Isn't It Time Muslims Defended Islam?

If you're never heard of Takfiris you soon will for they're the Muslim equivalent of ninjas and they're about to really stir things up in Pakistan.

Like the legendary ninja, the Takfiri is an assassin, but one religiously motivated to slaughter fellow Muslims they judge apostate for failing to embrace Islam strictly as revealed by Muhammed and his companions. Anyone deviating from the path is considered no longer Muslim and, hence, an infidel deserving of assassination.

Asia Times Online warns that a Takfiri force is about to be unleashed in Pakistan:

On the one side are US-backed President Pervez Musharraf and political parties such as Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party (now headed by her 19-year-old son Bilawal) and Nawaz Sharif's Pakistan Muslim League.

Against them are al-Qaeda ideologues such as Egyptian scholar Sheikh Essa, who are determined to stamp their vision on the country and its neighbor, Afghanistan.

Prior to 2003, the entire al-Qaeda camp in the North Waziristan and South Waziristan tribal areas of Pakistan was convinced that its battle should be fought in Afghanistan against the foreign troops there, and not in Pakistan against its Muslim army.

That stance was changed by Sheikh Essa, who had taken up residence in the town of Mir Ali in North Waziristan, where his sermons raised armies of takfiris (those who consider all non-practicing Muslims to be infidels). He was convinced that unless Pakistan became the Taliban's (and al-Qaeda's) strategic depth, the war in Afghanistan could not be won.

In a matter of a few years, his ideology has taken hold and all perceived American allies in Pakistan have become prime targets. Local adherents of the takfiri ideology, like Sadiq Noor and Abdul Khaliq, have grown strong and spread the word in North Waziristan. Former members of jihadi outfits such as Jaish-i-Mohammed, Laskhar-i-Toiba and Lashkar-i-Jhangvi have gathered in North Waziristan and declared Sheikh Essa their ideologue.

This is the beginning of the new world of takfiriat, reborn in North Waziristan many decades after having first emerged in Egypt in the late 1960s. On the advice of Sheikh Essa, militants have tried several times to assassinate Musharraf, launched attacks on the Pakistani military, and then declared Bhutto a target.

This nest of takfiris and their intrigues was on the radar of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the day after Bhutto's killing Sheikh Essa was targeted by CIA Predator drones in his home in North Waziristan. According to Asia Times Online contacts, he survived, but was seriously wounded. Sheikh Essa had only recently recovered from a stroke which had left him bedridden.

Someone has to smash this radical, fundamentalist threat. The West already has its hands full in Iraq and Afghanistan. Venturing into Pakistan could be a terrible debacle. Isn't it time the very nations next in line to be targetted by these extremists - countries like Saudi Arabia and Egypt - finally took some responsibility for defending Islam and moderate Muslim states from the ravages of these Islamist Jihadis? It's not as though these countries don't already feel threatened by the Wahabis, they do. The capricious Sauds have been playing both sides of this street for so long that they're vulnerable to the very monster they themselves empowered. It's not only Pakistan's survival that's at stake, it's their own.

Taliban Getting Outside Help. Ya Think?

General Rick Hillier has let the cat out of the bag, the Taliban is getting outside help.

Hillier said the Afghan insurgents are getting help from other radical groups, including those fighting in Iraq. Roadside booby traps in Afghanistan, also known as improvised explosive devices or IEDs, are becoming more sophisticated and deadly, in part because of outside help.

"We do see some of the tactics, perhaps, that do come out of Iraq," he said. "It's hard to say exactly . . . but we are pretty confident that some of the tactics in use of IEDs . . . has come out of Iraq, without question."

Support goes beyond expertise in explosives.

"Do we see foreign fighters in Afghanistan? We do.

"We see Chechens . . . and we see Arabs and Egyptians, Arabs from a variety of nations. We see Algerians and Moroccans, not in big numbers, but we do see those folks there."

Hillier seems to have made no mention of the (rabidly radical Sunni) Taliban being fed improvised explosive devices by (fiercely fundamentalist Shiite) Iran. This allegation was made by Hillier's boss, DefMin Pmackay, in Kandahar on Christmas day. Curious omission, that.

The general said that our glorious success in Afghanistan could have a stabilizing effect across the entire region - even in placid Pakistan next door. Yeah, right.

It's not that I don't expect Hillier to be top cheerleader for the Afghan mission. He hatched the idea and then sold it to the pols after all. What I find troubling is that he utterly shies away from discussing the metrics of just how well we're doing.

How well are we doing in Afghanistan? Who knows? How does one tell? Just what does winning look like? What does losing look like? How many areas in Kandahar province are free from the prospect of Taliban infiltration or attack? Maybe that's not a good measure. How many towns and villages can resist Taliban intimidation? That's probably not a good one either. How much territory do we control this year compared to last year and the year before? Move along, nothing to see here.

I guess we could use body counts, or at least we could if we had any reliable means to differentiate the civilians we kill from the insurgents we kill. Then again, body counts aren't much use if the enemy is able to readily replace his losses and keep recruiting and training new fighters as needed.

Hillier hasn't just lowered the bar, he's gotten rid of it entirely. The goal he initially set - way back when he talked our leaders into approving "the mission" - was to drive the Taliban out of Kandahar province. It was to kill a few dozen "scumbags." So just how has the general met his own stated objectives? Well, he's certainly killed a few dozen "scumbags" and a few dozen civilians to boot. But he's not driven the Taliban out of Kandahar. To the contrary, a few dozen have grown into many hundreds at least, possibly more, and they're not "out" of Kandahar but they are "throughout" Kandahar. The Taliban force has grown by leaps and bounds since we first arrived and yet we're still fielding the same minuscule battle group to fight them.

We've got some very important decisions to make this year including whether to extend "the mission" past its scheduled end in 2009. It's going to be a tough decision. Nobody in NATO wants in and yet no one wants to be the first to bail out either. The Dutch just extended their commitment to mid-2010 and I'm very suspicious that their incremental extension was taken in the hope that we would get out first so they didn't look quite so bad.

We've got important decisions to take and not much time to mull them over. Now, more than ever, we need some plain talk and clear direction from Rick Hillier. He either has to show us how to make this thing work, with clear and precise objectives, or he has to admit he hasn't got a clue about winning in Kandahar. I think he'll do everything he can to duck the tough questions that only he can address in hope that the whole thing can be blamed on feckless politicians.

Seven More Months of Bush, Yippee!

Here's something to celebrate tonight - the end of the Bush regime. Seven long years and counting, seven more months to go. Why so soon? Because Congress will recess for the 4th of July celebrations and that'll be it until the next president takes office. There'll probably be a few appropriations bills passed but there won't be any real legislative initiatives churned through Congress, the books will be closed on them if they aren't already.

Bush is going to try to push some muddled, Middle East agenda, but those who matter in that region are already waiting to see who will be the next occupant of the Oval Office. That's the person who matters to them now, not George w. Bush.

Then there are the wars. Afghanistan and Iraq remain in tatters and now Pakistan looms large as the next hot spot (and we thought it was going to be Iran - how silly). I expect Bush will opt for the security of military rule while making all the appropriate noises about democracy and civilian rule in Islamabad. When the going gets tough the Bushies look for tough guys, not democracy activists.

All things considered, I suspect the Frat Boy president will be glad to see the day where he can vacate the premises and leave his successor the job of cleaning up his neo-con, foreign policy incontinence.

If there's one legislative battle of interest, it may be Bush's initiative to make his tax cuts, scheduled to lapse in 2010, permanent.

So, raise a glass tonight to a better future - for Washington and the world - and don't forget that this year we can also celebrate the 4th of July!

Mexican Army Disarms Cops - Again

This time it's El Rosarito's police force that's been disarmed after an attempt on the life of its police chief raised suspicions the force had been infiltrated by drug traffickers. From The Guardian:

The guns from the El Rosarito force will be tested to see if they were used in recent crimes, including an incident in which hooded gunmen walked through the local security chief's offices shooting out computers and telephones, and leaving one person dead. The officers will also undergo "trust tests" expected to include lie-detector sessions and drug screening.

The security chief and local mayor have been assigned personal security entourages of dozens of soldiers, while the army has taken over everyday patrolling duties in the town of 160,000 next to Tijuana.

"We recognise that the enemy is inside our house and for this reason we are purging our ranks," the head of the state police, Daniel de la Rosa, told reporters.

The newspaper El Universal has put the total of execution-style murders for 2007 at 2,673, 20% more than 2006.

Galbraith Writes Off Pakistan

Peter Galbraith, writing in The Guardian, doubts that Pakistani democracy will survive the assassination of Benazir Bhutto.

Galbraith who has vast experience of the region as a former Senate Foreign Relations committee staffer and US diplomat believes that the Pakistani military will prevail instead.

"For all its flaws, the PPP is Pakistan's only true national institution. As well as overwhelming support in the Bhutto family's home province of Sindh, it has substantial support in Punjab and North-West Frontier Province. Like many south Asian political parties, it is a family affair, but it has an enduring platform: opposition to military rule.

Pakistan's army has long defined itself as the guardian of the nation, and successive generals have used this role as their excuse to seize and hold power. But the army is not a national institution. Historically, the Punjab has produced 90% of the officer corps while the Sindh, with 25% of Pakistan's population, is essentially unrepresented. Sindhis tend to see army rule as equivalent to Punjabi rule. The Bhutto killing sparked widespread attacks on federal property in Sindh and could galvanise separatist sentiment in the province.

Benazir was an extraordinarily gifted politician. She was a brilliant strategist who focused not only on finding a way back to power for a third time but also on constructing a moderate coalition - including power-sharing with Pervez Musharraf - that could defeat extremism, make peace with India and thus create conditions that would get the army out of politics for good.

But the larger problem is the Pakistani military. Pakistan's ruling generals have an almost unbroken record of sacrificing the national interest for their personal interest. Musharraf is not as bloodthirsty as his predecessor Zia ul-Haq but is no less keen on power.
Since Musharraf has certainly read the handwriting on the wall and yet still intends to stay in power, there is not much foreign leaders can do, in effect, to encourage his departure. Many Pakistanis - and most Sindhis - believe Musharraf and the army had a role in the Bhutto killing, which took place in a garrison city. Musharraf cannot be trusted to conduct an impartial investigation of the murder of his top rival. He has sacked Pakistan's independent-minded judges and imprisoned its lawyers."

Galbraith contends the US and Britain should press for an independent, United Nations investigation of the assassination.

"The Bhutto killing is tearing Pakistan apart. A UN investigation can help calm passions, but only the permanent departure of the army from power can provide a hope - and it is only a hope - of saving the country."

Safeguarding Privacy

Here's another reason why Canada is a great place to live. According to a survey by Privacy International, Canada remains a leading nation in protecting the privacy of its citizens.

From CanWest News Service:

"The 2007 rankings indicate an overall worsening of privacy protection across the world," says an overview of Privacy International's findings on the group's website.

The report describes "an increasing trend amongst governments to archive data on the geographic, communications and financial records of all their citizens and residents.

"This trend leads to the conclusion that all citizens, regardless of legal status, are under suspicion," the report states.

The countries that received the highest marks for protecting individual privacy in 2007 were Greece, Romania and Canada.

However the news wasn't all good for Canada.

Last year this country was described as having "significant protections and safeguards." The new ranking says Canada has "some safeguards but weakened protections."

The lowest ranking countries in the survey were Malaysia, Russia and China.

The United States, which has been criticized for its domestic surveillance as part of its war on terrorism, joined the United Kingdom on the list of nations described as "endemic surveillance societies" - the ranking's worst category.

The Next Leader of Pakistan?

The assassination of Benazir Bhutto has plunged Pakistan into turmoil. Her Pakistan People's Party was always a one-woman band so there is no natural successor to step into her shoes. That leaves Sharif and Musharraf. Of the two, Mushie is probably the strongest but is he strong enough?

What happens if Pakistan falls to a leader the nation cannot adequately support? It may fall back on the time-honoured alternative - military rule. That would mean that Musharraf's own, freshly-minted army leader, Ashfaq Kiyani, could step into his boss's old spot.

Kiyani is not only a career soldier from Punjab but he was also his nation's spymaster as former head of the Interservice Intelligence Agency (ISI). It's widely believed that Musharraf chose Kiyani to take over as head of the armed forces primarily because of his loyalty to Mushie but now that loyalty may be severely tested.

Musharraf's power is waning and, in Pakistan, that's not a good thing when political power is always shared with military power. As Mushie declines, Kiyani's position is ascendant. Some analysts are now of the opinion that, if the unrest against Musharraf isn't quieted soon, the army may "invite" him to step aside so that Kiyani can assume total control.

It's also reported that Kiyani has strong links with Washington so he may been seen as the best option to put down unrest.

The High Price of Time Squandered, Opportunities Lost

Penny wise, pound foolish. An old English truism about how a person can be utterly focused on saving a few pence but be wholly blind to wasting pound upon pound.

Squandered. That may be a fitting epitaph for the West's hapless adventure in Afghanistan. Opportunities squandered, treasure squandered, lives squandered - all in the name of being penny wise.

We wandered into the very heartland of insurgencies whose backward people have driven out one powerful invader after another for centuries - a perfect record in fact - and we thought we could do it on the cheap with what amounts to barely more than a token force when measured against the enormity of the challenge.

Washington and its Foreign Legion sallied forth in the arrogant belief our inherent superiority would bend these peasants to our will. Six years later and our military leaders still boast that the insurgents cannot fight us "head to head." That's as irrelevant and foolish as saying the Taliban is doomed because it has no submarines.

Memo to Washington, Ottawa and Brussels - these guys didn't fight "head to head" when they drove out Alexander or the British army (twice) or the Soviet army. They don't fight to lose, they fight to win and they know what works where, judging by the idiotic statements that still issue from our side, we don't.

Six lost years.

We got it wrong from the outset, confusing pushing on an open door with great military victory. The Taliban and the Northern Alliance had fought each other to utter exhaustion before 9/11. They were reduced to trench warfare that largely consisted of lobbing a few tank shells at each other every day. All our vaunted Western firepower really was little more than the straw that broke the camel's back and sent the Taliban retreating to the hills. As military victories go, that's about as meagre as they come and yet we were in the mood for celebrating great victory over the villains of 9/11 so that's exactly what we did. And so it was entered into the history books.

And then we proceded to turn the country on its head and miraculously transform it into a wonderful, Western-style democracy. We held an election, ensuring that our guy won. Then we sent the Foreign Legion into the field in pitiful numbers to hold the fort.

Do you remember General Rick Hillier swaggering about and proclaiming how his 2,500 strong ground force was going to Kandahar province to "kill scumbags" whose numbers he assured us were a mere few dozen? It didn't matter that he had a mere one rifle for every 30 sq. kms. of turf he'd undertaken to defend because there were only a few dozen bad guys and they were already all but whipped, right? As the words spilled out of his mouth they all sounded so confident, so convincing.

Six years later.

How things have changed. The vermin we thought exterminated have multiplied, sharpened their teeth and nails, and returned to plague us.

Our "just add water and stir" approach to building Afghan democracy has achieved every result predictable including insinuation into senior levels of the government of warlords, drug lords and even some known to collaborate with the insurgency. Is it any surprise that a horde like this would produce a national police service that is utterly corrupt and predatory to the civilian population?

That government is the foundation for everything we seek to accomplish in Afghanistan, whether civilian or military. And yet we simply look the other way lest we have to confront the reality that this foundation is rotten and crumbling. But, then again, this is Afghanistan and, even if you turn your back to one failure you then turn your face toward another - whether it is the fields of opium poppies, police banditry or a population utterly vulnerable and compromised by a resurgent guerrilla campaign.

Now we have the neighbouring state, Pakistan, thrown into even greater upheaval by the assassination of Bhutto. It is this state, where we're also promoting an "add water and stir" democracy, that serves as a refuge, staging area and training ground for our own insurgency.

Six years on, we've squandered lives, we've squandered treasure but, most critically, we've squandered time we never could afford to waste. We have reached the bottom of our bag of tricks and have now produced what is gradually becoming a permanent culture shaped by medieval feudalism, crime, corruption and conflict. The longer it is allowed to persist the more entrenched it becomes and the fewer options remain to us to change it to our liking.

The northern warlords - once our supposed allies - see what's coming and are re-arming, fully intending to call home their ethnic segments of the Afghan army when the time comes. They've lost faith in Kabul and Karzai, in the US and NATO, and they have a strong sense of what's ahead. Washington and Brussels may tell us that the mission is a generational thing but find one group in Afghanistan willing to wait that long.

Stability, Then Democracy - Eventually, Maybe, Perhaps

Is Pakistan in any condition to attempt the leap into the uncertain arms of democracy? Despite the assassination of the one person most capable of attempting to bring her volatile country in that direction, the Musharraf government continues to be pressured to hold national elections scheduled in less than two weeks.

Why?

Pakistan's military will not tolerate weak and ineffective civilian rule which is about all that is possible in the country's current state of disarray. What can be gained from putting Pakistan through a repeat of the Zia and Musharraf coups?

Even Bhutto's own PPP party was so fragile that, without her, there is no obvious leader to take her place. It was a one-woman band. That leaves her former rival, Sharif, who has already declared his party will boycott the elections. That seems to leave the way clear for Musharraf's bunch to win and what conceivable credibility will invest them in these circumstances?

Even without the existential challenges from al-Qaeda and the Taliban and other, homegrown Jihadist and Islamist groups, civilian rule for Pakistan is a dubious prospect. One major reason is the pervasive influence of the Pakistani military, not only in the nation's politics but in its economy.

Not only does the military have huge sums invested in businesses and real estate, but less active military officers commonly work in the economic sector. Retired members of the military have many business advantages, especially when competing for government contracts.

The Pakistani military is also able to acquire private land and redistribute it for its own personnel, where military-owned construction and transportation companies monopolize service through preferential awarding of government grants.

In Pakistan there are over 90 military foundations providing a wide variety of goods and services. There are also undocumented ventures such as bakeries and gas stations, which are set up in communities where they are able to undercut local prices.

Additionally, the actual military possesses financial autonomy and capacity to redistribute resources. The Pakistani military possesses considerable financial autonomy and is able to use the principle of eminent domain-generally used in America during the creation of highways, or public buildings-to acquire public land and redistribute it to their personnel.

Currently, the Pakistani military receives 10 percent of newly available land. The military received three million acres in 11 provinces in the last few years - just over 3.5 billion American dollars worth of property. As a result, there is less land for peasants to farm.

Military officials in Pakistan will aggressively defend these types of actions, saying that their business ventures are more effective and successful than private ones, and that that they are trying to raise money to better care for their soldiers.

Establishing legitimate democracy in Pakistan will require wholesale reform of the country's military, prying away its economic clout. Until then the most that can be achieved at the ballot box is the creation of a weaker and ultimately secondary, civilian administration. A civilian government that rules only at the sufferance of an autonomous military is pretty much doomed from the start.

Israel Clears Israel Over Cluster Bomb Attacks, Quelle Surprise!

The Israeli military has notified the Israeli military that it has completely exonerated the Israeli military in its use of cluster bombs in Lebanon during its failed skirmish with Hezbollah in 2006.

Israel's military advocate-general, Brig-Gen Avihai Mendelblit found the, " majority of the cluster munitions were fired at open and uninhabited areas", but in some cases the military hit residential areas, responding to rocket attacks by Hezbollah. In Maroon a-Ras, the bombs were used to "allow the evacuation" of Israeli soldiers.

Amnon Vidan of Amnesty International in Israel said he was not surprised by the decision, noting that in such cases, rather than have the army investigate itself, it was better that an international investigation take place.

"The amount of cluster bombs used in civilian areas, as well as testimonies by soldiers about the use of the bombs, and Israel's refusal to hand over to the UN maps of the locations where it fired the bombs to help demining efforts," all point to different conclusions than those reached by the military, he said.

In August 2006, Jan Egeland, then the UN undersecretary-general for humanitarian affairs and emergency relief coordinator, had harshly condemned Israel's use of cluster bombs, calling it "shocking and completely immoral."

"Ninety percent of the cluster bomb strikes occurred in the last 72 hours of the conflict, when we knew there would be a resolution," he said, adding that populated areas, such as homes and agricultural land were now covered with unexploded bomblets.

China Likes "Intensity Based" Emissions Policy

China has released a policy paper that essentially tells the West to back off in its demands that the peoples' republic curb its carbon emissions. From the Washington Post:

"China [claims it] should not be forced to put a limit on greenhouse gas emissions at this stage of its economic development, as urged by environmental activists and some Western governments.

Even now, with an economy growing at more than 10 percent a year, the 1.3 billion Chinese use only half the world's per-capita energy-use average for hydroelectric power and only one-fifteenth of the per-capita average for oil and natural gas, it said.

"China is a developing country in the primary stage of industrialization, and with low accumulative emissions," the report added, referring to its long-term average.

China, which is the world's second-largest coal producer with 2.21 billion tons mined in 2006, will continue to use large amounts in the foreseeable future, the report said.

With reserves of 1,034.5 billion tons, or 13 percent of the world's known total in 2006, the country cannot afford to ignore this traditional energy source despite the pollution it produces. But at the same time, the report said, the government is gradually reducing the percentage of China's energy consumption that comes from coal."

What the Chinese appear to be saying is that they're going to continue to use billions of tons of coal each year but that, as their economy grows, the percentage (intensity) of coal use will decline. Neat, eh? Sounds like it could've been written by Sharper himself.

Why Karzai Expelled Euro Diplomats

In case you missed it, Afghan president Hamid Karzai has ordered diplomats representing the EU and UN to leave his country. The official line is that these two - Michael Semple, acting European Union mission head, and Mervyn Patterson, a senior UN official - were endangering Afghanistan security by negotiating with the Taliban.

Talking to the Taliban? Please. Who isn't talking to the Taliban? Leave it to The Guardian to put Karzai's motives into perspective:

On the face of it they have been threatened with deportation for talking to Taliban leaders in Musa Qala, the town retaken by British and Afghan troops just before Christmas. The suspicion is that they have actually become caught in a political battle, perhaps involving the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai. Faced with the probable arrival of Paddy Ashdown as a UN envoy, the president may have wanted to show he retains sovereign authority by expelling officials from the bodies Lord Ashdown is supposed to oversee, the UN and the EU. The Afghan president is unlikely to have been shocked by the fact that the men were in contact with Taliban leaders, since he has done the same thing. Nor is Lord Ashdown opposed. Writing in the Guardian in July, he argued that "success is not measured in dead Taliban ... modern war is fought among the people ... the battle for public opinion is the crucial battle".

Indeed, the idea of an opposition force that can clearly be identified as the Taliban, and which should either be attacked or talked to, according to preference, is misguided. In a country fragmented along tribal, regional and religious lines, and with no history of central command, concepts such as government and insurgency are only partly helpful. British forces in Helmand province have been fighting Taliban soldiers, but the difference between them and local leaders is not always large.

The Taliban is at times as much a way of mind as it is a coordinated force, and to overcome it will need more than military might. It will require local negotiation and reassurance of just the kind the Secret Intelligence Service is said to have been carrying out."

Since I asked the question of who isn't talking to the Taliban, I suppose I should take a stab at answering it. I guess that would be our own Furious Leader, Little Stevie Harpo, and his trained chimp/waiter, Peter MacKay. The idea that the Taliban aren't going to be defeated in battle isn't one that passes through their wee minds. No, stay the course, for Sharper and PmacKay. Beats the hell out of having to come up with a workable solution, eh?

In a rare interview, Harper said he doesn't understand whether Canadians appreciate what is at stake in Afghanistan. "So I don't know whether Canadians do – or don't – understand. I think Canadians are deeply troubled by the casualties." What does he mean he doesn't know? This is the guy who spends vasty more on polling than any prime minister before him. Harper knows that Canadians are fed up with "the mission" and that he can take his full share of the credit for that. It's been his job, after all, to lead Canadians on this one, to persuade them to support this adventure. He's failed, completely, but - apparently lacking the ability to accept responsibility for his failure - and with no one else he can pin it on, he's reduced to saying he "doesn't know."

Bhutto Attacked, Possibly Assassinated

The New York Times, citing Pakistan's state news agency, reports that Pakistani opposition leader Benazir Bhutto has been killed.

The paper says Bhutto died in a gun and suicide bomb attack while attending a rally near Islamabad. She was taken to hospital where doctors tried to resuscitate her for 35-minutes before she was declared dead. The cause of death was given as shrapnel wounds.

The loss of Bhutto appears to leave Pervez Musharraf virtually unopposed in national elections set for next month.

Behind Karzai's Back

It looks as though Britain is having second thoughts about the viability of the Karzai government and its prospects for ever putting an end to the Taliban threat.

Afghanistan has just ordered two Westerners out, identified in the Sydney Morning Herald as "the acting European Union mission head, Michael Semple, of Ireland, and a senior UN official, Marvin Patterson, of Britain." An Afghan government source is said to have told the paper that the officials not only met with Taliban representatives but also gave them money.

Now word is out that British intelligence agents have also been dealing with the Taliban.

AGENTS from MI6 held secret talks with Taliban leaders despite a pledge by the British Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, that his country would not negotiate with terrorists.
Officers from the Secret Intelligence Service - MI6's official name - held discussions, or jirgas, with senior insurgents several times in the northern summer.

"The SIS officers were understood to have sought peace directly with the Taliban, with them coming across as some sort of armed militia," a source said. The British would also provide "mentoring" for the Taliban.

The disclosure came just two weeks after the Prime Minister told the House of Commons: "We will not enter into any negotiations with these people."

Meanwhile, Canadian defence minister Peter MacKay dished up turkey in Kandahar. Go get'em, Pete!

Peter MacKay Fingers Iran

Peter MacKay accuses Iran of giving weapons to the Taliban for use against NATO forces in Afghanistan.

MacKay, who is not known to suffer the burden of excessive credibility, failed to explain why Shiite Iran would be interested in helping a fundamentalist Sunni radical group in neighbouring Afghanistan. Nor did he provide any evidence of Iranian weaponry nor any credible military expert to verify his claim.

If MacKay is to be believed, however, it's curious that he didn't explain just what he's going to do about the threat to Canadian forces. Maybe he and Harpo ought to fly right into Tehran and tear a strip off the mullahs and ayatollahs who run Iran. Perhaps he ought to seal off the Iranian border. Surely he's got to do something. Or not.

A few months back I saw an interview with a Canadian army ordinance expert who lamented that there was such an abundance of discarded explosives and other materials littering Afghanistan that the only key part to build IEDs, or Improvised Explosive Devices, in short supply were the household batteries required to power the detonators. Those, he said, were being brought in quite easily from Pakistan.

Keeping the Brit Army in the Dark

A former employee of a British security contractor in Iraq says his company deliberately withheldfrom British officials information about the infiltration and corruption of the police services.

The company, ArmorGroup, was hired to train Iraqi police in the Basra area. One of its employees, turned whistle-blower, says the company told its employees not to pass on intelligence they acquired in their daily visits to the Iraqi police stations. Colin Williamson told British MPs about a source he cultivated within the Iraq police.

"This officer was a brilliant source of information in the Basra region. At one stage I was moved to a very dangerous place in the city called the Old State Building. This officer used to let me know in advance when there would be a mortar attack on the base. Each time he gave me prior warning I would go to a certain company commander, a major in the British army, and in turn warn him about it."

He added: 'I am convinced this man's information saved lives and yet our official line was not to tell the military about any intelligence we came across regarding the police and the militias. He was so well informed that on one occasion when he rang he said: 'You are about to be attacked at any moment' and before he could put down the phone the mortars came in."

...we were told not to report back any intelligence we picked up there, not to hand it over to the British military. Why? Because our bosses and probably, in turn, the FCO didn't want to expose how corrupt and infiltrated by the militia the police were."

The British Army has now turned the Basra region over to Iraqi security forces, the very outfits said to now be dominated by sectarian militias.

Maybe "Another Hole In The Head" Isn't Such a Bad Idea?

The Guardian reports a study of wounded Vietnam vets has found that certain types of head wounds appear to prevent soldiers from developing post traumatic stress disorder.

The unexpected side-effect emerged from a study of nearly 200 former US soldiers in Vietnam, which found that those who had suffered shrapnel injuries to specific regions of the brain did not go on to develop the psychiatric illness.

Jordan Grafman, a senior researcher at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke in Maryland, and his team took brain scans of 193 veterans, all of whom had brain injuries from fragments of shrapnel, either from incoming shells or from explosive devices rigged up to booby traps.

They also scanned 52 war veterans who had been in combat but did not suffer any brain injuries.

"Some of our patients could remember events that were very traumatic, such as attacking villages and seeing comrades dying, but it didn't seem to affect them in the same way," said Grafman, whose study was published in Nature Neuroscience yesterday.

Following the brain scans the veterans were divided into two groups, depending on whether they had a history of PTSD or not. When they looked at the distribution of brain injuries among the two groups the doctors realised that troops with damage to one of two parts of the brain were extremely unlikely to have PTSD.

One of the brain regions involved was identified as the amygdala, an almond-sized bundle of neurons in the seat of the brain that is important for interpreting fear and anxiety.
The second region is known as the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, or vmPFC, a larger structure found nearer the front of the brain, which is also thought to be involved in processing fear.

...none of the 50 men who suffered damage to the amygdala had ever experienced PTSD. Those who sustained a shrapnel wound to the vmPFC were also less likely to have PTSD, with 18% affected. In comparison, some 48% of those with no brain injuries and 40% of men with any other kind of brain injury had been diagnosed with PTSD.

The Light of Day Scorches Count Rudy

Republican presidential contender Rudy Giuliani has the nerve of a canal horse. He shot to an early lead among the Republican field, competing against the other candidates and - himself.

The more you know about Count Rudy, the less there is to like, much less admire. As the Republican race began, Giuliani had two advantages - the 9/11 terror attacks and the fact that most Repugs really knew very little about him. They admired him as "America's Mayor," the tough, little guy who could get'er done.

Now they're coming to learn that a lot of what they've been told about the little troll just isn't so and that there's also a lot to Rudy & Co. they haven't been told about. Niggly little things like why the New York firefighters sent into the doomed, World Trade Center towers on 9/11 didn't have functioning, two-way radios that could have warned them to get out in time.

Here's how Rudy stumbled when he tried to dodge the controversy on This Week with George Stephanopolous:

STEPHANOPOULOS: They make two main charges. Number one, that those firefighters in the north tower, many of them lost their lives because their radios didn't work. They also say you ended the recovery efforts too soon.
GIULIANI: Well, the radios that you're talking about weren't put online for three, four, five years after. So, it would have been impossible for me to have those radios ready. It took the city two or three more years...

STEPHANOPOULOS: But they had malfunctioned in 1993.

GIULIANI: But even with the new equipment, it took another two or three years for those radios to be put online. So it would have been impossible for us to have gotten them online before that, given the fact that it took so long afterwards.

Typical Rudy, just ignore the facts. The firefighters' radios didn't work in 1993. Even if it had taken "another two or three years for those radios to be put online" as Giliani stammered in response, why the department would have had them in 1996, 1997 at the latest, and the tragedy didn't happen until when? That would be 2001.

So there must be some other answer, right? There is but you won't get it from the lips of Count Rudy.

The High Cost of Tax Cuts

What if you called the fire department and only one guy showed up? A fire truck with one firefighter and that's it. Ridiculous, never happen, right?

That is happening in cash-strapped towns in Massacheusetts. From the Boston Globe:

At a fatal fire in Gloucester earlier this month, a single ladder operator drove to the blaze alone - a situation that officials there say is common. In the financially troubled town of Randolph, firefighters have been forced to ride alone as well, said Captain Jim Hurley.

And firefighters in other communities say they routinely roll to fires with as few as two people onboard ladder trucks or fire engines, leaving one to go into the burning home alone while the other mans the water pumps outside.

The combination of municipal employee healthcare costs, pension costs, and rising utility rates, as well as voters' reluctance to approve property tax increases through Proposition 2½ overrides, means that Massachusetts communities have had little choice but to make cuts to services, including fire protection.

Karoshi - Death by Overwork

It's a phenonmenon that's typically Japanese - death by working.

The official stats show that the average Japanese worker puts in 1,780 hours per year, just under the 1,800 logged by American workers. What doesn't enter into these calculations, however, are the hundreds of hours of "free overtime" expected to a lot of Japanese workers. From The Economist:

"...one in three men aged 30 to 40 works over 60 hours a week. Half say they get no overtime. Factory workers arrive early and stay late, without pay. Training at weekends may be uncompensated.

During the past 20 years of economic doldrums, many companies have replaced full-time workers with part-time ones. Regular staff who remain benefit from lifetime employment but feel obliged to work extra hours lest their positions be made temporary.

The survivors of Karochi victims are now going to court. When they succeed they can recover upwards of $1-million from the employer and a $20,000 annual payment from the Japanese government.

"...a recent court ruling has put companies under pressure to change their ways. On November 30th the Nagoya District Court accepted Hiroko Uchino's claim that her husband, Kenichi, a third-generation Toyota employee, was a victim of karoshi when he died in 2002 at the age of 30. He collapsed at 4am at work, having put in more than 80 hours of overtime each month for six months before his death. “The moment when I am happiest is when I can sleep,” Mr Uchino told his wife the week of his death. He left two children, aged one and three.

As a manager of quality control, Mr Uchino was constantly training workers, attending meetings and writing reports when not on the production line. Toyota treated almost all that time as voluntary and unpaid. So did the Toyota Labour Standards Inspection Office, part of the labour ministry. But the court ruled that the long hours were an integral part of his job. On December 14th the government decided not to appeal against the verdict.

The ruling is important because it may increase the pressure on companies to treat “free overtime” (work that an employee is obliged to perform but not paid for) as paid work. That would send shockwaves through corporate Japan, where long, long hours are the norm.

Blair's Not Alone

Henry VIII must be rolling in his crypt. A story in the Sydney Morning Herald reports that Roman Catholics have reclaimed their spot as the dominant faith in England.

CATHOLICS have overtaken Anglicans as Britain's most dominant religious group, reflecting great waves of migration from Catholic countries.

More people are now attending Mass every Sunday than are worshipping with the Church of England, confirming that the established church has lost its spot as the most popular Christian denomination after more than four centuries of unrivalled influence following the Reformation.

Leading figures warned on Saturday that the Church of England faced becoming a minority faith and that the findings should act as a wake-up call.

Hoover Wanted to Arrest 12,000

The International Herald Tribune reports on a newly released document showing that FBI Chief J. Edgar Hoover hatched a plan in 1950 at the outbreak of the Korean War to suspend Habeas Corpus and lock up 12,000 people he considered "disloyal."

Hoover sent his plan to the White House on July 7, 1950, 12 days after the Korean War began. It envisioned putting suspect Americans in military prisons.

Hoover wanted President Harry Truman to proclaim the mass arrests necessary to "protect the country against treason, espionage and sabotage." The FBI would "apprehend all individuals potentially dangerous" to national security, Hoover's proposal said. The arrests would be carried out under "a master warrant attached to a list of names" provided by the bureau.

The names were part of an index that Hoover had been compiling for years. "The index now contains approximately twelve thousand individuals, of which approximately ninety-seven percent are citizens of the United States," he wrote. "In order to make effective these apprehensions, the proclamation suspends the Writ of Habeas Corpus."

In September 1950, Congress passed and Truman signed a law authorizing the detention of "dangerous radicals" if the president declared a national emergency. But no known evidence suggests any president approved Hoover's proposal.

Top US Quotes of 2007

The Boston Globe has an interesting piece on the Top 10 Quotes of 2007. Here are a few of the paper's picks:

"(I have) a wide stance when going to the bathroom." - Idaho Senator Larry Craig

"I personally believe that U.S. Americans are unable to do so because some people out there in our nation don't have maps and I believe that our education like such as in South Africa and Iraq and everywhere like such as and I believe that they should our education over here in the U.S. should help the U.S. or should help South Africa and should help Iraq and the Asian countries so we will be able to build up our future for our children." - Miss Teen USA contestant Lauren Upton of South Carolina .

"That's some nappy-headed hos there." - Morning radio host Don Imus

"There's only three things he mentions in a sentence: a noun and a verb and 9/11." - Delaware Senator and Democratic presidential candidate Joseph Biden on Republican Rudy Giuliani

""I'm not going to get into a name-calling match with somebody who has a 9 percent approval rating." - Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Democrat from Nevada, delivered this zinger while talking about Republican Vice President Dick Cheney

"I think as far as the adverse impact on the nation around the world, this administration has been the worst in history." - Former president Jimmy Carter

Tony Blair Converts

No big deal, really. Tony Blair has switched sides from Anglican to Roman Catholic. The missus and kids are all RC anyway so Tony was just joining the flock. However the former Brit p.m. was so thrilled with his conversion that he went to the Middle East and took a picture of himself standing in front of his handiwork.

Canada's Misfit of The Year

For reminding us just how greasy Conservative leadership gets (and why we threw his party into the sewer). Canada's Misfit of the Year - Lyin' Brian Mulroney

For showing us that new Conservatives can be just as arrogant as the old bunch. First runner-up, our very own Furious Leader, the Smugmeister himself, Little Stevie Harper.


For showing us that honesty, integrity and mental stability are optional in a Conservative cabinet - Second Runner Up - EnviroMin, Mad Dog the Bali Buster, John Baird

For showing Canadians that the Conservative party is so lacking in talent that a guy who looks (and acts) like this guy can get into Cabinet, Third Runner Up - Tony Clement.

Ferdinand's Puppies Together Again

Ferdinand Porsche, that'll be Herr Doktor Porsche to the likes of you, left a rich legacy known worldwide today in the names Porsche and Volkswagen. Now his namesake company is poised to acquire a controlling interest in its much larger, lower-end sibling.

The automotive pioneer's grandson, Wolfgang, heads Porsche and soon hopes to head Volkswagen. VW, by the way, is 14-times as big as Porsche so the takeover is a Herculean chore. Wolfgang told the New York Times that uniting the companies is essential to keep VW from falling into the wrong hands:

“My father and my grandfather would have been very pleased to see this, but that wasn’t the reason we did it,” Mr. Porsche said at Porsche’s headquarters in a rare interview. “It’s a nice side effect.”

Porsche, he said, needed to bring Volkswagen into the fold to ensure that others do not get their hands on it. The two carmakers already collaborate in building sport utility vehicles and in developing hybrid engines. Porsche plans to use a Volkswagen assembly plant to stamp out the body of its eagerly awaited four-door sedan, the Panamera, due in 2009.

The takeover, which was the brainchild of Porsche’s chief executive, Wendelin Wiedeking, is intended to lock in that partnership. By acting when it did, Porsche headed off private equity investors, which it says were circling Volkswagen in 2005.

Paranoia Politics

Americans have come to hate and distrust their government as perhaps never before in their nation's history. From AlterNet:

"Scripps Howard News Service and Ohio University released a little-noticed study showing that one-third of Americans now "believe in a broad smorgasbord of conspiracy theories" revolving around government complicity in everything from the 9/11 attacks to the Kennedy assassination. The same survey last year found that "anger against the federal government is at record levels."

...the feelings are not motivated merely by a fear of the next bogeyman around the corner. The sentiments are symptoms of a deep crisis of confidence in our public institutions -- a crisis that is a predictable reaction to a government that now all but admits it breaks laws, hides information and disregards the public.

We have seen troops sent to war based on manipulated intelligence. We have discovered phones wiretapped without warrants. Just last week, we found out the CIA destroyed tapes of potentially illegal torture sessions. So many scandals now plague the government, it is hard to remember them all. And they have all happened with almost no consequences for the perpetrators.

Industries essentially bribe politicians with campaign contributions. Government employees regularly move into six-figure jobs lobbying for the industries they once regulated. Presidential candidates of both parties take time off from their small-town stump speeches about the middle class to hold big corporate fundraisers in New York penthouses and D.C. law firms. All of it is legal and treated as ho-hum by the media.

When [media] lobbyists recently pushed the government to relax ownership regulations and allow for further media consolidation, FCC chairman Kevin Martin provided just one week's notice for a required public hearing on the issue. Officially, the FCC held the hearing to consider public input about the proposed rule change. But Martin later told Congress that before the hearing ever happened he was already putting the finishing touches on his New York Times op-ed formally endorsing the media consolidation plan. And surprise! This week, the FCC officially ratified Martin's deregulation scheme, making it the law of the land.
Like so much of our government's behavior these days, it was kabuki theater at its most obscene -- an obscure yet powerful agency getting caught leaking profit-making secrets to lobbyists, and then telling the public its hearings are all a put-on, taking place well after the corrupt deals have already been cut."

This is possibly George w. Bush's greatest accomplishment, completing the corporatization of his nation's government. Halliburton has taken over much of the military's role on a massive-profit basis, routinely fleeces the government on its billings and then shelters all that revenue in offshore tax havens. Defence spending has returned to the levels of the height of the Cold War with no rival superpower worthy of the name. Tax dollars are pumped, by the truckload, into shoring up mortgages for predatory lenders who would otherwise have to bear the losses of their greed even as those tax dollars come increasingly from the working class whose children will also pay for the deficits now racked up year after year by a tax cut and spend like mad government.

Bush may be America's Battista. No wonder he's so admired by our own Furious Leader, Stevie Harper. No wonder Stevie is such an adherent to paranoia politics.

Republicans talk of "class war" as some despicable tactic exploited by politicians seeking to enrage the masses, the great unwashed. Some day, rank-and-file, average Americans may wake up and realize they've been on the receiving war of a very real, very powerful and very destructive class war that their alleged president has been waging against them, almost from the first day he took office.

Bite This, Steve

You can tell a lot about a politician by how it approaches the topic of global warming.

For the purposes of this discussion we'll leave out the deniers. They're going the way of the dinosaurs, at least the honest ones are. Most of the rest have slithered over into the "we get it camp", sort of.

The other two groups are the leaders, Group A, and the fearmongers, Group B.

The leaders are those who do what legitimate politicians are supposed to do - lead. They're the sort who come to the fore in tough times such as depressions or wars. They rally the people, rationally explain the problem, what must be done about it and why remedial action is necessary, worthwhile, even desirable. In a word, they're "leaders." They generate awareness and consent. That's Group A.

Then there's the other kind, Group B. This is the bait and switch type of lowlife. In the face of challenges they begin with denial and, as that option closes, invoke the next option, delay. To buy as much time as possible to do nothing, they pull out their tried and true weapon - fear.

This is the face of our very own Furious Leader, Stephen Harper. Have a Merry Christmas, he says, warning that, come the New Year, we'll all be wearing sackcloth and ashes as the government is forced to choke the very joy of life out of us in order to reduce industrial carbon emissions.

Hey Stevo, the Europeans are way ahead of us on climate change and just how are they doing anyway? Have they reverted to living in mud huts and eating grass? No? Why not? Maybe it's because they're focusing on ways to deal with the carbon problem that actually minimize the economic and social consequences. Maybe because they've explained to their people the positive side to this. Maybe because they're not working to protect something as environmentally vile as the Tar Sands.

Now no one is saying the Euros are there yet but they're a long way further down the road than we are, sitting on our fence watching them fade into the distance.

So Steve, take your fearmongering and shove it. Either lead or quit. Better yet, just quit. We'll all be better off without you.

Today's Quiz

Okay kids, this one's for the lawn furniture. All of the guys pictured above are evil but one of them is also really dumb - as in dumb as a post. And the winner is?

Don't Go, Oh Please, Stay, Please?

George w. Bush went before the cameras today to say that he is (finally/temporarily - your choice) concerned about Afghanistan.

"My biggest concern is that people say, 'Well, we're kind of tired of Afghanistan and, therefore, we think we're going to leave,'" Bush said at the White House. "That would be my biggest concern."

Bush and, in a separate appearance Condi Rice, then proceeded to positively gush over the wonderful contributions being made, as Shrub put it, by "the Brits, the Canadians, the Dutch, the Danes and other countries."

Hey, wait a minute. The line about "...we're kind of tired of Afghanistan and, therefore, we think we're going to leave," doesn't that sound exactly like what Bush himself said in 2002 when he decided he'd rather go play quagmire in Iraq? The guy's like a trained chimp except, perhaps, without the diaper.

Republican Glad Tidings

Rudy Giuliani seems to have fallen from his perch in the belfry. A New York Times poll indicates Rudy or "The Mayor" as much of the American media now calls him, has plummeted from numbers in the low 30's down to Mitt Romney territory in the low 20's. The Rude Man is sick at the moment. His aides say it's a touch of the flu but I have it on reliable sources he got ill from drinking bad blood.

And the Mad Mormon Romney has been outed by the Daily Kos. For some time now Romney has been peddling the line how he's down with civil rights issues. He's reminded anyone within listening range how his daddy, George, marched with Martin Luther King.

In a speech he gave from the George (HW) Bush presidential library, entitled "Faith in America," Romney threw out this line:

" I saw my father march with Martin Luther King. "

And, later, on NBC's "Meet the Press," Romney let out this one:

"You can see what I believed and what my family believed by looking at our lives. My dad marched with Martin Luther King. My mom was a tireless crusader for civil rights."

Turns out that was plain old-fashioned, Mormon bullshit. Outed by David Bernstein of ThePhoenix.com, Mitt's spinmeisters threw themselves into overdrive and claimed that George Romney and Martin Luther King did indeed march together in June. 1963 just not on the same day or in the same city.

Whew. That's like Romney saying his kids didn't go to Iraq but were serving America anyway by working on his campaign. This guy is almost as creepy as Count Rudy.

Another Pipeline, How Boring!

It's not the pipeline itself that's interesting but who owns it and who doesn't.

Russia has struck a deal with Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan for a pipeline to carry natural gas from the Caspian Sea to Russia. The deal puts an end to a Western bid intended to route the pipeline under the Caspian so that it wouldn't have to go through Russia.

The pipeline agreement increases Europe's dependence upon Russia for natural gas supplies, leaving the EU more vulnerable to potentially having a significant part of its fuel supply cut off at Russia's whim. Russia has already shown its willingness to use its energy exports to political advantage with countries like the Ukraine.

Good Dope, Bad Dope - All In The Mind?

When you gaze at the symphony on stage you probably don't expect to be looking into the faces of a bunch of drug users but, guess again.

In the 60's, it was all psychodelic drugs aimed at "expanding consciousness." Today what are becoming in vogue are drugs to focus consciousness and, according to the LA Times, they becoming increasingly widespread among society's movers and shakers:

Despite the potential side effects, academics, classical musicians, corporate executives, students and even professional poker players have embraced the drugs to clarify their minds, improve their concentration or control their emotions.

"There isn't any question about it -- they made me a much better player," said Paul Phillips, 35, who credited the attention deficit drug Adderall and the narcolepsy pill Provigil with helping him earn more than $2.3 million as a poker player.

The medicine cabinet of so-called cognitive enhancers also includes Ritalin, commonly given to schoolchildren for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, and beta blockers, such as the heart drug Inderal. Researchers have been investigating the drug Aricept, which is normally used to slow the decline of Alzheimer's patients.

They are all just precursors to the blockbuster drug that labs are racing to develop."Whatever company comes out with the first memory pill is going to put Viagra to shame," said University of Pennsylvania bioethicist Paul Root Wolpe.

In the real world, there are no rules to prevent overachievers from using legally prescribed drugs to operate at peak mental performance. What patient wouldn't want their surgeon to be completely focused during a life-or-death procedure? "If there were drugs for investment bankers, journalists, teachers and scientists that made them more successful, they would use them too," said Charles E. Yesalis, a doping researcher and emeritus professor at Pennsylvania State University. "Why does anyone think this would be limited to an athlete?"

In the world of classical music, beta blockers such as Inderal have become nearly as commonplace as metronomes.

The drugs block adrenaline receptors in the heart and blood vessels, helping to control arrhythmias and high blood pressure. They also block adrenaline receptors in the brain. "You still have adrenaline flowing in your body, but you don't feel that adrenaline rush so you're not distracted by your own nervousness," said Dr. Bernd F. Remler, a neurologist at the Medical College of Wisconsin in Milwaukee.

But cosmetic neurology, as some call it, has risks. Ritalin, Adderall and other ADHD drugs can cause headaches, insomnia and loss of appetite. Provigil can make users nervous or anxious and bring on headaches, while beta blockers can cause drowsiness, fatigue and wheezing.

In an article published today in the journal Nature, Morein-Zamir and University of Cambridge neuroscientist Barbara J. Sahakian say that clear guidelines are needed to decide what's fair. It may be reasonable to ban the drugs in competitive situations, such as taking the SAT. But in other cases, they wrote, people such as airport screeners, air-traffic controllers or combat soldiers might be encouraged to take them.

With a slew of memory enhancers in development, the issues are not academic.

Memory Pharmaceuticals of Montvale, N.J., for example, is eyeing drugs to combat those pesky "senior moments" that are considered a normal part of aging."If there were drugs that actually made you smarter, good Lord, I have no doubt that their use would become epidemic," Yesalis said. "Just think what it would do to anybody's career in about any area. There are not too many occupations where it's really good to be dumb."

One thing is obvious. If "cosmetic neurology" becomes accepted it will, in reality, become all but mandatory. It will reach the point where not to use the products brings sharp, and potentially career diminishing, consequences.

Dutch To Leave Afghanistan, July, 2010

The Dutch government has announced that it will pull the Netherland's 1,600 soldier contingent out of Afghanistan's Oruzgan province in July, 2010. The force has been in Oruzgan, alongside the Australian contingent, since 2006. Holland originally agreed to a 2-year committment but that was recently extended for a further two years.

It seems the Dutch are intent on leaving Afghanistan in 2010 regardless of whether NATO can find another nation to send troops to replace them. 12-Dutch soldiers have died while serving on this mission.

Some Fun For the Snowbound

On God and Spirituality

I just finished viewing a panel featuring Hitchens and Dawkins discussing why there is no God and what should be done to spread the word. Very interesting, intensely intellectual discussion.

In case you haven't noticed, their message is spreading. A lot of people are going down the path to hard atheism.

Since you asked, I'll tell you what I think. I don't know, I really don't.

Listening to the views expressed by these leading atheists I was struck by one fatal flaw that has plagued mankind since the beginning of civilization - the firm belief that we're at the centre of everything. It's a powerful urge, given that the religious and the atheists both lapse into it at every turn.

Remember when we had to believe that the planets, including our sun, rotated around the earth? We just had to be the centre of everything. Most of the monotheistic faiths have an idea of their God looking just like - why, me! Oh, c'mon Buddha sure does.

What if we're really way too dumb to get it? We don't expect humans in a vegetative state to be able to intellectualize very much. But what if, in the greater scheme of things, our greatest minds are just a tiny notch above that? What if we're all severely mentally challenged on some galactic scale and are just too damn dumb to know it?

We're still puzzling a lot of things out. Get into quantum physics and the string theory and some of the experts predict there are eleven dimensions, seven more than the mere four that we humans are capable of recognizing. If they're right, you inevitably have to ask what's behind Doors 5 through 11, eh?

We've learned so much over the past century and we're still just scratching the surface of the body of universal knowledge. So, my question is, what's the rush? Do we really have some, make that any legitimate need to resolve this God v. no god question now? Maybe we should just put it all on the back burner for another millennium or so until we get answers to all those questions that we're just now discovering that we didn't even know existed a decade ago and that aren't mentioned anywhere in anyone's holy book.

Now we've used religion as a crutch to try to deal with some of the great, unanswerable questions that have plagued man since he first looked up at the starry night sky. Maybe we were taking unfair advantage of religion, sort of like the dad who says "because" when the kid asks "why." But that would just be another typical human failure, not proof that there is no God.

Religion is curious. Everybody belongs to the right one and all the others are wrong. Look at Judaism, Christianity and Islam. We all share the same, Old Testament God, we just use different prophets to persecute the innocent. Neat trick, eh?

So I think that, for now, I'm going to remain firmly agnostic. But I'm always willing to change my vote just as soon as you can tell me where it all began, I mean really began, and what's behind those seven doors.

And a very merry Christmas to you all.

Canadian General Supports Afghan Detainee Transfers

Canada's army says it would have to pack up and go home if it had to stop handing over its detainees to Afghan prison authorities. What a load of utter nonsense!

From the Globe & Mail:

Listing a long series of possible embarrassments and defeats, Brigadier-General André Deschamps outlined what he says would be the dire consequences, including losing the war, should a Federal Court judge rule in favour of a request by human-rights groups to issue an injunction banning the transfer of detainees to Afghan prisons because of the risk of torture or abuse.

Gen. Deschamps sketches a variety scenarios. Taliban fighters might surrender in droves, he warns, if they knew Canada would release them because it could not either hold them or transfer them. "The insurgents could attack us with impunity knowing that if they fail to win an engagement they would simply have to surrender and wait for release to resume operations," he said in a sworn affidavit.

Gen. Deschamps, the chief of staff of Canada's Expeditionary Force Command that runs combat operations in Afghanistan, goes so far as to suggest the Taliban might win the war, at least in Kandahar, if the court were to grant the injunction.

Come on, Deschamps, get real. There's absolutely no reason NATO can't organize a compound for all ISAF detainees. Secretary general de Hoop Scheffer has a lot of alliance member countries that don't want to fight but could be cajoled into running a detention facility.

It's what we did in Korea. Back then we knew better than to hand over North Korean or Chinese prisoners to the South Koreans. Unless he's an idiot, this guy Deschamps knows there are several alternatives to handing detainees over to the Afghans. His over the top approach of "our way or Armageddon" reflects a deeply politicized armed forces.

Hey Steve, Pack a Lunch, Take Baird and Clement With You

It's Christmas, a notoriously bad time for the Grinch. Canadians have just handed our Furious Leader Stevie his lump of coal. The Globe & Mail reports that, after opening what appeared to be a real lead in the polls, Harper has once again let it tumble through his oily fingers.

"The Canadian Press Harris-Decima survey puts the Tories at 30-per-cent support, in a statistical tie with the Liberals, who are up four points to 32 per cent.
Support for the Tories dropped across all regions and demographic groups.

The striking shift comes in the wake of several controversies which may be taking a toll on the governing party:

• Former Progressive Conservative prime minister Brian Mulroney's admission that he accepted cash-stuffed envelopes from arms lobbyist Karlheinz Schreiber.

• Heavy criticism of Canada's position at the climate-change summit in Bali.

• The political fallout from a critical shortage of medical isotopes due to the shutdown of the Chalk River nuclear reactor.

The telephone poll of just over 1,000 Canadians was conducted Thursday through Monday and has a margin of error of 3.1 percentage points 19 times in 20."

Once again the Canadian public tells the CPC that Harpo and his ways are really, really creepy. The guy just doesn't get it. If they had a real leader, one whom Canadians could accept, they would have a majority government by now. That leader, however, would have to be a progressive conservative and stop trying to shove and kick our country out to the far right. Steve, only you and the other nutjobs live out there. Look, you blew $31-million on polling. You oughta know better.

Then again, if the Libs had a popular leader, we'd be in a majority now.

Afghanistan's Child Soldiers

Afghan boys are being pressed into service with the Afghan National Police, various militias and, of course, the Taliban.

A report from the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs states that these young boys routinely suffer physical and sexual abuse.

Abdul Qader Noorzai, head of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC) in Kandahar Province said, "Children are used for different purposes. The majority of them experience sexual abuse, others do all kinds of jobs such as cooking, cleaning, day patrols and even fighting."

In Kandahar Province, Canada's bailiwick, it's estimated that some 200 boys under 18 are serving with the Afghan National Police and the police auxiliary.

Under-age males have also been seen working for private security companies, particularly in Kandahar and Helmand provinces, said a senior government official who insisted on anonymity.

"The auxiliary police and private security contractors widely use child soldiers while the government and the AIHRC do not have the capacity to monitor, investigate and stop them," the official said.

Afghan officials also accuse the Taliban and other anti-government elements of deliberately using children for various military and illegitimate purposes. The Taliban use boys as foot soldiers and force children to engage in violent acts, they say.

Over 7,500 child soldiers went through Disarmament, Demobilisation and Reintegration (DDR) programmes between April 2003 and June 2006 under Afghanistan's post-Taliban peace building arrangements, according to the UN.

It's Not Just China's Toys or Its Water or Its Air That's Poisonous

China may be poised to become the world's biggest economy but it's being hammered by environmental threats along the way. Combined, these threats may well be enough to derail China's economic miracle.

Well known by now are China's severe problems with water supply and quality, it's horribly polluted air, and all the problems detected in its exports. Now, according to Spiegel Online, word is getting out about China's poisonous food supply:

Chinese journalist Zhou Qing, a critic of the regime, unearthed political dynamite in his two-year investigation of China's food industry. He interviewed grocers, restaurant owners, farmers and food factory managers for an exposé for which he won a prize as part of the German "Lettre Ulysses Award for the Art of Reportage" in 2006.

His book is a dark account of a ruthless food mafia that stops at nothing to maximize its profits, for example by using contraceptives to accelerate the growth of fish stocks, lengthening the shelf-life of cucumbers with highly toxic pesticide DDT, using hormones and poisoned salt in food production and putting absurd amounts of antibiotics in meat.

Zhou said uncontrolled greed had caused a food disaster of unimaginable proportions. "I can only warn you never to go in a restaurant." The danger of food producers being taken to task for their actions is slight. Everything disappears in China's endless bureaucracy, he said.

Zhou's claims may sound exaggerated, but they're borne out by recent developments. In early December the Shanghai city council slapped an export ban on products made by the Shanghai Mellin Food Company after cancer-causing substances were found in its pork products.
In July the former director of the state food and drug supervisory authority, Zheng Xiaoyu, was executed after being convicted of taking bribes to award licences for forged drugs, some of which had lethal side effects.

The children are the biggest sufferers, said Zhou. Poisoned baby food has led to severe diseases and physical deformities. Zhou writes that 200,000 to 400,000 people fall victim to poisoned food each year. A third of cancer cases, which are increasing at double-digit rates, can be attributed to food, he writes.

"Ordinary people don't know about it. If the people knew about it there would be a revolution. The wrath of the people would be unstoppable."

For thousands of years the power of China's rulers hinged on their ability to feed the people. "Revolutions aren't caused by political differences, they're caused by a lack of bread."

Paying the Price for Playing Both Sides

It all looked so clear when Bush/Cheney invaded Iraq. It was all about toppling Saddam and cleaning out the Sunni's Baathist regime.

That went pretty well except that Washington found itself with a bunch Iraq's great unwashed, its Shiites, demanding democracy of all things - neatly put, a transfer of the political reins from Sunni to Shia control. Ouch! Shiites in control, just 'cause they're the majority?

In one blistering moment of clarity amidst a thick fog of idiocy, the White House realized it had just made Shiite controlled Iran, the dominant power in the region. Its options were rapidly being foreclosed.

Oh dear. Then followed the kiss and make up moment with Iraq's Sunni leadership. The Americans even gave the "former" insurgents (ha, ha, ha) weapons and equipment so they could fight al-Qaeda terrorists. Now the Shiite government in Baghdad saw the US lavishing arms on he very group they know they're going to have to fight once the Yanks leave. Grrrrrreat!

Not to worry. Roughly a billion dollars worth of arms and equipment has somehow vanished from the Abu Ghraib compound. The stuff has vanished alright, that is if you don't bother following the tire tracks to the Shiite militias.

Isn't that great. Iraq's enormous weapons shortage has now been relieved!

But there were always the Kurds in the north to remain America's trusted and grateful allies. Not so much as you might think. First there was the poison pill of the Kurdish Autonomous Region's constitution that managed to get infiltrated, er incorporated into the Iraq constitution. This is the deal that will likely lead to the Arab-Kurd war over Kirkuk.

And then there's the Turks and their own Kurdish rebels. Now the Kurdish rebels, or freedom fighters, or terrorists, have been using northern Iraq as a safe haven from which to raid targets in Turkey. In response the Turks sent about 100,000 forces to the Iraq border.

The Americans have tried to get Turkey to back off but Ankara is in virtually the same moral position as Israel was when it invaded Lebanon last year to go after Hezbollah - with complete American support. So, Turkey's now saying "me too, me too" and has launched air strikes and even a small ground raid into the Kurdish Autonomous Region.

Then word leaked out that the Americans are helping the Turks target Kurdish sites inside Iraq. The Iraqi Kurds are livid. So is the Baghdad government even though it's Arab dominated.

What to do, what to do? The Sunni don't trust them and the Shiite don't trust them and, now, the Kurds don't trust them. Best send Condi to Iraq to soothe hurt feelings.

I think even the Bushies are realizing you can only play this game so many times before it gets old. That message got delivered to Condi today when the head of the Kurdish Autonomous Region, President Massoud Barzani, refused to meet with her. From BBC:

Kurdish Prime Minister Nechirvan Barzani said: "It was decided that Massoud Barzani would go to Baghdad to take part in a meeting with Condoleezza Rice and other officials, but he will not go now as a sign of protest against the American position on the bombings by Turkey.

"It is unacceptable that the United States, in charge of monitoring our airspace, authorised Turkey to bomb our villages," he said.

One Crazy Sumbitch

Is the Republican presidential frontrunner a genuine sociopath? Here are a few of the common characteristics:

Glibness and Superficial Charm

Manipulative and Conning They never recognize the rights of others and see their self-serving behaviors as permissible. They appear to be charming, yet are covertly hostile and domineering, seeing their victim as merely an instrument to be used. They may dominate and humiliate their victims.

Grandiose Sense of Self Feels entitled to certain things as "their right."

Pathological Lying Has no problem lying coolly and easily and it is almost impossible for them to be truthful on a consistent basis. Can create, and get caught up in, a complex belief about their own powers and abilities. Extremely convincing and even able to pass lie detector tests.

Lack of Remorse, Shame or Guilt A deep seated rage, which is split off and repressed, is at their core. Does not see others around them as people, but only as targets and opportunities. Instead of friends, they have victims and accomplices who end up as victims. The end always justifies the means and they let nothing stand in their way.

Shallow Emotions When they show what seems to be warmth, joy, love and compassion it is more feigned than experienced and serves an ulterior motive. Outraged by insignificant matters, yet remaining unmoved and cold by what would upset a normal person. Since they are not genuine, neither are their promises.

Incapacity for Love

Need for Stimulation Living on the edge. Verbal outbursts and physical punishments are normal. Promiscuity and gambling are common.

Callousness/Lack of Empathy Unable to empathize with the pain of their victims, having only contempt for others' feelings of distress and readily taking advantage of them.

Poor Behavioral Controls/Impulsive Nature Rage and abuse, alternating with small expressions of love and approval produce an addictive cycle for abuser and abused, as well as creating hopelessness in the victim. Believe they are all-powerful, all-knowing, entitled to every wish, no sense of personal boundaries, no concern for their impact on others.

Irresponsibility/Unreliability Not concerned about wrecking others' lives and dreams. Oblivious or indifferent to the devastation they cause. Does not accept blame themselves, but blames others, even for acts they obviously committed.

Promiscuous Sexual Behavior/Infidelity Promiscuity, child sexual abuse, rape and sexual acting out of all sorts.

Lack of Realistic Life Plan/Parasitic Lifestyle Tends to move around a lot or makes all encompassing promises for the future, poor work ethic but exploits others effectively.

Criminal or Entrepreneurial Versatility Changes their image as needed to avoid prosecution. Changes life story readily.

Welcome to the life and times of Rudolph Giuliani, overall still the favourite of Republicans to become the next president of the United States. It's telling that the one place not in thrall to Giuliani is the one place where his true character is best known - New York City. In its December 17 edition, The New Yorker takes a funny peek at "America's Mayor"

On Giuliani:

"His goal in life is to spear people, destroy them, to go for the jugular" - Former Mayor Ed Koch

"He is not bound by the truth. I have studied animal life, and their predator/prey relations are more graceful than his." - Schools chancellor Rudy Crew

"It's like a cult he's got there. You can't work with the guy unless you're willing to drink the Kool-Aid." - Police Commissioner William Bratton

"[He] didn't bring us together, our pain brought us together... We would have come together if Bozo was the mayor." - Al Sharpton

"He is a small man in search of a balcony" - Columnist Jimmy Breslin

On The Blame Game:

When Giuliani blamed an underling named Jerome M. Hauer for the foolhardy idea of placing the city's emergency=management headquarters in the World Trade Center, he was confronted with a memo in which Hauer had argued against the site and in favor of a less visible target in Brooklyn.

On Early Rudy:

Q: Who is Leo D'Avanzo? A: The Mob-connected uncle who employed Giuliani's father as a bat-wielding debt collector.

On Abusing the Rights of Others:

What action by the Giuliani administration was found by the courts to have violated the First Amendment rights of New Yorkers?

(a) Preventing taxi-drivers from assembling for a protest.
(b) Requiring city workers to obtain permission to speak to the press.
(c) Refusing to issue a permit for an anti-police-brutality march.
(d) All of the above, and many more.

Don't even ask.

On Giuliani's Vindictiveness:

His legal skirmish with New York magazine over a bus ad touting the magazine as, "possibly the only good thing in New York Rudy hasn't taken credit for."

On Judiths:

Judith Regan - carried on an affair with a top city official in an apartment near Ground Zero donated for the use of the relief workers.
Judith Nathan - carried on an affair with a top city official at a house in Southhampton.

On Rudy's Appointees:

Police Commissioner Bernie Kerik - indicted on sixteen charges, including corruption, mail fraud and tax fraud.
Housing Commissioner Richard Roberts - pleaded guilty to perjury
Housing Development Corporation head Russell Harding - found guilt of embezzlement and possession of child pornography.

But wait, there's more, so much more but I'll have to post that later. The point is that Republican presidential frontrunner Rudy Giuliani would be one scary guy as leader of the free world. What's scarier, however, is that all this background, and more, is public knowledge and yet a lot of Republicans would still support a Giuliani presidency. Heaven help us!

Condi Rice's Christmas Wish List

Wonder what you'll get US state secretary Condoleeza Rice for Christmas this year? Here's what she wants more than anything. Ready? She wants a calendar - one of those big, wall calendars with separate boxes for every day. And to go with it she wants a box of red felt marker pens.

Condi wants to slap that sucker up on the wall of her office and use the pens to cross off the days until it's all over, when it becomes somebody else's miserable job to try to clean up the messes she and her bosses have made around the world, the day when she can say "screw it" and kick back with a pitcher of margaritas.

Maybe if she can just down enough tequila she'll be able to overcome any residual traces of conscience, integrity and decency in time to bundle up three hundred pages of hallucinations, spin and outright lies to pour into a volume of memoirs. Lord knows she's done enough spinning and lying over the past seven years that, by the time Bush is run out of Washington, that she should be able to do it even passed out in a pool of vomit.

Then, as the hangover fades and the hands steady, she can ready herself for the real challenges of the coming years - defending herself and her masters against their accusers and attackers. They'll likely be challenged as no other administration in history. That's because there's been no previous administration so incompetent, self-serving, dishonest, secretive and utterly abusive of the public trust that attends high office. It'll be a whistle blowers' Mardi Gras and all those minions, keepers of the darkest truths, who've buried their heads all these years out of fear of the fabled retribution of the masters, will be free at last to talk, to reveal and indict, even to draw maps showing where the bodies are buried.

Yes, I would think that, much as the Bushies must be looking forward to being released from the constant shirking of responsibility, they must also view life after 2008 with a certain dread. Unless, of course, the Terror continues. Unless luck is with them one more time and the November runoff comes down to Clinton versus Giuliani. Then there may yet be hope.

FBI Says CIA FIBs About Waterboarding

It sounded like facile sophistry. "We waterboarded the guy and, viola, a few days later he spilled his guts. See, waterboarding works. And, best of all, we saved the world." That was the line the CIA was peddling about its use of torture on Abu Zubaida, who the agency claims was a really, really important, al-Qaeda kingpin.

Yeah, sure.

The FBI has come out in reply with what's been known about this guy for a long time - he's a mentally disturbed loudmouth. From the Washington Post:

While CIA officials have described him as an important insider whose disclosures under intense pressure saved lives, some FBI agents and analysts say he is largely a loudmouthed and mentally troubled hotelier whose credibility dropped as the CIA subjected him to a simulated drowning technique known as waterboarding and to other "enhanced interrogation" measures.

Bush has sided publicly with the CIA's version of events. "We knew that Zubaida had more information that could save innocent lives, but he stopped talking," Bush said in September 2006. "And so the CIA used an alternative set of procedures," which the president said prompted Abu Zubaida to disclose information leading to the capture of Sept. 11, 2001, plotter Ramzi Binalshibh.

But former FBI officials privy to details of the case continue to dispute the CIA's account of the effectiveness of the harsh measures, making the record of Abu Zubaida's interrogation hard for outsiders to assess.

There is little dispute, according to officials from both agencies, that Abu Zubaida provided some valuable intelligence before CIA interrogators began to rough him up, including information that helped identify Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks, and al-Qaeda operative Jose Padilla.

Retired FBI agent Daniel Coleman, who led an examination of documents after Abu Zubaida's capture in early 2002 and worked on the case, said the CIA's harsh tactics cast doubt on the credibility of Abu Zubaida's information.

"I don't have confidence in anything he says, because once you go down that road, everything you say is tainted," Coleman said, referring to the harsh measures. "He was talking before they did that to him, but they didn't believe him. The problem is they didn't realize he didn't know all that much."

Heather Mallick's Take on Brian Mulroney

I've been bothered by a nagging, undefined feeling I was left with after watching Brian Mulroney's performance before the Commons ethics committee. That's why I found Heather Mallick's take on it positively uproarious. Enjoy. From CBC.ca:

"I'd have paid good money not to see Brian Mulroney testify to the Ethics Committee. It was like watching your father get drunk at a party or seeing your mother naked.* I kept having to straighten myself out of the fetal position.

It was excruciating because it was so revealing but only in the worst way, like a group therapy session for the nation.

Over all of us glowered the shadow of the family patriarch, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, a man who inherited money and never developed a taste for it. It wasn't good for the deficit but at least we know Trudeau's deft, aristocratic hands never soiled themselves with thousand-dollar bills from any Mr. Dodgy.

A handful of MPs stood out. Pat Martin, the NDP's Ethics and Privacy critic and MP for Winnipeg Centre, is the stalwart son, Matt Damon in Syriana. "I'm not calling you a liar, Mr. Mulroney, but I don't want anybody here to think I believe you," he said wryly, which was as good a summing-up of our relationship with Brian Mulroney as has ever been spoken.

The essence of the intervention was all about dirt, in the anthropological sense. Dirt is matter out of place. Envelopes of thousand-dollar bills are matter that should never have touched Mulroney's hands. They did. Ergo, he has dirty hands.

It was a mistake, he tells the family, and besides they weren't really dirty in the first place. "I erred in judgment," he says. No. I erred in judgment when I didn't get my eavestroughs cleaned in November. You took cash from a German bagman. It's different.

He just can't help himself. Unctuous as ever, he goes over the top. He doesn't work at a law firm, but one of "the great law firms of Canadian history." He doesn't just have a family but a wife by his side and four young children and an ailing mother and a dead father … Brian, everyone in the room has a family. Everyone has a boss. It's not special.

"We all have enemies," he says, and waxes philosophical. But that's not how he really feels, so why pretend. He rails at Stevie Cameron, one of Canada's best and most implacable journalists, for talking to the RCMP in her office at home, which must mean she's some kind of informant. He doesn't realize that informants don't invite you to their home; they meet you in hotel rooms.

Canada is my family. I love them, I don't love them. After they looked like fools at the Bali summit, from now on when I go out with them, I'll pretend I don't know who these people are.

But I know Brian. Every family has a Brian."

http://www.cbc.ca/news/viewpoint/vp_mallick/20071214.html

For The Sake of the Mob, Don't Decriminalize It!

Organized crime must have been delighted with prime minister Harper's decision to scrap the Martin government's marijuana initiative. Criminalizing the production of even small amounts of pot ensures that it will remain the exclusive preserve of organized crime. It also ensures these career criminals will be able to line their pockets with huge profits, completely untaxed, with which they can import other drugs like cocaine and even weapons. See, everybody wins - everybody except you and me, that is.

Now we all know that pot leads to harder drugs. According to the RCMP's annual report, this is especially true of oganized crime. From Canadian Press:

The Mounties say the involvement of organized crime has significantly expanded the Canadian drug trade, with outlaw motorcycle gangs and Asian groups the reigning kingpins of the marijuana industry.

The report notes crime groups that once specialized in a single drug have branched out into various substances, including popular club drug Ecstasy.

"These organizations are powerful, well-connected and are dealing in high profit-yielding illicit ventures across the globe."

Based on seizure data for 2006, Canadian police prevented an estimated $2.3 billion in drugs from reaching the streets. The report suggests, however, that may represent between just five and 20 per cent of the total amount of illegal drugs in Canada.

Some 90 per cent of Canadian-grown marijuana is produced in British Columbia, Ontario and Quebec.

So Steve, keep up the good work. Organized crime is counting on you.

So Just When Is "New Europe" Going To Pull Its Weight?

Funny how "new Europe" was clamouring to get under the skirts of NATO but seems intent on doing bugger all to show any gratitude. We're now obliged to defend countries like Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Latvia, and Lithuania but just where are these clowns when they're needed to lend a hand in Afghanistan? If you chose Door "2", "nowhere to be seen", you're right.

Now, admittedly, some of these newcomers are lightweights - total populations smaller than middle sized cities. But then there's Poland with 38-million, Romania with 22-million, Hungary and the Czech Republic, each with 10-million. Here are NATO's own figures:

"...the Alliance's total population [has] increased from 735 million to 839 million since 1999 - an expansion of 104 million or roughly 14 per cent (see table with data from 2000, the most recent year for which detailed comparative information is available). NATO's active armed forces will have increased by a similar proportion, from 3,448,590 to 3,986,045 — an expansion of about 16 per cent. Reserve forces, however, will have grown substantially in size, with the Central and Eastern European states bringing an additional 1,714,700 reserves to the "old" NATO's 3,774,000 - an increase of about 45 per cent."

Excuse me? The new kids have 1,714,700 soldiers in their reserves and we're left struggling with a piddling 26,000 soldiers at the wet end of a pissing contest in Afghanistan? By the way, did you get that combined total - just shy of FOUR MILLION "ACTIVE" SOLDIERS. And we can't find reinforcements and reserves to supplement and relieve the 26,000 in Afghanistan, about half of which are doing the 'heavy lifting'?

I'm sorry but usually when you come into a club you pay your dues. A lot of these countries were falling all over each other to brown nose George Bush when it came to invading Iraq. Why aren't they making anything resembling a decent effort to wade in and help when it comes to Afghanistan?

If these numbers shock you, they should. Canada, and the Dutch and the Brits are hanging our soldiers' butts out there without the support of either "old" or "new" Europe. If that's the best Jaap de Hoop Scheffer can do, he ought to resign.

Parole Board Lunacy

Robert Latimer, who presents no risk to re-offend, is slammed back in prison. Robert Gary Wallin, well he's another story entirely. The Canadian Parole Board has decided that Wallin, who strangled a girl in Stanley Park, leaving her brain damaged, is still capable of violence, but is to be let out early anyway.

In 2002, Korean student Ji-Won Park was jogging through Stanley Park. Wallin attacked her, choking her with the wire of her headset and then using his hands. She's in a wheelchair and can no longer speak.

So the parole board believes Wallin is still capable of doing the same thing but - this is the best part - he's made some changes to his life and is supported by family. So, out he goes.

Sorry but if you believe the guy's a risk to cause further violence to the public, keep him inside. He can have Latimer's cell.

US Shows Signs of Backing Away From Bali Deal

From the "it was bound to happen" file, Agence France-Presse reports the White House is already expressing "strong concerns" about the minimalist climate change deal reached at Bali.

As negotiators headed home after two weeks of intense haggling, the White House complained that the agreement did not do enough to commit major emerging economies such as China and India to big cuts in greenhouse gas emissions.

It underlined lingering division over how to confront the perils of global warming, which scientists warn will put millions of people at risk of hunger, homelessness and disease by the end of the century if temperatures keep rising at current rates.

An isolated US delegation had backed down during an unplanned 13th day of talks and said it would finally accept the deal, but hours later US President George W. Bush's administration counter-attacked.

The White House said any Kyoto successor treaty must acknowledge a nation's sovereign right to pursue economic growth and energy security.

While there were several positive aspects to the Bali deal, it added, the "United States does have serious concerns about other aspects of the decision as we begin the negotiations."

The drama of Bali will be minor compared to the poker game when talks on a new treaty reach crunch point, said Fernando Tudela, Mexico's under-secretary for environmental policy.
"The mother of all battles will be in 2009," he cautioned. "This is just a warm-up."

Afghanistan's Newest Benefactor - China

No, they're not going to help NATO fight the Taliban or al-Qaeda. Instead the Chinese will be helping themselves to one of the largest copper deposits in the world. It's the Aynak copper mine in Logar province and the Chinese beat out rivals from Canada, the US and Russia to get it.

China Metallurgical Group has committed $4-billion to the project which will also see a direct rail line constructed linking Afghanistan and China. I wonder if the Chinese project will be using electricity generated by the Kajaki dam NATO has been struggling to defend against the Taliban? Maybe NATO will even wind up providing security for China's investment.

It's believed that part of the investment is a desire, on China's part, to "push back" against India and the Indian/US efforts to contain China. Now it's seen in some quarters that it's China working to encircle India. This is the take of M K Bhadrakumar, a career diplomat in the Indian Foreign Service for over 29 years, published in Asia Times Online:

"...the mother of all Chinese encirclement of India still remains largely unnoticed in Delhi - the Beijing-Tehran axis. There is wide recognition that if the United States hasn't been able to push through another tougher United Nations Security Council resolution against Iran over its nuclear program, that has been largely because of China's reluctance to concur.

But what happened last Sunday still came as a bolt from the blue. China Petroleum Corporation, better known as the Sinopec Group, signed a contract with the Iranian Oil Ministry for the development of the Yadavaran oil and gas fields in southwestern Iran.

The current estimation is that the project cost will be $2 billion. Under the contract, China will make the entire investment necessary to develop the fields. The first phase is to produce 85,000 barrels of oil per day and the second phase will add another 100,000 barrels. According to Iranian estimates, Yadavaran has in place oil reserves of 18.3 billion barrels and gas reserves amounting to 12.5 trillion cubic feet.

China outmaneuvered both the US and India on Iran. When the American National Intelligence Estimates collapsed Bush's claims of Iran's imminent nuclear threat to the world, China was ready to move - and quickly. India, meanwhile, found itself shut out, having succumbed to US pressure to sanctions against Iran.

Indian diplomacy has a lot of catching up to do. In the short term, Delhi will have to pay a price for overlooking the geopolitical reality that Iran is the only really viable regional power in the Middle East and the Persian Gulf. Delhi's best hope is that true to their innate pragmatism, Iranians will let bygones be bygones.

Homecoming Without A Home

Encouraged by the reported success of the US Army's "surge" in Baghdad and running out of money in exile, large numbers of Iraqi refugees are heading home. Unfortunately when they get back they often find no home to return to. The top map shows Baghdad in April 2006. The bottom is the city in November, 2007. The blue areas are predominantly Sunni neighbourhoods. The yellow are mixed Shia, Sunni, Christian neighbourhoods. The red are Shia dominated zones. The biggest demographic change is the enormous expansion of Shiite occupation of Baghdad and the commensurate decline in the city's mixed neighbourhoods.

The city has been pretty thoroughly ethnically cleansed. Houses vacated by those who fled for their lives were quickly re-occupied or looted, even destroyed. If you're a Sunni returning to what has, during your absence, been transformed in Shia territory, what do you think your chances are of telling the Shiite in your home to get out? From the Washington Post:

"It's very easy to say, 'Come home,' " said Guy Siri, the U.N. deputy humanitarian coordinator in Iraq. "But come home where, and how? It's much more complex than that. You have to look at the whole environment, how the community will accept them, whether it's economically viable. There's a whole lot of thinking on the government side to be done."

U.N. refugee officials immediately advised against the move, saying any new arrivals risked homelessness, unemployment and deprivation in a place still struggling to take care of the people already here. For the military, the prospect of refugees returning to reclaim houses long since occupied by others, particularly in Baghdad, threatened to destroy fragile security improvements.

"It's a problem that everybody can grasp," said a senior U.S. diplomat here. "You move back to the house that you left and find that somebody else has moved into the house, maybe because they've been displaced from someplace else. And it's even more difficult than that, because in many cases the local militias . . . have seized control and threw out anybody in that neighborhood they didn't like."

At least one of every six Iraqis -- about 4.5 million people -- has left home, some for other parts of Iraq, others for neighboring nations.

What To Do In Boston When You're Loaded

It's the 7th Annual Boston Santa Speedo Run. This year the run was for the Boston Women's Lunch Place, a daytime community centre for poor Boston women and their children. Entrants had to raise $250 to get in the run. Pictures from the Boston Globe and, mercifully, the photographers avoided the train wrecks in marble bags.

Water, It's the New Oil

Looking for a good investment? Have a look at the leading companies in the rapidly expanding, global water supply industry. There are a lot of places in the world where people lack access to clean, fresh water and that's a growing market at least for the century to come. What's more, people who need fresh water will pay what it takes to get it. Life itself doesn't really work too well without it.

Water as a commodity. It's something a lot of Canadians have fretted over for years, the idea of somebody selling our stock of freshwater to foreign bidders. Keep your eye on that.

An interesting development in the US southwest where water is becoming increasingly scarce. It arises out of the apportionment of water between agriculture and domestic use. About three-quarters of their fresh water supply is earmarked for agriculture. People gotta eat - or do they? Some clever farmers in the region are reportedly now getting into the business of selling water they might otherwise be putting on their fields. They're not selling their quota, just the water. That means they're taking a common resource, privatizing it and putting it onto the commercial market. The best thing is they never pay dime one for the water itself. They get it so they can grow crops. The new way, however, cuts out all the bother of planting and irrigating and harvesting. You simply sell what you never produced in the first place. Neat trick, eh?

"Water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink."

For some people - a lot of people actually - the danger is too much water, sea water to be specific. Rising sea levels forecast to result from global warming pose an enormous problem to the Middle East. Egypt's Nile River is especially vulnerable to rising water levels and the associated infusion of salt and brackish water. The UN Environment Programme estimates it could result in the displacement of between two and four million Egyptians by 2050.

Sea water levels don't have to rise very much at all before they begin salinating the groundwater supplies of particularly vulnerable spots like Gaza. A little salinity in groundwater can be incredibly destructive. It's widely believed that the ancient Mesopotamian civilization was destroyed when they rendered the once richly fertile lands of the Tigris and Euphrates delta utterly sterile by centuries of irrigating with brackish water. The salts don't wash away. Instead they accumulate over time until the soil becomes incapable of supporting plant life. Remember how the Romans took revenge on Carthage?

Sea water levels are also expected to wreak proper hell on security in the Jordanian, Israeli and Palestinian areas (and, please, don't send me e-mails screaming that there is no Palestine).

The report entitled Climate Change: A New Threat to Middle East Security, by the non-governmental organisation Friends of the Earth Middle East (FOEME), was presented at the annual UN Climate Change Conference in Bali, Indonesia.

It believes climate change could act as a “threat multiplier”, exacerbating water scarcity and tensions over water between nations linked by hydrological resources, geography and shared borders, particularly in Jordan, Gaza and Egypt.

“Poor and vulnerable populations, which exist in significant numbers throughout the region, will likely face the greatest risk”, says the study.

Okay, this isn't the delusional ranting of some whacko, leftie NGO. It's a reality already recognized in studies by very hard-nosed Israeli hydrologists who argue fiercely that Israel needs to keep a permanent hold on the Golan Heights and the West Bank for its own hydrological survival. They worry that a Palestinian West Bank and a Syrian-controlled Golan will leave Israel at the mercy of its enemies for essential access to freshwater.

Of course there's always desalination plants. Sure, but not really. Desalination plants use a lot of fossil fuel and generate a lot of contamination of coastal waters but the product they produce, while economically feasible for urban consumption, is way too expensive to quench the enormous thirst of the agricultural sector.

“Economic unrest across the region, due to a decline in agricultural production from climate impacts on water resources, could also lead to greater political unrest, posing a threat to current regimes and, thereby, affecting internal and cross-border relations,” the FOEME report claims.

It Only Took Them Six Years to Realize It's Broken

Afghanistan reviewed - top down, bottom up and even sideways. The US State Department, the Pentagon and NATO are beginning to scratch their heads and wonder why six years of war in Afghanistan has gone exactly nowhere?

NATO already has an idea, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer recently dropping the stinker that the alliance can expect to be in Afghanistan for "generations." As though the place was worth it!

Why all this sudden interest? As the New York Times puts it, the White House and NATO are "deeply concerned about the prospect of failure" in Afghanistan.

"The reviews are an acknowledgment of the need for greater coordination in fighting the Taliban and Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, halting the rising opium production and trafficking that finances the insurgency and helping the Kabul government extend its legitimacy and control."

Greater coordination? Does that mean that, after six years of split and inconsistent leadership, they've realized the need for a unified command with something resembling real tactics? What a stroke of bloody genius!

And as for helping the Kabul government "extend its legitimacy and control," how can anyone hope to extend what's never been established? And how can Washington and NATO establish legitimacy and control in the Kabul government without ridding it of the warlords, drug lords and even insurgent collaborators within its ranks that leave it hopelessly compromised and corrupted? The Karzai government is one sick puppy, damn near terminal.

What this all comes down to is showboating, a bit of tinkering here and there, and that's about it. Proof of that comes in this line from the Times report: [the reviews] are not expected to result in a similar infusion of combat forces, mostly because there are no American troops readily available.

Typically, the White House and the Pentagon are trying to dump every bit of blame they can at the feet of NATO. Maybe it's just a coincidence that they never breathe a word of their boss's jackass decision to pull his troops out of Afghanistan to play quagmire in Iraq. Maybe not.

My take on what's needed, right now, in Afghanistan. It would begin with NATO secretary general Jaap de Hoop Scheffer acting, for once, like he had a pair (even though he doesn't). That would mean standing up to the White House and the Pentagon and telling them to get their finger out and start massive transfers of troops from Iraq back to Afghanistan. It would mean reminding America that Afghanistan is their deal and their primary responsibility; that NATO expanded its role to allow America to get things finished up in Iraq; and that fighting the sort of insurgency the Taliban is waging is enormously labour-intensive. It would mean Scheffer telling Washington and the Pentagon that NATO is no longer willing to play enabler to a dysfunctional US military effort, no longer willing to be stooges in a hapless "war on the cheap" in Afghanistan. It would mean telling Washington and the State Department to come up with an effective plan, now, to clean up the Kabul government and transform it into a functioning central government that's worthy of shoring up.

If America isn't willing to make a genuine commitment to Afghanistan - and that's measured in many scores of thousands of troops - we're just barely treading water in a hopeless cause. If the Americans want to win this thing, or at least pretend they want to win it, it's time they bellied up to the bar. If not, let's get out just as soon as we can.

America's Richest Getting Oh So Much Richer!

The Congressional Budget Office reports that the top 1% of Americans saw their incomes increased by more than the total income of the bottom 20% of American wage earners last year. In fact it was a lot more. From the New York Times:

"The poorest fifth of households had total income of $383.4 billion in 2005, while just the increase in income for the top 1 percent came to $524.8 billion, a figure 37 percent higher.

Earlier reports, based on tax returns, showed that in 2005 the top 10 percent, top 1 percent and fractions of the top 1 percent enjoyed their greatest share of income since 1928 and 1929.

Asked how much of the increase at the top was from the tax cuts rather than market gains, Peter R. Orszag, the budget office director, said, “I can’t give you an answer to that because we just don’t know.”

“A lot of people justifiably feel they are working harder and smarter, they are baking a bigger and better pie, and yet their slice is not growing much at all,” said [Jared Bernstein, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington]. “It is meaningless to middle- and low-income families to say we have a great economy because their economy looks so much different than folks at the top of the scale because this is an economy that is working, but not working for everyone.”

Russia Turns Inward

Ten, fifteen years ago there existed an opportunity to bring Russia into the West. Instead we just declared the Cold War over and treated Russia with distrust.

Implicit in the Russian withdrawal from its Warsaw Pact allies' territory was an understanding that the West wouldn't swallow them up so that they could serve as a neutral, buffer zone at least for a couple of decades.

Instead of that, we began gobbling them up bringing them into the European Union and, worse, NATO. Just as Russia was wobbling its way toward some form of democracy we decided to bring it's former allies into our own alliance that is now parked right on Russia's doorstep. We got away with it because Russia was in disarray and weak. Now that's all changed.

Today's Russia is energetic and self-confident. It has a lot of oil wealth. And it is now Russia that has a deep distrust of us, the West. From the BBC:

In the last few weeks Russian suspicion of the outside world seems to have reached a new level of hysteria.

The day after Russia's parliamentary elections last week we awoke to find thousands of fanatical young Putin supporters patrolling the streets of Moscow.

They had been told by their Kremlin masters to take control of "key buildings" to prevent any attempt at a political take-over by "foreign-backed groups".

Among the buildings targeted for special attention were the British Embassy and the BBC bureau.
When I went outside to ask them why they were picketing us, the group of callow youths were hard put to come up with an answer.

"We are here to make sure no-one tries to steal our victory," one young woman tried.

No one in Russia believes the American missile-interceptor batteries and radars being positioned in Poland and the Czech republic are there to defend America against a rogue attack by Iran. Most Russians have little doubt that America has effected a policy of trying to contain and isolate Russia, pretty much along the same lines as what it's doing with China.

Last week Andrei Lugovoi, the man wanted in Britain for the poisoning murder of Alexander Litvinienko, was elected to parliament as an ultra-nationalist MP.

At the time the sole surviving MP from Russia's pro-Western liberal parties lost his seat in parliament.

Speaking afterwards one of his colleagues put it to me this way: "In the 1990s we had an opportunity to turn Russia outwards towards the West. But we failed. Now it's gone, and it won't be back for at least a generation."

Why does this matter? Because the world's current sole superpower is beginning to decline, helped along the way by the emergence of the BRIC nations - Brazil, Russia, India and China - as the new economic superpowers. A recent international poll found that most believed that Russia and China would be equal rivals to the United States in terms of global influence by 2020.

Not much attention has been paid to it in the West but Bush has triggered arms races in both Russia and China. In Russia, Putin has reacted to Bush's plan to develop a new generation of nuclear weapons and anti-missile systems with a Russian plan to develop its own next generation of nukes and systems to defeat America's ABM defences. America has embraced India to effect a military cordone sanitaire of China's entire coastline. In response China is fielding a new and highly capable blue water navy, advanced long-range missiles and new generation combat aircraft.

Are we headed for another Cold War, one in which the other side may hold the key economic advantages? Let's hope not. A good step would be a US President not committed to continuing the blockheaded policies of the current dolt.

Red Light, Green Light

You're driving along and you see a traffic light ahead that's turning yellow. What does the prudent driver do at that point? That driver takes his/her foot off the gas pedal in preparation for braking. Then the prudent driver begins to apply the brakes as gradually as possible.

Now there are also drivers who don't take their foot off the gas and power their way right up to the light. They're the ones who really have to throw the brakes on hard and they don't always get stopped in time.

I think most of us would agree that the prudent driver has the best approach. It's cautious, it saves wear on the brakes and lowers gas consumption. It's also the most comfortable, safest approach.

Look at it this way. The prudent driver sees the yellow warning light ahead and heeds it. That driver puts a hard cap on his/her fossil fuel consumption and begins introducing gentle measures to control the problem that lies ahead. The driver, the passengers in the car, all the other cars around, everyone wins.

The guy who powers his way right up to the light and then throws his brakes on hard at the last moment loses. He's burned up fuel he didn't need to waste getting to that light and put some very hard wear on his brakes and tires. He's put himself and his passengers through what most would consider a jarring, emergency stop. And, in the process, he's left himself, his passengers and everyone around him utterly vulnerable to the unexpected - an icy patch on the road, for example. But there's the positive side to it too - the guy did get to the red light first.

In terms of global warming, the light has turned yellow. We've been warned. We've been told that we either stop soon or we're going to have an awful accident. So what would be the prudent thing to do? The first step would be to put a hard cap on our carbon emissons. That takes the foot off the gas pedal. Then, having achieved that Herculean chore, we would look to cutting those emissions, applying the brakes, as gently as possible while ensuring we get stopped before we go through that red light.

Then there's the Bush/Cheney/Harper/Baird approach. They sort of agree the light looks yellow but they want to discuss what that means and, above all else, they don't want to take their foot off the gas pedal. They figure they won't worry about braking. After all, somebody else will be at the wheel before their car reaches the light, let that loser slam on the brakes. Right now it's party time. Hand me another Bud will ya?

I don't want to go along for this ride and I sure don't want one of these drunken lunatics at the wheel.

Don't Put That In Your Mouth, Really, Don't

NYT Photo

I'm really lucky. The fishing boats come in less than a mile from my front door so I can get all the seafood I can eat and I know exactly where it came from. You inlanders often aren't so lucky.

If I don't know where it's from, I don't eat it. There's a reason for that as the New York Times explains today.

FUQING, China — Here in southern China, beneath the looming mountains of Fujian Province, lie dozens of enormous ponds filled with murky brown water and teeming with eels, shrimp and tilapia, much of it destined for markets in Japan and the West.

Fuqing is one of the centers of a booming industry that over two decades has transformed this country into the biggest producer and exporter of seafood in the world, and the fastest-growing supplier to the United States.

But that growth is threatened by the two most glaring environmental weaknesses in China: acute water shortages and water supplies contaminated by sewage, industrial waste and agricultural runoff that includes pesticides. The fish farms, in turn, are discharging wastewater that further pollutes the water supply.

Farmers have coped with the toxic waters by mixing illegal veterinary drugs and pesticides into fish feed, which helps keep their stocks alive yet leaves poisonous and carcinogenic residues in seafood, posing health threats to consumers.

Environmental degradation, in other words, has become a food safety problem, and scientists say the long-term risks of consuming contaminated seafood could lead to higher rates of cancer and liver disease and other afflictions.

Environmental problems plaguing seafood would appear to be a bad omen for the industry. But with fish stocks in the oceans steadily declining and global demand for seafood soaring, farmed seafood, or aquaculture, is the future. And no country does more of it than China, which produced about 115 billion pounds of seafood last year.

China produces about 70 percent of the farmed fish in the world, harvested at thousands of giant factory-style farms that extend along the entire eastern seaboard of the country. Farmers mass-produce seafood just offshore, but mostly on land, and in lakes, ponds, rivers and reservoirs, or in huge rectangular fish ponds dug into the earth.

“There are heavy metals, mercury and flame retardants in fish samples we’ve tested,” said Ming Hung Wong, a professor of biology at Hong Kong Baptist University. “We’ve got to stop the pollutants entering the food system.”

More than half of the rivers in China are too polluted to serve as a source of drinking water. The biggest lakes in the country regularly succumb to harmful algal blooms. Seafood producers are part of the problem, environmental experts say. Enormous aquaculture farms concentrate fish waste, pesticides and veterinary drugs in their ponds and discharge the contaminated water into rivers, streams and coastal areas, often with no treatment.

Here in British Columbia we have a thriving but controversial aquaculture industry producing farmed "Atlantic" salmon. Even we're coming to realize the environmental peril associated with this nonsense. And no, we don't eat that garbage. It's all loaded into trucks and sent east. Folks out here won't eat salmon unless it's wild. Let's just say it tastes better.

But this is the holiday season, a time when we tend to indulge ourselves. Here's a tip. When you go into your fish market and you see all those lovely, huge black striped Tiger Prawns, ask where they're from before you buy. I don't even ask anymore.

Yippee! An Agreement to ...Talk

The crowning achievement of the Bali climate summit is an historic breakthrough compromise whereby the United States of America (presumably with us in tow) agreed to almost nothing except to keep talking. No target dates, not even any targets. Talk, more talk, and we've all seen just how productive talking with holdout nations like Canada and the US can be.

Bush may have botched Afghanistan and made an even more horrible mess of things in Iraq and came within a hair's breadth of setting the rest of the Muslim world on fire but he has succeeded in one thing. He has relentlessly defended Big Oil and Big Coal from any American involvement in carbon treaties. That, kids, is George w. Bush's legacy.

Every keener in law school learns that an agreement to agree is nothing, can't be enforced. It's virtually meaningless. Here we don't even have an agreement to agree, just an agreement to talk to see if we can maybe reach an agreement to agree sometime within the next two years.

Yes, we've all seen this con game played by Washington before. We're told they're going to really do something about this carbon problem real soon, absolutely. That's where Harper and Baird go to get their lines. Here's how you'll know the United States is serious. That'll be the day when they stop blowing the tops off mountains in West Virginia, that's when. But don't hold your breath.

If This Guy Can't Believe Mulroney, Should You?

"I Know Brian"

Brian Mulroney's former deputy prime minister finds Big Chin's testimony about Karlheinz Schreiber hard to swallow.

Now, in fairness, it should be noted that straight arrow, Erik Nielsen has been public about his doubts of Mulroney's integrity for many years.

When the Globe & Mail asked Nielsen if he bought Mulroney's story to the Commons ethics committee, he said, " no" before chuckling and adding. "I know Brian."

Mr. Nielsen said his impression of Mr. Mulroney's performance was that it raised more questions than it answered. He added that Mr. Mulroney was able to change the flow of the questioning towards Mr. Schreiber.

"That, of course, is a very common tool of the experienced committee Parliamentarian. So it didn't answer anything. There are as many questions, even more, left now after Brian's testimony than there were before, and I don't think they are ever going to be answered."

A very common tool. Actually that's not bad - for an epitaph.

R2P - A Lot of Work Remains

I found this paper delivered by Gareth Evans, President, International Crisis Group at The Hague just a few days ago. It's an update on the R2P or "responsibility to protect" initiative promoted by the Martin government and now, judging by the carnage of Darfur, still struggling. It's an academic issue for Canada, given that our military is essentially bogged down for the foreseeable future in Afghanistan. But it remains an important doctrine. What follows are excerpts from Evans presentation dealing with the thorny question of the use of force under R2P and the hurdle of the UN Security Council.

The R2P idea is very straightforward. The sovereign state itself has the primary responsibility to protect its people from genocide and other mass atrocities – ethnic cleansing, crimes against humanity and war crimes – occurring within the boundaries of that state. But if the state in question is unable or unwilling to take the necessary action that responsibility shifts to the wider international community.

...if prevention fails and atrocities are occurring or imminently about to occur, the responsibility to protect means the responsibility of the state itself, or others if it doesn’t act, to react appropriately. This may involve diplomacy and persuasion, but also as necessary more coercive measures like economic sanctions and criminal prosecution, and ultimately – but only in extreme cases, and as a last resort – military intervention. And, particularly after a military or other coercive intervention, R2P involves the responsibility to rebuild - to provide full assistance with recovery, reconstruction and reconciliation, to address again the causes of the harm that intervention was designed to halt or avert.

Each individual State has the responsibility to protect its populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity… We accept that responsibility and will act in accordance with it…

The international community, through the United Nations, also has the responsibility to help to protect populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. In this context, we are prepared to take collective action, in a timely and decisive manner, through the Security Council, in accordance with the Charter, including Chapter VII…, should peaceful means be inadequate and national authorities are manifestly failing to protect their populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity.

The cumulative weight of the post-World War II human rights instruments, the Genocide Convention, the Rome Statute establishing the International Criminal Court, and now the unanimous endorsement of the concept of the responsibility to protect by the General Assembly at the highest level, has made it simply no longer possible to argue – as it was possible to argue for centuries before – that sovereignty is a license to kill.

Although that won’t stop some people trying, for example the Shanghai professor who was quoted in USA Today a few weeks ago as saying ‘China has used tanks to kill people on Tiananmen Square. It is Myanmar’s sovereign right to kill their own people too.’ There are some parts of the world in which we have a lot of education still to do.

...when is it legal, and legitimate, to use military force in R2P situations. The issue here is about coercive force, applied without the consent of the state in question, not about peace operations for civilian protection purposes mounted consensually.

...many, particularly in the global South, to see R2P as being only about the use of force, and just another way of talking about ‘humanitarian intervention’, which throughout the 1990s debate was indeed a concept synonymous with military coercion.

...it is inevitable that use of force issues have dominated the R2P debate. There is an emotional context here: the conscience-shocking atrocity-crime situations that resonate most in our memory, certainly in this country, are the ones where we know that the timely use of military force would have saved thousands, or hundreds of thousands, of innocent lives – the cases like Rwanda in 1994 and Srebrenica in 1995 when force should unquestionably have been used but wasn’t. These are the cases that make us ask ourselves each time, with a mixture of incomprehension, rage and shame, how we can possibly find ourselves saying ‘never again’ when we have said it so many times before.

the ICISS commission advocated ...that for any decision about the coercive use of military force, against the will of the state in question, the Security Council adopt as guidelines five criteria of legitimacy. All of them have an explicit pedigree in Christian ‘just war’ theory, but their themes do resonate equally, and are not inconsistent, with the other major world religious and intellectual traditions. They are as follows:

(1) Just Cause: Is there serious and irreparable harm occurring to human beings, or imminently likely to occur, [essentially genocide or ethnic cleansing].
(2) Right Intention: is the primary purpose of the proposed military action to halt or avert human suffering, whatever other motives may be in play?
(3) Last Resort: has every non-military option for the prevention or peaceful resolution of the crisis been explored, with reasonable grounds for believing lesser measures will not succeed?
(4) Proportional Means: is the scale, duration and intensity of the planned military action the minimum necessary to secure the defined human protection objective?
(5)Reasonable Prospects: is there a reasonable chance of the military action being successful in meeting the threat in question, with the consequences of action not likely to be worse than the consequences of inaction?

the problem of what exactly is to be done in a situation in which the criteria of legitimacy seem manifestly to be satisfied, yet the cloak of formal legality is not available because, for whatever reason, the Security Council, fails or refuses to authorize the relevant military action: in other words, what most people would now accept was the situation with Kosovo in 1999.

which of two evils is the worse: the damage to international order if the Security Council is bypassed, or in the damage to that order if human beings are slaughtered while the Security Council stands by?

The object must be to create a worldwide intellectual and political environment in which, when the next Rwanda or other conscience-shocking man-made human rights catastrophe comes along, as unhappily it surely will, there is a reflexive protective response – and the only question is not whether to act, but when, where and how. I hope that this World Legal Summit can play its part in creating that environment. None of us want to have to say ‘never again’ ever again.

Iraq's Future Hides in Syria

One in five Iraqi refugees in Syria reports having been tortured or subjected to other violence. And one in three of them left Baghdad during the US military surge when conditions were supposedly made much better.

Those are preliminary findings of a United Nations study reported by McClatchey Newspapers.

The survey also found that the refugee population is highly educated and that many refugees are just weeks away from exhausting their savings.

The preliminary results, however, offer intriguing insights into the refugees. Of the refugees polled, 78 percent said they'd come from Baghdad. Thirty-five percent said they fled between July and October, when U.S. troop strength peaked during the surge. Another 30 percent said they'd fled to Syria during 2006, as sectarian violence intensified.

Nearly a third — 32 percent — have graduated from a university or hold master's and doctorate degrees.

Preston Manning's Shattered Dreams

Remember Manning's vision embraced in his Reform Party? Grassroots, participatory democracy. Government of the people, by the people, for the people - writ large. His government was one that would do the people's will.

Now we have Manning's protege, esconced in 24 Sussex Drive, running the most top-down, secretive, autocratic government Canada has seen in at least half a century. Recent studies have shown Harper's agenda to be on the wrong side of public opinion on nearly everything. This is a guy governing despite the people's will.

Manning has to say nice things about Harpo, he really doesn't have a lot of choice. But what must he be thinking? First he spawned the laughably hapless Stockwell Day, now it's Harper.

Supreme Court of Canada Takes Jurisidiction in Jewish Divorce

The case involved the religious divorce, or get, that ensnarls Jewish couples in particularly nasty divorces.

The Jewish faith holds that it is the husband's prerogative to give or withhold the get. If the husband turns nasty the wife, though divorced under civil law, remains his wife in the eyes of their faith.

In Bruker v. Marcovitz, the parties divorced in 1980. As part of the settlement, Marcovitz agreed to give Bruker the get. When all was said and done he reneged, thinking there was no way she could do anything about it. Finally she sued for damages and won. The Quebec Court of Appeal, however, overturned her victory and so the case worked its way to the Supreme Court of Canada where - she won! Justice Abella wrote the 7-2 majority decision:

"The husband must voluntarily give the get and the wife consent to receive it. When he does not, she is without religious recourse, retaining the status of his wife and unable to remarry until he decides, in his absolute discretion, to divorce her. She is known as an agunah or "chained wife". Any children she would have on civil remarriage would be considered "illegitimate" under Jewish law.

For an observant Jewish woman in Canada, this presents a dichotomous scenario: under Canadian law, she is free to divorce her husband regardless of his consent; under Jewish law, however, she remains married to him unless he gives his consent. This means that while she can remarry under Canadian law, she is prevented from remarrying in accordance with her religion. The inability to do so, for many Jewish women, results in the loss of their ability to remarry at all.

...The provision at the heart of this dispute is Paragraph 12 of the parties’ Consent to Corollary Relief, by which they agreed to appear before the Rabbinical authorities in the City and District of Montreal for the purpose of obtaining the traditional religious Get, immediately upon a Decree Nisi of Divorce being granted. [Emphasis added.]

The issues in this appeal, as mentioned earlier, are whether this obligation constitutes a valid and binding civil obligation under Quebec law and, if it does, whether Mr. Marcovitz is exonerated from liability for failing to perform his obligation on the basis that it violated his freedom of religion."

After holding that the obligation on Marcovitz was contractual and not purely religious and therefore could be remedied in the breach, the Court rejected his claim that an award of damages would violate Quebec's Charter by interfering with his freedom of religion.

"...Despite the moribund state of her marriage, Ms. Bruker remained, between the ages of 31 and 46, Mr. Marcovitz’s wife under Jewish law, and dramatically restricted in the options available to her in her personal life. This represented an unjustified and severe impairment of her ability to live her life in accordance with this country’s values and her Jewish beliefs. Any infringement of Mr. Marcovitz’s freedom of religion is inconsequential compared to the disproportionate disadvantaging effect on Ms. Bruker’s ability to live her life fully as a Jewish woman in Canada."

I'm posting this mainly because it reminds me of my first - and last - matrimonial case. By the time it was over I decided I'd never take another - ever - and I never did.

NATO Stuck in Afghanistan for "Generations"

"Afghanistan is not a commitment that you enter into for two or three years. Developing that nation will take a generation, or generations."

That happy prediction from the alliance's own secretary-general Jaap de Hoop Scheffer. A reasonable person could take that to mean that NATO will be bogged down in Afghanistan for somewhere around 30-years. Isn't that great?

Generations? Is that how long it's going to take to give Karzai an Afghan army that can replace NATO's 26,000 soldiers in ISAF? No, of course not, so we're going to be stuck there ...exactly why? Well, in typical Scheffer style that's left out of the pitch.

Are we there to wipe out the Taliban? No, that doesn't seem likely, even our generals say that can't be done. Are we there to wipe out the opium trade? That would only outrage too many top dogs in the Kabul government. Best leave that one alone. Are we there to drive out the tyrannical warlords? No, then we'd be at war with the entire country.

Six years down this road NATO's secretary general owes us - all the people of all the NATO nations - some clear answers. Just what are we there to do, how are we going to do it and when will we be able to declare "mission accomplished." Until he gives us straight answers to those direct questions, everything else that comes out of his mouth is pure bullcrap.

To say that NATO has to stay in Afghanistan for generations needs to be seen for what it really is. It's Scheffer's tacit admission that he doesn't have the foggiest idea how to get us out.

Why America's Latest Financial Crunch is Different

The realm of modern high finance with subprime mortgages and ABCP (asset based commercial paper) derivatives of all sorts is tough for most of us to grasp. Even the head of the US Federal Reserve Board needed to get an extensive briefing so that he could get a working knowledge of how these things were structured.

It's a global problem because these grossly overvalued securities were snapped up by banks worldwide. Banks in Britain, even Canada are taking a hit on their derivative holdings. Bush has tried to head off collapse by introducing a new mortgage plan designed to help some homeowners avoid default, triggering further snowball foreclosures. Now the Fed has stepped in announcing a plan to loan $40-billion to US banks to bolster their liquidity.

However, Princeton economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman says what American institutions are facing isn't the classic, run on banks of the old days. Things are much different now.

Suppose that there’s a nasty rumor about the First Bank of Pottersville: people say that the bank made a huge loan to the president’s brother-in-law, who squandered the money on a failed business venture.

Even if the rumor is false, it can break the bank. If everyone, believing that the bank is about to go bust, demands their money out at the same time, the bank would have to raise cash by selling off assets at fire-sale prices — and it may indeed go bust even though it didn’t really make that bum loan.

And because loss of confidence can be a self-fulfilling prophecy, even depositors who don’t believe the rumor would join in the bank run, trying to get their money out while they can.

But the Fed can come to the rescue. If the rumor is false, the bank has enough assets to cover its debts; all it lacks is liquidity — the ability to raise cash on short notice. And the Fed can solve that problem by giving the bank a temporary loan, tiding it over until things calm down.

In August, the Fed tried again to do what it did in 1998, and at first it seemed to work. But then the crisis of confidence came back, worse than ever. And the reason is that this time the financial system — both banks and, probably even more important, nonbank financial institutions — made a lot of loans that are likely to go very, very bad.

First, we had an enormous housing bubble in the middle of this decade. To restore a historically normal ratio of housing prices to rents or incomes, average home prices would have to fall about 30 percent from their current levels.

Second, there was a tremendous amount of borrowing into the bubble, as new home buyers purchased houses with little or no money down, and as people who already owned houses refinanced their mortgages as a way of converting rising home prices into cash.

As home prices come back down to earth, many of these borrowers will find themselves with negative equity — owing more than their houses are worth. Negative equity, in turn, often leads to foreclosures and big losses for lenders.

What’s going on in the markets isn’t an irrational panic. It’s a wholly rational panic, because there’s a lot of bad debt out there, and you don’t know how much of that bad debt is held by the guy who wants to borrow your money.

How will it all end? Markets won’t start functioning normally until investors are reasonably sure that they know where the bodies — I mean, the bad debts — are buried. And that probably won’t happen until house prices have finished falling and financial institutions have come clean about all their losses. All of this will probably take years.

China Nears the Wall

There's not much you can do without water. No morning shower or orange juice and coffee at breakfast. No bread for toast, no bacon or eggs. No milk for your cereal. No cereal. All of those things depend on an adequate supply of water, lots of water.

The Chinese are struggling with a very real water crisis. Although they have 7% of the world's freshwater supply a lot of it winds up very polluted and contaminated. China's growing industrial base is placing heavy pressures on both water resources and water quality.

The country's leaders now say that, by 2030, China will consume its entire water supply. Every last drop will be needed to keep the nation going. Every lake, every river, every aquifer. The trouble is, you never manage to get all your water, can't be done. You can't wring out soil or pump out every crevice. You can't even really empty a river or a lake or an aquifer, not entirely. And if you did, imagine what would happen to the land itself? Wildlife would go extinct, forests would die, soil would erode, and on and on and on.

So what the Chinese are really saying is that by 2030, China's demand for freshwater will equal its total water resource, meaning that it will exceed its supply. That figure, however, leaves out a couple of other factors. It doesn't account for seasonal variances, like the drought that now afflicts parts of the country. It doesn't reflect changes in precipitation, where too much rainfall arrives at the wrong time resulting in flooding that then flows into the sea.

What the Chinese also have to contend with is their reliance on glacier-fed rivers. Like India, a key source of China's freshwater comes from Himalayan glaciers. And how have they been doing lately? A separate report out of China today shows that the country's high glaciers in the western (Himalayan) region have shrunk 18% over the past five years. From Reuters:

The shrinkage was most evident in two areas in the far Western region of Xinjiang and in part of Tibet, the official Xinhua news agency said.

"The change of glaciers is in fact a manifestation of the pressure upon China's environment from global warming," it quoted Ding Yongjian, a Chinese Academy of Sciences research fellow, as saying.

"Global warming has led to an increase in the average temperature in the western area of China over the past few decades. This has caused the glacial shrinking, a thawing of frozen earth and worsening arid conditions."

It would be extremely shortsighted to shrug this off as China's problem, none of our business. China, which until recently was massively agrarian, sees itself as a victim of global warming it blames the West for creating. It may be overtaking the US as the number one GHG emitter now but that's 2007 and this problem has been building for a century or more.

China is an emerging economic superpower, it's also an emerging military power complete with advanced aircraft, missiles and a bluewater navy. As nations go, this is the type you least want to find itself facing destabilizing environmental pressures.

Schreiber Lashes Back

He didn't waste any time responding to Brian Mulroney's claims. Karlheinz Schreiber says there's one way to tell whether it's Mulroney or him who is telling the truth: look at the documentary evidence and call other witnesses. He says there's a lot to be learned from bank records, hotel receipts, etc.

Schreiber disputes two cornerstones of Mulroney's story. He denies Mulroney's claim that their business deal was made only after BMPM left office. And he denies that Mulroney earned the money by lobbying heads of state at the international level. Schreiber maintains there wasn't even anything, any product, to promote.

I expect the next time the ethics committee hears from Karlheinz Schreiber - that is if the Tories don't get rid of him to cover their asses - they can expect to receive a pile of documents contradicting Mulroney's claims.

So far, the best analysis of this bucket of deceit and duplicity I've read is Andrew Coyne's. If you haven't read it, take a look:

http://andrewcoyne.com/2007/12/does-mulroney-take-us-for-fools.php

Hey, Harpo - Want My Opinion?

Harper's hypocrisy seemingly knows no bounds.

Canada's one-man goon squad thought he'd score some easy political points by commissioning a study into the polling practises of previous Liberal governments. Oh, he was going to get those scoundrels!

Harpo commissioned former PQ cabinet minister Daniel Paille to dig into the Libs practises with a view to getting enough dirt to hold an embarrassing public enquiry. Paille went back to 1990 and duly delivered his report - one that was left to gather dust on a Tory desk.

Paille did his homework alright. His report shows that the Harper government spent $31.2 million on opinion research in the last year - more than any previous year and almost twice the $18 million spent on average during the Liberal years.

This from a bozo bully boy who keeps telling us he doesn't govern by polls. Harper's not only a greasy hypocrite, he's a damned liar to boot. That's my opinion and, best of all, I'll give it to Steve free of charge.

Calling Robert Hladun

Karlheinz Schreiber has repeatedly said that his Edmonton lawyer, Robert Hladun, received two approaches - one from Brian Mulroney, the other from Mulroney and his lawyer, asking for a statement from Schreiber attesting that no money ever passed between them.

Mulroney says it never happened.

What we need to hear is Robert Hladun's account. Ordinarily this sort of thing might be subject to a solicitor-client privilege, at least arguably, but not now that Schreiber has effectively waived privilege by discussing it publicly.

Schreiber has made the allegation. It's demonstrably damaging to Mulroney. Hladun can clear the air. If the ethics committee wants to clear Brian Mulroney, subpoena Robert Hladun and get his evidence on this on the record, under oath.

If Hladun denies Schreiber's account, then that should be one giant hole in the guy's credibility. If Hladun confirms Schreiber's account, that pulls the carpet right out from under Mulroney's.

CTV Goes to Bat for Mulroney

Mike Duffy and Craig Oliver were falling over each other to come up with reasons to shut down the Commons ethics committee right here, right now.

As far as these two jokers are concerned, it's over. Oliver even came up with the excuse that, if there was anything murky going on, why didn't Schreiber wear a wire?

And, of course, Oliver said the government should boot Schreiber out ASAP because, after all, the Germans are freaking out. Say what?

Best of all, they say there's no way to get to the bottom of the discrepancies between the sworn accounts of Schreiber and Mulroney. Impossible, can't be done. Time to clear Mulroney and move on. No need for a public enquiry now.

And that, my friends, is journalism at its lamest. If these two pillars of parliamentary journalism don't know how to sort out evidentiary discrepancies, it's because they've conveniently forgotten. They're curiously doing their utmost to kill this thing now, just when the evidence is finally going somewhere.

Chewing the Fat, Mulroney Style

He's as slick as ever. After listening to his brief testimony, about the most important aspect of today's hearing was the emergence of discrepancies between the evidence of Schreiber and Mulroney. The more discrepancies in this sort of case the better. It gives greater opportunity for credible third parties to be brought in to corroborate or discredit one side or the other. Now the committee needs to find people who don't have a dog in this fight.

Was Brian Mulroney evasive? On the narrative behind his voluntary disclosure he sure was. Mulroney raised the sanctity of what passes between a Canadian taxpayer and the revenue department as allowing him to dodge questions on what he did. Now, Revenue Canada, as it then was, is under an obligation of confidentiality but that doesn't shield the taxpayer. Every day in this country spouses embroiled in matrimonial disputes are compelled to produce their income tax returns going back years. They would be laughed out of court and likely left to cool their heels in a jail cell if they refused to disclose their tax records on the basis of some sacred relationship with the revenuers. Mulroney is in exactly the same position on his tax situation.

So we heard all about Mulroney's suffering and the pain inflicted on Mila and the kids. He read Schreiber letters and various press clippings. What he didn't do was get himself off the hook, not even close.

The EU Turns Its Back on Bush

Poor little Georgie Bush can't get no respect anymore. Folks just aren't at the Clown Prince's beck and call today.

Shrub got bitchslapped in Bali today by the European Union whose reps sent a message to the little peckerhead that they won't be showing up for his "Major Economies Meeting" in Hawaii next month unless the US gets with the programme at the Bali climate summit.

Germany's enviromin, Sigmar Gabriel, put the EU position bluntly, “No result in Bali means no Major Economies Meeting.”

“The best we hoped for was that the U.S. would not hobble the rest of the world from moving forward,” said Kevin Knobloch, president of the Union of Concerned Scientists, a non-profit American organization. “Our delegation here from the States has not been able to meet that low level of expectation.”

The head of the American delegation, levitating over the facts, said America is working very hard to achieve consensus - there's no question there. Unfortunately by consensus she means capitulation and by climate plan she means stay the course.

Unbelievable, Simply Unbelievable!

Brian Mulroney has fed the Commons ethics committee an account of his dealings with Karlheinz Schreiber that conforms with the facts he cannot avoid and yet rings utterly hollow.

Yes, he took the money from Schreiber, but it was only $225,000.

Yes, it was in cash.

Yes, he decided to pay income tax on it in 1999 after Schreiber was arrested.

No, he didn't disclose his relationship with Schreiber when asked while he was under oath in 1995 because he thought they were only discussing Airbus.

Yes, he took the money as a fee for helping Schreiber help Thyssen by lobbying on the international level for the German weapons maker.

Yes, he paid tax on the entire amount ($225,000) without deducting any of the expenses he incurred in lobbying.

So, there it is - or at least there's where it is right now. But let's go back to the question Mulroney was asked and his sworn statement in answer:

Counsel: Did you maintain contact with Mr., er, Schreiber after you ceased to be prime minister?

Brian Mulroney: Well, from time to time, not very often, when he was going through Montreal, he would give me a call, we would have a cup of coffee, I think once or twice, and he told me that he continued to work on his projects, ah, that he was pushing the new government, and he told me that the idea of the project at that point was ______ , but the desirability at the time was to work with the provincial government of Quebec and the federal government, ah, the new federal government, to establish this new project in the east end of Montreal where the jobs were badly required and he told me that, um, he had hired Marc Lalonde to represent his interests before the new Liberal government.

Mulroney is stretching credulity to the breaking point to claim that this question pertained to Airbus. He isn't telling the truth. Did you maintain contact with Schreiber after you ceased to be prime minister? That question couldn't be clearer and it wasn't for Mulroney to dodge it with tortured interpretations now.

He's snagged. At the very least this warrants proceedings against him for perjury. He's certainly created a prima facie case for any prosecutor to bring to trial. Maybe he's got a better explanation that he could provide in a proper hearing but, if so, we should be able to get to the bottom of this. And, if Mulroney wasn't telling the truth to the counsel who questioned him in 1996, we know that he was lying before the ethics committee today also. And, if he was lying about this, what else is he lying about?

Mulroney, International Man of Influence?

According to Mulroney-watcher, author William Kaplan, it's rumoured that Brian Mulroney will tell the Commons ethics committee that he earned his $300k fee from Karlheinz Schreiber by acting as a lobbyist at the "international level."

Kaplan, who broke the story of the Mulroney-Schreiber cash deal, says this is a rumour that's been circulating for the past week. From the Ottawa Citizen:

"Kaplan, who wrote the book "A Secret Trial," predicted in an interview Wednesday that if rumours are true, Mulroney will tell MPs on a Commons committee his work for Schreiber focused on international lobbying at the United Nations Security Council.

But Kaplan adds that in the six years he has kept tabs on the saga - and the numerous times he has talked to Mulroney - it will be the first time he has heard this particular version.

"I've been following this story for years and this is a brand new explanation. It's one that I have started hearing in the past week - it's being circulated out there. But I've never heard it before," said Kaplan.

In an e-mail response to questions about the possible international lobbying explanation, Kaplan added: "Assume it's true. Did he ever actually lobby anyone on the Security Council? Don't think so."

Why Harper Betrays Real Conservatism

"Nobody makes a greater mistake than he who does nothing because he could only do a little."

That little bit of wisdom comes from the father of modern conservatism, Edmund Burke. It's applicable to the abject refusal of our SoCon goverment to introduce hard caps on carbon emissions unless the "big emitters" do the same.

This quote comes from an interesting retrospective on genuine conservatism - not the Harper kind or the Bush/Cheney strain - but truly progressive conservatism by Michael Gerson writing in today's Washington Post.

Gerson writes of the great progressives such as Lord Shaftesbury and William Wilberforce (great, great grandfather of the magnificent judge, Lord Wilberforce) in 18th and 19th century England.

Prime Minister William Pitt pressed a young member of Parliament named William Wilberforce to introduce a bill for the abolition of the slave trade. Wilberforce's research found that the holds of slave ships were, according to one witness, "so covered in blood and mucus which had proceeded from them in consequence of the (dysentery) that it resembled a slaughterhouse." Enslaved Africans on the ships attempted to starve themselves to death or to jump into the ocean. Wilberforce thought this suffering a good reason for reform.

A later conservative, Lord Shaftesbury, fought against conditions that amounted to slavery in British factories, rescued child laborers from chimneys and mines, and worked for improved sanitary conditions in British slums. In 1853, for example, the citizens of Dudley, England, had an average age at death of 16 years and 7 months. "I feel that my business lies in the gutter," said Shaftesbury, "and I have not the least intention to get out of it."

And Burke himself had a foot in this tradition. He was an early opponent of slavery, supported reforms to help debtors and opposed discrimination against Irish Catholics. He accused reactionary conservatives of defending "their errors as if they were defending their inheritance." He was deeply critical of those who refused to act because they thought nothing could be accomplished.

This history is directly relevant to modern debates. In some conservative quarters we are seeing the return of Burkeanism -- or at least a narrow version of it. These supposed Burkeans dismiss the promotion of democracy and human rights as "ideological," the protection of human life and dignity as "theological," and compassionate conservatism as a modern heresy.

But the compassionate conservatism of Wilberforce and Shaftesbury is just as old as Burke, and more suited to an American setting. American conservatives, after all, are called upon to conserve a liberal ideal -- that all men are created equal. ... And skepticism in this noble cause is not sophistication; it seems more like exhaustion and cynicism.

A significant portion of Americans are motivated by a religiously informed vision of human dignity. For them, compassion is not merely a private feeling but a public commitment -- as public as the abolition of slavery or the end of child labor. And they are looking not for another Wellington but for another Wilberforce.

Reading this article I was reminded that it isn't conservatism I loathe, merely the selfish, callous cynicism that people of Harper's ilk have used to pervert it.

http://letters.washingtonpost.com/WBRH0168655DED98DFE7F378B523E0

Baird - Enviro Confidence Man

He sure sounds like he means it - but he's just pulling your crank.

EnviroMin John Baird has "served notice" on Canada's big industrial polluters that he's cracking down. They've got six months to disclose their greenhouse gas emission levels and cutbacks will begin next year. Yippee for us!

But there's a catch, a lot of catches. The one that matters is the one that Baird won't mention, his plan still is "intensity based." That means you can keep pumping out even greater amounts of greenhouse gases so long as the processes you use are a little bit cleaner.

All in all, it's welcome news for Baird/Harper's prime constituent - Big Oil and their mega Tar Sands project.

Matthew Bramley of the Pembina Institute also criticized the government's use of so-called intensity targets. Loosely put, intensity targets are a per capita measurement system that allows a company's overall pollution to increase as long as its emissions drop for each product it makes.

"There's just a huge amount of spin ... It's extremely misleading,'' Bramley said.

"The oil sands sector will be able to meet these targets while tripling its actual emissions.''

How the Right Co-opted Canada's Media

Rightwing nutjobs like to attack the mainstream media as Liberal pawns. Anyone with roots in journalism going back more than three decades knows the media has actually gone the other way - right into the laps of the right. It takes a real nutjob to see Liberal bias in Canada's media, especially our newspapers. The Sun Media group, CanWest Global, National Post - they're all firmly entrenched in the right and shamelessly spread their deplorably biased coverage. Even the Globe & Mail has shifted centre right over the past decade. That pretty much leaves the Toronto Star and CBC in a lopsided position.

Frances Russel in today's Winnipeg Free Press points out that it was the way the right co-opted the mainstream media that all but killed the Mulroney-Schreiber story:

"William Kaplan is a law professor and author. Norman Spector, now a political commentator, was Mulroney's chief of staff from 1990 to 1992 and then his ambassador to Israel. Lawrence Martin is a Globe and Mail columnist and author. And Stephen Kimber is Rogers Communications' chair in journalism at the University of King's College in Halifax.
All have commented on the Mulroney-Schreiber affair and what it says about Canadian journalism.

In the opening chapter of his 2004 book, A Secret Trial: Brian Mulroney, Stevie Cameron and the Public Trust, Kaplan writes that he couldn't believe his ears when veteran reporter Philip Mathias read him the story the National Post refused to publish in 2001. Had it been, Canadians would have learned almost seven years ago that Schreiber paid Mulroney $300,000 in three instalments in 1993 and 1994.

Kaplan was equally shocked when Mathias recounted why his story was "spiked."

Mathias gave it to Post editors in early January 2001. Three months later, it still hadn't seen the light of day. Frustrated, Mathias wrote letters to Conrad Black and the Aspers, the paper's co-owners. At a meeting with senior editors, Mathias was told there was no story. He was repeatedly asked why he kept pursuing it -- and why he went over his editors' heads.

That night, Mathias was phoned at home by Kenneth Whyte, the Post's editor-in-chief, now editor-in-chief of Maclean's magazine. Whyte told Mathias he also backed killing the story.

Thus, Canadians didn't hear about the cash payments to Mulroney until the fall of 2003. Even then, they were only mentioned in passing in paragraph 26 of one of a series of articles written by Kaplan for The Globe.

In a column last month, Norman Spector excoriated the media for allowing Kaplan's 2003 shocking but buried disclosures about Mulroney to "fizzle out." Here's why Spector thinks they did:

"With the National Post having killed what would have been an extraordinary scoop, Mr. Kaplan's book ended up being ignored by most CanWest newspapers. In Quebec, Mr. Mulroney has always enjoyed the benefit of the doubt, as well as the support of influential friends in command of major chunks of the media. In Ottawa, many reporters were looking for reasons not to write about the book..."

Lawrence Martin has written several articles about the Canadian media's rightward migration. In a January 2003 column headlined It's not Canadians who've gone to the right, just their media, he quoted an unnamed European diplomat saying "You have a bit of a problem here. Your media are not representative of your people, your values." Too many political commentators are right of centre while the public is in the middle, the diplomat continued. There is a disconnect.

Martin believes the disconnect began when Conrad Black converted the Financial Post into the National Post, hired a stable of conservative commentators like Mark Steyn, David Frum and George Jonas, bought the centrist Southam chain and turned the entire package into a vehicle to unite Canada's right and retool the country's values to U.S.-style conservatism.

Even further right rests the Quebecor-owned tabloid Sun Media chain. Mulroney was chairman of the board of Sun Media and sits on Quebecor's board."

Best of All - No Broken Glass on the Floor of the Car

Paris Hilton appeared in Berlin for the launch of her newest product - champagne in a can. That's right - a can. No more broken bottles in the backseat of your Escalade when you're drinking Paris' own Rich Pressco champagne. Better yet, when you're done you can simply crush the empties and stow them safely out of sight under the seat!

Hilton says the profits from her cans will go to providing water for the needy. That's what she said but it turns out she's going to whittle that down to 20% of the net.

To promote Rich Pressco canned champers, Hilton appeared in a coat of gold paint. Voila!

America's Lawyer of the Year - Alberto Gonzales!

I guess that makes Paul Wolfowitz "strategist of the decade." No but seriously, The Guardian reports that the American Bar Association Journal has picked Mr. Torture himself its lawyer of the year for 2007.

"The ABA Journal also picked Attorney General Michael Mukasey - Gonzales' successor - to be its lawyer of the year for 2008 because he has to deal with the problems left when Gonzales resigned under fire last fall.

"Qualifications for the title were not immediately clear. But the ABA Journal's picks, which will be published in its January issue, appear to award lawyers who spent a lot of time in the media spotlight.

"`The top legal story of 2007 was unquestionably the unraveling of support for the Bush administration's expansive view of presidential power during wartime, and with it, the slow-motion destruction of Alberto Gonzales' reign as U.S. attorney general,'' according to a statement issued Wednesday by the ABA Journal.

"'Add to that the controversy over whether the administration fired eight U.S. attorneys for political reasons, and no single lawyer made more news in 2007 than Gonzales,'' the magazine said."

Only in America.

Framing Global Warming

Like any tough issue, how you frame the problem can greatly shape the debate. That's what is happening on the anthropogenic global warming issue.

At first it was framed as a scam perpetrated by corrupt scientists exploiting fear to rake in government grants. Then, year after year passed while those with an enormous financial interest in debunking the "junk science" failed to come up with any peer-reviewed science to back their claims. It should have been a piece of cake with hundreds of billions of dollars hanging in the fossil fuel industries balance. When they failed miserably they fell back on the "denial industry", hiring the same outfits that R.J. Reynolds once used with some success to persuade the gullible that there was no link between cigarettes and cancer.

Still, the denial industry has earned its pay by feeding enough skeptics what they wanted to eat. In doing that, they put back any serious effort to curb carbon emissions by several years. Not a total victory for Big Oil and Big Coal but a very handsome return on their investment anyway.

So with the "rearguard" crumbling, the next line of defence is to frame AGW as an economic issue. This is even better for the fossil fuel industry because it gives rise to xenophobic stalemate. Entire nations engage in finger-pointing rhetoric to dodge having to actually slash emissions. There are plenty of moral arguments to go around and, the best thing, they're on significantly differing footings. Our side, the dirtiest and most advantaged, conceal the fact of our gluttonous consumption by recognizing only total emissions. Their side, the less advantaged and vastly more populous, recognize per-capita emissions. On a per capita basis, China puts out a small fraction of our GHG emissions. India? Don't even go there. Both sides have moral justifications that they can use to hide behind and they're doing it.

What everyone seems willing to go to any lengths to avoid is the third way that the global warming issue can be framed. It's the one they fear most and make almost any effort to avoid mentioning. It's the issue that frames anthropogenic global warming as an instrument of suffering, displacement, even death on massive scales suffered not by those who sit back and argue over who has to go first but by the very people who have contributed almost nothing to atmospheric carbon levels.

Do you think these people have the luxury of caring which nations should first cut their greenhouse gas emissions or how to accommodate sustainable economic growth among the developed world or whether emissions should be assessed on a national or a per capita basis?

Once you frame global warming in the context of its true victims, all the moral and economic justifications become empty pretence. In the context of those who suffer and will continue to suffer more and more from our excess, the debate becomes relatively simple: how do we do the right thing by these people; how do we cut greenhouse gas emissions as much as possible as quickly as possible; how do we restore their right to a homeland and peace and even life itself?

There are times when you have to put aside your arsenal of justifications and stand up and do the right thing. Why are we so afraid of that?

Pickton Pulls The Full 25

Serial killer Robert Pickton's parole eligibility has been set at the maximum 25-years. Other than the faintest of faint-hope applications, that'll mean Pickton won't qualify to apply for parole until, let me see, 2032. And, in light of his chances of getting parole even then, it might as well have been set at 2332.

The monster will never again draw breath as a free man. That is only as it should be.

Pickton, like Clifford Olson, deserves to await an unmarked grave in a prison yard.

It's Their Planet Too

It's curious how we've come to believe, even if we can't bring ourselves to come right out and say it, that we're entitled to do pretty much whatever we like with the earth's common resources from the oceans to the atmosphere. These things, which cannot be owned by any country and must therefore belong to all equally, are nonetheless there to be exploited for our prosperity even if that has to be achieved at great suffering to others.

It's a principle of all civilized societies that a person is presumed to intend the logical consequences of their acts. In other words, if you do something, you're deemed to intend the consequences of what follows and it doesn't matter if those consequences are borne by you or someone else. Without this core principle, laws would be largely impossible to apply and enforce.

There is an out, an exception to this principle. It only applies to consequences that can actually be foreseen when the act occurs. If something happens that no reasonable person could have seen coming, well then we give you a pass.

Now, let's take carbon emissions. The big emitters, and that includes Canada, are likely to bring suffering, displacement, even death in large numbers to the poorest, most vulnerable nations on earth. That is the logical consequence of our failure to slash our carbon emissions. Maybe it wasn't foreseeable ten years ago but it's certainly foreseeable now. It's been thoroughly researched, studied and documented. That foreseeability exception I mentioned isn't available any more.

So, it comes down to this. By shirking our responsibility, as Canadians, to slash our greenhouse gas emissions, we can quite fairly be deemed to intend everything we're inflicting - and, more importantly, about to inflict - on the poorest, most vulnerable nations on earth.

It's no excuse to say that China and the US aren't leading the way. Just because they're firing carbon salvoes at these unfortunates doesn't make it any more acceptable that we're also doing it. Their sins are their sins, our sins are our sins, our crimes against humanity are our crimes and it doesn't make any difference whether China or the US even exist.

Consider this situation. The US has 50-machine guns and China has 50-machine guns and Canada has just 5. Suddenly the Americans and the Chinese open up into a mass of thousands of Sub-Saharan African climate migrants. We begin firing with our few guns, drowned out by the roar of the Chinese and American guns. Then we say, well we only had a few guns so we really didn't make any difference. The Americans and the Chinese were going to wipe them all out anyway. Really? Is that what we are as Canadians?

We fully intend to inflict the consequences of our fossil fuel extravagance on the people of the Third World. We intend that they suffer drought and floods, desertification and famine. We intend to render their homelands uninhabitable and we intend to displace them, to turn them into climate refugees. We intend every single misery that we bring to them. I'm sure we all wish that wasn't necessary but that doesn't change the fact that we intend that they get what's coming their way.

My Take on Today's Schreiber Testimony

One thing struck me about today's hearing and it was how well prepared certain Tory MPs seemed to be. They were asking "lawyer" questions, the sort one regularly gets at cross-examinations. I'm guessing that the Cons had the party's legal team working overtime prepping them for today's Schreiber appearance.

The questions were pretty good but lacked effective follow-ups and this allowed Schreiber to pretty much hold steady and swat the underlying allegations away. I suspect they hoped to gore Schreiber to weaken his evidence as much as possible before Mulroney testifies. They also attempted to close off Schreiber's evidence but that didn't work either as the sly little elf made it clear he had a lot more to tell the committee.

Again, Schreiber said he didn't bribe Mulroney with Airbus money. The cash payments came from funds Schreiber received from Thyssen and were paid to secure Mulroney's assistance in lobbying for the Bear Head project once Kim Campbell had safely won the next election. Schreiber was adamant that Mulroney misled him and failed to do anything for the money.

Schreiber has already caused Mulroney trouble by claiming Brian got Airbus money via GCI, Frank Moores' lobby firm. He's worked very hard to distance himself from that alleged transaction. The commonly held suspicion was that the Airbus money came from Schreiber, not from Mulroney's pal, Moores.

Hard to say what to expect when Mulroney gets sworn in on Thursday. I hope the Libs and NDP have their own lawyers prepping their questions for that one. This is a fairly complex saga, the sort that can easily get terminally bogged down in confusion unless the questions are focused and the questioners well disciplined. We will see.

Chairman Harper Gags Canada's Military

Achtung! From this day forward, requests for information and interviews must now be pre-cleared by the military with their political commisars, senior bureaucrats under the prime minister's office. It sounds awfully Stalinesque.

The Privy Council Office directive applies to all matters of "national importance," but is primarily focused on shaping information related to the war in Afghanistan.

The order was issued within the last two weeks and caps a determined effort by the Conservatives to assert more civilian control over the military, which has been seen in government circles to have too much influence in the conduct of the war.

Clamping down on public comment follows restrictions imposed earlier this year by the military itself on the release of documents under access-to-information legislation.

Smothering the political fire of the Afghanistan debate has been a principal aim this fall for Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who effectively shut down opposition criticism in the House of Commons by appointing a eminent persons panel to review Canada's role beyond 2009.

"They want to turn the noise down," said one defence source.

A second official added that the military side was in the "information business" while the political side was "in the marketing business."

A retired colonel and expert in access-to-information said the military, the group that has been most effective in rallying support for Afghanistan and explaining the mission to Canadians, has been gagged.
"People should absolutely be concerned because these are our sons and daughters serving in Afghanistan," said Michel Drapeau, a lawyer and defence commentator.

"It leaves one with the impression of some sort of political manipulation or lack of transparency, where transparency should be absolutely necessary."

Lack of transparency? I don't think so. What could be easier than seeing through Stephen Harper?

Shoring Up Canada's Sullied Reputation

Stephen Harper promised to transform Canada into a world leader, a nation that all others would know and respect. Instead he's turned Canada into a global pariah, a nation that all others are struggling to comprehend. At Bali, Canada is seen by the world for what Harper has made it - all balk and no action.

There's some comfort in knowing there are others at Bali who are working hard to shore up our nation's sullied reputation. From the Toronto Star:

"Environment ministers from Canada's two biggest provinces held a joint news conference in Bali repudiating the position of their national government.

Quebec's Line Beauchamp and Ontario's John Gerretsen made it clear that Ottawa does not speak for their provinces, which together account for almost two-thirds of the national population.

They urged Ottawa to set an example for others.

"If the U.S. is not willing to sign on, does that mean nobody should sign on?" Gerretsen asked rhetorically, with Beauchamp by his side.

"We don't like this attitude."

Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty chimed in from Toronto.

"What Canadians want their government to do is lead on this score, and we're not leading – we're following," McGuinty said. ``Worse than that, we're hindering."

Beauchamp summed up her response whenever other countries' delegates ask what Canada is doing.

"People are trying to understand Canada's position," she said. ``But honestly, we're not here to either explain it or defend it."

When Can a 10-Year Old Girl "Consent" to Sex With 9-Men? When She's An Aussie Aboriginal

Let's face it, if a judge let nine rapists off the hook after they'd had their way with a white child, that judge would be toast. If the kid is an aboriginal, an Australian aboriginal, well, hey, that's a different matter entirely.

It took a month for the story to hit the papers but now that it has, Queensland's attorney-general, Kerry Shine, has leapt into action to appeal the outrageous sentence. Maybe Shine ought to explain what he/she has been sitting on this case all this time. The AG's office obviously knew about it, just as they get reports on every criminal case heard in their jurisdiction.

"Bradley's handling of the case was revealed by the Australian newspaper. In passing sentence, she said that she accepted the girl involved "was not forced and ... probably agreed to have sex with all of you but you were taking advantage of a 10-year-old girl and she needs to be protected". The judge reminded the group of nine that it is an offence to have sex with a girl under the age of 16."

Diamond's Road Map to Collapse - Rational Bad Behaviour

UCLA Prof. Jared Diamond's studies have shown that doomed societies "often fail even to attempt to solve a problem once it has been perceived."

"...some people may reason correctly that they can advance their own interests by behavior harmful to other people. Scientists terms such behavior "rational" precisely because it employs correct reasoning, even though it may be morally reprehensible. The perpetrators know they will often get away with their bad behavior, especially if there is no law against it or if the law isn't effectively enforced. They feel safe because the perpetrators are typically concentrated (few in number) and highly motivated by the prospect of reaping big, certain, and immediate profits, while the losses are spread over large numbers of individuals.

"A frequent type of rational bad behavior is 'good for me, bad for you and for everybody else' - to put it bluntly 'selfish.' As a simple example, most Montana fishermen fish for trout. A few fishermen who prefer to fish for pike, a larger fish-eating fish not native to western Montana, surreptitiously and illegally introduced pike to some western Montana lakes and rivers where they proceeded to destroy trout fishing.

"One particular form of clashes of interest has become well known under the name tragedy of the commons,' in turn closely related to the conflicts termed 'the prisoner's dilemma' and the 'logic of collective action.' Consider a situation in which many consumers are harvesting a communally owned resource, such as fishermen catching fish in an area of ocean, or herders grazing their sheep on a communal pasture. If everyone overharvests the resource, it will become depleted by overfishing or overgrazing and thus decline or even disappear. ...But as long as there is no effective regulation of how much resource each consumer can harvest, then each consumer would be correct to reason, 'If I don't catch that fish or let my sheep graze that grass, some other fisherman or herder will anyway, so it makes no sense for me to refrain from overfishing or overharvesting.'

Diamond has studied several civilizations where this "correct" or "rational" logic has brought collapse and others where ruin was avoided. There have been three approaches that have worked to preserve commons resources. One is for government to step in and regulate. A second is for the commons resource to be privatized and divvied up so that each owner will have a direct incentive to prudently manage his interest. The third (and least likely option) is for the consumers to recognize their common interests and establish, obey and enforce their own harvesting regime.

Black Sentence In

Lucky guy. Conrad Black has been sentenced to 6.5 years imprisonment - 78 months. Black has been released on bail pending his appeal. If he loses on appeal, he can expect to serve 85% of his sentence behind bars.

So Much for Enviro-Friendly British Petroleum

After spending tens of millions of dollars trying to con the world that BP, Britain's primo oil company, was environmentally conscious, the company has decided to screw all that and jump head first into the Athabasca Tar Sands.

The British newspaper The Independent has wasted no time slagging BP for its environmental hypocrisy:

Producing crude oil from the tar sands – a heavy mixture of bitumen, water, sand and clay – found beneath more than 54,000 square miles of prime forest in northern Alberta – an area the size of England and Wales combined – generates up to four times more carbon dioxide, the principal global warming gas, than conventional drilling. The booming oil sands industry will produce 100 million tonnes of CO2 (equivalent to a fifth of the UK's entire annual emissions) a year by 2012, ensuring that Canada will miss its emission targets under the Kyoto treaty, according to environmentalist activists.

The oil rush is also scarring a wilderness landscape: millions of tonnes of plant life and top soil is scooped away in vast open-pit mines and millions of litres of water are diverted from rivers – up to five barrels of water are needed to produce a single barrel of crude and the process requires huge amounts of natural gas. The industry, which now includes all the major oil multinationals, including the Anglo-Dutch Shell and American combine Exxon-Mobil, boasts that it takes two tonnes of the raw sands to produce a single barrel of oil. BP insists it will use a less damaging extraction method, but it accepts that its investment will increase its carbon footprint.

BP said it will be using a technology that pumps steam heated by natural gas into vertical wells to liquefy the solidified oil sands and pump it to the surface in a way that is less damaging than open cast mining. But campaigners said this method requires 1,000 cubic feet of gas to produce one barrel of unrefined bitumen – the same required to heat an average British home for 5.5 days.

A spokesman for BP added: "These are resources that would have been developed anyway."

Experts say a pledge to restore all open cast tar sand mines to their previous pristine condition has proved sadly lacking. David Schindler, professor of ecology at the University of Alberta, said: "Right now the big pressure is to get that money out of the ground, not to reclaim the landscape. I wouldn't be surprised if you could see these pits from a satellite 1,000 years from now."

Lord Black Gets Off Easy

Black Judge says 6-8 years to be appropriate range. Judge agrees to use more lenient, 2000-sentencing guidelines. She also used the pre-sentence report estimate of $6-million in misappropriation instead of the $32-million figure argued by prosecutors.

We're Hypocrites or Maybe Just Harpocrites

Stephen Harper said he wanted to elevate Canada's reputation on the global scene. He's failed. He has transformed our reputation by dragging it through the mud. From the Globe & Mail:

Yvo de Boer, head of the United Nations climate-change agency, said Canada seems to be hypocritical in what it demands from other countries.

"I personally find it interesting to hear Canada just a little while ago indicating it would not meet its commitments under the Kyoto protocol and now calling on developing countries to take binding reduction targets," he told a press conference today at the Bali climate-change conference.

Rajendra Pachauri, head of the climate science panel that was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize today, has blasted the Harper government for its climate stance.

"This particular government has been a government of skeptics," said Mr. Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which shared the Nobel Prize with Al Gore.

"They do not want to do anything on climate change," he added in a published interview in New Delhi.

It Couldn't Happen to a Nicer Guy

The Atlanta Falcons' former star quarterback, Michael Vick, has been sentenced to 23-months in prison for his role in a dogfighting operation conducted on his property. From the Toronto Star:

Vick pleaded guilty in August, admitting he bankrolled the "Bad Newz Kennels" dogfighting operation and helped kill six to eight dogs.

In a plea agreement, he admitted bankrolling the dogfighting ring on his 15-acre property in rural southeastern Virginia and helping kill pit bulls that did not perform well in test fights. He also admitted providing money for bets on the fights but said he never shared in any winnings.

It was reported that some of the non-performing dogs were killed by hanging or electrocution. This was truly sadistic stuff. As for Vick's football career? The Falcons' owner wished him well as he goes on his "legal journey."

10-Year Old Girl Gang Raped, Suspended Sentences All Around

An Australian judge has given suspended sentences to three men convicted of gang-raping a 10-year old aboriginal girl. One of the men was a repeat sexual offender. They were let off the hook along with six juveniles ages 14 to 16.

Judge Sarah Bradley concluded the girl "probably agreed" to have sex with the nine males.

From The Guardian:

The newly elected prime minister, Kevin Rudd, said he was "appalled and disgusted" by the details of the case while Queensland's attorney-general, Kerry Shine, said he would appeal the judge's decision. Indigenous leaders said it sent a terrible message to vulnerable girls and women living in fear in Australia's their communities.

"If this was a white girl in white suburban Brisbane' there's no way the defendants would have walked out of court," said child protection campaigner Hetty Johnston.

Aboriginal academic Professor Boni Robertson called for the judge to step down while there was an inquiry. "It's undermined everything we have worked for over the last 10 years to get our women justice in this country," she said.

I'm not sure exactly what this says about the problem but it took over a month for word to get out about the sentencings.

The Battle of Musa Qala - Same Old Story

It's the same old story. We surround and seal off a Taliban stronghold. No way out for the bad guys. It's surrender or die time. Then we go in for the kill and - they're gone, safe to fight another day at a time and place of their choosing.

Afghan army units rolled into the downtown area of the Helmand province village of Musa Qala today and by early accounts it was hardly a battle at all. NATO and US warplanes bombed hell out of the place to prepare for the infantry assault to retake the village.

So, isn't it better that this ended without a big fight? No, it's not. You have to engage the insurgents and that means killing or capturing them. They have to be taken out of the fight, for good. Allowing them to vanish so that they can come back again on their terms isn't a victory, except for them. For us it's a failure and it's one that we're getting pretty good at.

The Power to Choose Our Fate

Al Gore collected his Nobel Peace Prize today. He took the opportunity to advance his campaign against global warming, noting that we still have "the power to choose our fate."

“It’s time to make peace with the planet,” he said in the acceptance ceremony in Oslo’s city hall. “We must quickly mobilize our civilization.” He added: “Something basic is wrong. We are what is wrong and we must make it right.

The Afghan Army's Big Debut

It's been years in the making and by this time tomorrow the world will know if it was worth it. "It" is the Afghan army. Tomorrow it's tasked to retake the town of Musa Qala, a Taliban stronghold since the British army cleared out of the place last October.

According to British commanders the town is surrounded. "If you think of it like a house, the house is surrounded, the Afghan army is waiting outside. We are in the process of kicking the door in, then the Afghan army is going through it," said British army spokesman Lieutenant Colonel Richard Eaton.

No word on how many Taliban insurgents remain in Musa Qala but, judging by recent clashes, it's likely they're going to dig in and fight. How the Afghan soldiers will fare against a determined adversary remains very much to be seen.

From the Dregs to the Highest Heights of Society

Robert Pickton got his today. Conrad Black receives his tomorrow. The lowly, dim pig farmer/serial killer and the guy who had it all, and more, but never enough.

Back to back. Sunday and Monday. While Lord Black's crimes cannot begin to rival the heinous butchery of Pickton, both have fallen with the thud of a gallow's trap door. Pickton's fall, however, doesn't entirely eclipse Black's if only because Black is falling from such great height.

What a week. Look at Canada's newsmakers this week - Baird, Pickton, Black, Mulroney. What a week we'll have to look back on.

Remorseless Punishment

Conrad Black has a strong chin. I can't understand why he wants to lead with it.

Connie, that'll be Lord Piddlepuddle to you, gets his comeuppance tomorrow when he's sentenced on three counts of fraud and one of obstruction of justice. The prosecutors want the judge to throw the book at Black - a full 20-years worth. The defence is hoping that a favourable pre-sentence report will get his Lordship a lighter deal, 5-7 max.

The judge has a lot of leeway in what fate to dole out to Lord Crossharbour. One of the things the court assesses is the attitude of the defendant/convict. Judges really like to see the condemned grovel and they prefer lament by the bucketful. Remorse, that's the key. If the doomed is already really, really remorseful why then there's no need to tack on extra years so that he will feel remorse. And that's where Connie's ego trips him up.

Black has told anyone who'll listen that he has nothing to apologize for and that he'll wear his imprisonment proudly, like Michael Milken or Leona Helmsley. He actually gives the impression that this will be some sort of crucible to test his very nobility.

Still, no one's betting on what term Black will face. Some still believe seven is the magic number. If it is, it won't be Conrad's doing.

The Grandiose Myth of the Energy Superpower

This is a follow-on to an earlier post "Are We Captives to Our Own Oil?"

We keep hearing about Canada's great future as an "energy superpower." What is that beyond a grandiose myth?

This myth is clearly grounded in the Athabasca Tar Sands and driven by America's growing dependence on the bitumen to deliver a massive supply of SUV juice to the American market. Already Cheney and others are talking about a fivefold increase in tar sands production in the very near future.

Will this make us an energy superpower or an energy supercolony? We're going to do exactly what with all this newfound superpower clout? Are we going to use it to dominate, influence and direct Washington? Where else can we use it except where our filthy, ersatz oil is going to wind up?

Washington doesn't yield power that way. I'm sure those folks see the power balance between our two countries as just about right now and for the future, regardless of their oil dependence. If anything, I expect American leaders are looking for changes in our political relationship that will bolster their interests in Canada and our strategic assets. In that quest I think we're far more valuable to Washington as an energy supercolony than an energy superpower.

Deep economic integration? Of course. It's the deal that Harper is focused on and the cards he has to play are Canada's strategic assets and not just bitumen oil either. Water is the future oil and anyone who doubts that needs to drive from Georgia to California.

Leaving Afghanistan

The Dutch are staying, so are the Australians and so are we.

The idea of Canada withdrawing its soldiers once their commitment is up in 2009 is becoming increasingly untenable. We won't leave, not because we want to stay, but because the consequences of our leaving are unthinkable. To leave, we would be abandoning our most important military alliance, the one we've been in for more than half a century.

But our troops are needed elsewhere and the need for them in other corners of the world is going to increase steadily. So, how then, do we get ourselves out of Afghanistan?

The first step is to acknowledge what our combat group is doing over there. It's there to provide security while the government gels up and a proper Afghan army and police service can be put in place.

The next step is to recognize why we've made virtually no progress despite the Taliban having been run out six years ago. We've been waging war on the cheap. NATO and the US combined have just a fraction of the number of troops in Afghanistan needed for this sort of warfare. We're lucky to have done as well as we have. And our middling military effort has been the best of the whole show. Our attempts to create a viable (as in representative, democratic, unified and non-corrupt) government have been a flop. Our efforts at reconstruction have been a flop. The country remains in the choke hold of the warlords and druglords, both within and outside of the government. Meaningful and effective reconstruction requires adequate security and that can't be delivered until our side, not the Taliban, occupies the countryside.

So, just what can we do? Keep treading water - for a while and use whatever time remains to us to actually change the status quo. How to change the status quo? Train an effective Afghan infantry force, using a model already well known to Canada. Train them here - 1,000-1,200 at a time. Three months basic, three months infantry school, a couple of months specialty training and - then home - fully trained, fully equipped and ready to become an operational battalion under NATO direction initially. Train officers, train ranks and train trainers. By the time we have gotten four to six courses trained and returned to Afghanistan, there ought to be the basis for a cohesive, effective and nationalist army willing to serve its country.

There are plenty of NATO members reluctant to pull their weight in Afghanistan. They should pick up the tab for the training operation in Canada.

Once we have four battalions up and running in Afghanistan, twice our current troop level, we can pull our soldiers out and have them available to deploy in other places where they may actually do more good.

Why train them in Canada? To get them out from under the thumbs of the corrupt politicians and warlords in their homeland, at least long enough to allow them to be formed into something better than a uniformed militia for one of the several ethnic groups in Afghanistan.

Is that enough? Yes, it is. What are the options? Stay the course? Oh yes, that's working really well, isn't it? Defeat the Taliban? Sure, just increase force levels tenfold. For Canada that means creating the same mini-army we mustered for Korea except it would also mean keeping them in place over there for two decades more at least.

Mobilizing our resources to train an Afghan army is the best way out. It may be our only hope of leaving Afghanistan.

No Caps for Washington/Ottawa

The United States has said it will not accept mandatory carbon caps at the Bali summit. It says it will come up with its own plan instead, some time around mid-2008. Yeah, right. Our sunken eyed, knuckle-dragging Enviromin, John Baird, then jumped in on cue to say that Canada wouldn't sign any pact that didn't include the US. Baird compared a binding carbon deal without the US to unilateral nuclear disarmament. He said it would amount to "environmental Armageddon" to ink a deal that didn't impose binding targets on China and India.

My question. The intransigence of Washington and Ottawa is so transparent and disingenuous why did Baird and his American counterpart, Harlan Watson, even go to Bali at all? Oh yeah, I forgot, they needed to be there to torpedo any chance that the rest of the world might reach a deal without them.

Scumbags. They really are scumbags.

Are We Captive To Our Own Oil?

What happens when traditional oil exporting nations stop?

Mexico, for example, is the second largest source of foreign oil for the United States. Within a decade, Mexico, and several other oil exporters, are likely to become net oil importers instead.

The New York Times reports that oil consumption is soaring within oil-rich nations, hastening the transformation.

The economies of many big oil-exporting countries are growing so fast that their need for energy within their borders is crimping how much they can sell abroad, adding new strains to the global oil market.

Experts say the sharp growth, if it continues, means several of the world’s most important suppliers may need to start importing oil within a decade to power all the new cars, houses and businesses they are buying and creating with their oil wealth.
Indonesia has already made this flip. By some projections, the same thing could happen within five years to Mexico, the No. 2 source of foreign oil for the United States, and soon after that to Iran, the world’s fourth-largest exporter. In some cases, the governments of these countries subsidize gasoline heavily for their citizens, selling it for as little as 7 cents a gallon, a practice that industry experts say fosters wasteful habits.

The trend, though increasingly important, does not necessarily mean there will be oil shortages. More likely, experts say, it will mean big market shifts, with the number of exporting countries shrinking and unconventional sources like Canadian tar sands becoming more important, especially for the United States. And there is likely to be more pressure to open areas now closed to oil production.

And there it is. If you think we're going to be able to clean up Athabasca or cut Canada's already massive carbon emissions, think again. Even if we, the Canadian people, really wanted to fight carbon-driven global warming, you're up against Edmonton, Ottawa and Washington - and that means, good luck and thanks for stopping by.

The Climate Change Shell Game

There may be something worthwhile after all to "intensity-based" carbon emission targets. They're not appropriate for developed nations but they might work as a fair compromise for the emerging economies of India and China.

The developed nations, those responsible for the lion's share of the atmospheric carbon now giving rise to AGW, ought to adopt hard caps on carbon emissions. We've amassed great wealth but in the process have despoiled the global environment - so we kind of owe it to the planet to take the hit for what we've done.

That sacrifice ought to be made without letting other major emitters entirely off the hook. India and China should be required to pursue their economic development in conjunction with the introduction of cleaner, less-carbon intensive technologies. Both countries have already recognized the need to go that route anyway. Their own societies are in serious jeopardy if they don't. So, what's the hurdle? It seems to be in getting them to make a formal commitment to doing what they're going to have to do in any case. I think that speaks of a serious lack of trust in the developed world.

What's not to trust? The United States and Canada certainly come to mind. Along with Australia and Saudi Arabia we're the very dirtiest countries on the planet, man for man. We're preaching from the moral low ground, the abyss.

The thing is we suit each other's interests to a T. It's the industrialized world versus the industrializing world - pointed fingers blazing away. By framing the problem that way it becomes intractable, letting everybody off the hook. The Chinese decide that we won't bite the bullet, we decide that they won't either. Neat. By framing the issue this way we don't have to look beyond - to the little people, the poorest of the poor who will pay for our excess and our intransigence.

Think we're not ignoring the weakest and most vulnerable people on the planet? Think again. Look at the several threats to their very existence that they're facing and look at our role in contributing to those dangers. Increased temperatures, increased evaporation, disruptions in precipitation patterns, desertification, submergence and more - and we're driving these changes that beset these people. And to all the global warming deniers and the carbon emission "do nothing" crowd -you're sending these people a message - loud and clear - "Go fuck yourselves. I've got mine, buddy, you get yours the best way you know how."

The Globe & Mail published an editorial this week endorsing the Harper/Bush platform of environmental remediation patterned to the imperative of sustainable growth. Sustainable for whom? Sustainable where? Do they mean sustainable downriver, sustainable downwind, sustainable for people living in poverty thousands of miles away? Or do they mean sustainable just for us? The question answers itself.

Diamond's Road Map to Collapse - Failure to Perceive

Global warming; desertification; species extinction; resource depletion; freshwater exhaustion; soil, air and water contamination; deforestation; overpopulation - where to begin?

Despite the current focus on AGW, or man-made global warming, we're facing a host of environmental challenges and threats. Yet even on what may be one of the simplest to quantify and redress, carbon emissions, our leaders inevitably lapse straight into gridlock. At the national and global levels we're confounded by failures of group decision-making. Despite what you may think, this is nothing new to the experience of man. There is plenty to learn from the past and no time like the present to take a hard look at these lessons.

UCLA prof Jared Diamond has studied these failures of group decision-making and lumps them into four categories:

"First of all, a group may fail to anticipate a problem before the problem actually arrives. Second, when the problem does arrive, the group may fail to perceive it. Then, after they perceive it, they may fail even to try to solve it. Finally, they may try to solve it but may not succeed. ...Perhaps if we understood the reasons why groups often make bad decisions, we could use that knowledge as a checklist to guide groups to make good decisions."

On our difficulty to perceive the onset of global warming:

"Perhaps the commonest circumstance under which societies fail to perceive a problem is when it takes the form of a slow trend concealed by wide up-and-down fluctuations. The prime example in modern times is global warming. ...as we all know, climate fluctuates up and down erratically from year to year. ...With such large and unpredictable fluctuations, it has taken a long time to discern the average upwards trend of 0.01 degree per year within that noisy signal.

"Politicians use the term "creeping normalcy" to refer to such slow trends concealed within noisy fluctuations. If the economy, schools, traffic congestion, or anything else is deteriorating only slowly, it's difficult to recognize that each successive year is on the average slightly worse than the year before. It may take a few decades of a long sequence of such slight year-to-year changes before people realize, with a jolt, that conditions used to be much better several decades ago.

"Another term related to creeping normalcy is "landscape amnesia"; forgetting how different the surrounding landscape looked 50-years ago, because the change from year to year has been so gradual."

Old people like to reminisce about the old days when they were young. I used to feign interest while putting my mind on the back burner. Now I listen and, better yet, I ask pointed questions. What was the air like back then? What was the water like when they had to pump it out of the ground by hand? What was the summer sun and the winter cold like in those days? When you actually get them focused on what life was like in the 1920's it's astonishing how much they remember and the clarity of their recollections. Astonishing but also very unsettling when you realize they're describing an environment that no one is likely to enjoy again for centuries to come.

There Goes the Neighbourhood

China says it won't consider mandatory cuts in carbon emissions, instead demanding that the United States take the lead in cutting its own greenhouse gas production.

China noted its per capita GHG levels are still only one-sixth of the American figure. China argues that it has only been generating significant carbon emissions for a short period contrasted with the many decades that the West has been doing it.

The trouble is, China is right. That, however, doesn't change the fact that as an emerging economy with the world's largest population, China has now edged out the US as the largest carbon emitter.

So, what have we got? A standoff. The US says no mandatory cuts. China says "me too." Stephen Harper puts on his delightful French maid's costume and jumps in Bush's lap to go along for the ride.

That's not to say that both countries haven't taken some steps to deal with the problem, China in particular. China actually doesn't have much choice given the severe environmental devastation plaguing its cities and countryside alike. China, like the US, may be poisoning the world but it's poisoning China most of all.

It appears there's a decided lack of political will among the major emitters and that means little chance of any effective carbon control agreement coming out of Bali. How bad are things over there? Well, CNN pulled its news crews out yesterday having concluded there's nothing to report.

We're already at a point where there's no single answer to this problem. Anything workable we come up with will be a blend of remediation and adaptation. That, in turn, requires a mix of scientific, technological, political, economic and military inputs. As the problem worsens the blend shifts away from remediation and more toward adaptation. That, in turn, diminishes the effectiveness of peaceful solutions and increases the role of military and security options.

If you want to understand the link between global warming and global security, do some research on the hydrological issues affecting Israel's ability and willingness to give up the Golan Heights and the West Bank.

If the expert consensus is right and the nations of this planet have just a few years to put in place a truly effective carbon-emission reduction plan, I'm betting we're just going to have to live with whatever is behind Door 2. I just don't see this turning out well.

Worse Than Abu Ghraib?

The CIA defied Congress, the US courts and the 9/11 Commission to destroy video tapes of two interrogations of al-Qaeda suspects. It's widely believed the videos contained footage of torture techniques used by the agency.

At first, CIA officials claimed the tapes were destroyed out of security concerns. Right. Now it appears what the CIA operatives were concerned about was the security of their own asses. A number of officials have now admitted the agency was motivated by its own legal exposure.

The intelligence agency only disclosed the destruction of the tapes when informed by the New York Times that the paper knew about it and was about to print the story.

CIA director Michael Haydon said the tapes were destroyed to protect the safety of undercover officers and because they no longer had intelligence value.

Gay Bashing Still A-OK In Freedom Land

The feckless Democratic congress has again caved. This time it was over a provision that would extend hate crime protections to matters involving gender, sexual orientation and disability.

The provision had been included in a defense authorization bill but Dems agreed to scrap it when it appeared it might cost them enough votes to block passage of the legislation. The hate crime legislation had been attached to a defense bill because the Dems hadn't been able to get it through the Senate as stand-alone legislation.

Demoratic senators Carl Levin and Ted Kennedy said in a joint statement, "At a time when our ideals are under attack by terrorists in other lands, it is more important than ever to demonstrate that we practice what we preach, and that we are doing all we can to root out the bigotry and prejudice in our own country that leads to similar violence here at home."

With the spineless Democratic presidential candidates, notably Lady Flipper herself, already caving on withdrawing American forces from Iraq, this lesson should be a warning of how very little can be expected should the Republicans lose the White House in 2008.

No Answers, Endless Questions

When Karlheinz Schreiber finished testifying on Tuesday, Conservatives proclaimed "Mission Accomplished" - Mulroney had been exonerated. They got that straight from Schreiber's mouth, good enough for them.

When Karlheinz Schreiber finished testifying today, these same Tories denounced the man as patently unbelievable. Mulroney's still exonerated but you somehow can't believe anything else the man says.

Hmmm. How much of Schreiber's testimony has been true and accurate? I don't know - and here's the kicker - neither do you.

Schreiber's sworn evidence hasn't really answered many of the original questions but it has definitely raised a lot of new issues. Consider it Airbus Affair, Part Deux.

The focus has definitely shifted from the narrow Mulroney-Schreiber controversy to a much broader story, one that revolved around a European aircraft manufacturer, a now defunct Canadian corporate lobbyist, the company's now dead founder, former Mulroney aides turned lobbyists and, of course, Mulroney and Schreiber.

There are credible witnesses who were on the periphery of this saga who should be called to testify. I expect their evidence would indicate whether there is more to this business than we've understood before today.

Just avoid the temptation to prejudge the Airbus affair or the people involved in it - at least not yet.

Mulroney is far from off the hook. There are circumstances directly tied to the former prime minister that he needs to explain including the fact of taking Schreiber's money, his sworn statements on discovery, the claim that he sought a false statement from Schreiber and his belated income disclosure to Revenue Canada. All of those things stand regardless of what transpired with Moores, CGI and Doucet.

So accept that all we have at the moment are new avenues of enquiry, documents to be hunted down, witnesses to be questioned. There's a lot of slogging ahead before anyone can be satisfied about what actually happened in the Airbus affair.

Are You Naive?

Karlheinz Schreiber has given evidence that seems to link Brian Mulroney to the Airbus affair. He told the Commons ethics committee that he was approached in 1992 or 1993 by Fred Doucet, former Mulroney aide turned lobbyist, to open an account for Mulroney. From Toronto Star

Schreiber told a House of Commons committee this morning that Fred Doucet, Mulroney’s former chief of staff, asked him to open an account in the name of Mulroney’s lawyer in 1992 or 1993.

Mulroney was still the prime minister when Schreiber alleges the discussion occurred.
Schreiber said the request astounded him.

“What the hell has Mulroney to do with Airbus?” Schreiber recalled asking Doucet, who was working as a lobbyist by then.

Doucet’s answer: “Are you naive?”

Schreiber also told the committee that he often dealt in large sums of cash.

"You get a much better price if you pay in cash."

Schreiber said the bulk of the Airbus "commission" money didn't go through his company, International Aircraft Leasing, but into Frank Moores' Government Consultants International or GCI.

NDP MP Pat Martin asked Schreiber why he'd be surprised that Mulroney might have had something to do with Airbus when he appointed 13 of the 15-members of the Air Canada board of directors, one of them noneother than Frank Moores.

Today, however, he said the conversation with Doucet about money for Mulroney took place in the Ottawa offices of Government Consultants International — a lobbying firm stocked with staffers who were well-connected to the former prime minister.

“Why would Mulroney get money for Airbus? For what?” Schreiber said he asked Doucet.
“And he said, `Airbus.’ ”

Within hours of the conversation, a rattled Schreiber said he contacted Frank Moores, another Mulroney confidant who was one of the principal owners of the lobbying firm, about the payments destined for Mulroney.

Moores told him to forget about the conversation, Schreiber testified. Others at GCI also urged him to ignore the reasons behind the request for the transfer to a Swiss bank account. Moores passed away in 2005.

“They told me I should stay away from this. It is in their hands and they look after Brian Mulroney.”

Karlheinz, Volume III

Never, ever ask a question unless you already know the answer. Never, ever attempt to impeach a witness until you're sure the witness can't use your question against you as an opportunity to reinforce his own position.

I watched a bit of Karlheinz Schreiber's testimony this morning before the Commons ethics committee and I was floored at the incompetence of a number of Conservative MPs, falling all over each other, each trying to score a KO and each just fanning the air.

Schreiber is not telling the truth, when that suits him. That much is obvious. The committee want to focus on condemning or exonerating Brian Mulroney. Mr. Schreiber is focusing on telling them what will best suit his immediate interests.

On Tuesday Schreiber stuck a skewer into Jean Charest. Today he set his sights on Peter MacKay.

But what of Mulroney? Schreiber has opened the prospect that money flowed to Mulroney, not from Schreiber's bank accounts, but from GCI, Frank Moores' lobbyist firm. GCI and Moores were directly linked to Airbus. Moores was on the board of Air Canada. Unfortunately that may be a tough one to crack. Moores is long dead. GCI is long gone. Fourteen years have elapsed since the first cash-stuffed envelope passed from Schreiber's hand to Mulroney's.

I'd be surprised if the RCMP investigators who worked on the Aibus affairs all those years don't have documents and statements on what's been brought out in the Schreiber hearings.