophy, bk v, ch xvii, sec 3 (1848) in: The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, vol 3, p. 594.

Meanwhile, Jeff Huber's latest post about the disaster that is Afghanistan is up on his blog today.

Sounds like there are lots of "desirable outcomes" but no plans how to get there.

Try that tactic on your next road trip.

Sad? Yes, Mr. Harper, it is.

Stephen Harper, with the patronizing pomposity that he is famous for, shook his head and declared that the protests against the Security and Prosperity Partnership, taking place in Montebello with George W. Bush and Felipe Calderon, were "sad". Such a pitiful bunch - over 1000 of them - who refused to be put in cages well away from the Great Leaders so their protests could not be heard. The inevitable scuffles broke out. Some threw stones and water bottles. The heavily armoured police in full riot gear returned fire with pepper spray and tear gas. Nice to know whose side the police are on.

So, while they meet in secret to pound out the process of turning the continent into Fortress North America, with all good things flowing north from Mexico and south from Canada into the great maw that is the U.S., we are supposed to sit back and allow it to happen.

The thought that Bush, the serial lawbreaker of both international and U.S. constitutional law, the agressor, the liar, the condoner of torture and domestic spying, the trasher of habeas corpus, the vacationer-in-chief, was entertained in our country at our expense, enrages me.

Felipe Calderon probably isn't the elected leader of Mexico. Polls before the elections showed that Manuel Lopez Obrador had a clear lead, but U.S. manipulations in the electoral process, just like they did in Canada, returned a leader who was not supported by the people. In Mexico, as in Canada, we will never know how far that interference went.

Why we should worry about the Montebello talks, by Bruce Campbell, which first appeared in the Ottawa Citizen and is linked here from rabble.ca, gives us more that a few causes for concern.

...[P]assenger 'no fly' lists: In June, Canada's no-fly list came into effect, part of a broader agenda of security measures negotiated under the SPP. The list is rife with potential for abuse—blacklisting innocent people, racial profiling, invasion of privacy, use of false information and faulty criteria for judging high-risk travellers.

Canada's list will likely merge with the much larger U.S. no-fly list, with major negative implications for Canadians' civil liberties.

The Arar Inquiry found that the RCMP, through their intelligence sharing practices, were complicit in the rendition and torture of Canadian citizens in violation of international law. It recommended measures to protect against future abuse. Maher Arar has still not been taken off the U.S. terrorist watch list.

The U.S. continues to systematically violate the Geneva conventions on torture and rendition, recently codifying these practices in the notorious Military Commissions Act. The Harper government has not raised its voice publicly against U.S. abuses. What is it doing at the SPP table?

...[D]omestic processing of oil: Energy security, especially oil, is a top priority for the U.S., and the Harper government is eager to oblige by facilitating the rapid expansion of Alberta oilsands production for export south.

Among the energy accomplishments cited by the SPP leaders at their 2006 meeting was a Canada-U.S. pipeline agreement that would lead to a uniform regulatory approach for cross-border pipelines.

Recently the countries' energy ministers talked about cutting red tape for various planned pipelines that would take oilsands bitumen to the U.S. for processing.

The Communications, Energy and Paperworkers union has produced studies showing that 18,000 jobs that would otherwise be created by processing in Canada will go south.

...[S]ome 40 per cent of the pesticides Canada regulates have stricter limits than U.S. regulations. The U.S. sees them as trade barriers and wants a list of priority pesticides to be watered down.

Thanks to an astute Citizen reporter, we know the Canadian government is in talks to relax its requirements on pesticide residues on U.S. fruits and vegetables.

With the Bush administration aggressively dismantling its own regulatory systems, this harmonization concession amounts to Canada mirroring U.S. deregulation. Will this be the norm or the exception?

...[E]ach step may, or may not by itself have significant consequences for Canadian policy flexibility. But cumulatively, the negative overall impact on Canadian sovereignty and democracy will be huge.

I find serious cause for concern in those provisions. The rule of law trashed in Canada, no energy security and no food security.

What is really "sad" in all this is that we allow the U.S. and the Harper puppet regime to run Canada.





August 21, 2007