The Military-Industrial-Media-Government Complex

In a 2007 article entitled "The Conference of Defence Associations gets $100,000 a year from the Department of Defence", CDA executive director Alain Pellerin told Maclean's John Geddes :

"We also have to write a number of op-eds to the press."
Asked if there is any aspect of Tory defence policy the CDA opposes, he couldn't think of one.

Six days ago the Ottawa Citizen ran an article "End the Inquisition" by Paul Chapin which rather hysterically equated the Afghan committee's hearings on the detainee issue with Senator Joe McCarthy's anti-communist witch hunt. The Citizen did note in Chapin's bio that he is director of the above-mentioned Conference of Defence Associations, but rather unhelpfully failed to mention he was also the author of the very detainee agreement he was defending.

Yesterday Harper Bizarro had a very good post up detailing missing bio info in a Globe and Mail David Bercuson editorial, Liberals, lay down your arms. In it Bercuson advised Iggy to clamp down on Lib defence critic Ujjal Dosanjh and Lib foreign affairs critic Bob Rae re their determination to get to the bottom of the Afghan-detainee issue. As noted by Harper Bizarro, the G&M omitted to mention that Bercuson is director of the Centre for Military and Strategic Studies at the University of Calgary and director of programs at the Canadian Defence and Foreign Affairs Institute(CDFAI), and therefore has funding ties to the very Department of Defence he is defending. h/t Pogge

Also worth noting is that the comment editor at the Globe and Mail who runs these pieces joined the Advisory Council of CDFAI in 2006.


At 13 university centres across Canada, the Department of National Defence funds defence 'studies' through its Security and Defence Forum. This is from Embassy Mag in 2007 :

"According to the Department of National Defence, over 600 people, including 183 faculty members, are employed in these centres across Canada. In 2005-2006, scholars from these centres churned out 600 publications, including articles, books, and chapters. In this same period, the centres received funding worth $1,255,000. As of October 2006, DND approved a 25 per cent increase in funding. In the next five years, the funding will shoot up to $1,650,000, a 32 per cent increase."

Steve Staples, Rideau Institute, Feb 2007 :

"It's not about scholarly journals, peer reviewed articles that they have written -it's really about appearing in the mainstream media. What you tend to get as a general trend, is a steady stream of hawkish opinion from academics that are all linked together through Department of National Defence funding."

Not all this hawkish think tank funding is DND of course. CDFAI donors for instance also include Enbridge, General Dynamics, and Lockheed Martin.

Something to think about given that media Rolodex seems to fall open so easily to the same DND and corporate funded analysts over and over again.

As Pogge says, "What we have here is taxpayer dollars being laundered through the defence budget and used to pay academics to lobby us ."

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Pipeline saboteurs in the media... and biblical solutions to WMDs

Experts at a national conference for emergency officials in Calgary yesterday were mightily exercized about last week's EnCana gas pipeline bomb attempts in BC. Well, not so much the actual bomb blasts themselves, but how they would play in the U.S.
The Canadian media played along :

Alberta ripe for attacks: experts - Economic terrorism would rattle U.S

Terrorists target U.S.A. via Alberta - Hitting energy supply seen as strike on U.S

Gas pipelines vulnerable to terrorism: expert

Yikes! Who are these experts and what are they saying?

"Alberta has become a "prime location" for terrorists looking to capitalize on shaky economic times in Canada and the United States, terrorism experts said"
"I think that the alarm bells are going off and that is indicated by the fact that the RCMP are bringing in the people who deal with terrorism to look at this," Mercedes Stephenson, a military analyst, told CTV Newsnet Sunday.
"You don't blow up part of a pipeline and kill lots of people . . . you disrupt the economy," she said.
She said that Alberta supplies more than 90 per cent of California's natural gas supply.
"You are not disrupting just Canada but you are disrupting Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego."

Mercedes Stephenson : 27 year old media/think tank whiz kid, has worked for the Pentagon, the Cato Institute, US Army Headquarters, and the Fraser Institute. A Koch Fellow, a master's student at the University of Calgary's Centre for Military and Strategic Studies where she wrote a thesis published by the Department of National Defence about the importance of Canada embracing the U.S. Ballistic Missile Defence System, a frequent military analyst for CBC, CTV and Global News.

Note : According to Steve Staples of the Rideau Institute, U of C's Centre for Military and Strategic Studies is one of 12 university programs funded by the Department of National defence to "churn out 6oo articles a year which have to toe “a particular view” that subscribes to larger spending on the military."
“It’s not about scholarly journals, peer reviewed articles that they have written—it’s really about appearing in the mainstream media. What you tend to get as a general trend, is a steady stream of hawkish opinion from academics that are all linked together through Department of National Defence funding,” says Mr. Staples.


Alrighty then. Next expert :
"Longtime international foes of the United States are closely watching that nation's sharp economic decline, said Igor Shafhid, a world expert in nuclear, biological and chemical weapons.
Financial instability causes panic and fear, said Shafhid, founder of Global Strategic Resources, which develops and teaches emergency-preparedness courses in the U.S. and Russia.

"Those are things terrorist states or countries will take advantage of," he said. "If it goes towards recession or depression in the United States, I suspect some activities might start happening in the next few years in the form of biological, radiological or who-knows-what-else terrorism."

However, he said there's no need to fear the world will be destroyed."

Igor Shafhid : author of "Inside the Red Zone", "his personal journey within a godless Russia to the classified operations of the Soviet Strategic Rocket Force where he trained as a military doctor in WMD deployment. Using his own life experience Dr. Shafhid brings answers to Russia's fascination with WMDs, the need for a solid civil defense program, and the importance of maintaining the Biblical foundation America was founded on."
Featuring "Biblical solutions to remain a safe-guarded nation under God"


Dear CanWest, CTV, Calgary Herald.
It would have killed you to include a little bio info on these experts to go along with your fear-mongering Terror! Terror! Terror! headlines?

For shame. Besides, where's your sense of fun?

Not one of you mentioned a single word about biblical solutions to WMDs .


OK, we'll provide our own expert then :
Here's Andrew Nikiforuk, author of "Saboteurs: Wiebo Ludwig's War Against Big Oil".
He dismissed the RCMP's description of the saboteur as an eco-terrorist and said he doesn't believe the saboteur meant to hurt anyone.

"This is not the work of eco-terrorists, for God's sakes. This is the work of a pissed-off landowner who's probably a property-rights advocate, who doesn't like the fact that either his health has been damaged, or his property has been devalued by sour-gas developments."

"Whoever did this wanted to make the headlines, they didn't want to kill people. If you want to kill people up there with sour gas, it would be very easy to do. There are thousands and thousands of pipelines, wells, and scores of sour-gas plants up there," he said
"Whoever did this planned it very well, picked the locations very carefully, and seems to have been either skilfully adept at not rupturing a pipeline, or skilfully inept at not rupturing a pipeline -- and I suspect there are signs here of skilful adeptness."

It's a long shot, I know, given that Nikiforuk fails to make any mention of San Diego or biblical solutions to WMD, but I'm leaning towards his analysis here.

h/t Toe at Bread 'n Roses