The absolutely stupid harpercon decision to blow $9,000,000,000.00 on new prisons (ostensibly to jail those convicted of the unreported crimes our useless and intrusive national statistics agency said rose by three percentage points in 2004), joined with the $1,200,000,000.00 wasted on the G8 & G20 summits, and the $16,000,000,000.00 that harper wants to spend on F35 fighter jets (so as to protect us from Al Qaeda’s box-cutters) made me think about how rich a country that Canada is that our governments can even seriously think of blowing money like this.

I mean, McGuinty was able to blow $1,000,000,000.00 on useless consultants on his “E-Health” debacle and we really didn’t miss it. (Of course, in economic reality, all that money was spent on conspicuous consumption in the GTA and “invested” on Bay Street, but we, the tax-payers of Ontario can pretty much say we kissed it goodbye with nothing in return.)

In an example of the extreme, nauseating arrogance of hegemony, the Glib & Stale’s Gary Mason said that the Vancouver Olympics’ price-tag of over $1,000,000,000.00 (discounting the permanent infrastructure benefits such as the Sea to Sky Highway and a new convention centre and etc., which, built at inflated Olympic construction rates put the bill at around $6,000,000,000.00) was worth it, because:

There is little question, however, that B.C. will derive economic benefits from the Olympics for years to come. The Games will have been the main driver of economic growth in the province for 2010. Given the fallout from the most recent recession, their arrival couldn’t have come at a better time for the province.

Moreover, I think the Games gave the country something you can’t put a price on: a feeling of pride that has spurred a new confidence that you could feel the day after the Olympic cauldron was extinguished.

Maybe it’s not a tangible benefit, but it may be the most important one of the Olympics. One that can justify the cost all by itself.

Awwww! What a sensitive, artistic soul Gary Mason is! I gotta say it again! AWWWWWW!!!! Who could argue with such a poet?

It would certainly be easier for governments not to do these sorts of things, to think small, not big, never to take chances for fear of being criticized. And there are certainly people who believe every available dime of taxpayers’ money should be spent on health care and education and not trivial pursuits such as sporting festivals.

Huh. When you put it that way, it makes a lot of sense actually. Gary Mason, who has looked with equanimity on the devastation of Canada’s health care and social welfare infrastructure generally, and who no doubt trashes left-wing Canadians as stupid, tree-hugging, hippy air-head flakes who can’t make the serious, tough decisions, wants us to ignore wasting billions of dollars on fascist athletic spectacles because they give him a woody. Fuck you Mason, you contemptible piece of shit!

How many governments would like to be able to toss that kind of money around ‘eh? Imagine what Haiti or Angola or Vietnam could do for their people with the $33,200,000,000.00 that I’ve mentioned so far? That’s right folks, three of our governments (harper’s federal government, and Ontario and British Columbia) have managed to piss-away thirty-two billion dollars on useless events and useless military junk and failed software programs over the past few years.

Don’t get me wrong. Economically, some of this money never left the country. It was taken from the pockets of Canadians or Ontarians or British Columbians and put into the pockets of other Canadians or Ontarians or British Columbians. (Most likely police, private security contractors, construction contractors and construction workers, and, last but not least, asshole “consultants” of some sort who made thousands of dollars a day but who still billed us for the coffee they bought on their coffee breaks while they were failing utterly to build a secure, virtual database for Ontarians’ health information.) But even accounting for this, the money that didn’t get given to foreign military contractors and what-not, tended to benefit a small minority of people and didn’t build anything of any lasting value to the majority. You can’t have a functioning economy just buy issuing cheques to everyone and allowing them to buy Toronto condos and imported consumer goods. You have to build things that work once in a while.

And, as well, we can’t afford this sort of nonsense forever. These multi-billion dollar vanity projects, combined with general austerity for the majority of the population, including in our education and health care sectors, have been leading us on the road to ruin for a couple of decades now. It’s not just an amusing curiosity that Ontario is now a recipient of equalization payments now. No, no, no. This sad achievement is a direct result of the moronic policies of the revolting mike harris regime of the 1990s and the arrogant dithering of McGuinty since then. And Ontario’s sorry state was made worse by the austerity of the Chretien-Martin Liberals and now the harpercons, who are themselves running the entire country into the ground.

The fruits of unregulated capitalism are the suicidal farting attacks of the world’s financial sector and the Earth’s vomiting of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico and over the skies of the Tar Sands of Alberta (and thence into the world’s atmosphere where it contributes to the Global Warming that will upset the balance of all life on earth).

These people are maniacal, wasteful, self-destructive psychopaths. They must be stopped.

And if you ain’t got no money nobody gives a shit what you think anyway!

Disturbing, disturbing, highly disturbing stuff from Alison at Creekside and the passionately anti-NDP Eugene Forsey. It seems that the House of Commons Standing Committee on Environment has decided to shred all the evidence from its past six meetings and all the research evidence that was to go into their report.

The last seven committee sessions on the tar sands have been locked to the public.

At the last public session back in March, the committee heard testimony from a scientist who had conducted the first independent research done since 1983 on airborne tar sands contaminants found in the snow pack along the Athabasca River.
Dr. David Schindler from the University of Alberta told the committee that at the 31 locations he had tested :

“Mercury emitted from these plants has increased three-fold in seven years, lead has increased four-fold in six years, and arsenic three-fold in six years as well.”

Further, he said that although Environment Canada tests at only one location on the Athabasca, it has come up with the same numbers, as have the oil companies in their own research.
Schindler contends the oil companies’ reports on contaminants are duly submitted to Environment Canada but he believes EC is being muzzled and prevented from making the findings public, and the oil companies of course are not obliged to do so on their own.

And that, my friends, was the last public session of the Environment Committee before it went in camera for the next six sessions and decided against making a report to the House, and to us.

This is serious stuff. It goes like this people: If you’re a convinced proponent of the Tar Sands project (but an honest one) you’d say “I think all this global warming stuff is so much hooey,” or “I don’t think these pollutants are so excessive or that they’ll be all that harmful,” and then you’d allow to be published whatever the studies say.

The fact that the harpercons are doing the same-old strategies of obstruction (based on their play book for the destruction of democracy) shows that they’re actually revolting pieces of shit who KNOW that bad stuff is happening, which they don’t want the people to know about.

It ought to be front-page news, a major scandal, in this country, but I’m now convinced that we have a bullshit democracy where “the rule of law” is a sick joke. After the overthrow of the Aristide government, after mike harris’s contribution to the death of Dudley George, after two prorogations, after the torture of innocent Canadians and Afghans, after the constitutional crisis provoked by harper’s refusal to inform Parliament had degenerated into some boring committee sideshow where nobody is going to be embarrassed, and after the non-reaction to the total reaming of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms at the Toronto G20, … after all those things and more (APEC-Suharto-Pepper-Spray, Caledonia, etc.,) I have no faith in this country’s political system or its people.

Tomorrow, check this space for extended commentary on Miley Cyrus’s career aspirations.

Richard Fadden, director of the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service, fresh from whining about how mean everybody is to his agency of drooling idiots who torture Canadian citizens by proxy, has decided to embarrass himself further by babbling the following to the Canadian news media:

Canada’s spy agency suspects that cabinet ministers in two provinces are under the control of foreign governments, CBC News has learned.

Several members of B.C. municipal governments are also under suspicion, Richard Fadden, the director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, told CBC News in an exclusive interview.

“We’re in fact a bit worried in a couple of provinces that we have an indication that there’s some political figures who have developed quite an attachment to foreign countries,” Fadden said.

“The individual becomes in a position to make decisions that affect the country or the province or a municipality. All of a sudden, decisions aren’t taken on the basis of the public good but on the basis of another country’s preoccupations.”

He said the politicians and public servants see it as a long-standing relationship and have no idea they are being used.

“All of a sudden, decisions aren’t taken on the basis of the public good but on the basis of another country’s preoccupations.”

Read more: http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2010/06/22/spying-csis.html#ixzz0rhRpjnuS

I’m calling him “stupid” because as a Harvard trained constitutional scholar and a master of understanding and appealing to his fellow human beings, Barack Obama ought to have been smart enough to know that he’s destroying his presidency with each passing day by resorting to the same old, cynical, inhuman, deluded, corporatist neoliberalism and imperialism.

The people who were inspired enough to elect him were angry at bush II’s shredding of Constitutional civil rights. What does Barack Obama do? Shit all over them and the Constitution by maintaining and expanding his predecessor’s assaults.

The people who were inspired by him were angry at bush II’s unending, illegal, corrupt, murderous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. What does Obama do? Leave his soldiers in their permanent bases in Iraq and dramatically ratchet-up the war in Afghanistan (to prop-up the corrupt, pedophile-druglord Karzai regime).

The people who believed in him wanted genuine healthcare reform. What did Obama give them? a bloated monstrosity of legislation that tames some of the most glaring abuses of the private insurance industry while costing the tax-payers’ more than single-payer would have and forcing people to buy private health insurance plans that still don’t offer sufficient coverage.

People were angry about having their tax dollars going to bail-out the Wall Street crooks whose own insane greed brought them to the brink of bankruptcy. What does Obama do? Sabotages genuine attempts to reign-in Wall Street while mouthing insincere populist platitudes.

People are furious over how B.P. caused a gigantic ecological catastrophe as a result of the deregulation of the oil industry brought about by bush II’s VP Dick Cheney and his top-secret negotiations with his fellow oil industry scum-bags. What is Obama doing? Continuing to mouth stupid platitudes about his “concern” while allowing B.P. to conduct the response to their catastrophe all their own way, always giving them the benefit of the doubt.

The fact that Obama faces a challenge from the even more deluded, even more intellectually bankrupt Repugnican Party isn’t an excuse. There’s a voting base out there that would be galvanized by the reversal of his failed politics, indeed, it’s the same fucking voting base that he has to thank for becoming President of the United States of America! But Obama is all about playing the game as it has traditionally been played in order to succeed within that system, and the USA’s political culture is so debased as to be incapable of recognizing when policies are toxic, insane and self-destructive. Even after everything they’ve done turns to shit, they still call the shots and the formal media culture grants the neo-liberal, imperialist, corporatist viewpoint its hegemonic power.

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.)

December 2005 – Amnesty International and the BC Civil Liberties Association file an application in the Federal Court seeking to stop the practice of transferring detainees from Canadian custody to Afghan authorities

Feb. 6, 2007 – Military officials begin investigation of three complaints by Afghan prisoners that they were abused while in the custody of the Canadian forces.

Feb. 21, 2007 – Amnesty and the BCCLA again seek to stop the transfer of detainees

March 2, 2007 – Three detainees at the centre of a probe into abuse of detainees by the Canadian forces disappear. They are never found.

March 9, 2007 – Amir Attaran reveals a covert agreement signed in 2005 to transfer detainees to Afghan secret police

April 23, 2007 – Globe and Mail reveals thirty allegations of abuse by Afghan authorities of prisoners transferred by the Canadian Forces, contradicting earlier claims by the government that no complaints had been made

April 25, 2007 – Then Defence Minister Gordon O’Connor says that Canada will monitor detainees for signs of abuse. The same day, the Globe and Mail reveals that a report on the treatment of Afghan detainees was circulated to Cabinet Ministers in 2006 which was censored to remove information damaging to the government. The government had previously denied the existence of this report.

April 26, 2007 – The Globe and Mail reports that Michael Byers and William Schabas sent a letter to the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court requesting an investigation into Gordon O’Connor and then Chief of the Defence Staff Rick Hillier on the grounds of possible crimes committed against Afghan detainees.

April 27, 2007 – Stockwell Day insists Canada has had access to detainees since the beginning of the mission, and that all allegations of mistreatment by Afghan authorities are false. He also insists that the existing agreement provides sufficient protection for Afghan detainees.

April 30, 2007 – The government denies that there have ever been any specific allegations of prisoner abuse. Later the same day, Stockwell Day says that Canada has received at least two specific allegations of torture.

May 2, 2007 – A source inside the Ministry of Foreign Affairs revealed that the original prisoner transfer agreement was drafted primarily by the Canadian Forces, and that Foreign Affairs was largely frozen out, suggesting that Hillier acted without government authority. Later the same day, the National Post reports that negotiations for a prisoner transfer agreement were initiated approved Paul Martin and Bill Graham in May of 2005 showing that the government was directing policy on detainee transfers.

May 3, 2007 – Canadian government signs new detainee transfer agreement with Afghanistan. The agreement includes substantially increased protections for detainees, at least on paper.

May 18, 2007 – Amir Attaran testifies before a committee of the House of Commons and reveals a cover-up of reports indicating that detainees transferred by Canada were tortured by Afghan authorities. Lieutenant-General Walter Natynczyk, then Chief of the Land Staff, now Chief of the Defence Staff, says that there is no proof any detainees transferred by Canada have been tortured.

June 6, 2007 – Stockwell Day tells the parliamentary committee that they shouldn’t care about abuse allegations because the people making the allegations are “terrorists.”

June 9, 2007 – CBC reports that the Department of Foreign Affairs now acknowledges six specific claims of torture or abuse

June 25, 2007 – The Globe and Mail reports that one of the investigations into the fate of Afghan detainees transferred by Canada won’t be allowed to look into whether or not they were tortured or abused

July 9, 2007 – The Globe and Mail reports that the Department of National Defence has been systematically and illegally refusing access to information requests on the topic of the treatment of transferred detainees on the grounds of national security, including information as innocuous as the number of detainees transferred

Sept. 22, 2007 – The Globe and Mail reports that fully one quarter of the detainees transferred to Afghan authorities by the Canadian Forces have disappeared and cannot be found

Oct. 29, 2007 – La Presse reports that prisoners at Afghan jails in Kandahar province continue to be tortured. The government dismisses the report as Taliban propaganda.

Nov. 6, 2007 – The Federal Court dismisses the government’s motion to strike the application by Amnesty and the BCCLA for documents relating to prisoner transfers

Nov. 15, 2007 – The Toronto Star reports that the government admits that one of the allegations of torture is “credible.”

Nov. 22, 2007 – Peter MacKay asserts that suggesting that the Canadian Forces are involved in war crimes is “un-Canadian”.

Jan. 24, 2008 – The Globe and Mail reports that the government stopped transferring detainees to Afghan authorities on November 5, 2007, but didn’t tell anyone.

Jan. 25, 2008 – A government spokeswoman says that the government was not told that the Canadian Forces were suspending prisoner transfers. Later the same day, she says she mispoke on that point. Stephane Dion reveals that he and Michael Ignatieff were informed the prior week but were sworn to secrecy.

Feb. 1, 2008 – The Globe and Mail reports that the government was aware in the spring of 2007 that the governor of Kandahar was personally involved in torturing prisoners. The allegations against the governor were reported to the International Red Cross by Canadian diplomats, but not to the House of Commons.

December 10, 2008 – Amnesty once against files suit in the Federal Court claiming that the new detainee transfer agreement has not stopped torture.

Oct. 7, 2009 – Richard Colvin files documents with the Military Police Complaints Commission which is holding hearings on the question, in an attempt to get around the government’s attempts to stop him from testifying to the Commission. Colvin claims that the Canadian government was aware of torture as early as 2006.

Oct. 14, 2009 – The Toronto Star reports that Colvin warned the government in writing in May 2006 about the risk of torture with transfers to Afghan detainees.

Nov. 18, 2009 – Colvin testifies to the parliamentary committee that the government knew it was likely that all detainees transferred by the Canadian forces were tortured.

Nov. 19, 2009 – Peter MacKay denies that there has been a single proven allegation of torture, and that Colvin got his information directly from the Taliban.

Nov. 22, 2009 – Yahoo News reports that the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission has documented at least 400 cases of torture across Afghanistan. The vast majority of these claims were made in 2006 and 2007, when Colvin was in Afghanistan. The same day, Peter MacKay repeats his assertion that there is no proof that any detainees have been tortured.

Nov. 25, 2009 – The government bars Colvin from handing over documents supporting his claims to the parliamentary committee investigating detainee abuse on the grounds of national security. On the same day, the Toronto Star reports that e-mails sent to the office of Peter MacKay as early as 2006 expressed alarm about the treatment of Afghan detainees. This is contrary to MacKay’s claim that he never heard anything about it until May of 2007.

Nov. 26, 2009 – Former Afghan MP Malali Joya backs up Colvin’s claims. Later the same day, Luis Moreno Ocampo, the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, begins an investigation into the complicity of NATO troops in the abuse of Afghan detainees. The news makes almost no splash in the Canadian media.

Nov. 27, 2009 – Three top generals claim that they were not worried because the Colvin memos never used the word torture, despite the fact that they have been shown to contain descriptions of treatment that amount to torture. Later the same day, in a humiliating new low for Canada, China lectures the government of Canada for its participation in torture.

Dec. 2, 2009 – The Canadian Press reports that in June of 2006 the Red Cross warned Canadian diplomats in Kandahar that detainees were being abused by Afghan authorities

Dec. 7, 2009 – The Globe and Mail reports that documentary evidence and the sworn testimony of Canadian officers proves at least one instance in 2006 in which Afghan authorities so badly beat a detainee that the Canadian Forces took him back into their custody. This evidence makes a liar of both Peter MacKay and Walter Natynczyk.

Dec. 11, 2009 – The House of Commons votes to require the government to turn over all relevant documents in an unedited form to the parliamentary committee. The government flatly refuses on the grounds of national security.

Dec. 14, 2009 – Lawrence Cannon admits that some of the detainees transferred by Canada have gone missing and cannot be accounted for because the Afghan authorities refuse to account for them to Canadian officials in defiance of the 2007 agreement.

Dec. 18, 2009 – CBC reports that documents prepared for Peter MacKay in 2008 indicate that the military police launched six separate investigations into allegations of abuse involving members of the Canadian Forces.

Dec. 30, 2009 – Stephen Harper prorogues Parliament, dissolving the parliamentary committee investigating the abuse of detainees.

Jan. 25, 2010 – The Toronto Star reports that the government is refusing to pay Colvin’s legal fees after they were the ones to summon him to testify.

Jan. 28, 2010 – The government agrees to pay Colvin’s legal fees.

Mar. 6, 2010 – Amir Attaran reveals that the documents that the government is resisting releasing will reveal that the Canadian government made a policy decision to transfer detainees to Afghan authorities for the purpose of the detainees being tortured.

Mar. 9, 2010 – CBC reports that Canadian officials began preparing a public relations strategy as early as March 2007, several months before the first documentation of widespread abuse in the Globe and Mail.

By TS

If I really cared, I could just go over to Brian’s stupid blog and get the pro-war spin on NATO plans to bribe “moderate Taliban” to stop fighting. Or, I could go to Terry Glavin’s stupid blog, and get the same thing with a load of self-satisfied self-praise and idiotic trashing of anti-war types as being members of the leftist-islamo-fascist conspiracy.

But those guys are delusional dunces. They’ll just say that this is more of the same sort of successful policy like bush II’s “surge” and the resultant “Anbar Awakening” that saw Sunni Iraq repudiate the Taliban and stop fighting the USA. Of course, anyone who says that the USA’s occupation of Iraq was a success is nobody we should be expected to take seriously. The Sunnis accepted the reality that they were out-gunned and out-numbered and it therefore made sense to stop fighting in return for money, money, lots of money, from the USA. But Iraq remains a hell-hole and the government is employing the same torture and oppression as did Saddam Hussein’s.

All the media reporting on these overtures to “moderate Taliban” mentioned that the Karzai government’s corruption and incompetence drove these Afghans into the insurgency. Well, bribes from NATO to angry Pashtun farmers isn’t going to make Karzai’s government any less corrupt, incompetent, brutal or unelected. The existence of these “moderate Taliban” also shows the non-Taliban nature of the much of the insurgency.

I mean, can we, at long last, connect the dots here? Okay: NATO is hoping to enter into talks with “moderate Taliban” to try to get them to stop fighting the Karzai government. This involves paying them money not to fight. The media reports that these “moderate Taliban” are mostly driven by the “incompetence and corruption” of the Afghan government. Toss in brutality and criminality and there’s your whole picture right there.

“Oh that’s the wingnut, leftist, anti-American Guardian newspaper you’re quoting from!” bleat the delusional, pro-war idiots. Okay, fine. NATO wants to go into talks with “moderate Taliban” who only want to throw diluted acid into school-girls’ faces, who only want punish really, really unchaste Afghan women by throwing smaller rocks at them than the original Taliban did, and who only sorta want to impose a kinda totalitarian religous semi-fanaticism on their people and the rest of the world.

Nah, let’s go back to reality and sanity. The puppet-Karzai heads an unpopular, unelected government that is incompetent, corrupt, and brutal and which has alienated scores of Afghans (mainly among the Pashtun, the country’s largest ethnic group). At the end of eight bloody years, it is just as incompetent, brutal and corrupt as it was at the start. Being so unpopular, bloody and criminal, it has produced a growing insurgency comprised of people we admit we have no other quarrel with. That’s why we’ve decided to call them “moderate Taliban” and enter into peace-talks with them.

If they agree and only a sliver of support remains with the genuine Taliban, that doesn’t detract from the fact that for eight long years, just as us critics on the left have been insisting, we have been fighting and killing and dying for an ignoble cause. Not only that, but blithely, stupidly, betrayed our supposed values and become complicit in war crimes! Our governments could have spent more money on creating a stable, honest government in Afghanistan. Our governments could have spent less on killing Afghans and more on providing them with jobs and incomes (just as I was prepared to accept that we might, but correctly doubted).

If, after eight long years, our fearful leaders decide that they’ll change tactics slightly, and provide money to people abused and robbed by our incompetent and corrupt puppet-government, that’s no real cause for celebration. It’s an admission of complete failure. It’s an admission that the country was a mess, is a mess, and will stay a mess, despite our latest policy of bribing people not to fight. If only a sliver of the insurgency is genuinely fanatical Taliban, then we’ve driven tens of thousands of people into their arms through OUR brutality, corruption, and arrogance.

That means that those Western governments who were quite happy to have their soldiers fight, kill and die to defend a corrupt, brutal puppet-government are directly responsible for the sufferings and deaths of their military personell, because they could have (at any time!) stopped with the expensive air-strikes and other military “solutions” and instead addressed the genuine grievances of the people we are fighting. But the reasons they didn’t do this FROM THE START are the reasons why, after eight goddamned years, they’re doing such a half-assed job of things now. And that’s the reason the reconciliation will be only a partial, tentative affair. Our leaders are psychopaths, completely detached from the most obvious connections between their actions and their consequences.

And the fact that there existed throughout and exists today, a genuinely sane, rational, alternative viewpoint to this campaign of waste and slaughter, and that it continues to be denigrated as “unserious” and unfit for power, is a testimony to the complete insanity of our present political culture.

The NYT’s David Brooks is not one of the towering intellects of our times. If you go to that link you’ll find that Glenn Greenwald has assembled a cornucopia of David Brooks’ errors, including such gems as:

EITHER SADDAM HUSSEIN will remain in power or he will be deposed. President Bush has suggested deposing him, but as the debate over that proposal has evolved, an interesting pattern has emerged. The people in the peace camp attack President Bush’s plan, but they are unwilling to face the implications of theirown. Almost nobody in the peace camp will stand up and say that Saddam Hussein is not a fundamental problem for the world. Almost nobody in that camp is willing even to describe what the world will look like if the peace camp’s advice is taken and Saddam is permitted to remain in power in Baghdad, working away on his biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons programs . . .

So now we stand at an epochal moment. The debate is over. The case has gone to the jury, and the jury is history. Events will soon reveal who was right, Bush or Chirac. . . . But there are two nations whose destinies hang in the balance. The first, of course, is Iraq. Will Iraqis enjoy freedom, more of the same tyranny, or a new kind of tyranny? The second is the United States. If the effort to oust Saddam fails, we will be back in the 1970s. We will live in a nation crippled by self-doubt. If we succeed, we will be a nation infused with confidence. We will have done a great thing for the world, and other great things will await

I imagine that Brooks makes at least a six-figure income, writing columns for the NYT (and with his television appearances he’s no doubt a millionaire) and it must be a pretty sweet gig. Writing any fool thing that pops into your stupid head and never having to explain yourself when you turn out to be catastrophically wrong, even nine times out of ten wrong.

A big part of Brooks’s shtick is (apparently, I don’t trouble myself to read him with any regularity) how he understands how “regular” or “ordinary” US-Americans think. And he explains the common horse-sense of the ordinary god-fearin’ Amuriken to the chattering classes and the upscale readers of the NYT. Brooks’s understanding of the average US-American is, apparently, a figment of his imagination. He infamously chided the Harvard Law School graduate Barack Obama for his elitism and stated that Obama (unlike Brooks supposedly) would have difficulty relating with the regular folks at the salad-bar at an Applebee’s Restaurant. It turned out to be the case that Brooks himself would have difficulty interacting with the people at the salad-bar at this middlebrow family restaurant chain because Applebee’s doesn’t have a salad-bar.

So, we see that Brooks is, therefore, both a complete idiot whether commenting on foreign or domestic issues. Once again though, this lazy-minded incompetent no doubt commands over a million dollars a year in payment for his ignorant ramblings.

How fitting it is, therefore, that this pompous piece of shit sees fit to lecture the people of Haiti, in their hour of great suffering, on the necessity for self-reliance and hard work!

As Lawrence E. Harrison explained in his book “The Central Liberal Truth,” Haiti, like most of the world’s poorest nations, suffers from a complex web of progress-resistant cultural influences. There is the influence of the voodoo religion, which spreads the message that life is capricious and planning futile. There are high levels of social mistrust. Responsibility is often not internalized. Child-rearing practices often involve neglect in the early years and harsh retribution when kids hit 9 or 10.

Interesting Mr. Brooks. Do please go on …

We’re all supposed to politely respect each other’s cultures. But some cultures are more progress-resistant than others, and a horrible tragedy was just exacerbated by one of them.

Really? What should we do then?

Fourth, it’s time to promote locally led paternalism. In this country, we first tried to tackle poverty by throwing money at it, just as we did abroad. Then we tried microcommunity efforts, just as we did abroad. But the programs that really work involve intrusive paternalism.

These programs, like the Harlem Children’s Zone and the No Excuses schools, are led by people who figure they don’t understand all the factors that have contributed to poverty, but they don’t care. They are going to replace parts of the local culture with a highly demanding, highly intensive culture of achievement — involving everything from new child-rearing practices to stricter schools to better job performance.

It’s time to take that approach abroad, too. It’s time to find self-confident local leaders who will create No Excuses countercultures in places like Haiti, surrounding people — maybe just in a neighborhood or a school — with middle-class assumptions, an achievement ethos and tough, measurable demands.

This disgusting cretin hasn’t the slightest idea about what he’s talking about, as usual. Might it not be the case that flooding the agricultural economy of Haiti with massively subsidized US agricultural products might have been devastating to the Haitian people’s economy and their self-reliance? Might it not be the case that Haiti’s insanely corrupt ruling class would not have such an easy time of fleecing their country were it not for the fact that the USA, Canada and France and the United Nations do such efficient work of frustrating every attempt by the people of Haiti to overthrow this gang of thieves and murderers? How can we blame the people of Haiti for the mismanagement of their country when 98% of them haven’t had the chance to manage it?

David Brooks, to repeat, is an incompetent dunderhead. He is paid an exorbitant amount of money to write about foreign and domestic affairs and he is consistently wrong about pretty much everything. This jack-ass doesn’t have the right to lecture me about the value of hard work, let alone the entire nation of Haiti. David Brooks deserves to windex the video-screens of peep-show booths. Open up your mouth David, I need to take a piss.

I’ve written about Haiti several times on my blog. Not because I can claim to be any expert on the country, but because I’m so deeply ashamed at the enormity of our crimes against these people. I’ve tried to resist talking about Haiti and the tragedies resulting from the earthquake because I sincerely believe that the focus must be on trying and convicting stephen harper for war crimes, exposing him for his cowardice and gross abuse of power in proroguing parliament to escape the discovery of his criminal policies by the Special Committee on Afghanistan.

But the brazen self-satisfied hypocrisy of North America about our “generosity” towards Haiti and contemptible, racist, hypocritical garbage from scum such as David Brooks have compelled me to write about it.

Others in the blogosphere point to the even stronger rumours that harper is planning to cowardly prorogue parliament until after the fascist spectacle of the Olympics in order to avoid public accountability for his possible complicity in war crimes in Afghanistan.

This is unacceptable.

If harper does pursue this detestable course of action of course the opposition parties must join to force an election at the soonest possible opportunity when the new session of parliament opens. By his actions in Afghanistan, by his partisan leaking of documents (the secrecy of which he has argued is vital for “national security”), by his contempt for the will of the majority in parliament in refusing to hand over said documents, and by myriad other ways, harper has lost the right to any claim in this nation’s confidence in his ability to govern this country.

stephen harper is clearly insane and unfit for public life.

But if parliament is suspended, we, the decent, sane majority of Canadians have to put the pressure on him and his lackeys. I should add, or clarify, that it will be the decent, sane, engaged, concerned minority that must keep the pressure on. Because while the vast majority of Canadians are intelligent, decent, sane people, only a minority are dedicated enough and informed enough to grasp the gravity of this threat to our political system and our way of life. Too many of us are lulled into a consumerist cocoon of ignorance and apathy. The dedicated minority must go out into our communities and preach to people outside the choir about the seriousness of this crisis, the horrible ramifications of allowing business-as-usual with this twisted freak harper and his gang of foaming psychopaths.

We must lay down the case for the coming election, the seriousness of the issues involved, the horrible consequences of allowing these crimes to go unpunished.

And while we’re laying the groundwork for the ultimate repudiation of the political bowel-movement that is Canadian “conservatism,” and for the permanent destruction of the Stupid Party of Canada, we must make every effort to let our mainstream media and political institutions know exactly how we feel about the serial travesties of business-as-usual.

The Afghanistan debacle. The world financial meltdown. Ecological collapse. Increased poverty and homelessness. Evil in Haiti. Anti-Aboriginal racism. The destruction of our public healthcare sysem. On and on it goes.

This cycle of arrogant stupidity, … capitalist greed presenting itself as wisdom about “harsh realities” has had time enough to prove itself and it has failed.

And the most fanatical practitioners of this insanity, the so-called “Conservative Party of Canada” must be made to understand [albeit temporarily, given the limitations of their mental faculties] what detestable, freakish vermin they are. If we “liberal [sic] elitists” used to look down our noses at these morons, it was because they were such repulsively stupid, dangerously stupid morons.

We will not stop our work to transform our societies into ecologically sustainable, sane economies just because you’re an oil-industry shill or an ignorant, delusional consumerist.

We will not remove equal rights for people of non-heterosexual orientations because you’re a fanatical adherent to some imaginary, sex-obsessed deity or because you’re a twisted closet-case.

We will not drop the call for a public inquiry into war crimes to enable your racist, imperialist blood-lust.

Your day has passed.

Gotta run. But I’ll be back to flesh this out. I think the post title will get people thinking though.
Back.

There are countries that pretty blatantly torture people and there are countries that at least make the effort to say that they do not torture people. And then, of course, there are countries that don’t torture people period.

Canada, thanks to the harpercons, is now in the first of those categories. For legal purposes, the harpercons and their drooling-idiot supporters don’t come right out and admit their complicity in torture. But at the same time, they constructed a prisoner-transfer process that was designed to provide them with plausible deniability as to what we knew about the people we handed over. At the same time they’ve been pretty shameless about blocking access to see what they’ve been doing, what they’ve been saying, what happened and when they knew about it. And, finally, they respond to genuine questions about Canada’s adherence to its obligations under international law by yammering about how our prisoners were all vermin who deserved whatever it is they might have gotten and how people who want to ask questions are all troop-hating traitors.

I’ll repeat: “Plausible deniability” is no excuse. The harpercon’s attempt at being smart has back-fired. It was determined in the Tokyo War Crimes trials that if someone was in a position to know and didn’t know that war crimes were being committed, then it was determined that those officials were guilty for not having made the effort to know what was going on under their watch.

There is nothing to debate here. The harpercons are guilty of war crimes. Our government is guilty of war crimes. We, as Canadians, are guilty of war crimes.

But we have a choice. We can take our country back. We can take it back from the moral deficients, the mental freaks who shriek so loudly on the internet and in our newspapers, about how torture is justified. About how the rule of law has an on/off switch. We can take our country back from these imbeciles by forcing our political-legal system to hold the harpercons to account for their crimes.

And I say we should make this point in time the moment when we made our stand because this is the way for us to get the most bang for our buck. This isn’t something that can be debated ad nauseum. This isn’t something that requires a lot of digging and investigating or anything. Right here, right now, we can send the whole harpercon front bench to PRISON and there is no way out of it for them.

In all honesty, global warming, our abuse of the First Nations people, and the economic crisis are bigger issues than this. But convicting harper on war crimes charges is easier than shutting-down the Tar Sands. Convicting the harpercons is simpler than reversing our policies on First Nations issues. Convicting these scumbags will be simpler than arguing for a sane economic policy. And, furthermore, putting the harpercons behind bars will make working on those other issues immeasurably easier.

Recently, the opposition parties passed a parliamentary resolution calling for a public inquiry into this issue but the govenment is not bound by the will of the representatives of a majority of the people of this country. So be it. One way to get the will of the majority’s representatives imposed is to make them the government. If there is no other way to do this, then let us have the opposition introduce a measure of non-confidence in this government, and if we have to have an election on this issue, let us have it.

Let us make this an election on whether or not Canada is a nation that commits war crimes or not.

If that’s what is necessary to take our country back then let us fight it on this issue. As I said, there are other concerns that Canadians have, but nothing is as clear-cut as this. Nothing is so easy to rectify as this. When it is so simple it is incumbent upon us to do what is necessary. Let this be a contest between the decent people who believe that Canada is supposed to be a decent place, and the freaks who believe that it’s okay to torture as long as it happens to your enemies or you contract it out.

Doesn’t our political system claim “the rule of law” as one of its fundamental values? Even if we believe this claim is a sham, we must admit that at least they agree that this pretence must be upheld if they’re going to claim our respect for their authority. Well, if there is simply no way out of the fact that they committed war crimes, then there is simply no way out for them than to face the consequences. When something as blatant as this happens and they try to fob it off, they are fobbing off the basis of their own legitimacy. If we can have a fight about this, then there is no way that they can avoid defeat. And this isn’t smoking a joint, or speeding on the highway, or taking a bribe even. This is TORTURE. This is INTERNATIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS LAW. If the rule of law should apply to governments, shouldn’t it at least apply here?

Ah, but what about the Liberals? Sadly, this is the debased state of our political culture. We cannot move against the harpercons unless we agree to allow the Liberals (who violated international law in Haiti, who first got us into the Afghanistan debacle, who oversaw the first violations of human rights after 9-11/2001) to go free. Our political culture is such that we cannot go against both of these criminal gangs because enough Canadian voters support one or the other of them to make it impossible. (I was prepared, when the Liberals had a majority, to propose that the NDP work with the CPC and the BQ to investigate Liberal crimes in Haiti. To my eternal shame, I got so far as briefly circulating a petition before life and work pressures made me think that Haiti’s calvary had to wait. Then, the Liberals fell, the harpercons came to power, and the moment passed.)

But we could argue this: That it is worth it to make this concession if it means destroying the harpercons, who are so toxic for Canada’s political culture, if it means re-asserting that Canada is more the product of its decent citizens than of its morons and psychopaths, if it means that we get to set a precedent for future prime ministers tempted into following the USA into another such abomination, that they might get in over their heads and find themselves responsible for and liable for actions such as war crimes.

[Please note: I’m certain that given the chance the NDP could be just as lazy and callous about human rights as any other party. I’m also pretty sure that Bloq politicians are no angels when it comes to First Nations issues that conflict with Quebecois sovereignity. To their credit, the NDP has the natural intelligence and the courage to have rejected the Afghan “mission” from the get-go. But this non-immunity from corruption is just the point: Our politicians can only go as far as the Canadian people will let them go. If WE decide, as a people, that something like handing over innocent people to suspected torturers is not acceptable, and that there are consequences for doing so, then they will not do it! It’s up to us to change the culture so that Canadian politicians do not debase us like this in the future!]

If there is an election, let us fight it. Afghanistan is worth an election. Torture is worth an election. Let us have an election where the big subject is whether the cynical abuse of “national security” is no big deal. Where selective leaking of documents to discredit a courageous whistle-blower is fine by us. Where dumping people as quickly as we can into the hands of murderers and rapists is what this country is all about. Where making insurgents fight all the harder against the Canadian Forces because defeat and incarceration means being castrated, blinded, crippled, or some other horror, is “supporting the troops.” Where throwing billions of dollars and over one-hundred Canadian lives down a rat-hole is sound foreign policy. Let us debate this evil policy. Let us debate this evil government.

To conclude: If we do not think an election is a realistic possibility, then we MUST come up with some more viable strategy. This is the image of our country at stake here. This is whether or tax-dollars and our silence support the rape of the children of impoverished Afghan peasants at the hands of a brutal, corrupt government defended by our soldiers and our soldiers’ lives.

If we decide that there’s nothing that can be done, then nothing will be done. And we will be signalling that when Canada signs covenants against torture, it’s meaningless. That we concede that the rule of law does not apply to our own governments. [In a case as clear as this, giving the harpercons a pass out of defeatism is stating just that.]