U.N. turning the screws on Abdelrazik

Yesterday, a mere three days after the government announced it will comply with the Federal Court decision ordering it to bring Abdelrazik home, the United Nations Security Council blacklist committee decided to publish their reasons for putting him on its 1267 blacklist back in 2006. The allegations mirror similar charges posted on the U.S. Treasury Board website three years ago. What impeccable timing.

He is, they assure us, "associated with Al-Qaida, Usama bin Laden or the Taliban" and "a key member of a Montreal terrorist cell". Their case :

He attempted to go to Chechnya to fight against the Russians - twice - they say.
Really? And we're holding that against him?

He knew Ahmed Ressam, the Millenium Bomber who attempted to attack LAX in 2000.
Yes and as an avowed repudiator of terrorism, Abdelrazik testified against him for the prosecution, an act he could be forgiven for coming to regret in light of how that is turning out for him.

He told one individual that he was "personally acquainted with Osama bin Laden."

He knew Abu Zubaydah, the schizophrenic halfwit waterboarded 83 times in 2002 in order to elicit a false confession linking Sadaam and al-Qaeda that could be used to justify the US invasion of Iraq.
"That information is the fruit of torture," responded Abdelrazik's lawyer.

Abu Zubaydeh again. Abu Zubaydeh is the sad source of many allegations under torture.
Rather surprised that the UN Security Council 1267 page would have the fucking audacity to bring him up actually, but now that they have, let's go with that :

Abu Zubaydeh's lawyer, Brent Mickum :

Who is Abu Zubaydah? He was born in Saudi Arabia, but is not a Saudi citizen. He was educated in India. Following his university training, he traveled through the United States, considering possible universities where he might pursue his master's degree. In an interview with ABC, former CIA agent John Kiriakou described him as "a very friendly guy" who wrote poetry and was keen to talk about current events and compare the differences and similarities between Islam and Christianity. That has been my experience as well.

Like many other young Muslims before him, Zayn ultimately embraced the teachings of the Qur'an and traveled to Afghanistan to fight against communist insurgents who remained after the withdrawal of the Soviet army. In 1992, while fighting on the front lines, he was injured in a motor attack that left him with two pieces of shrapnel that remain embedded in his head to his day. So severe were his injuries that he lost the ability to speak for more than one year. His memory is compromised even today. He cannot remember his mother's name or picture her face. He cannot remember his father's name, but recalls that he looked like a prominent movie star in the Arab community. Although Zayn ran a news agency with a partner, he cannot remember his former partner's name.

Later, when Zayn returned to the front lines, he was told that he was no longer fit for fighting because couldn't remember how to shoot.

Zayn was never a member or a supporter of any armed forces that were allied against the United States. He had no weapon when he was taken into illegal custody. He never took up arms against the United States nor against its coalition allies. He was not picked up on a battlefield in Afghanistan at the time of his detention, but was taken into custody in Pakistan, where he was wrongfully attacked, shot, and nearly killed. So serious were his wounds that a surgeon from John Hopkins University was flown to Pakistan to perform emergency surgery to save the life of a man the Bush administration believed to be the number three man in al Qaeda."

We await the UN Security Council's explanation on why all their hardwon resolutions against torture should be laid aside to countenance the torturing of a halfwit on behalf of US colonialism.
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Abdelrazik is expected to land back in Canada on Saturday, accompanied on the flight by his lawyer, a Foreign Affairs official and two RCMP.
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Man of Steel vs Government of Silly Putty

On Friday the government adjourned for three months because they have to get started on their barbie bunfests for next fall's election and hell there's not much going on in Canada right now anyway, right?

Today we learn :

"In a significant policy shift, the Canadian government now believes that telling the country's taxpayers the future cost of the war in Afghanistan would be a threat to national security.
... Julie Jansen, the director of the military's access branch, cited "the defence of Canada or any state allied" with it, in justifying the withholding of the figures for the three next fiscal years."

Three years? WTF?

"The military's new secrecy comes after the financial cost of the mission became a major issue for several days during last fall's federal election campaign."

Right. That would the report from our fearless first-ever Parliamentary Budget Officer Kevin Page, aka Jennifer's Man 'o Steel, the guy who .. well, let's let Jennifer explain :

"Parliamentary Budget Officer Kevin Page released his accounting of the true costs of the Afghanistan War , which to nobody's surprise turned out to be somewhat higher than Stephen Harper's guestimate."

Page's first report, released during last fall's election, calculated that the cost of the Afghanistan mission not including military equipment will be about $18.1 billion by 2011.

The second, published shortly before Diamond Jim Flaherty vowed there was absolutely no chance of a deficit in 2009, projected a serious deficit for 2009.

Parliamentary Librarian William Young and House and Senate Speakers Peter Milliken and Noel Kinsella referred to these corrections of the government's mistakes as evidence that Page was "exceeding his mandate".

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....Wait for it ... don't rush it ...

Parliament wants to gut first-ever Parliamentary Budget Office's independence, say observers

"The Joint Library of Parliament Committee's report will gut Canada's first-ever Parliamentary Budget Office of its transparency and independence and is a simple power play to keep Kevin Page in line because he embarrassed the federal Department of Finance, says Parliamentary observers and some MPs.

"What they've done is put Kevin Page in a box, haven't they?" Concordia University professor Jim McLean told The Hill Times last week.
"The whole idea of the Parliamentary budget officer was to have an arm's length assessment, to have a person and a group backing up that person of highly-qualified people who could make independent assessments and do it in a transparent fashion. Independence and transparency has been stripped out of this, all together."

McLean : "Twelve people in an office embarrassed the thousand thinkers in the Department of Finance and that's where the politics of the whole thing started to work against Kevin Page."

The muzzling of Kevin Page is a bipartisan effort with both Senate Speaker Noel Kinsella and House Speaker Peter Milliken wanting him reined in :

"The parliamentary library operates on a solicitor-client basis. This means any research the library collects for MPs and senators is "privileged" and can be withheld at their request. As an adjunct of the library, Mr. Page's reports would be done for MPs and committees who then can could use the information as they want."

Privileged. Withheld at their request. As they want.

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Well it will make a nice change from all that transparency and accountability we've been dealing with lately.

McLean : "the office is going to be buried, very, very deep."

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Time for Jennifer to fire up her forces again.

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Braidwood Inquiry : It ain't over yet

Justice Thomas Braidwood is "appalled", RCMP lawyer Helen Roberts is "tearful", and the Braidwood Inquiry into Robert Dziekanski's death has been put on hold until September pending further investigation into an incriminating November 2007 email which was only turned over to the Braidwood Inquiry this week.

The email from Chief Supt. Dick Bent to RCMP Assistant Commissioner Al McIntyre :

"Finally spoke to Wayne [Supt. Wayne Rideout, head of the Integrated Homicide Investigation Team investigating Dziekanski's death] and he indicated that the members did not articulate that they saw the symptoms of excited delirium, but instead had discussed the response en route and decided that he did not comply that they would go to CEW [conducted energy weapon]."

Rideout's lawyer read a statement from his client saying the email was "simply a misunderstanding" and that that "Rideout doesn't remember saying such a thing and Bent must have been mistaken".
A tearful Roberts stated the email "was simply overlooked" and that "Bent was mistaken in his e-mail and that the officers did not formulate a plan to use the Taser as soon as possible."

I would think 25 seconds is about as "as soon as possible" as is humanly possible, plan or no plan.
All four mounties testified under oath that they did not discuss anything amongst themselves prior to taking down Robert Dziekanski with five TASER™ shots.

When the Inquiry resumes September 22 , Rideout, Bent and McIntyre will likely be required to testify. Will Bent just say : Yeah, I was mistaken ?

Does this make you any happier about the sweeping new powers the Cons propose to give the RCMP to "collect information about Canadian Internet users without a warrant, and activate tracking devices in their cellphones and cars"?
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Sources : CBC, Natty Post, CP.
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Cons agree to bring Abdelrazik home

Justice Minister Rob Nicholson announced in Question Period today that the government will comply with, rather than appeal, the Federal Court decision ordering it to repatriate Abdelrazik,
stranded in Sudan since 2003.
Good.
As Chris Selley writes : "It's all over but the thousands of unanswered questions"
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Here's one.
How much did this July 2006 US Embassy memo figure in extending Abdelrazik's exile?

"US Embassy DCM John Dickson made a demarche this afternoon re Abdelrazik.
... He had been asked to deliver a message from the White House, specifically from senior levels of the Homeland Security Council. [US] Ambassador Wilkins might be calling Ministers Toves [sic] and Day tomorrow. Frances Townsend might also be calling.

Dickson's main message was that the US would like Canada's assistance in putting together a criminal case against Abdelrazik so that he could be charged in the US. The US had information on Abdelrazik but at this point, it was not enough to charge him; the same might be true for Canada. If Canadian police or security agencies shared what they had, it might prove to be enough for the US to proceed, as the threshold for prosecution there was lower than here."

Days later the US added Abdelrazik to the UN Security Council terrorist blacklist, despite not having sufficient evidence to charge him under their 'lower threshold'.

And just so we're clear here - the threshold for action was spectacularly lower.
Recall that Maher Arar was renditioned to Syria the day after a wounded 14 year old Omar Khadr in Bagram prison was shown photos of Arar and coached into saying that "he looked familiar", and the US evidence against Abdelrazik appears to be the unfortunate spinoff derived from waterboarding a schizophrenic halfwit 83 times in 2002 in order to elicit a false confession linking Sadaam and al-Qaeda that could be used to justify the US invasion of Iraq.

Here's a question :
We don't know what correspodence transpired after the memo above, written three years after Arar returned to Canada and during the time we were hearing advance notice of the O'Connor report which would clear him of all terrorism allegations two months later. Was Abdelrazik kept in exile at the Canadian Embassy in Sudan to avoid a similar debacle by someone who decided he was safer left there than he would be back in Canada?
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Consumated : a blue ribbon panel. Oooooh.

The ConservaLiberal coalition in action :

Walkom : "For the Liberals, the time is never right. They come up with endless excuses for never forcing an election on the minority Harper government: They don't have enough money; they don't have enough candidates; their leader is too new; the polls are inauspicious; the weather is too warm; the weather is too cold..."

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"Then they were heroes. They were heroes."

Another brown Canadian citizen has been held in the US for 5½ years without charge, 4 of them in solitary confinement, for "allegedly assisting al-Qaeda", and his lawyer worries that he will suffer the same fate at the hands of the Canadian government as Omar Khadr and Abousfian Abdelrazik.

CBC : Ottawa not saying if Canadian linked to al-Qaeda can return

"Last month, U.S. federal prosecutors offered to drop the five charges of material terrorism if Warsame pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of conspiracy to support al-Qaeda."

Mohammed Warsame has accepted the offer - and after four years in solitary in the US, so would I - but Warsame does not deny his association with al-Qaeda. In 2000, he left Toronto for Afghanistan to train with al-Quaeda. Disillusioned by what he found there, he returned to Canada in March 2001 - six months before 9/11 - was picked up by the FBI in Minneapolis in 2003, and has been held in custody without trial ever since.

As his lawyer puts it : "Like many young Muslims, he was attracted by the notion of an Islamic state he believed was a sort of utopia."

Reading this I was reminded of a Chris Sands interview with the wife of an American diplomat stationed in Kabul. She spoke of her husband accompanying the Afghan resistance on their missions across the border against Soviet troops and of her friendship with fundamentalist Mujahideen leaders.
"Then they were heroes. They were heroes," she said.

Yes. They were praised as heroes, we now know, for being used by the US to embroil the Soviet Union in a crippling unwinnable war. But what is not often mentioned is the effect all that hero worship and propaganda in the western press would have had upon young Muslim teenagers in Canada and the US.
Warsame's crime was to have believed it.
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Premiers, governors endorse North American energy super-corridor

"Forget the Persian Gulf: Fort McMurray to Port Arthur, Texas is new powerhouse"

Western premiers and U. S. governors on Sunday hailed their push to develop a cross-border Western Energy Corridor.

Saskatchewan Premier Brad Wall, Alberta's Ed Stelmach, and Manitoba's Gary Doer were in Utah for the Western Governors' Association annual conference "to explore a broader energy relationship" with their American counterparts.

Stelmach said the western governors are very supportive of the corridor concept.
Montana Governor Brian Schweitzer declared the oilsands--the second-largest proven oil reserves in the world--are critically important to U. S. energy security and a major component for a powerhouse energy corridor.
"The most important energy corridor on the planet is no longer the Persian Gulf. It runs from the oilsands, Fort McMurray to Port Arthur, Texas," Schweitzer said.

"A large part of energy independence is going to be dependent upon developing the oilsands."
Colorado Governor Bill Ritter agreed, saying "it's both western parts of Canada and the United States that can play a role in energy independence."

Wall and Stelmach are scheduled to meet with U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu today :

"Chu has also lauded the potential of the oilsands, saying recently it’s an important piece of U.S. energy security.

Happy to oblige, I'm sure.

What's this Western Energy Corridor about again?

An Overview of the Western Energy Corridor Initiative

"The United States faces an unprecedented threat to its economic and national security due to its dependence on foreign oil and gas. Given this threat, the U.S. must secure and steward itsown domestic energy supplies more effectively.
The Office of Naval Petroleum and Oil Shale Reserves is proposing a major technical study under the auspices of the Energy Policy Act of 2005, Section 369(i) to perform a regional analysis of the development potential of the Western Inland “Energy Corridor”.

~ Thomas Woods, Idaho National Laboratory - the U.S. Energy Department’s main nuclear laboratory

Last spring, the Alberta and US governments signed an agreement to jointly research the use of atomic power for tarsands development. The Alberta Research Council and the U.S. Energy Department’s main nuclear laboratory, Idaho National Laboratory, announced they will collaborate on "the potential application of current and future nuclear energy technology".

So to recap :
~The US Dept of Energy funds their main nuclear laboratory, the INL, to come up with the Western Energy Corridor Initiative.
~Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba sign on to it via the Western Governors' Association.
~Alberta and US governments sign an agreement for future nuking of the tarsands via the INL and Alberta Research Council.
~Stelmach and Wall are meeting with the US Dept of Energy Secretary today.

I remember when we were just worrying about the NAFTA Superhighway.
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The late great Great Lakes

Bob alerts us to this CBC headline : Canada, U.S. will renegotiate Great Lakes water treaty

"Canada and the United States will renegotiate the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Saturday in Niagara Falls, Ont.
Clinton, who was joined by Foreign Minister Lawrence Cannon, crossed the border for celebrations marking 100 years of the Boundary Waters Treaty between the two countries.
"We have to update it to reflect new knowledge, new technologies and, unfortunately, new threats," Clinton said.
"The rivers, the lakes, the streams, the watersheds along our boundary do not belong to one nation, they belong to all of us," she said at celebrations overlooking the falls."

This sort of "all your water is belong to us" chat freaks us right out as we immediately imagine Canadian water being shipped south so that desert communities in the southern US can continue to hose down their driveways twice a day. And so it should.

But the US State Dept transcript, the DFAIT website, and tv news video have Clinton using the rather less alarming term "amend" rather than "renegotiate" to describe the new talks as needed to update bilateral action on "pollution, increased population and urbanization, land use practices, invasive species, new chemicals and the impacts of climate change."

Well it is the Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement after all and certainly attention to these issues is long overdue. Obama has earmarked $475 million for Great Lakes rejuvenation, which is $475 million more than we have.
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But we would have been a lot happier if Lawrence Cannon had not had to stop himself today from referring to Van Loan as the Minister of Homeland Security in a toadying speech that included the comment : "Our country’s prosperity and security are inseparable from those of the United States".

We also would have been happier if both his and Clinton's remarks on water quality did not segue mid-sentence into Canadian complaints about "Buy American" provisions - as if one were dependent on the other, as if "amending" the Great Lakes agreement was being offered up by Canada in exchange for a US rollback on "Buy American".
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WATERLIFE - the NFB interactive site for an amazing film by Kevin McMahon
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Only $24 billion, you say...

Two weeks ago The Star published this rogue's gallery of the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board and the extravagant bonuses they received despite having lost $24 billion in taxpayers' money.

Yesterday in the HoC : NDP Wayne Marston :

"...according to economist Toby Sanger, in the last 10 years, the CPP fund would have made $13 billion more than it did if it had been invested in government bonds, rather than in a diversified portfolio of equities, real estate and bonds.

In the fiscal year 2009, the losses in the fund wiped out four years of contributions..."

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Four years of contributions...

Naturally the CPPIB defence team immediately rushed to its defence :

Ted Menzies, Con : "We do not want political interference in the remuneration of this board. They have done a very good job... We are absolutely on the right track"

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Dean Del Mastro, Con : "The NDP has a history of advocating explicitly for political interference in the CPPIB. That is inappropriate.

I actually believe that the CPP Investment Board is very well managed"

Steve : "I actually noticed, by the way, that the board, in fact, did drop a total compensation for its executives by 31 per cent last year."

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A new info war - yeah, that's the ticket in Afghanistan

US plans push for 'information war' in Afghanistan

"The United States plans to devote more money and manpower to the "information war" in Afghanistan as NATO-led forces battle an aggressive media campaign by Taliban insurgents, officials said on Friday.

US and NATO officials increasingly see public relations as crucial to turning the tide against the militants who have successfully spread their message through radio, the Internet and mobile phones.
The emphasis on public relations comes amid concern among US and NATO officials about the effect of civilian casualties from US-led air strikes."

2,118 innocents died last year - an increase of 40%, according to the U.N. Mission in Afghanistan

"This makes the 2008 civilian death toll the highest of any year since… the fall of the Taliban regime at the end of 2001" : annual report for the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights.

"Air-strikes were responsible" for nearly two-thirds of those deaths, and "remain by far the most deadly tactic used by pro-Government forces."

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US response? 45 new communications officers and "securing mobile phone towers" :

"US naval officer, Admiral Gregory Smith has been assigned to oversee stepped up communications efforts under the new commander of US and NATO forces in Afghanistan, Lieutenant General Stanley McChrystal.
The goal of such efforts was to promote a lively debate among Afghans and not to force feed American ideas, he told the Council on Foreign Relations.
Apart from carrying out more ambitious media campaigns, US military and intelligence agencies are reportedly working to jam Taliban radio broadcasts in Pakistan and Afghanistan ... "
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UPDATE : Back here at home, The Star is running the tragic story of Warrant Officer Perreault, a Canadian vet of that war with PTSD :

"a new system of compensating injured soldiers means Perreault gets not a cent for having post-traumatic stress disorder. His numerous other injuries maxed out allowable payout, leaving several injuries uncompensated"

This shit makes me absolutely fucking livid. What a fucking disgrace.

Perrault has a supportive wife who understands why he blackens her eyes and strangles her in his sleep.

Maybe some of you "Support the War" folks out there would like to shift some of that "support" to the actual people we send to Afghanistan to prop up US imperialism and Steve's pretensions to a "role on the world stage".

Enough.... enough...

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