Steve and Sandra talk tasers

CTV : "RCMP Cpl. Gregg Gillis is the force's expert on Taser training and excited delirium -- the mysterious condition of heart-pounding agitation used as a kind of catch-all label by those who can't otherwise explain why a growing number of people have died soon after being zapped."

Heh.

Updated figures:1000 incidents involving Tasers in BC since 2005

Candlelight vigil for Robert Dziekanski

"People become good by doing good; it is rare that a person is good by nature alone. Goodness does not exist so one can make use of it. Goodness does not flow from a place of weakness but one of power."
~ written by Robert Dziekanski on a postcard to his mom.
It was read at his memorial in Kamloops by a family friend who ended his eulogy to a man who emigrated to Canada with two suitcases full of books by saying,
"People become good by doing good, Robert said. You become good by doing good. Be good people."

Photo from community service and candlelight vigil at Vancouver Airport
Postcard link : h/t Dana

On cowardice

Since the invasion of Iraq in 2003, US army desertions are up 80%.

More US veterans have committed suicide than have died in Iraq.

In 2005, 6,256 vets committed suicide at an average of 17 per day.
In the 20-24 age group, they averaged 22.9 suicides a day, four times the national US average.
One in four homeless people in the US are veterans even though they represent just 11% of the adult population. One in four!
Times Online Nov 15, 2007

I'm writing this for all you fuckwits out there chiming in to comments at CBC that Jeremy Hinzman and Brandon Hughey are cowards, that they shouldn't have signed up if they didn't want to fight, that people can't change their minds, that if they were willing to go to Afghanistan they should be willing to go to Iraq, that as war deserters they deserves to be sent back to face courts martial and jail in the US.

Hinzman enlisted in 2001 at age 22. A year later he and his wife had become Quakers. After his application for conscientious objector status was denied, he served his tour of duty as an armourer in Afghanistan. It was not till his unit was to be redeployed to Iraq that he deserted to Canada in 2004 with his wife and child.

Hinzman in 2004 : "The war on Iraq is immoral and illegal. If you are ever going to wreak havoc on a country, it would need to be justified. Every justification or rationale that we have ever offered for going to Iraq has been bogus. There were no weapons of mass destruction there. There have been no links established between Saddam and international terrorists, and then the notion that we're going to bring democracy to Iraq is -- we'll see if that comes to fruition, but I don't think we'll see it, unless it's convenient to America's agenda."

So he did his duty in Afghanistan but couldn't stomach Iraq.
How exactly does this differ from Canada's official position on Iraq?

Nonetheless the very reasons that caused Hinzman to desert are the same ones that he is not allowed to use in his application to the Immigration Board of Canada.
Hinzman on his Immigration hearing : "They raised the issue that they felt that the legality of the war in Iraq was irrelevant to our refugee claims. So, we were unable to argue that in any way."

But because he originally volunteered and did complete his tour in Afghanistan, he is not considered to be a conscientious objector so he isn't eligible for refugee status. Amnesty International disagrees.

Last week, after losing two immigration hearings and one from the Federal Court, the Supreme Court of Canada declined to hear their case. Their only hope now is a parliamentary intervention, one which would be certain to piss off the US. Does the Security and Prosperity Pact even allow Canada to accept war resistors now?

That protest sign behind Hinzman reads : "Canada should be a refuge from militarism - Pierre Trudeau".

Well? Are we? Or are we so thoroughly enmeshed in the illegal US war on terra that we are the cowards now?

War Resisters Support Campaign.
As usual there are some MPs email addresses there for you to write to.

Ankle-deep in blood and shit

A request for desert camel boots from Stockwell Day's newly arrived leader of a Correctional Service Canada inspections team in Afghanistan in February, 2007:

"They afford the appropriate ankle support when getting in and out of the LAV/Coyote/Nyala vehicles. Additionally the colour is more appropriate in the summer heat. On a Health and Safety level we will be walking through blood and fecal matter when either on patrol or in the prison and should not be wearing our personal footwear as it will track into our personal quarters."

It's certainly tracking all over the carpets in Ottawa now.

G&M : Nov 19, 2007 "The government was forced to release the documents on detainee conditions after a federal judge ordered it to disclose them as part of a suit brought by Amnesty International Canada and the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association."

CP Nov 5, 2007 "The government had argued that the issues involved were political rather than judicial, that human rights advocates lacked any legal standing to mount a challenge, and that the case should be thrown out because it has no chance of succeeding."

Co-council to both human rights groups, Amir Attaran, has been trying to alert us and get some action on this since at least March 2006, when he and Michael Byers along with Louise Arbour, Canadian rep at the UN, all published papers on the abuse of Afghan detainees.
The Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, in 2004 : "Torture continues to take place as a routine part of police procedures. The AIHRC has found torture to occur particularly at the investigation stage in order to extort confessions from detainees."

This is what Con House leader Peter Van Loan still airily refers to as "allegations by the Taliban".

Are we there yet? Could we get some grown-ups on this?
Look, we have a lot of serious issues to deal with in Canada : important stuff like fixing our debt to First Nations, stopping the sell-off of Canadian companies and the flow south of our resouces, getting serious on the environment, to name just a few.
Canada is already a signatory to the Geneva Conventions. We simply don't have time to go back and re-fight and re-argue all the battles for some semblance of civilization that we have already won. And we certainly don't have time for any government that hasn't figured this out yet.

Update : Mattt at bastard.logic links to skdadl's comment at Pogge :

"I think we call this the banality of evil. I have to walk through blood and fecal material, so I need better boots. This is the road to Nuremberg, folks. And this is being done in our name. Everyone happy to sit here quietly and be a "Good Canadian"? "

Welcome to Canada : We speak English, French, and Taser

Daev at Designated Protest Zone gives such a good synopsis of the state-sponsored execution of Robert Dziekanski that I'm just going to pillage the whole thing :

"The terminal was basically empty, the man never posed any sort of danger to anyone (least of all four armed cops), the police readied their tasers before entering the area near Mr. Dziekanski and assessing the situation, addressed Dziekanski only in English after they had been told he did not speak the language, tasered him at least twice (the second time after they climbed on top of him) even after Dziekanski appeared relieved at the officers' intial appearance, applied their full body weight to Dziekanski's midsection (which can be deadly after being tasered due to respiratory muscle paralysis), and then made no attempt to revive him beyond checking for a pulse after he went totally limp.
No thanks for the Vancouver International Airport for treating Dziekanski like some sort of caged animal for 10 hours and offering zero assistance."

And even with 8 minutes of video evidence, the RCMP have the unmitigated gall to trot this out:

"What I urge is that those watching the video, take note of that. Put what they've seen aside for the time being. And wait to hear the totality of the evidence at the time of the inquest," Carr said."

Daev ends with a biting bitter quote from Cartman at EnMasse :

"Fuck this shit. The police killed a guy because he was emotional and was breaking STUFF. They can take it out of his airport improvement fee."

Update : HOLY SHIT
From Tim in comments :
Introducing the TASER XREP, a projectile taser with a range of 100 feet that fires from a 12-gauge shotgun.
A "microprocessor controlled optimal electrode selection technology" checks 20 times a second for the best electrode connection to achieve the greatest incapacitation. It is expected that the victim will grab at it which closes another connection to prevent him/her from letting go and shocking the victim further.
100 feet? 100 feet! That's crowd control.

Another RCMP murder

Four thugs in RCMP uniforms tasered an unresisting man at least twice with 50,000 volts before handcuffing him and then kneeling on his back and his neck until he was dead. They made no attempt to revive him.


On Oct 14, Polish immigrant Robert Dziekanski cleared Customs and then spent the next ten hours waiting at the baggage carousel for his mother Zophia to pick him up as they had previously arranged. Neither of them were aware when they made this arrangement that the baggage carousel was now in a secure area that she would not be allowed to enter.

Zophia made three attempts to get help from airport authorities to contact her son over nine hours before being told he was not there and that she should go home. No one at airport authority was apparently willing to walk the hundred yards to where an increasingly frantic Robert who spoke no English had now gone those nine hours without food or drink. He began to crack, yelling in Polish. A woman passenger tried to use the airport translating phone for him but discovered it did not work. Robert picked it up and smashed it to the floor and began throwing his luggage around. Airport Security called in the police.

As other passengers yelled out to them that Robert did not speak English, the four RCMP entered the room and demanded in English that Robert stand against a wall. He complied and they tasered him. And then they tasered him again. Twenty five seconds elapsed between when the RCMP arrived and when they tasered and piled on top of him. "Hit him again, hit him again," an officer called out. And then he was dead.

We have airline passenger Paul Pritchard from Victoria to thank for making this video , this very ugly and shocking video, public. He gave it to the RCMP to help them with their investigation and they promised to return it in 48 hours. When they later told him it would probably be several years before he got it back, he sued and they returned it. Presumably it did not back up their earlier bullshit cover-up stories planted in the press last month that their victim was possibly insane or a drug mule or had some rare medical condition.

Shame on you, RCMP.

Justice for Robert Dziekanski
There's some links there to people you should be writing letters to.

See also Welcome to Canada : We speak English, French, and Taser

Pasta la vista, baby

The RCMP are looking into new claims regarding Brian Mulroney and the $300,000 he was paid by arms lobbyist Karlheinz Schreiber back in '93 to, um, promote a pasta business Schreiber was interested in. Mr.Mulroney says "he was paid the money for private business dealings and was late paying income tax on the three $100,000 payments he received from Mr. Schreiber because he was traumatized by allegations made against him by the RCMP".

He didn't actually mention the $300,000 in the first RCMP go round of course but he was still so traumatized at the time that we had to pay him a $2.1 million libel settlement.

So far the RCMP are holding a preliminary examination that might lead to opening a formal investigation, and Harper, who is also apparently mentioned in Schreiber's affadavit, is going to appoint someone to advise him on how narrow a scope a full inquiry can have while still being, uh, 'full'.

Also at issue for Steve are the two letters containing the affadavit information allegedly sent to Harper by Schreiber in March and again in September - letters that were vetted by the 35 members of the Privy Council Office, apparently hired for the express purpose of just not getting the whole stove-piping thing.
Back in January, the Justice Department prepared Airbus coaching notes for the current Justice Minister Rob Nicholson, who was formerly a parliamentary secretary with Mulroney : "Neither I nor my predecessor, the Honourable Vic Toews, received any briefing material related to this issue.''

And Harper stated this week that he was not about to become Schreiber's "penpal".

Unfortunately Mulroney sounds like he's getting set to feel traumatized all over again anyway.
Here is his statement {emphasis mine}:

"Twelve years ago to the day, I was trying to deal with very grave and damaging accusations against me, contained in a letter sent to the Swiss authorities. These accusations were related to the sale in 1988 of Airbus planes to Air Canada, back then a Crown Corporation.

After a tough and lengthy battle against these false and horrendously libellous accusations, the government of the day had to admit that they had absolutely no evidence to support them, and apologized to me and my family. In addition, they had to reimburse me of all my legal and other expenses.

Twelve years later, the same people at the CBC and at certain other media organizations who were at the origin of the 1995 accusations are still conducting their vendetta. Last Friday, Prime Minister Stephen Harper decided that he needed the counsel of an independent third party to advise him on the course of action to follow after new allegations were made in an affidavit filed by Karlheinz Schreiber from his prison cell where he is detained pending the execution of an extradition order confirmed twice by the Supreme Court of Canada.

I will fully co-operate with the special adviser soon to be appointed by the Prime Minister, but I have come to the conclusion that in order to finally put this matter to rest and expose all the facts and the role played by all the people involved, from public servants to elected officials, from lobbyists to the police authorities, as well as journalists, the only solution is for the government to launch a full-fledged public commission of inquiry which would cover the period from 1988 to today.

Only then will the whole truth be finally exposed and tarnished reputations restored. I am willing to meet the special adviser to reiterate my conviction that this is the only way to prove to Canadians that I have done nothing wrong."
G&M

Steve and Sandra throw Brian under a bus

To : The Ministers of Whatever and your various meaningless minions
From : The PMO
"Effective immediately and until further notice, none of you are to utter the name Brian for any reason whatsoever. Needless to say, talking to anyone named Brian is also strictly forbidden. Some of you nobodies have displayed the unfortunate lack of foresight to name your firstborn Brian. Too bad, no exceptions.
Signed,
Sandra Buckler

PSA : Steve Won't Teabag Brian No More
TGB : Trouble in the Conservative Sandbox

Remembrance Day 2007

Photo by Magda Indigo, who grew up in Flanders.

We'll all meet down at the cenotaph in a little while : the veterans, their relatives, Frank from the Danish Resistance, those honouring the women and the First Nations of WWI & II, the Koreans from the General Store, and the people moved to start attending after the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

Peace.

British Columbia : Nigeria North?

Royal Dutch Shell, of Niger Delta infamy, has coalbed methane extraction plans for the Sacred Headwaters Basin at Mount Klappan in B.C.

Shell Canada has striven mightily to present an image of being a good Canadian corporate citizen but if, as mentioned in this excellent video from The Dogwood Initiative, Royal Dutch Shell has now taken over Shell Canada completely, all bets are off.

Royal Dutch Shell is one of the world's worst polluters with one of the world's worst civil rights records and here they are planning to use one of the world's most destructive forms of resource extraction on the Mount Klappan headwaters. We all remember how Shell 'transformed' Nigeria.

So what can you do? You can vote this vid up at YouTube for a start. The more popular it is, and it's a very good vid, the more people will see it. Go on, off you go. For more info : Skeena Watershed Conservation Coalition.

A few more like this wouldn't hurt either :

Sent: Sunday, November 11, 2007 8:47 AM

To: questions@shell.com

Subject: Coal Bed Methane Plans in British Columbia

Gentlemen:
This is to express my extreme displeasure with your plans to extract petroleum products in the Sacred Headwaters Basin, Mount Klappan, British Columbia.
This pristine ecological area needs preservation, not industrial mining operations.
Until you can provide verification of the cessation of plans to violate this area of the world, I and my circle of contacts will not be purchasing any Shell products.

Sincerely,

West End Bound

Thanks, guys.