Dogs are victims in a scary war

By Barbara Amiel - Thursday, November 19, 2009 at 8:00 AM - 36 Comments

Looking at life from a dog’s point of view can refocus matters great and small. Take the Berlin Wall, which crumbled 20 years ago. Thousands of dogs policed that wall and just like that they were all out of a job—some 7,000 of them, apparently. The guard dog of choice was the Caucasian ovcharka, which coincidentally is a dog I hope to add to my two Hungarian kuvaszok if I am up to it. Some people rescue homeless dogs; I look for native East European breeds who share in an ersatz Jewish identity to this extent: in that part of the world, historically speaking, someone will try and do them in.

The wall fell and West Berliners feared packs of ovcharkas storming into the city. Given the dog’s size (up to 90 kg) and its heritage—tearing the throats out of wolves and escapees alike—I can’t blame them. Just a month earlier, after brutally repressing demonstrations before the October visit of Mikhail Gorbachev to East Berlin and fearing more, the murderous Stasi chief Eric Mielke stated, “I will now . . . show that our authority still has teeth . . . [demonstrators] are cowardly dogs . . . they will run like rabbits as soon as they’ve seen our dogs.” Continue…

NFL Picks Week 11: Wherein You (Yes, YOU) Get a Chance to Beat Scott Reid

By Scott Feschuk - Thursday, November 19, 2009 at 6:04 AM - 9 Comments

* Update: Winner of the Beat Scott Reid Challenge announced below in the comments.

Scott Feschuk Last week: 6-8-1 Season: 73-68-3

Scott Reid Last week: 6-8-1 Season: 80-61-3

There are few things more enjoyable in life than beating Scott Reid at something – just ask Stephen Harper. And now it can be your turn!

Can’t Miss NFL Picks and Other Lies is proud to present the First Annual Beat Scott Reid Challenge. How’s it work? Simply email in your picks for this week’s games to sfeschuk@sympatico.ca (feel free to post them in the comments, too, but they MUST be emailed in to be eligible).

If you get more games right than Scott Reid, you’ll be entered into a random draw to receive something that’s NFL-related and valued in the tens of dollars (no, not Terrell Owens’ work ethic).

Deadline for entries is kickoff of Thursday night’s game – though if you miss that you can still enter by Sunday at 1 p.m. ET and just have the Thursday game count as a loss. Spreads will be as listed in our picks below. All decisions of the judges, including which of the Landers sisters was hotter, are final.

Miami (plus 3) at Carolina, Thursday night

Reid: We have now gone three weeks in a row without an interception from Jake Delhomme. That’s the football equivalent of Robert Pattinson going three weeks without appearing on the cover of a teen magazine. So colour me skeptical about Miami’s chances in this matchup. Ronnie Brown won’t play. Chad Henne can’t play. But by God and Tony Sparano, Joey Porter will play no matter what those chatty Cathys at ESPN whisper. Personally, I can’t see how Carolina will lose this game. Of course, I can’t see how Kristen Stewart can fall for that phony Pattinson when my hair is clearly better. Pick: Carolina

Feschuk: Hi there! To all the young Twilight fans reading these words thanks to a Google search of “Pattinson and Stewart,” I’d like to welcome you to Can’t Miss NFL Picks and Other Lies. Wait, don’t leave! You may be surprised to learn that Continue…

The prologue

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, November 18, 2009 at 11:07 PM - 5 Comments

In spring 2007, the Globe’s Graeme Smith conducted 30 interviews with detainees and documented various allegations of abuse after they were transferred from Canadian to Afghan authorities. Paul Koring subsequently reported that the Harper government was warned of mistreatment. Months later, Smith reported that Canada had lost track of at least 50 detainees due to poor record-keeping. In November of that year, Canada temporarily halted transfers.

There are also the 2005 and 2008 U.S. State Department reports on human rights in Afghanistan.

A 2007 review of the situation from the CBC is here. And, from Wikipedia, a timeline of events between Dec. 2005 and Jan. 2008.

Vancouver 2010: Maclean's predicts the winners

By Cameron Ainsworth-Vincze - Wednesday, November 18, 2009 at 9:10 PM - 48 Comments

Experts are predicting a huge medal haul for Canada at the 2010 Vancouver Games, and the pressure is on our athletes to make the host country look good. Although the Canadian team won’t be finalized until a few weeks before the competition begins, here is a glimpse at 50 athletes we think have podium potential.

Check after the break for the full listing.
Continue…

Security expert calls for probe of torture charges

By John Geddes - Wednesday, November 18, 2009 at 7:19 PM - 57 Comments

One of Canada’s leading security experts says explosive allegations from diplomat Richard Colvin on torture in Afghanistan are so troubling the government should now allow an impartial body to investigate his charges.

Wesley Wark, a visiting professor at University of Ottawa’s Graduate School of International and Public Affairs, who served on the federal government’s Advisory Council on National Security from 2005 until summer 2009, said he finds key aspects of Colvin’s testimony to a House committee today “troubling but doubtful.”

Colvin told MPs that while he was serving in Afghanistan, senior Canadian military and government officials failed to act on his warnings that detainees handed over to Afghanistan’s notorious prison system by Canadian troops were being tortured.

Despite being skeptical about important details in Colvin’s story, Wark said the Conservative government should either allow the federal Military Police Complaints Commission to proceed with its inquiry into the controversy, or let some other body take on the task.

The MPCC’s bid to hear Colvin’s testimony and probe his charges has been repeatedly blocked and delayed by the government’s lawyers and is now tied up in Federal Court.

Continue…

The Commons: 'There is no evidence'

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, November 18, 2009 at 7:03 PM - 17 Comments

The Scene. The Liberals stood and applauded, the Conservatives stood and applauded, and Bob Rae happily motioned for everyone to applaud his presence. A joke was exchanged and then it was immediately to the uncomfortable questions.

“Mr. Speaker, the question I have is for the Minister of State of Foreign Affairs,” Mr. Rae said, eyeing Peter Kent directly. “Richard Colvin, who is a foreign service officer of great distinction, when he went to Kandahar in April of 2006, said that he found the condition of Afghan detainees, and I quote from his affidavit, to be ‘serious, imminent and alarming,’ as a result of which he wrote what he described as an action memorandum to his department, as well as to other departments.”

With that established, the question.

“I would like to ask the minister,” Mr. Rae finished. “Given the fact that it was an action memorandum, why did it take the government 18 months to act?”

Mr. Kent stayed seated, the government instead opting to offer up Defence Minister Peter MacKay. “Mr. Speaker, I thank my honourable colleague for the question,” the Defence Minister began, left hand in pocket to project an attitude of casual ease. “In fact, two and a half years ago we did action this particular file.”

Indeed, the government’s actions on this file in 2007 are the subject of some allegation. But more on that in a moment. Continue…

Richard Colvin speaks (II)

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, November 18, 2009 at 5:18 PM - 19 Comments

Canadian Press has an excerpt from Mr. Colvin’s opening statement.

Counter-insurgency is an argument to win the support of the locals. Every action, reaction or failure to act become part of the debate. In Kandahar, Canada needs to convince local people that we are better than the Taliban, that our values were superior, that we would look after their interests and protect them. In my judgment, some of our actions in Kandahar, including complicity in torture, turned local people against us. Instead of winning hearts and minds, we caused Kandaharis to fear the foreigners. Canada’s detainee practices alienated us from the population and strengthened the insurgency.

On the similarities between torturees' testimony and torturers' testimony

By Paul Wells - Wednesday, November 18, 2009 at 5:12 PM - 91 Comments

As part of the bucket defence* they are deploying in response to Richard Colvin’s testimony on allegations of torture routinely inflicted on prisoners handed over by Canadian Forces to Afghan authorities, Conservative MPs are arguing that these prisoners were, after all, trained to tell tall tales about horrible treatment to attract sympathy. This is a standard argument made by torture apologists. It is probably true sometimes.

But there is a previous, exhaustively documented set of cases, not directly related to the case of Canadian-captured prisoners in Kandahar, where outrageous claims from prisoners were closely corroborated with official reports of outrageous behaviour from their captors. I refer, of course, to the International Committee of the Red Cross report on torture at the Guantanamo prison in Cuba. When I wrote in March about Mark Danner’s 13,000-word account of the ICRC report, Maclean’s carried a world-weary, oh-you-silly-goose letter from some dork along precisely these lines: Oh, poor Wells, don’t you understand that these prisoners are bad people, they make stuff up, you can’t trust them any farther than you can throw them.

And then an interesting thing happened. The U.S. Department of Justice released detailed memos written by and for the Guantanamo prisoners’ American captors which closely matched the prisoners’ own accounts. (A summary of the techniques for which U.S. officials sought a legal fig leaf is here; Danner’s authoritative account of the ICRC report is here.)

As I say, the fact that something happened over there does not mean it happened over here. I mean only to show that, in several documented cases where prisoners claimed to have been stripped, slapped, starved, slammed against walls and made to believe they were about to drown, their captors had in fact sought permission to strip, slap, starve, slam them against walls and make them believe they were about to drown.

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* A bucket defence is a scattershot defence against an allegation of wrongdoing. The individual parts of the defence may have no relation to one another and may even be mutually contradictory. So, say I borrow a bucket from you and return it with a hole in the bottom. You get angry. I respond: (a) There is no hole; (b) It was there when you loaned the bucket to me; (c) I didn’t put the hole there, Jimmy did; (d) I put the hole there by accident. So the Conservatives are arguing that the prisoners’ testimony is a lie; that Colvin is reporting hearsay; that he buried his reports so nobody could have found them; that prisons are dangerous places everywhere; that Colvin is an unreliable fellow. The goal of a bucket defence is not to suggest a single, coherent, rebuttal of a claim. It is to throw up such a fog of confusion and contradiction that the entire process is discredited or spectators are discouraged from continuing to pay attention.

All Afghan detainees were tortured

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, November 18, 2009 at 4:21 PM - 6 Comments

A Canadian diplomat told a Commons committee on Wednesday that every single detainee transferred by Canadian soldiers to Afghan authorities between 2006 and 2007 was beaten and tortured using electric shocks. As if that weren’t enough, Richard Colvin, who served as the political officer at the Canadian-run provincial reconstruction base in Afghanistan, says many of those detainess had committed no crime. Colvin told special committee on Afghanistan he repeatedly warned officials in the Foreign Affairs and Defence departments of the mistreatment of prisoners, but that warns went unheeded. In fact, Colvin says he was told not to write about prisoners in his reports and that military officials ignored similar warnings from the Red Cross.

CTV

Richard Colvin speaks

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, November 18, 2009 at 3:51 PM - 64 Comments

At this moment, Richard Colvin is delivering crushing testimony to the special committee on the Canadian mission in Afghanistan. Here is the first dispatch from Canadian Press.

A federal official says all of the prisoners Canada handed to Afghanistan’s notorious intelligence service in 2006-07 were tortured — and many of them were likely innocent … In a blistering indictment of Ottawa’s handling of prisoners, Colvin said the Red Cross tried for three months in 2006 to warn the Canadian army in Kandahar about what was happening to prisoners, but no one would “even take their phone calls.”

Reports from Canadian Press, the Star, Canwest, Reuters, the Sun, CTV and CBC.

An extract from Colvin’s opening statement here.

That landscaper was a complete Nazi

By Martin Patriquin - Wednesday, November 18, 2009 at 3:42 PM - 13 Comments

Forgive the non-Québécois digression, but it’s mighty slow around here. Parizeau wrote a book, the Habs suck and kids are getting flu shots. It’s enough to keep a man from getting out of bed.

So, yeah, Nazis. The above picture is a screen grab of a farm in the verdant suburbs of London, Ontario, and referenced in Alex Caine’s The Fat Mexican, about The Bandidos motorcycle gang. As an amateur labyrinthian, I can attest to the difficulty of properly sculpting anything into the landscape, which makes the above oeuvre all the more impressive. Clean lines make for easier goose stepping, I guess. (I’m told by someone who knows that the ponds to the north of the swastika are stocked with “very, very blond fish.”)

The land is owned by Martin K. Weiche who, according to his hilariously straight Wikipedia entry, is “a far-right neo-Nazi political figure and building contractor in Canada.” Mr. Weiche is a lifelong Nazi, a would be usurper of small Caribbean nations and father to notorious biker gang member. Apparently, he’s also dyslexic. By carving a left facing swastika into his pasture, Mr. Weiche is actually declaring his affinity for  Hinduism and Buddhism–not the Third Reich–to low flying airplanes and the prying eye of Google Earth.

It’s an odd but surprisingly frequent mistake among Nazis, who are usually rigorous in making sure everything is right, perfect, straight and pure. Read this and check the picture:

Man, the Führer would be so pissed.

Thanks Santa, a Pet Rock!?

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, November 18, 2009 at 3:41 PM - 0 Comments

Buried in the junk drawer of everyone of a certain age is a (probably unsolved) Rubik’s Cube (1980). Or maybe a Slinky (1948). Surely no one saved their Pet Rocks, 1975 was a very bad year, presentwise. Esquire magazine has assembled a slide show of top-selling Christmas gifts dating back to 1929. One thing is certain, they don’t get cheaper as the years progress. Centuries from now, archeologist will dig through the rubble of civilization and date our decline from our Christmas discards. “Ah, this would be the primative Cabbage Patch Period, which predates the Beanie Baby Era—well before the Great Bankruptcy brought on by the Electronic Age.”

Esquire

Did no one hear Dean Del Mastro's plea for decency?

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, November 18, 2009 at 3:34 PM - 4 Comments

After Question Period just now, Navdeep Bains rose on a point of order to allege that Vic Toews, Conservative frontbencher and president of the treasury board, had used a “gun-like gesture” during QP.

Mr. Toews rose in response and accused Bob Rae of not sufficiently supporting Canadian soldiers.

Conservative Mark Warawa rose to accuse Mr. Bains of making the same gesture, a point Mr. Bains appeared to find ridiculous.

Mr. Bains repeated his assertion that Mr. Toews should apologize.

Mr. Rae rose to loudly refute Mr. Toews’ insinuation.

Mr. Toews rose to repeat his original insinuation.

A short while later, deputy government house leader Tom Lukiwski rose to apologize for a factual error contained in one of the government’s ten percenters.

Spot the irony

By Paul Wells - Wednesday, November 18, 2009 at 3:32 PM - 38 Comments

From the Globe:

“I think it is the most scandalous and scurrilous misuse I’ve ever seen of parliamentary privilege and taxpayers’ dollars, to divide a community and to pit one community against another,” said Liberal Joe Volpe, the MP for Eglinton-Lawrence.

Now That's Some Good WIRE Quoting

By Jaime Weinman - Wednesday, November 18, 2009 at 2:25 PM - 3 Comments

The Wire gets so much praise from people who don’t actually like television, and has spawned so many David Simon quotes about why he’s better than everyone and every show should be more like his, that it’s easy to forget that the show really was as good as Simon says, one of the few shows that has taken the “novelistic” approach (really, an expanded version of the mini-series approach) and made it work superbly. This compilation of the “100 best Wire quotes” is a good, quick reminder.

Pelosi plays the villain in new children’s book

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, November 18, 2009 at 2:17 PM - 0 Comments

Now right-wing Americans have another way to impress upon their kids the horror they believe is taking place in Congress. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi is the central villain in a new children’s book by Fox News regular Katharine DeBrecht. In Help! Mom! The Radicals are Ruining My Country!, Pelosi provides the inspiration for Speaker Queenosi, a bug-eyed incarnation of evil whose socialist, out-of-touch policies prevent two little boys from selling swing sets, despite the fact that they need the profits to pay their workers. As Queenosi reasons, everyone deserves a swing set, even those who can’t afford one, “Little common people are entitled to a swingset just like the rest of you commoners.” But whether the little common people will catch on to the political message is another matter entirely.

Quill and Quire

The usual suspects

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, November 18, 2009 at 1:24 PM - 14 Comments

A potentially interesting note from the Globe’s review of changes in Michael Ignatieff’s office.

Instead of a roll call of Liberal MPs posing queries in Question Period, expect a core group of spokespeople, perhaps five or six, to take most of the Commons limelight.

It is tempting to say this is a good idea, but perhaps only because it is any idea. Legislated reform of Question Period should still be considered. But there is probably much parties and members could do on their own. Must each party, for instance, pursue a half dozen different topics each day? Could they, instead, go repeatedly at just one or two topics? Why restrict the leader of the opposition to three questions and other members to two? The most riveting exchange of the past two years was Stephane Dion and Stephen Harper’s back-and-forth of last December. For the sake of the nation, we needn’t go through that exact sort of thing too often, but there is probably something to be said for more often deviating from the routine. Or, for that matter, doing away with much of the routine entirely.

The per capita boast (II)

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, November 18, 2009 at 12:43 PM - 27 Comments

It has now been two weeks since Leona Aglukkaq’s office was asked to provide evidence to support the claim that Canada had the highest per capita supply of H1N1 vaccine. Such evidence has not yet been provided.

In the three sessions of Question Period since the Liberal opposition asserted this claim to be incorrect, the government has avoided making a specific per capita claim to this country’s vaccine supply. The closest Ms. Aglukkaq has come to the assertion was in this exchange last Friday. Continue…

Baldly going where no senator has

By Scott Feschuk - Wednesday, November 18, 2009 at 12:34 PM - 49 Comments

Is it too soon to nominate the 2010 Maclean’s Parliamentarian of the Year? Because I vote for Senator Mike Duffy. Other politicians may achieve the improbable—passing a private member’s bill, for instance, or shutting up for two consecutive seconds (keep trying, John Baird)—but the former TV show host has done the impossible: he has made the people of Canada actually pay attention to a senator.

For decades now, being appointed to the upper chamber has been like joining a club—not a cool club like the Friars Club or even a useful club like the Hair Club for Men, but a club whose proceedings go entirely unnoticed by society at large. Think of it as Fight Club but with naps instead of fist fights. Continue…

Divided they stand

By Luiza Ch. Savage - Wednesday, November 18, 2009 at 12:30 PM - 0 Comments

Outside Capitol Hill, conservative protesters had declared “No socialistic health care” and chanted “Kill the bill.” But the real obstacles to President Barack Obama’s effort to pass health care reform legislation this year have been divisions among his fellow Democrats. The bill that narrowly passed in the House of Representatives last weekend came at a high price for many liberal Democrats: among other things, it included broad restrictions on abortion funding in order to win over the votes of conservative Democrats, without whom the bill would not have passed. Now, as the Senate prepares to debate its own health care bill, which would eventually have to be reconciled with the House version, any final product is expected to be even more conservative—again, thanks to Democrats.

Included in the House bill was a so-called “public option”—a government-run not-for-profit insurance plan intended to compete with private insurers to provide Americans with a lower-cost option. The provision, which Republicans decry as a “government takeover of health care,” is already a far cry from the Canadian-style government-administered single-payer system many liberal Democrats wanted. But a crucial handful of conservative Democrats in the Senate are skeptical of the public option, and may torpedo such a provision—opening a potentially bitter ideological divide within the Democratic party. Continue…

G20 to be held in Toronto

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, November 18, 2009 at 12:09 PM - 0 Comments

Stephen Harper’s summer announcement that the 2010 G8 summit will be held in Huntsville, Ont., left some locals none too pleased. So it’s no surprise that there was reaction to news that Canada will host not just eight, but 20 countries next June. In response, says one source, Harper has decided to keep the G8 where it is, but host the larger G20 summit in Toronto. Provincial and federal insiders cite new demands for lodging and security that would make the G20 too much for Huntsville, a rural Ontario district, to handle.

Canada has been expecting to host the G8 for quite some time. But only in September did world leaders decide that their main international economic council should be expanded to include 20 nations. Still, a spokesman for Industry Minister Tony Clement, whose riding includes Huntsville, insists that “there is nothing to announce” just yet, and that the government is still “doing what we can to host in Muskoka.” The last summit hosted in Canada, in 2002, was in Kananaskis, Alberta.

The Globe and Mail

Remember that air passengers' "bill of rights"?

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, November 18, 2009 at 12:06 PM - 8 Comments

It was supposed to be a bill of inalienable rights for the passengers, by the passengers. Well so much for that. It turns out the airlines themselves had a primary role in writing the so-called “Flight Rights Canada” document unveiled with fanfare last fall. Over the objections of departmental bureaucrats, Transport Minister Lawrence Cannon’s office happily worked with the carriers themselves to develop the thing. All this is evident in correspondence between the minister’s office and civil servants, which was requested under Access to Information by Canwest News. The government was trying to block its release, according to Canwest, when someone sent the full package of uncensored documents to the news service by mistake. Or maybe it wasn’t a mistake. Maybe whoever passed it on has the misfortune to travel frequently on Canada’s “award winning” airlines.

Ottawa Citizen

The next Sarah Palin?

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, November 18, 2009 at 12:04 PM - 9 Comments

Right-wing radicals in the U.S. are lining up behind an outspoken, striking brunette as their 2010 female presidential hopeful but it isn’t former Alaska governor Sarah Palin, the Guardian reports. The far right’s new darling is 53-year-old Michele Bachmann, a mother of five from Minnesota who calls herself a “fool for Christ” and lambastes Obama as a socialist at the head of a “gangster regime.” Bachmann has emerged as one of the most strident voices in American politics as a leader of the so-called Tea Party movement, which has campaigned vociferously against health-care reform, the economic stimulus package and legislation to combat climate change. She’s viewed as part of an increasingly visible “female brand” of conservatism rising in America fuelled by syndicated commentators Michelle Malkin and Ann Coulter and of course Palin herself. “All these women express a mood of conservative discontent that is becoming increasingly vocal and, some experts warn, extreme,” the paper notes, quoting Shaun Bowler, a political scientist at the University of California: “They are tapping into grassroots frustration… they are charging up an already highly charged group of people.” Among liberals Americans, Bachmann has emerged a figure of both fun and fear: “It is hard to think that people take her seriously. But on a national level it is happening. It scares me,” said Aaron Landry, a senior correspondent at MNpublius.com, a Minnesota-based politics blog.

The Guardian

Olympic pride: an Orwellian perspective

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, November 18, 2009 at 12:02 PM - 2 Comments

You’d be hard pressed to find too many Canadians who would say the Olympic torch is, above all, a symbol of Orwellian police treatment. But that’s what two Antigonish, N.S., residents are saying, after what they describe as a “bizarre” run-in with the RCMP over the anti-Olympic posters they put around town. Jesse Campbell and Rachelle Enxuga say they were contacted by the RCMP after putting up the posters; officials, they insist, had collected detailed information on their personal identities and anti-Olympic organizing. “Just keeping tabs on a community discussion group in that way, I find a little bit Orwellian,” Campbell explains. He adds that he thinks money being used for the Vancouver Olympic Games would be better spent on housing and social programs. The RCMP says it is standard course for officers to investigate groups that may pose a threat to public safety. “Before an event and throughout an event, we gather information and we seek to either confirm or disregard individuals as a potential threat to the safety and security of the torch relay, or any other public event,” said RCMP spokeswoman Sgt. Brigdit Leger. On Tuesday, the Olympic torched made its way through Antigonish; there were no disruptions.

CBC