Lesbian soldier may be granted asylum

By macleans.ca - Sunday, November 22, 2009 at 7:28 PM - 3 Comments

Private Bethany Smith, a 21-year-old U.S. army deserter, won a key court battle on Friday when a Federal Court judge ordered Canada’s refugee board to reconsider its decision to deny Smith’s application for asylum in Canada. Smith left a military base at Fort Campbell, Ky., two years ago after suffering what she says was persecution based on her sexual orientation. According to Smith, after a fellow soldier outed her as a lesbian, she was harassed, made to work harder than others, and even threatened. Justice Yves de Montigny found in Smith’s favour, finding that Smith had legitimate reason to fear “that she could be punished for leaving an environment where her life is in danger.”

Canwest News Service

The Liberals are doomed

By Philippe Gohier - Sunday, November 22, 2009 at 7:09 PM - 26 Comments

The latest salvo in the federal Liberals’ seemingly endless internecine war was launched by Janine Krieber over the weekend when she posted an open letter on her Facebook page saying once-dominant party is at death’s door. “The Liberal party is in a free fall, and it won’t recover,” the wife of ex-leader Stéphane Dion writes. “Like all the liberal parties in Europe, it will become a poor little thing at the mercy of ephemeral coalitions.” According to Krieber, her husband was more than willing to “take all the time and the hits to rebuild the party” in wake of Paul Martin’s shabby treatment of Jean Chrétien—that is, had “the elites of Toronto” not gotten in his way and foisted Michael Ignatieff onto the party. The end result, Krieber notes, has seen it suffer yet another steep drop in popularity, even further down from where the party was under Dion. “They couldn’t accept 26 per cent,” she writes, “now we’re at 23 per cent.”

Canadian Press

'We did indeed stop the transfer more than one time'

By Aaron Wherry - Sunday, November 22, 2009 at 3:28 PM - 12 Comments

General Walter Natynczyk reveals the transfer of detainees has been stopped more than once. Until now it has only been disclosed that transfers stopped briefly in the fall of 2007.

Canadian officials have halted the transfer of prisoners to Afghanistan’s intelligence service “more than one time,” because of the possibility of torture, Canada’s chief of defence staff said Sunday.

Gen. Walter Natynczyk, speaking at the end of the three-day Halifax International Security Forum, declined to offer details, saying additional information is expected as more witnesses speak before a special House of Commons committee.

“We indeed did stop the transfer more than one time,” he said. “At the same time, I don’t want to throw out more information. There’s a process that’s undergoing and I know that the witnesses will be called forward for that process and give their testimony.”

A 6,000-mile screwdriver

By Aaron Wherry - Sunday, November 22, 2009 at 1:00 PM - 43 Comments

A former NATO official steps forward, albeit anonymously.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s office used a “6,000-mile screwdriver” to oversee the denial of reports of Afghan detainee abuse when the scandal first erupted in 2007, according to a former senior NATO public affairs official who was then based in Kabul.

The former official, speaking on condition his name not be used, told the Toronto Star that Harper’s office in Ottawa “scripted and fed” the precise wording NATO officials in Kabul used to repudiate allegations of abuse “at a time when it was privately and generally acknowledged in our office that the chances of good treatment at the hands of Afghan security forces were almost zero.”

“It was highly unusual. I was told this was the titanic issue for Prime Minister Harper and that every single statement that went out needed to be cleared by him personally,” said the former official, who is not Canadian.

That Krieber manifesto, short version

By Colby Cosh - Sunday, November 22, 2009 at 6:59 AM - 95 Comments

1. I believe the Liberal Party of Canada is destined to become a miserable component of ephemeral coalitions, like the liberal parties in Europe, because it refused to submerge its identity in an ephemeral coalition, the way the liberal parties in Europe did.

2. Our party was inherently doomed from the moment Mr. Martin ousted Mr. Chrétien. So my husband’s subsequent leadership really never had a chance. Nonetheless, given a chance, my husband certainly could have saved the party; it would be quite wrong to suggest that it was doomed.

3. Nothing good at all can come of using polls to attack a party leader, but did I happen to mention how badly Mr. Ignatieff is doing in the polls?

4. I dream of a party where the order of the day is happiness, and not assassination. Now excuse me for a few moments while I disassemble, clean, and conceal this fragrantly smoking .50-calibre rifle I’ve just noticed lying at my feet.

Only a dozen

By Aaron Wherry - Sunday, November 22, 2009 at 2:35 AM - 30 Comments

Canwest talks to the current warden of Sarpoza prison in Afghanistan.

Prisoners were tortured at Sarpoza Prison in Afghanistan, but not in nearly the numbers alleged this past week by a Canadian diplomat, the prison’s chief warden has told Canwest News Service.

“Yes, there was torture and people were certainly beaten,” chief warden Col. Abdullah Bawar said Saturday during an interview conducted inside the prison’s heavily guarded walls. “Hands and legs would be tied and they would be beaten with cables. I even remember one man who broke his leg from a beating.”

Although his timeline was a bit fuzzy as to when such abuses stopped, Bawar estimated that “around 100 prisoners” from a population of about 1,100 had been physically abused during 2006 and 2007, which he referred to as “this dark period.” The information Bawar offered makes it nearly impossible to say precisely how many — if any — of the abused prisoners would have been handed over by Canadian troops. A rough estimate suggests it may have only been as many as a dozen.

In a separate analysis, David Pugliese estimates Canada may have turned over nearly 600 detainees. Former diplomat Harry Sterling says the Colvin paper trail should be easy to follow. And CBC posts the report that, if I’m not mistaken, momentarily brought a halt to transfers in November 2007.

Mme Krieber regrets

By Paul Wells - Saturday, November 21, 2009 at 8:48 PM - 197 Comments

The wife of Stéphane Dion posts, and then removes, a Facebook update that won’t get her the best seat at the next Liberal Christmas party:

The Liberal party is in a free fall, and it won’t recover. Like all the liberal parties in Europe, it will become a poor little thing at the mercy of ephemeral coalitions. For having refused the historic coalition that could have placed it at the head of the left, it will be punished by history. Well, I was convinced the moment Paul Martin treated Jean Chrétien so cavalierly. That moment signalled the death of our party. If the elites of Toronto had been more alert, humble and realistic, Stephane was ready to take all the time and the hits to rebuild that party. But they couldn’t accept 26 per cent, now we’re at 23 per cent.

The time has arrived to make a choice. I don’t want the Conservatives to continue changing my country. They are in the process, slowly, just like any dictatorship, of changing the world. Torture doesn’t exist, corruption is a point of view. Do we really have the right leader to discuss these issues? Can someone really write all these insanities and make us believe he’s simply changed his mind? To justify violence, he must have really given it serious thought. Otherwise, that’s very dangerous. What guarantee would there be that he wouldn’t change his mind again? …

That sound from the Dion household is a voice counselling alertness, humility and realism. And they said irony was dead.

As many as 600 detainees may have been handed over

By macleans.ca - Saturday, November 21, 2009 at 2:19 PM - 5 Comments

Just how many detainees did Canadian soldiers hand over to Afghan authorities who, according to Canadian diplomat Richard Colvin, more than likely tortured them? The government isn’t saying, but based on numbers released by the British government, it could be as many as 600. British authorities claim their soldiers took 97 Afghans into custody before transferring them to Afghan officials between the start of 2006 and the summer of 2007. During his testimony before a Commons committee, Colvin said Canada had transferred six times as many as the British, putting the Canadian tally somewhere around 600. Colvin also testified many of the detainees transferred by Canada had likely committed no crime. “Some of these Afghans may have been footsoldiers or day fighters,” he said, “but many were just local people, farmers, truck drivers, tailors, peasants, random human beings in the wrong place at the wrong time, young men in their fields and villages, who were completely innocent, but were nevertheless rounded up.”

Ottawa Citizen

Weekend reading

By Aaron Wherry - Saturday, November 21, 2009 at 12:41 PM - 64 Comments

The Globe details an April 2007 memo from Richard Colvin, the Star talks to a European Union official who concurs with Mr. Colvin’s account of the situation in Afghanistan and in both stories we get the first hint of what David Mulroney will say when he decides to comment publicly. Both the Globe and Star explore Mr. Colvin and his career in the foreign service. And in a pair of interviews, Malalai Joya, a member of Afghanistan’s parliament, talks about torture in her country and her view of Canadian involvement.

Origins of the Great Arizona Civil War

By Colby Cosh - Saturday, November 21, 2009 at 4:59 AM - 20 Comments

Patricia Treble’s short piece about Sheriff Joe Arpaio, the publicity-hogging Faulknerian nightmare who runs law enforcement in Maricopa County, Arizona, mentions in passing that

recently, a defence lawyer complained that, while her back was turned in court, two officers rifled through her privileged legal documents and even managed to photocopy some pages. The sheriff’s office insisted that the men, who were caught on video, were examining the papers for contraband.

Unfortunately, no text description is adequate to capture the surrealism of bailiffs stealing documents from a defence lawyer in open court. It’s really the kind of thing you have to see for yourself. And even then you might not believe your eyes.

Reason magazine justice crusader Radley Balko has context, along with an update, wherein the gonzo weirdness of Maricopa County gets weirder still.

Former Parliamentarians gather with future former Parliamentarians

By Mitchel Raphael - Friday, November 20, 2009 at 6:54 PM - 14 Comments

The Canadian Association of Former Parliamentarians held a dinner in the Fairmont Château Laurier ballroom. Below, former Reform MP Deb Grey.

Former NDP leader Ed Broadbent (right) and NDP MP Yvon Godin.

Continue…

Hand of Gaul goal, the gall

By Andrew Potter - Friday, November 20, 2009 at 5:32 PM - 7 Comments

It appears to be business as usual in Europe: The Irish are never happier than when they are miserable, while the French are hiding their mauvaise foi nationale behind a fog of bureaucratese. Oh, we’d love to replay the game, they say. Except FIFA won’t let us. Les règles sont les règles and and all that.

I’ve written about cheating in soccer before – mostly with respect to diving, or what the Europeans charmingly refer to as “simulation”. There are key differences between diving and a deliberate handball (one is an attempt at drawing a penalty in the absence of a foul, the other at trying to avoid getting called for an actual offence), but both are symptoms of the very serious problem with professional soccer.

I actually think that Henry is being honest when he says that the handball was instinctive, but that’s precisely the problem. All manner of cheating has become second-nature in soccer, to the point where the shame is not in trying to get away with it, but merely in getting caught. Everyone is expected push, tug, dive, poke, swipe, and otherwise do whatever it takes to gain the slightest advantage, while players who eschew these tactics are generally seen as old-fashioned gentlemanly suckers.

Soccer has a culture problem, but at least part of it stems from the incentive structure of the game. Goals are so hard to come by that any behaviour that achieves any advantage at all is seen as fair game.

What can be done about  it? The obvious answer is that the risk/reward calculus needs to be fixed.  One possibility would be to change the game to make it easier to score. Another would be to make the cost of being caught cheating too high. The first solution is probably not on (it would hardly help to make the goals wider) while the second just misses the point: the problem is not that referees aren’t punishing cheaters harshly enough, it is that they aren’t catching them at all.

That’s why, in the uproar since the French “victory”, people are calling for a change to the refereeing system — either bringing in more refs, or adding video replay or other technological aids. That should be done regardless. But that is an indirect way of addressing the  fundamental problem, which is that soccer is a sport that continues to reward and even celebrate dishonourable behaviour.

France should insist that FIFA allow a rematch. And if FIFA refuses, then France should refuse to go to the World Cup.

Let us now think seriously about this place

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, November 20, 2009 at 5:05 PM - 18 Comments

Janice MacKinnon, Rick Salutin, Jeffrey Simpson, Susan Delacourt and Ned Franks talk with Steve Paikin about the utility or futility of our current Parliament.

Spot the flu line celebrity

By Paul Wells - Friday, November 20, 2009 at 4:57 PM - 19 Comments

From a colleague at our Maclean’s Toronto headquarters:

“[Another colleague] just called from her place in the flu line at Metro Hall. Eight

over from her is Dalton McGuinty. Also waiting.

“No press, no aides, just one guy who looks like security.

“She thought someone ought to know.”

Important context to come

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, November 20, 2009 at 4:33 PM - 16 Comments

Unsolicited, a three paragraph statement from Foreign Affairs arrived just now.

It is important to let the Parliamentary Committee process unfold and to consider and weigh the testimony of subsequent witnesses before drawing any conclusions about how events in Afghanistan may have unfolded in 2006 and 2007.

It is our understanding that other current and former DFAIT employees will be testifying before the Parliamentary Committee. Their testimony will provide important context and information about this issue.

Canada has a robust monitoring regime for Canadian transferred detainees in place. From the beginning of our engagement in Kandahar in 2005, Canada has taken steps with the Afghan government to ensure that Afghanistan meets its domestic and international obligations with respect to the treatment of detainees.

What Canadians really believe

By Ken MacQueen - Friday, November 20, 2009 at 4:11 PM - 80 Comments

An Ontario court judge will soon decide if Canada’s prostitution laws should be struck down. In British Columbia, the Supreme Court will decide if laws prohibiting polygamy can still be enforced. And in the House of Commons, a private member’s bill would make it legal for the profoundly ill to seek a doctor’s help to commit suicide. As a nation we are reinventing, refining—or undermining—our morality in dramatic fashion. In some instances we are asking the courts to do our thinking for us. But in most cases we forge a national sense of right or wrong in the millions of individual judgment calls we make every day—increasingly without the guidance of organized religion.

With so many moral issues at a crossroads, Angus Reid Strategies undertook a national survey last month asking Canadians to consider 21 ethical issues. Their answers—on issues as diverse as animal rights, prostitution, homosexuality and illegal drug use—show some profound divisions by gender and region. But taken together, they seem to reveal a rather astounding liberal tilt in our morality, albeit with some exceptions. Each Canadian steers by his and most certainly her moral compass, and the wonder is we don’t bump into each other more often.

Consider these six sticky moral situations. Which are the most and the least acceptable to you, and to most Canadians?

1. You plan to have an abortion.
2. You wear a mink coat.
3. You favour killing convicted murderers.
4. You think the dying have the right to commit suicide with a doctor’s help.
5. You don’t care if the drugs you buy have been tested on animals.
6. You support medical research using the stem cells of human embryos.

Let’s start by saying there’s never been a better time to be a Canadian mink, or a seal, or a lab rat. Canadians today are more likely to moralize about the treatment of animals than about the lives of our fellow humans. Just 22 per cent oppose euthanasia, but 41 per cent condemn medical testing on animals, the survey found. Abortion is considered morally wrong by 22 per cent of Canadians, fewer than the 31 per cent who have moral qualms about wearing fur. But while four in 10 oppose animal testing, only 17 per cent take issue with researchers using human embryonic stem cells. As for capital punishment, 53 per cent of Canadians consider it “morally acceptable,” a jump of six percentage points since Reid last asked the question in 2007.

Continue…

From the magazine: The Halifax panel discussion on Afghanistan

By Paul Wells - Friday, November 20, 2009 at 3:47 PM - 0 Comments

CPAC’s second In Conversation With Maclean’s town hall, colloquially known as Coyne and Wells On the Road, took place in Halifax last week. With a distinguished panel of guests, we tackled the situation in Afghanistan and what Canada should do next. Here’s a tightly edited recap of our conversation.

The legacy of Preston Manning

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, November 20, 2009 at 3:30 PM - 84 Comments

Don Newman posits his theory as to where everything went sideways.

The fraying was not — it might surprise some I’m sure — the fault of the Bloc Québécois who, while preaching their own view of both history and the future, always treated Parliament with respect.

Rather it came from the Reform party led by Preston Manning. Reformers came to Ottawa with the argument that everything in the Nation’s Capital was corrupt. In fact, Reform MPs were ordered at one point not to stay in Ottawa over the weekends in case they became corrupted by this latter day Babylon…

Manning, of course, is long gone. Replaced first by Stockwell Day, then by one of the original Reformers, Stephen Harper, the current prime minister. But while Harper lives at 24 Sussex and seems to enjoy all the trappings of the prime minister’s office, as indeed he should, he seems to maintain the Reformer’s deep suspicion of Ottawa and all other political parties.

I arrived too late in Ottawa to witness the Reform party in its original form. And aside from interviewing Chuck Strahl and having pleasant phone conversations with Monte Solberg and Deb Grey, I’ve had little interaction with its founding figures. But it seems to me to be the most intriguing Canadian political phenomenon of the last decade. And the University of Calgary’s archive of related documents is probably worth a long look through.

Week in Pictures: November 14th – November 20th, 2009

By macleans.ca - Friday, November 20, 2009 at 2:56 PM - 0 Comments

The further readable Ignatieff

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, November 20, 2009 at 2:52 PM - 2 Comments

As noted when we first collected Michael Ignatieff’s freely readable writings, Prospect magazine did, for a time, make available all of the pieces Mr. Ignatieff wrote for it. They haven’t reopened the entire archive to non-subscribers, but a couple pieces are now available for free. They are Virtual War from April 2000 and Identity Parades from April 1998.

There is also this—an exchange of essays between Mr. Ignatieff and Jack Granatstein on the importance of history—from the book Great Questions of Canada.

And tonight Mr. Cosh is topping the bill

By Paul Wells - Friday, November 20, 2009 at 2:51 PM - 32 Comments

If you haven’t noticed yet, please give a warm welcome to Colby Cosh of Edmonton, who’s our latest addition to the blogging roster. He’ll also be writing for the magazine. Most of you already know Colby from the National Post and other venues. His blog will speak for itself and, in any case, defy easy categorization: he writes about everything with authority; he thinks his own way around issues rather than pulling handy cant down off the Handy Cant Rack; he’s politically conservative, most times, but (a) writes a lot about issues that have nothing to do with party politics (b) wears no party’s team jersey. He is not “our replacement for Kady.” Of course there can be no such creature in any case. He is simply a welcome new voice.

Noble fight or lost cause?

By macleans.ca - Friday, November 20, 2009 at 2:35 PM - 16 Comments

Wells: In Kandahar, they actually poll the residents quite frequently about how they feel. Kandahar residents feel substantially less safe than they did a couple of years ago. They have a lot less confidence in the government than they used to. No wonder, after the lurid spectacle of the elections this summer.

Until 2009, the deadliest month for coalition forces in Afghanistan was July 2008: 46 soldiers died. We are now four months in a row with a substantially higher—nearly double—death toll than in July 2008. These rates could be sustainable if there was some kind of light at the end of the tunnel, but what we keep seeing is more tunnel. Afghanistan is the smaller of a sort of duplex of international terrorism, which is Afghanistan and Pakistan. When we concentrate on Pakistan, the bad guys just move across the mountains into Afghanistan and vice versa.

Coyne: Afghanistan has to be seen in the context of the situation in Pakistan—where we have an insurgency that would take enormous heart from a defeat for NATO in Afghanistan—and in the broader fight against “jihad international,” where the best slogan for recruiting al-Qaeda fighters is, “We’re winning.” Everybody wants Pakistan to get serious about going after its own Taliban. Why are the Pakistanis going to do that if they think we’re going to leave Afghanistan, if they’re going to have a Taliban government on their doorstep? It’s true that we have not defeated the Taliban. But the Taliban haven’t defeated us either; they cannot seize power as long as we’re there. As long as NATO remains we can train up the Afghan army.

If we were proposing no change in strategy that would be one thing, but we are on the verge right now of bringing in 40,000 more troops from the U.S., of changing fundamentally the strategy toward counter-insurgency. That’s an odd time to pull out.

Continue…

Who's who

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, November 20, 2009 at 2:21 PM - 9 Comments

CBC lists eight government, military and diplomatic officials raised in Richard Colvin’s testimony. Six have so far not commented or declined comment. Lieutenant-General Michel Gauthier rejects any suggestion of wrongdoing on his part and promises more information when he testifies at committee next week.

The standard of proof

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, November 20, 2009 at 2:10 PM - 12 Comments

In QP this morning, John Baird explained, in part, the government’s unwillingness to put its faith in Mr. Colvin’s testimony as follows.

Mr. Speaker, it is important to note that in his testimony before the committee earlier this week Mr. Colvin confirmed that he never witnessed abuse firsthand.

It is unclear whether this consideration equally imperils some or all of this 2005 report of the U.S. State Department, this 2008 report of the State Department, the 2007 reporting of the Globe’s Graeme Smith, this government’s own 2006 overview of the human rights situation in Afghanistan, or this 2009 report of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission.

It’s also unclear whether the government believed Mr. Colvin to have firsthand knowledge of abuse when, as the Defence Minister explained yesterday, the government revised its detainee transfer agreement because of “concerns that were being expressed by Colvin and others.”

Keeping in mind that it is equally unclear to what degree Mr. Colvin’s concerns were taken into account given that Gordon O’Connor, the defence minister at the time, said yesterday that he did not read any of Mr. Colvin’s reports.