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Harper’s New Canada, Omar Khadr, and the wrong side of the law

I haven’t discussed Omar Khadr since video of his “interrogation” by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service at the Guantanamo prison camp was released by his lawyers.

Partly, this is because I’m not sure what to say about it. Surely, the video isn’t an accurate portrayal of Mr. Khadr’s illegal kidnapping and torture. The dismissive and ignorant joking of a CSIS operative (”No snow in Cuba, eh?”) is no doubt a poor representation of his abuse at the hands of US state-terror and its Canadian accomplices. Despite the juvenile character of the interrogators, it remains deeply disturbing. Khadr can be heard pulling his hair and clothes and repeating — depending on where you read it — either “kill me” or “help me”, while calling for his mother in Arabic.

He’s been subjected to abuse that is widely considered mental torture, according to international law and the US Army Field Manual. And even the US Supreme Court has ruled against its legality and authority in the Khadr case (Hamdan vs. Rumsefeld 2006, and Boumediene v. Bush 2008, and many others.) Now, Khadr is to be seen at a nonlegal show trial that the highest judicial arm in the US has rejected.

And for all our Conservative government’s hub-bub about treaty obligation and copyright law (WIPO and CDMCA), what about all the treaties we’ve signed in the last 110 years about human rights, the conduct of international justice, and the prosecution and abuse of children? For our Tories, treaties are meant to be broken, especially when asked to be broken by the Office of the US Trade Representative or the Vice-Presidents. International agreements are tossed around as play things by this government, and most often at the instruction of the US executive branch. And that’s not a nice crowd to be in, right now.

Back at home, the recorded experience of Omar Khadr, while rightfully upsetting many Canadians, has “emboldened” others to develop new justifications for the extrajudicial, trans-border abuse of minors. Dislike of the Khadr family is seen as reason enough to violate international law and abandon our principles of justice and the rights of children. As is our ignorantly used, so-called fear of “terror” — what essentially amounts to xenophobia and subservience to US neo-imperialism (see: Maher Arar). But, hey, we’re getting used to it.

And it’s not just world opinion and law we’re on the wrong side of, our minority Government even disagrees with the US Supreme Court. Harper dismisses the footage and any responsibility his astonishingly disgraceful government might have for it. “Where can we find justice for Khadr but in a widely disrespected and criminal US show trial?” he says. The aggregate of the US “war on terror”, is, frankly, the most disgusting and inhuman project we’ve allowed ourselves to be entangled with. The crimes to our south and across the world must be rejected and loudly denounced, not defended by the leader of a petty party concerned, supposedly, with justice.

In the illegal detention and abuse of Mr. Khadr, we see, perhaps, Mr. Harper’s idea of “justice.” And perhaps, as he says, we should “get used to it.”

July 18th 2008 (2)
Tags: america + bush II + canada + crime + gitmo + harper + justice + khadr + law + lawlessness + omar khadr + politics + power + scotus + state terror

More Security Implications of Climate Change

Wired’s Danger Room writes about the military security implications of climate change, taking the lead from Mr. Thomas Fingar’s — Chairman of the U.S. National Intelligence Council — trip to Capitol Hill last month.

Summarizing:

1. Climate change will have wide-ranging security implications globally “worsening existing problems — such as poverty, social tensions, environmental degradation, ineffectual leadership, and weak political institutions.”
2. Intra- and interstate conflict will become more common over competition for resources, especially in the developing world
3. The developed West will likely face
• Immigration pressures from those feeling the conflict of the developing world
• Safety and maintenance and repair pressures over weather damage
• Food and resource access and distribution conflict internally
• Legitimacy and control problems if the state is unable to meet constituent requirements

On immigration, Fingar testified, the United States “will need to anticipate and plan for growing immigration pressures. Although sea level rise is probably a slow and long-term development, extreme weather events and growing evidence of inundation will motivate many to move sooner rather than later.”

And he offers a reality that is too often dismissed, rather than being captured by debate: that the solutions themselves can often do damage, too — at least in the short term.

Government, business, and public efforts to develop mitigation and adaptation strategies to deal with climate change — from policies to reduce greenhouse gasses to plans to reduce exposure to climate change or capitalize on potential impacts — may affect US national security interests even more than the physical impacts of climate change itself.

Greenwashing, for instance, is one example of businesses efforts on climate change that continues to result in substantial harm — through delay, confusion, and ongoing wealth transfer to old corporations. Corporate welfare directed at energy profiteers under the guise of environmentalism — like Stelmach’s $2 billion carbon capture and sequestration transfer — ensures corporatists won’t be required to capture the costs of their activity in their bottom lines.

If action on climate change requires massive wealth transfer from public coffers to R&D for private big-oil, we need to more clearly understand what problem we’re trying to solve. Are we trying to maintain the viability of the petrocracy or are we trying to mitigate public risks? Certainly, such action doesn’t insulate our province from resource scarcity and climate risk, but merely ensures the marketability of our product in a conflict-ridden global energy market.

Sadly, as the security and public safety challenges of climate change become better understood, the hypocrisy and core beneficiaries of public policy becomes clearer.

Climate Change May Sap Military, Intel Chief Says

July 11th 2008 #
Tags: canada + ccs + climate change + green + greenwashing + security + stelmach

We are living in the Second Gilded Age

Bill Moyers’ interview with Steve Fraser on the “Second Gilded Age” begins with two startling statistics.

1. The top 200 wealthiest people control more wealth than the bottom 4 billion, and
2. In the United States of America the top 0.01%, or 14,000 families own 22.2% of wealth, while the bottom 90% — 133 million families — control only 4% of the country’s wealth.

Moyer’s describes the first Gilded Age:

The first gilded age, so named after this novel, published by Mark Twain in 1873, depicted the late 19th century as an era marked by great frauds, shabby scandals and mediocrity in high places. Greed and speculation drove big business, and politicians lined up to do what trusts and corporations told them. Tycoons provided the capital; human nature did the rest. Sound familiar? Well, as Mark Twain himself said, history may not repeat itself but it certainly does rhyme.

This Gilded Age might be more insidious. The wealth elite balance their ostentatiousness with public theatre and the manufactured language of “democracy”. Fraser calls this age more pseudo-populist than the last, wealth itself having learned much from marketing, psychology, and the experience of the past.

K street lobbyists [...] dressed up in blue jeans and hard hats, rallying for tax cuts for the rich. And saying, ‘These are not for the rich’. This is for guys like us, you know, who wear dungarees and hard hats.” But they were it was like some staged and you had a lot of that kind of thing. You have, you know, in the olden days, back in the 19th century our business elites masqueraded as you know Louis the 14th and Henry the 8th. Today, they don’t do that. They instead masquerade in cowboy hats. And they’re just plain folk. And they’re supposed to be democrats like the rest of us, defending us against those pointy headed bureaucrats in Washington. And so on. And so, there’s this kind of inversion of this populism.

And it’s not just all-caps LIBERALS like Stephen Fraser or Moyers talking of the new Gilded Age. Even the American Conservative plainly concludes:

The holders of great wealth, especially if they are organized into a political lobby of similar holders of great wealth, can buy not only more goods, more capital, and more people. They can also buy (through the vehicle of campaign contributions) more important people: politicians and other public officials and therefore public policies.

The American Conservative does offer hope for change, as does Fraser, but both suggest it won’t be quiet or paced:

In the course of the 20th century, there were several eras of growing economic inequality. On a few occasions, they came to an end in a relatively gentle way, with democratic elections and more egalitarian legislation. More often, however, they were ended by a catastrophe, such as the Great Depression, a violent social revolution, or a world war. When the rich went out, it seems, they normally did so with a bang, and not with a whimper. The way things are now going, it is likely to be so in the future.

Full video interview and transcript here.

July 10th 2008 (1)
Tags: america + corporatism + corruption + democracy + elite + gilded age + inequality + lobbyists + wealth