Really?

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, November 25, 2009 at 10:42 PM - 17 Comments

From Bruce Cheadle’s analysis of the scene.

Hillier managed to plug his recently released memoir and even autographed a couple of copies for star-struck MPs after his testimony.

And from the Twitter feed of CBC radio reporter Alison Crawford.

At cttee Paul Szabo snapped several pics of Hiller on his personal camera & then asked someone to snap one of him with Hillier.

The Commons: Lost in translation

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, November 25, 2009 at 6:04 PM - 60 Comments

The Scene. No hair is apparently so fine it cannot be split. If Confucius did not say so, he perhaps should have.

After Michael Ignatieff had stood to open Question Period and wondered aloud about the government’s competence, the Prime Minister, making his second consecutive appearance in the House, rose and explained, en francais, as follows.

“Quand nos diplomates, nos soldats ont reçu des preuves crédibles de cas d’abus, nos diplomates, nos soldats ont agi dans ces cas.”

Now, as scrawled quickly in ye olde Moleskine, the House of Commons translators, they of pleasant, if harried, voices, relayed “des preuves crédibles de cas d’abus” as “proof of abuse.” For the record, the authority that is Google understands this to mean “credible evidence of abuse.” And our dog-eared 1977 copy of Cassell’s French Dictionary translates the term “preuves” as “proof; evidence, testimony.”

This may or may not matter. Continue…

The generals

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, November 25, 2009 at 5:49 PM - 8 Comments

Reports from the testimony of Rick Hillier and Michel Gauthier from the Canadian Press, Globe, Star, Sun, CTV, CBC and Inside Politics.

Meanwhile, the Justice Department is allegedly blocking Richard Colvin from releasing some of the documents related to the situation.

California man discovers Charles Manson is his biological father

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, November 25, 2009 at 4:53 PM - 6 Comments

Matthew Roberts is a Ghandi-loving, long-haired, vegetarian neo-hippy from California. Imagine his surprise, then, when he found out his biological father is none other than serial killer Charles Manson. Roberts had known since a young age he was adopted, but the 41-year-old didn’t seek out his biological parents until 12 years ago. When he first contacted his biological mother, she wouldn’t reveal who Roberts’ father was. She eventually told Roberts she’d been raped by Manson after meeting the cult leader in 1967, two years before the gruesome Tate murders. Roberts, who bears an uncanny resemblance to Manson, said it was “like finding out that Adolf Hitler is your father” and claims he fell into a depression at the news. He’s since contacted Manson in prison, who now sends him “weird stuff and always signs it with his swastika.” However, the two have never met, nor have they spoken over the phone.

The Sun

Kandahar: we didn't know what we were getting into

By John Geddes - Wednesday, November 25, 2009 at 4:16 PM - 15 Comments

Gen. Rick Hillier, the retired chief of defence staff, just moments ago reminded the House committee on Afghanistan about how Canadian troops in Kandahar, in the spring and summer of 2006, found themselves fighting pitched battles against hundreds of Taliban insurgents.

It’s worth remembering how not long before those startlingly violent days, the Canadian officer dispatched to head operations in southern Afghanistan was anticipating nothing of the sort. (UPDATE: More background on the Kandahar surprise of ’06 here.)

Perhaps the fact that Canada’s military leaders didn’t really expect the all-out fighting Hillier just described partly explains why they didn’t properly plan for transferring to the Afghan authorities any prisoners taken during such intense combat operations.
Continue…

'Fortress Kandahar' in U.S. plans

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, November 25, 2009 at 3:35 PM - 6 Comments

The first wave of fresh U.S. troops coming to Afghanistan will set about creating a security halo around Kandahar, where Canadian forces have spent three years trying to suppress the Taliban, according to the Wall Street Journal. The plan by U.S. commanders is an acknowledgement of sorts that the Canadian-led allied effort in the region has failed, and a recognition that Kandahar is a strategic linchpin to fighting the insurgency in the country’s mostly Pashtun south. Full marks to the American brass if it works. But critics point out the generals are following the same failed strategy the Soviets did in Afghanistan during the 1980s, retreating to city bastions while insurgents gained power in the countryside.

Wall Street Journal

Norwich, we have a problem

By Colby Cosh - Wednesday, November 25, 2009 at 3:28 PM - 427 Comments

I can’t say I am spectacularly surprised at the emerging scandal over private e-mails obtained from the servers of the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit, which is at the heart of the process that produces IPCC reports on climate change. Some of the controversial practices revealed by the leaked e-mail corpus, such as fidgeting with visual presentations of statistics in order to make them as impressive and sensational as possible, are just evil habits that nonetheless form part of the standard operating procedure of applied science. But others—ignoring requests for data sets from one’s scientific adversaries, playing politics with scientific editorial boards, denouncing criticisms as not being peer-reviewed while working behind the scenes to ensure that those same criticisms are shut out of the peer-reviewed literature—were already known parts of the climate-panic industry’s playbook.

The CRU e-mails, whose veracity has so far held up to intense worldwide scrutiny and been generally confirmed by the University of East Anglia, reveal top IPCC contributors to be supercilious, inquisitorial, paranoid, nasty, thuggish, hypocritical, and, in general, trapped in an echo chamber of very modest dimension. If you didn’t already have a sense that all of this was true, you haven’t been paying close enough attention to the debate.

If, on the other hand, you instinctively think that “Climategate” isn’t going to be a big deal in the long run, I would suggest contemplating the very earliest reactions of the climatology nerds at ClimateAudit.org, the global-warming skepticism site edited by Canadian researcher Stephen McIntyre (who is mentioned dozens if not hundreds of times in the CRU e-mails as a particularly intractable bête noire). In the hours immediately after the CRU leak, many members of the Climate Audit community, confronted with evidence of malfeasance and scumbaggery by the scientists who have been attacking skeptics as lunatics and astroturfers for two decades, at first reacted with… well, skepticism. And, in some cases, even sorrow. Sample quotes from the comment thread:

• An ideological hacker smart enough to hack CRU is smart enough to manufacture a bombshell or two and seed it amongst the rest of the data. Treat “too good to be true” material with a lot of caution initially from such a source.
• Folks I would run, not walk, away from this as quickly as possible. To think they would be stupid enough to not cover their tracks on this is not credible IMO. While parts are likely real, some could be added as embellishments meant to create the furor it is already creating in the skeptic community. Let’s not make any judgements on the authenticity until we are sure what we have here is real and not a plant.
• I find this really quite shocking and distrubing. I mean it is one thing to think that such subversion is going on; it is quite another thing – if this is all undoctored – to read it. I don’t know whether to be elated (as a skeptic) or a little sad that this will reflect badly on science regardless.
• …I have concerns like others that this entire archive may be a “spiked” version of an otherwise legitimate (hacked) archive …but much of my concern is driven by the fact that I assume that things can’t be this blatant.

More such examples could be cited. The point is that the skeptics suspected the contents of the CRU leak were too “good”—that is, too damaging to the cause of the global warming hypothesis and the IPCC—to be true. It now seems nearly certain that they are true. Under the circumstances, what George Monbiot calls “climate rationalists” can hardly maintain a posture of indifference and dismissiveness. Monbiot himself, displaying a courageous spirit of openness that his critics may not have anticipated, has been arguing as much: but voices of agreement on his side of the debate are so few that he admits “I have seldom felt so alone.”

Palin: Canada should scrap public health care

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, November 25, 2009 at 3:22 PM - 25 Comments

When Marg Delahunty, comedian Mary Walsh’s outsized über-Canadian character on This Hour Has 22 Minutes, asked Sarah Palin what reforms Canada should undertake to its health-care system, the former vice-presidential candidate was unequivocal: “Canada needs to dismantle its public health-care system and allow private enterprise to get involved and turn a profit.” The exchange followed Walsh’s ambush of Palin at a book signing in Columbus, Ohio, where Walsh asked Palin to say “a few words of encouragement for the Canadian conservatives who have worked so tirelessly to destroy the socialized medicare that we have.” Walsh was promptly kicked out of the event by Palin’s security team, but managed to exchange a few words with Palin in the book store’s parking lot.

Canadian Press

No surprise: America’s gay couples live in states that recognize their relationships

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, November 25, 2009 at 3:07 PM - 0 Comments

As this map on The Economist website shows, the highest concentration of households headed by gay couples, according to U.S. Census data, are in states that recognize same-sex partnerships or marriage. According to the Williams Institute, a gay rights think-tank at UCLA, D.C. has the highest proportion of gay households in the country, with 14 for every 1,000 headed by same-sex couples. (The national average is 4.7.) Though Maine has the second highest concentration, with more than eight same-sex households for every 1,000, that could soon change: voters recently decided to repeal legislation recognizing gay marriage. And as the map indicates, gay couples are least likely to live in the heartland, which is also a Republican stronghold.

Economist

Free at last

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, November 25, 2009 at 3:04 PM - 2 Comments

A spokesperson for Amanda Lindhout’s family has confirmed that the Red Deer-area freelance journalist has been released by the men who held her captive for 15 months in Somalia. The spokesperson needn’t have bothered. Lindhout, 28, gave a number of interviews earlier today from her hotel room in Mogadishu, describing how she’d been beaten by her captives, kept in a small windowless room, and how she had imagined running through Vancouver’s Stanley Park to keep sane. She was released earlier today along with Australian photojournalist Nigel Brennan. The pair had been held captive for almost a year and a half. Lindhout said she believed a ransom had been paid in exchange for their release. “We have now brought both foreign journalists to the Sahafi hotel. We have been working for eight days on their release, but finally succeeded,” Somalia MP Ahmed Diiriye told Reuters. “I don’t want to comment on how we released them now.”
CTV

Toronto Sun

Mr. Obama goes to Copenhagen

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, November 25, 2009 at 3:02 PM - 12 Comments

The White House has confirmed U.S. President Barack Obama will attend the global climate summit in Copenhagen next month, a meeting which Canadian officials have already dismissed as unlikely to produce a meaningful follow-up to the Kyoto Protocol. Though officials in Stephen Harper’s office say plans could change should world leaders decide to meet there, Canada’s prime minister isn’t planning on attending the summit, opting to send Environment Minister Jim Prentice instead. So far, 65 world leaders have confirmed they’ll be in Copenhagen, but Obama’s presence stands out as the conference organizers’ biggest coup. “The world is very much looking to the United States to come forward with an emission reduction target and contribute to financial support to help developing countries,” says Yvo de Boer, the UN’s climate treaty chief.

CBC

Uncle Sam, take down that wall

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, November 25, 2009 at 2:02 PM - 0 Comments

Yeah, yeah, security’s important. But what about landscaping? The City of Ottawa is asking the U.S. embassy and RCMP to consider this question as it seeks to revitalize Sussex Drive, where authorities had erected an unsightly concrete barrier following 9/11. Presumably, the wall was intended to block would-be car bombers from using the embassy as a target. But many residents felt the measure was out of proportion with the actual threat. Now the  city, along with the National Capital Commission, is asking for something a little less ugly to protect the edifice, which occupies some of the most visible real estate in the nation’s capital.

Ottawa Citizen

'I’m not getting into the personality, the professionalism'

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, November 25, 2009 at 2:02 PM - 20 Comments

Peter MacKay maintains he never saw Richard Colvin’s reports, only that he received briefings to which there were attachments of which Mr. Colvin was a contributor. A month ago, for the record, Mr. MacKay said he did not heard the name “Richard Colvin” until the diplomat became involved in the Military Police Complaints Commission hearings.

Half of Canadians believe Colvin

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, November 25, 2009 at 1:57 PM - 3 Comments

A new Harris-Decima survey shows 51 per cent of Canadians believe diplomat Richard Colvin’s assertions that all of the detainees handed over to Afghan authorities in 2006 and 2007 were likely tortured, and that government officials knew about their treatment. These results come after Colvin told the Parliamentary Committee investigating his allegations that he had warned the office of the Minister of Foreign Affairs about the torture, but was ignored. The Harper government is doing all it can to discredit Colvin, claiming that his testimony is unreliable and his colleagues do not support the torture allegations. However, the survey shows that only a quarter of Canadians believe the Conservative’s side of the story, and emails obtained by the Globe and Mail show that the government was trying to minimize media questions about the transfer of prisoners during Colvin’s time in Afghanistan. Laurie Hawn, the parliamentary secretary to Defence Minister Peter MacKay, says Canadians have yet to hear the full story, and that their opinions may change once more witnesses, including former chief of defence staff Rick Hillier,  testify before the Parliamentary Committee.

CBC

Globe and Mail

The Danish experience

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, November 25, 2009 at 12:58 PM - 5 Comments

Further to this, it seems the Danish government is currently being sued by a former detainee who was seized by Danish forces and turned over to the Americans.

The Danish defence ministry went on trial here Tuesday in a case brought by a man who claims he was tortured while a prisoner in Afghanistan. Ghousouallah Tarin has alleged he suffered torture at the hands of US troops in Afghanistan after he was turned over to the Americans by Danish soldiers…

According to Tarin’s lawyer, Tyge Trier, the central question in the trial is what the Danish government knew about the US treatment of Afghan prisoners, which his client alleges was in violation of the Geneva Conventions on prisoners of war.

Linkage

By Andrew Potter - Wednesday, November 25, 2009 at 12:33 PM - 20 Comments

1. Another interview from the Daily Beast with Mad Men’s Matthew Weiner

2. Is the “conscious coma” story bogus?

3. Monkey Uprising: South Africa edition (Thanks Simon)

4. Blame Canada: Times of London columnist looks across the pond and sees a domestic constitutional crisis.

5. Bishop Allen has a new album coming out. I saw their show in Brooklyn saturday night; about half the show was new material and it all sounded great. Here are some pics:

Continue…

Back from the brink

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, November 25, 2009 at 11:26 AM - 0 Comments

The name Aksel Lund Svindal is a mouthful, but Canadians better get used to hearing it. The Norwegian skier has won the overall Alpine World Cup championship—meaning he is a medal threat in four different races—two of the past three seasons. And the reason he didn’t win the 2007-08 season was a horrific crash in Beaver Creek, Colorado, that left him with multiple broken bones and a gash in his backside so deep that surgeons opened his abdomen to assess the damage. The bad news for the rest of the world is that he appears to back at the top of his game.

New York Times

Stop the lama love-in

By Andy Lamey - Wednesday, November 25, 2009 at 11:15 AM - 140 Comments

Everyone loves the Dalai Lama. Just how much was on display two weeks ago when the Tibetan religious leader paid a visit to the town of Tawang in northeastern India. Ethnic Tibetans travelled to the frontier outpost from all over the sub-continent in order to venerate the 74-year-old monk at a huge outdoor rally. “He is our god, he is the living Buddha. A glimpse of the Dalai Lama is like getting spiritual power inside you,” said one participant in explaining the extraordinary adulation the Dalai Lama inspires. Here in Canada, our view is not so different. When the Dalai Lama travelled to Vancouver, Calgary and Montreal last month, tens of thousands crowded into stadiums to hear his message of universal compassion. The rapturous reception was in keeping with our decision in 2006 to grant him citizenship, the highest honour Canada bestows on foreign leaders. The Dalai Lama’s other admirers include the U.S. government, which awarded him the Congressional Gold Medal, and the Nobel Peace Prize committee. The general feeling of Lama-mania was summed up by TV star Sandra Oh, who co-hosted one of his Canadian appearances. “He’s a rock star! Rock star! Seriously, a rock star!”

Yet if the Dalai Lama is a rock star, does he live up to the hype? His spiritual teachings contain elements of illogic and intolerance that would not be accepted from any other religious figure. That these go unnoticed is largely due to the way Tibetan Buddhism functions as a spiritual Rorschach blot onto which Westerners project their hopes and desires. The primary problem, however, is political. In addition to being a spiritual figure, the Dalai Lama is the leader of the Free Tibet movement. And when it comes to advancing that goal, he has been a resounding failure. Uncritical adulation legitimizes the Dalai Lama’s failed leadership and undermines one of the great political causes of our time.

It’s not hard to understand the Dalai Lama’s appeal. At first glance he holds out the promise of religious belief purged of any trace of fundamentalism. When it comes to modern science, for example, he has said that when it conflicts with Buddhist teachings, Buddhism should be revised. Other theological statements he has made, such as his declaration that “any deed done with good motivation is a religious act,” bespeak a similarly open-minded temperament.

But this progressive outlook can sometimes turn out to be illusory. Consider the teaching for which he may be best known, his doctrine of universal compassion. As he has written, “non-violence applies not just to human beings, but to all sentient beings—any living thing that has a mind.” That belief is why, when the Dalai Lama was invited to a fundraising luncheon for a monastery in Wisconsin in 2007, the organizers expected him to ask for a vegetarian meal. Instead they watched him happily ingest pheasant and veal. “He pretty much lapped up every single plate that he had put in front of him,” one tablemate later said. “He loves food; he likes good food.” The Dalai Lama, it turns out, is vegetarian at his official residence in India but not while travelling. But a doctrine of compassion that switches on and off depending on geography is not much of a doctrine at all.

The Dalai Lama’s position on same-sex relationships is equally puzzling. “I look at the issue at two levels,” he told the Vancouver Sun in 2004. Homosexuality is perfectly acceptable for non-believers. And for people who look to the Dalai Lama for guidance? “For a Buddhist, the same-sex union is engaging in sexual misconduct.” The double-sided approach is rooted in a traditional method of explaining discrepancies between schools of Buddhism, whereby the Buddha is said to have taught different things to different people. But as with the doctrine of compassion, the Dalai Lama’s considered view ends up being a sloppy relativist mess. Or at least it does in the West, where he is obliged to state his view regarding non-Buddhists. When addressing Buddhists directly the Dalai Lama’s position is less complicated—and more crudely prejudicial.

This side of the Dalai Lama’s spiritual teachings is never subject to criticism. Why? One possibility is that the Dalai Lama solves a specifically Western problem. In the 19th century the shared religious values that once permeated our civilization began a “long withdrawing roar,” as Matthew Arnold put it. Any religion one adopts now is merely one possibility among many, a reality that drains each of its explanatory value and force. An infatuation with the Dalai Lama is the Goldilocks solution for a culture that finds traditional religion too hot and atheism too cold. His exoticism marks him as authentic, and subjecting his teachings to critical scrutiny is beside the point, as there is never any chance we are going to engage his teachings seriously enough to be challenged by them. We instead want to bask in his distant spiritual glow.

The Dalai Lama’s appeal is arguably closely entwined with the peculiar fascination the West has long exhibited for all things Tibetan. When Europeans discovered Tibet, it was a remote kingdom that had never been colonized and still seemed to exist in the ancient past. It quickly became a land of fantasy. Shangri-La, the mystical Tibetan paradise, was first depicted in the 1933 novel Lost Horizon by James Hilton. In the late 1930s the Nazis sent an expedition to Tibet, hoping to find an ancient race of Aryans. After the devastation of the Second World War, European intellectuals imagined Tibet as “an unarmed society.” As Buddhist scholar Donald Lopez notes, these myths have a common source. In each case, “the West perceives some lack within itself and fantasizes that the answer, through a process of projection, is to be found somewhere in the East.”

This process continued after China invaded Tibet in 1959, and many Tibetans were driven into exile. When the Beatles recorded Tomorrow Never Knows, John Lennon wanted his voice to sound like “the Dalai Lama on the mountain top.” Remember the cuddly and eco-friendly Ewoks in Return of the Jedi? The language they spoke was modified Tibetan. Today Tibet is embraced by celebrities ranging from the Beastie Boys to action hero Steven Seagal. “The Dalai Lama gave me a spiritual blessing that would not have been given to anyone who was not special,” Seagal announced in 1996. “I don’t think he has given such a blessing to another white person.”
Just how special Seagal is became clear in 1997 when Tibetan religious authority Penor Rinpoche declared him to be the reincarnation of a 17th-century lama. However ridiculous it may seem to imagine the star of Exit Wounds and Pistol Whipped as a holy being, Seagal’s anointment symbolizes the transformation Tibetan Buddhism has undergone as it has come in contact with new patrons and admirers in the West. Rather than something “out there,” Tibetan culture is influenced by how Westerners engage with it.

Unfortunately, on a political level, that influence has been highly negative. Seeing how requires understanding the different and at times conflicting roles the Dalai Lama now plays in addition to being the spiritual head of Tibetan Buddhism. Nowhere is this more true than in regard to his position as leader of the Tibetan government in exile, and the Free Tibet movement more broadly.

Since China invaded Tibet it has engaged in a campaign of ruthless repression. It is official government policy to “end the nomadic way of life” of traditional Tibetans and to forcibly resettle them. Tibetans who protest are subject to show trials and torture. Opposing China’s actions has rightly been characterized as a moral struggle on the scale of the movement against apartheid or for Indian independence. Unfortunately, the Dalai Lama is the equal of neither Nelson Mandela nor Gandhi. He is as miscast as the head of Tibet liberation as the pope would have been leading the struggle against Hitler. Under his leadership political goals have inevitably taken a back seat to spiritual ones.

A comparison to South Africa is instructive. One of the most inspiring moments in the struggle against apartheid came during the famous Rivonia trial when Nelson Mandela, faced with a possible death sentence, spoke from the prisoner’s dock. Freedom, he said, was “an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.” Mandela’s speech galvanized the anti-apartheid movement. The Dalai Lama’s pronouncements, by contrast, could not be less defiant. “I practise certain mental exercises which promote love toward all sentient beings, including especially my so-called enemies.” Mandela endorsed an international boycott of South African athletes. When China hosted the 2008 Olympics, the Dalai Lama sent Beijing his regards. “I send my prayers and good wishes for the success of the event.” If the Dalai Lama had led the struggle in South Africa, apartheid would still be in effect. Unsurprisingly, 50 years after the occupation, Tibet is still not free.

At times it seems that is what Western Tibetophiles would unknowingly prefer. In the words of actor Richard Gere, a long-time advocate of Tibetan independence, “Many of us constantly remind our Tibetan friends, ‘You must maintain that sense of uniqueness and that genuine cultural commitment to non-violence. If you pick up arms and become like the Palestinians, you’ll lose your special status.’”

Leave aside the fact that the moral case for armed resistance in Tibet is as strong as it was in France under German occupation. There are many steps an independence movement can take that fall short of violence, measures such as strikes or boycotts. The Dalai Lama has thrown himself into none of these, which are all at odds with loving one’s enemy. This approach is reinforced by his Western admirers, who are drawn to the myth of Tibet as an unarmed society (even though Tibet has fought armies from Mongolia, Nepal and Britain). The overall effect of his staunchest Western fans therefore has been to reward and perpetuate an approach to Tibetan independence that has no hope of ever succeeding.

To be fair, his Holiness has begun to admit as much. “I have to accept failure; things are not improving in Tibet,” he said last November, acknowledging the “death sentence” Tibetans continue to face under Chinese rule. His supporters stress the awareness he brings to the Tibetan cause and the anger Chinese officials express whenever the Dalai Lama receives an audience with a Western leader. But after a certain point, awareness has to give way to action.

Slowly, another political faction is taking form. As one young Tibetan who has spent his entire life in exile in India said in March, “We do not get anything from China. So some young people want to go to a little bit of violence—not to kill anyone but to do something so that China knows they will actively [resist].” Such a view is in keeping with the position of the Tibetan Youth Congress, which stands for “the total independence of Tibet even at the cost of one’s life.” If progress is to ever be made on Tibet, these approaches need to be taken seriously. But that can only happen if the Dalai Lama steps aside as a political leader, and lets a new generation take over.

First, however, public perception of the Dalai Lama needs to change. As it stands, when people turn their attention to him, they do so in the spirit of answering John Lennon’s call to “turn off your mind, relax, and float downstream.” The outcome of this lazy attitude is to reinforce the Dalai Lama’s leadership and his counterproductive efforts to free his people. The basic problem was summed up by the Dalai Lama himself when he stated, “I find no contradiction at all between politics and religion.” So long as the Dalai Lama is regarded as a figure of both spiritual and political liberation, his efforts to make the first goal happen will ensure the second never does.

The burden of proof (II)

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, November 25, 2009 at 11:04 AM - 10 Comments

Sébastien Jodoin, a public interest law fellow with Amnesty International in Ottawa, sends along a response to these questions.

To answer your question, under international law, the question is not whether the Canadian officials were presented with incontrovertible evidence of torture, the question is whether they were presented with evidence of the real risk of torture and what steps they took in response to this risk to preempt the perpetration of torture.

The U.N. Committee Against Torture, which has responsibility for ensuring state party compliance with the Torture Convention, has stated that the protections under the Torture Convention extend to detainees held by the military forces of a contracting party, regardless of where those forces are situated. The Committee considered this same armed conflict in Afghanistan and found that Denmark violated its non-refoulement obligation when it transferred detainees to the jurisdiction of another state.

He cites this report of the UN Committee Against Torture. The relevant paragraphs therein are as follows. Continue…

…Because that sort of thing never happens in prison

By Martin Patriquin - Wednesday, November 25, 2009 at 10:41 AM - 26 Comments

From a nice piece about Uganda’s anti-homosexual bill in the Globe this morning:

The law would impose a sentence of life imprisonment on anyone who “penetrates the anus or mouth of another person of the same sex with his penis or any other sexual contraption.” The same penalty would apply if he or she even “touches another person with the intention of committing the act of homosexuality.”

So Uganda is going to punish homosexual behaviour by throwing the homosexual into close quarters with dozens of other desperate and lonely men for the rest of his life. Makes perfect sense. Of course that will ‘cure’ him.

More e-mails, more questions

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, November 25, 2009 at 10:41 AM - 18 Comments

Richard Colvin indicates at least some of his reports were sent directly to the Foreign Affairs Minister’s office, while internal e-mails show Foreign Affairs was worried that making too big a deal of a change to the detainee transfer agreement in early 2007 might compel some to ask why it took so long. The Star pinpoints the arrival of Colvin’s memos to Peter MacKay’s office in spring 2006. The Globe profiles David Mulroney. The Professional Association of Foreign Service Officers issues a statement on the public treatment of Richard Colvin. And op-eds from Errol Mendes, Wesley Wark, James Ron, Lewis MacKenzie and Vic Toews.

An NFL star tries curling

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, November 25, 2009 at 10:39 AM - 1 Comment

San Francisco 49ers tight end Vernon Davis might be a 6-foot-3 NFL star with excellent speed and soft hands, but can he throw draw weight to the button? Can he play the chip-and-lie? Actually, Davis shows promise as a curler. He agreed to try an evening of chess on ice at the San Francisco Bay Area Curling Club recently, as part of a bid by the club to boost U.S. interest in the sport before the Vancouver Olympics. Davis reportedly enjoyed the game so much he had to be dragged away from the rink late to get enough sleep for the next morning’s 49ers practice. “I didn’t think it would be this much fun,” he said. Another convert.

Washington Post

"Biggest Loser" weight loss questioned

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, November 25, 2009 at 10:37 AM - 3 Comments

More than 40 former contestants from “The Biggest Loser” are getting together for a reunion special, but one important person won’t be there: Ryan C. Benson, who lost 122 of his 330-pound starting weight, and went on to win the program’s first season, the New York Times reports. Now weighing in at over 300 pounds, Benson says he was shunned by the show because he admitted he lost some weight by fasting, even dehydrating himself until he urinated blood. “The Biggest Loser” is now in its eighth season, and is one of NBC’s most watched shows. But doctors, nutritionists and physiologists who don’t work on the show have expressed doubt about its regimen of strict diet and up to six hours a day of exercise, in which contestants sometimes lose over 15 pounds per week. (Experts recommend losing two pounds per week for healthy weight loss.) Season 3 contestant Kai Hibbard, who lost 118 pounds, has written on her blog that she and other contestants would drink as little water as possible before weigh-in. After the show ended, she added 31 pounds in two weeks, she says, mostly just by drinking water. The winners of the first four seasons have each added back at least 20 per cent of their weight since the show ended. On the first episode of this season, two contestants were sent to hospital, yet new contestants are entering the show even more out of shape than the ones before. “I’m waiting for the first person to have a heart attack,” Dr. Charles Burant, a professor of internal medicine at the University of Michigan, told the newspaper, calling the show “exploitative.” But Dr. Rob Huizenga, the medical consultant to “The Biggest Loser” and an associate clinical professor of medicine at UCLA, said it’s safe. “This is not only a major amount of weight loss, it is a totally different kind of weight loss compared with surgery or starvation diets,” he said. Yet, when talking about the recent one-mile race that sent two contestants to hospital, Huizenga admitted that “if we had it to do over, we wouldn’t do it.”

New York Times

Depressed girls gone wild?

By Colby Cosh - Wednesday, November 25, 2009 at 2:39 AM - 38 Comments

I realize nobody has all that much interest in being strictly fair to insurance companies, but I’m sort of horrified by the way the Nathalie Blanchard story is being handled in the press and electronic media. The evidence for the notion that Ms. Blanchard lost her long-term disability benefits “over Facebook photos” appears to amount entirely to “She says she was told that’s what happened.” Now, she could be quite right. Manulife admits it does use Facebook to investigate disability claims, as anyone would expect them to do. Here’s a news flash for particularly naïve children and desert-dwelling stylites: an insurance company following up a suspicion of a false claim uses every kind of evidence it can scrape up. Its hirelings will quiz your neighbours, co-workers, and friends! They will rummage through your garbage! They will engage in photo and video surveillance! They’ll Google you until the cows come home!

In short, this is, like this spring’s “Craigslist killer” news story, a narrative to which the supposed cynosure of attention really has no special relevance. At all. It would be nice if news organizations could get together, run one last banner headline announcing that THE INTERNET EXISTS, and be done with these trumped-up technology angles for all time.

Anyway, since we don’t know what other evidence Manulife’s investigation turned up, and they are bound not to tell us, it seems inappropriate for the headlines and the secondary commentary on the story to take Blanchard’s version as the gospel. Which is exactly what everybody is doing, even though Manulife may have had a dozen other reasons for cancelling the claim.

I’m not suggesting, mind you, that they necessarily do. An insurer makes decisions like this with hypothetical litigation in mind. That’s not necessarily conducive to clear thinking: it’s conducive to thinking like a juror, which may well be the diametrical opposite. It would not be surprising if some excitable junior associate had been shown Blanchard’s Facebook pictures of fun in the sun and thought “Well, well, well. These will be awfully hard to for her to explain to a jury.” You would have to be an idiot to think that such pictures are, in themselves, good evidence that Blanchard is not depressed. And, unfortunately, the world is full of idiots.

The key question for an insurer, however, is not whether Blanchard has depression, but whether she is making bona fide efforts to return to her job. Her duty isn’t to stop being ill, but to do what she can to get as well as she can and start earning her paycheques again. There are plenty of seriously depressed people who still manage to drag their butts out of bed and punch the clock most days. Blanchard’s statements to the CBC leave me wondering a little about her self-understanding, and since thousands of bloggers and editors apparently have no trouble questioning Manulife’s credibility, I feel quite licensed to wonder.

She says, for instance, “that on her doctor’s advice, she tried to have fun, including nights out at her local bar with friends and short getaways to sun destinations, as a way to forget her problems.” I suppose that a physician treating depression would recommend, in a general way, that his patient should try to get exercise, seek pleasant new experiences, maintain strong social networks, etc., etc. On the other hand, I can’t see any doctor having a display of travel brochures on the wall of his office, or publishing a guide to Eastern Townships nightlife. Again, pictures of Blanchard at a bar cannot possibly demonstrate that she is not depressed. But they could show that she was defying a doctor’s advice concerning the safe use of psychiatric medication, or the consumption of alcohol itself, if she were at risk of co-morbidity from substance-abuse problems.

Blanchard also says, by the way, that she “doesn’t understand how Manulife accessed her photos because her Facebook profile is locked and only people she approves can look at what she posts.” I hope that since this interview, someone has taken her aside and gently explained the Sherlockian maxim that “when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” In this case, the compelling conclusion is that somebody Blanchard trusted snitched on her to the insurer, perhaps in a spasm of dudgeon over her insurance-subsidized lifestyle. It happens. In fact, it was known to happen before there was such a thing as Facebook.