I love the War on Terror. Let’s face it, without it, what would I really have to write about on a daily basis? The world has been plunged into the most ambiguous event in modern history, placing those on all sides – and there is certainly more than one – in positions of ensuring their survival at any price. In that regard, even the perpetuation of the ‘war’ itself represents the survival of radical ideologies, be they those engineered in Washington or in the mountains of southern Afghanistan. Ironically, both existed long before the World Trade Center fell.

Since 9/11, that tragedy has been used to justify actions that, in truth, no sane society would ever permit unless something of that magnitude existed to provide manipulation. Then again, the people of the United States have been kept in the dark for so long with regards to the covert actions of their own country as to render them little more than four-year robots, required to help facilitate the democratic façade. When the DOD and the CIA have both operated outside of the Constitution since their inception without that fact being seriously debated or challenged, what other conclusion is there to reach?

Usury and indoctrination are not solely the tools of religious radicals. In truth, the technique was gleaned from far more experienced employers of that mechanism. And that is not to say that the United States, or even the Soviets, wrote the book on it, as it’s a text that spans centuries. Just that they simply added a chapter or two.

The beauty of the War on Terror it that it is a conflict without sides precisely so that they don’t have to be taken. Sure, the common perception of it is that it’s a war against terrorism, but that is such an impossibly grandiose statement that, were it true, it would require action to be taken all over the world, not just in those nations in which radical Islam exists. In truth, it would also require that action even be taken against those that instituted the War on Terror in the first place.

For those that, following the end of the Cold War, waited patiently for a chance to unleash an imperialistic US foreign policy doctrine steeped in the arrogance of a one world power, and all the benefits that come with it, the War on Terror is tantamount to Christmas 365 days a year. It is a war without rules, without defined goals, without a conclusion. It is a war in which those that are prosecuted by it can also be used as facilitators for its objectives. Take, for example, US relations with Sudan.

As some of you might be aware, the United States officially classified what has taken place in Darfur as genocide. Of course, when one examines what has, and continues to, take place there, there is no question that Khartoum aided the Janjiweed militias that have been largely responsible for what has transpired in Darfur. Khartoum has denied any connection, of course, despite the fact that last year much of the Janjiweed was absorbed into the Sudanese Armed Forces, primarily the Popular Defense Forces and Border Guards.

So what does that have to do with the War on Terror and the United States?

Well, even though the Bush administration has condemned what is taking place in Darfur as genocide, and even gone so far as to impose sanctions against Sudan, they have also been working with the government in Khartoum on initiatives to do with the war in Iraq, primarily focused on infiltrating Salafi Jihadi groups. The sanctions, while real, are soft, and thus meant to placate a world view that is decidedly critical of the Sudanese government’s complicity in Darfur while maintaining its ‘extensive intelligence collaboration with Sudan’ – as the Los Angeles times put it in June of this year…

“The relationship underscores the complex realities of the post-Sept. 11 world, in which the United States has relied heavily on intelligence and military cooperation from countries, including Sudan and Uzbekistan, that are considered pariah states for their records on human rights.

“Intelligence cooperation takes place for a whole lot of reasons,” said a U.S. intelligence official, who like others spoke on condition of anonymity when discussing intelligence assessments. “It’s not always between people who love each other deeply.”

Sudan has become increasingly valuable to the United States since the Sept. 11 attacks because the Sunni Arab nation is a crossroads for Islamic militants making their way to Iraq and Pakistan.

That steady flow of foreign fighters has provided cover for Sudan’s Mukhabarat intelligence service to insert spies into Iraq, officials said.

“If you’ve got jihadists traveling via Sudan to get into Iraq, there’s a pattern there in and of itself that would not raise suspicion,” said a former high-ranking CIA official familiar with Sudan’s cooperation with the agency. “It creates an opportunity to send Sudanese into that pipeline.”

So, in short, you condemn the government of Sudan for being complicit in what you have termed genocide and yet you willingly conduct intelligence operations with them.

That, in a nutshell, defines the War on Terror. Right and wrong have no place in it primarily because no defined enemy has ever been established. At first it was Bin Laden’s al-Qaeda, which then grew into an ambiguous global network of terrorists, as Bin Laden’s capture became less likely – and, for all intents and purposes – less of a priority. Actions undertaken in various locations, such as in London, by individuals acting independently of any known or established terrorist group then filled the void, providing the war’s spin doctors the opportunity to place it in an improper context, that being that terrorism is alive and well and not, as in the case of the London attacks, based on racial or religious tensions within a specific society or something undertaken as a response to the US occupation of Iraq, among other things. In a sense, such occurrences are little more than blowback entirely respondent to a reckless and hypocritical US foreign policy doctrine, though they are never reported as such by much of the media. Instead, they remain vague in their purpose, with any door left open that infers a connection to a greater evil.

It is, in truth, difficult to find a historical comparison to the sweeping power provided by the ambiguity of the War on terror. Not even the National Socialists in Germany were gifted such an all-encompassing blank cheque with regards to indoctrination and public subversion. In truth, they would have probably marveled at the unprecedented, manipulative power that it has provided the United States and its allies. In their case, the restriction of civil liberties, etc, was overt, harsh, and decisive. Fear was employed on a much more basic and forceful level – nowhere nearly as subversively as it has been with regards to Western societies since 9/11. The crucial element, of course, is that public cooperation because of that fear has led to the acceptance of something that has not only been globally justified as both necessary and just, but completely open ended without limitation or a definition of finality.

If you do business with those guilty of genocide what does that say about you? There was a time when it would say very little, but given the ability to evoke the term ‘War on Terror’, the rules have changed. A world away, we view what has transpired in Darfur as a massive tragedy, but many, faced with the knowledge that the US government still has a relationship with the Sudanese government that is based on counter-terrorism initiatives, view the latter as being of equal importance. True, what has befallen those innocents in Darfur is horrific, but then again, so was 9/11. And that, when it comes to Western perceptions, is all that need be said. It doesn’t matter that the ratio of deaths is not even closely comparable, because, like it or not, admit it or not, we’re talking about the lives of foreigners in a part of the world that is wholly alien to us.

The War on Terror has amplified the need to ensure our security to a global level, enveloping the lives of others, allowing us to use who we will in attempt to ensure our ends no matter the transgressions of those that would aid us in doing so, or the innocent lives lost in the pursuit.

Like it or not, that truth alone renders the War on Terror already lost, though it will most probably take decades for most to come to terms with it.

November 30, 2007 11 Comments

As we’re all aware, Santa Claus doesn’t exist. Neither does the tooth fairy, Frosty the Snowman, the Boogieman, the Easter Bunny, and, of course, Black Sites, nor the illegal seizure and transport of foreign nationals by the United States, a practice known as Rendition.

Were one to ask Maher Arar, he would certainly tell you that Rendition is a very real practice, having been a victim of it. US intelligence leaned on the RCMP, the RCMP offered up a lamb, Arar was seized at JFK, flown to Washington and then to Jordan where he was driven to the Syrian border and handed over to the Syrian authorities who then, over the course of a year, held him in prison and tortured him in an attempt to extract information regarding a subject he knew nothing about – al-Qaeda.

Of course, the inquiry into Arar’s Rendition resulted in the sacking of the head of the RCMP, an apology from the government, and a financial settlement. But thus far US courts have rejected Arar’s attempts to hold the government that was actually responsible for the Rendition accountable.

No real surprise there.

Unfortunately, Canada is not alone in complicity when it comes to aiding and abetting the practice of Rendition. Others have willfully allowed planes Rendering detainees to use their airspace and even land within their borders, fully aware of their cargo and purpose…

“The secret flight plans of American military planes have revealed for the first time how European countries helped send prisoners, including British citizens, to the Guantanamo Bay prison camp.

Despite widespread criticism of alleged human rights abuses and torture at the US base in Cuba, a Sunday Times investigation has shown that at least five European countries gave the United States permission to fly nearly 700 terrorist suspects across their territory.

Three years ago, The Sunday Times published flight logs of CIA civilian jets in Europe, setting off a controversy over the whether countries across the continent have been secretly involved in America’s rendition of terrorist suspects to countries that carry out torture.

The row is now set to be reignited. Inquiries by Ana Gomes, a Portuguese member of the European parliament, have uncovered not only more CIA flight logs but also more sensitive military flight plans, which until now have remained a closely guarded secret.

The logs show how most prisoners changed planes at a Turkish military airbase and flew across Greek, Italian and Portuguese airspace. Others reached Cuba after touching down in Spain, whose governing socialist party once expressed indignation at conditions in Guantanamo.

The flight logs show that three Britons – Shafiq Rasul, Jamal Udeen and Asif Iqbal – were flown across Europe to Cuba on January 14, 2002. Moazzam Begg, another Briton, was taken by the same route to Guantanamo on February 2, 2003; and Binyam Mohamed, a British resident whose release the British government is now trying to negotiate, arrived in Cuba after crossing Europe in a special flight in September 2004.

According to the flight plans, the first 23 prisoners to arrive at Guantanamo – including another British citizen, Feroz Abbasi, then 21, and an Australian, David Hicks – had arrived at the American naval base in Cuba after flying from the Moron airbase in Spain.

Abbasi has claimed in a statement that prisoners were abused within hours of arriving. “We were made to sit on our heels, one foot over the other, supported by one foot’s toes alone, for hours. Some of us were old, weak, fatigued, and injured – they were the ones to drop first in the searing Caribbean heat.”

Described by the Pentagon as the “worst of the worst” from Al-Qaeda and the Taliban, the images of prisoners such as Abbasi dressed in orange jumpsuits, their heads shaved and shackled by their wrists and ankles, shocked the world. Within a day, Donald Rumsfeld, then US defence secretary, announced that the Geneva conventions would not apply to what were now called “enemy combatants”.

Last week, Europe’s leading watchdog on human rights alleged that European countries had breached the international convention against torture by giving the US secret permission to use its airspace.

Thomas Hammarberg, the Council of Europe’s commissioner for human rights, said: “What happened at Guantanamo was torture and it is illegal to provide facilities or anything to make this torture possible. Under the law, European governments should have intervened and should not have given permission to let these flights happen.”

Gomes added: “It’s clear to me that Guantanamo could not have been created without the involvement of European countries.”

Methods used at Guantanamo Bay, condemned by Britain’s Court of Appeal as a legal “black hole” and as a “monstrous failure of justice” by one law lord, have included the prolonged use of isolation, sleep deprivation, and use of stress positions. “These are methods that have been declared as unlawful by the European Court of Human Rights,” Hammarberg said.

The military flight plans show that all key flights arriving in Guantanamo had come across European airspace either through Spain or the Incirlik airbase in southeastern Turkey. The Sunday Times compared the military flight plans against a database compiled by Reprieve, the British-based charity that represents Guantanamo prisoners, of when prisoners first weighed in at the camp.

The investigation, cross-checked against other Pentagon documents, shows for the first time which prisoner arrived on which flight at Guantanamo, and by what route. At least 170 other prisoners flew over Spanish territory, more than 700 crossed Portuguese space, and more than 680 were transshipped at Incirlik. Most flights also crossed Greek and Italian airspace, according to a source in European air traffic control.

On February 2 2003, for example, a US Air Force C-17 Globemaster plane took off from Incirlik with 27 prisoners on board for Cuba. The same day, prisoner number 558 weighed in at 136lb (62kg) at the camp. He can be named as Moazzam Begg, now 39, from Birmingham, who was released in January 2005, and has never been charged with a crime.

Interviewed by phone last week, Begg recalled: “Inside the plane there was a chain around our waist, and it connected to cuffs around my wrists, which were tied in the back, and to my ankles. We were seated but it was so painful not being able to speak, to hear, to breathe properly, to look, to turn left or right, to move your hands, stretch your legs, or anything.” At the time flights were landing in Spain and crossing Spanish airspace, socialist leaders there were expressing “indignation” over conditions in Guantanamo. Now the socialists are in government after winning an election in March 2004 just after the Madrid train bombings and they are being asked to defend Spain’s continued collaboration with American operations. Under international law, government and military planes can cross another country’s territory only with diplomatic permission.

In a statement to the European parliament on the visits of CIA planes to Spain, the foreign minister Miguel Angel Moratinos has testified: “Our territory may have been used not to commit crimes on it, but as a stopover on the way to committing crime in another country.”

Spain, it has now emerged, had a specific agreement with the US to allow flights and visits to Spanish airbases for American planes.

In Portugal, the foreign minister Luis Amado has said flights across his country’s airspace took place “under the aegis of the UN and Nato and that Portugal naturally follows the principle of good faith in the relations with its allies”. Nato’s role in Guantanamo stems from a secret agreement made in Brussels on October 4 2001 by all Nato members, including Britain. Although never made public, Lord Robertson, the former British defence secretary who was later Nato’s secretary-general, explained that day that Nato had agreed to provide “blanket overflight clearances for the United States and other allies’ aircraft for military flights related to operations against terrorism”.

Today, Nato is more coy about its role in helping send prisoners to Guantanamo.

In a letter to Gomes, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, the current secretary-general, said no Nato planes had “flown to or from Guantanamo Bay” and that Nato “as an organisation has no involvement or co-ordinating role in providing clearance or overflight rights for other flights”. Turkey, meanwhile, has declared that its agencies had “reached no findings regarding any unacknowledged deprivation of liberty conducted by foreign agencies within the territory of the republic of Turkey or any transport by aircraft or otherwise of the persons deprived of their liberty”.

In London, Clive Stafford Smith, legal director of Reprieve, said, with America threatening that Guantanamo prisoners faced the death penalty, European governments had made “pious statements” that they would never send prisoners to the US without obtaining assurances they would not be executed.

Stafford Smith added: “Some European governments, it’s now clear, systematically assisted in clandestine flights and illegal prisoner transfers to Guantanamo Bay. We need a full investigation and Europeans need to face their responsibility for these crimes.”

If Guantanamo is, as the United States has repeatedly claimed, filled with some of the most dangerous terrorists in the world, and they have overwhelming proof of culpability, then why not try them based on the evidence that they have in a wholly transparent fashion? What does the US have to lose by refusing to engage in such a process compared to the military kangaroo court that has been fashioned to deal with it? Of course, given the legal ambiguity of the status given those detained, to undertake truly transparent proceedings would, of course, thrust to the forefront the afore mentioned ambiguity that has been employed by the United States regarding the classification of those being detained. Serious questions would have to be confronted regarding the Geneva Conventions, access to the International Red Cross/Red Crescent, and, most importantly, the legal classification of detainees as it applies to either international law or the laws of the United States itself.

How long will the detainees at Guantanamo be held? If an individual has been interned there for years, what actionable intelligence could they still possess now? And if they possess none, or have run their course as a mole within the population in exchange for God knows what, then they either have to be tried for a crime or released. That’s how the law works, especially as it applies to a nation founded on the rule of law that is holding them beyond the law.

Of course, there are other options to consider. That some of the individuals that were held, and endured God knows what, were flipped because they were told they would spend the rest of their lives as prisoners if they didn’t. Thus, they could be shuttled off to various locations around the world in an attempt to have them infiltrate various known radical elements within certain communities. Then again, who’s to say they wouldn’t simply disappear given the chance? Perhaps threats were made against their families, maybe members of their families are also being detained – the truth is that the possibilities are endless. But one thing that remains constant is the fact that there are hundreds of individuals being held incommunicado and outside of the strictures of any truly recognized legal platform. US Combatant Status Review Tribunals do not apply, no matter the justifications given by the US government, because the rights afforded those that face them are overwhelmingly limited, not to mention the fact that such proceedings, that are without legal precedent both internationally and under US law, are considered matters of national security and thus entirely suspect to the influence of policy objectives.

November 29, 2007 25 Comments

I have struggled of late to pen something in-depth for the site. I do my usual daily reading, but I feel exhausted with regards to providing commentary. Over the weekend I did write a piece for a local publication called ‘Street Corner’, though I’m not sure when it will appear. I have, of course, written about this subject before, so some of what I wrote on the weekend may not seem new to avid readers of the site, but I thought that I would post it anyway.

A five Minute Car Ride Apart

It’s an odd thing to walk out of one’s front door and realize that the reason that you’re not amongst those huddled in doorways or wandering the streets in the morning mist is because you can afford medication for the illness from which you suffer. I walk my two dogs down Cordova to the corner at Carrall each morning and quite often engage in brief conversations with those waiting outside of the methadone clinic, most of them overjoyed to play with the dogs and share in a few seconds of polite conversation before I continue on to the coffee shop around the corner. It is never lost on me that the similarities between us are greater than our dissimilarities. In truth, that is a universal principle here on the Lower Eastside, despite the fact that many Vancouverites believe that that isn’t the case.

It takes a blow to understand the ramifications of one. The Lower Eastside is a veritable living museum of victims of blows, in most cases far more than one. In my life I have had to deal with my fair share (as have we all), the most severe of which, for me, is the mental illness from which I suffer, one that is shared by a variety of individuals that call the streets beyond my front gate home. In their case, unlike that of my own, they haven’t the realistic ability to have their conditions properly addressed, their demons tempered, the darkness of their thoughts poured over by $300 dollar an hour psychologists or, for that mater, even psychiatrists that work within the system itself. There are, of course, outreach and counseling initiatives that exist down here, but they remain massively under funded, their volunteers and permanent staff taxed to the limit.

We are, all of us, more alike than not, despite the fact that many in this city would disagree when it comes to comparing themselves to those that inhabit this neighbourhood. I have always found it bizarre that humanity is so easily overlooked, but I am never surprised by it. To see others, those we think beneath us, as equals, is not something that most are willing to do on a routine basis. Perhaps that is why those who drive down Hastings on their way to and from work lock their doors if they happen to get caught at the lights. Not because they are afraid of what is beyond their windows, but because they are afraid of what is presented in the reflection of their rearview.

No matter views to the contrary, the civility and compassion of every society on this earth is measured by how it confronts the worst of its problems: poverty, the care for its elderly, the displaced, the mentally distraught, the abused and shattered. Vancouver’s Lower Eastside remains a testament to this city’s ever evolving arrogance and incivility, one that is not merely nationally known, but internationally.

Every morning I walk out of my front door and I see people. And beyond the slum hotels and the tenements that clutter this neighbourhood, Vancouverites run the Seawall and play with their dogs in parks oblivious to the overwhelming difference between what are, in truth, two worlds – a five minute car ride apart.

November 27, 2007 46 Comments

Right now, as I type this, international trans-corporations are being taxed next to nothing by the government of Alberta to rape the Canadian wilderness in the pursuit of oil. The province of Alberta is the richest in the country, but the rest of Canada does not share in its wealth, nor is it used to help bolster those federal social programs that are in dire straights.

In the near future, Newfoundlanders may very well begin to reap the benefits of off shore resources. One wonders, given the economic disparity that they have been forced to endure since the collapse of the cod fishery, if they will follow suit.

I mention these things because, since 1989, the child poverty rate in this country has remained the same despite a 50% increase in the size of the economy. And that is simply disgusting.

In Canada, 11.7% of children live in poverty, and that figure is only based on after-tax income. Measured before income tax, the rate climbs to 16.8%. That, my friends, is one-in-six-children in this country.

British Columbia boasts the worst record. In 2005, some 15.2% children, before income tax, lived in poverty.

So what can be done? Well, the group Campaign 2000 has some ideas, though a lot of people are bound not to like them…

No matter how you look at this issue, it’s a national disgrace. And as a nation we are responsible for addressing it.

November 26, 2007 64 Comments

Two days ago, a UN committee came to the conclusion that the use of Tasers can be ‘a form of torture’, and thus in contravention of the U.N. Convention Against Torture…

“Use of the electronic stun devices by police has been marked with a sudden rise in deaths – including four men in the United States and two in Canada within the last week.

Canadian authorities are taking a second look at them, and in the United States, there is a wave of demands to BAN them.

The U.N. Committee Against Torture referred Friday to the use of TaserX26 weapons which Portuguese police has acquired. An expert had testified to the committee that use of the weapons had “proven risks of harm or death.”

“The use of TaserX26 weapons, provoking extreme pain, constituted a form of torture, and that in certain cases it could also cause death, as shown by several reliable studies and by certain cases that had happened after practical use,” the committee said in a statement.”

Obviously, there are those that are going to passionately disagree with the UN’s conclusion. Then again, one has to wonder how many deaths it’s going to take to compile enough evidence to sway those that believe Tasers are a useful policing tool.

This topic has, of course, been a hot one of late. Those that support the use of Tasers point to the fact that they help protect police officers in dangerous situations. I’ll not argue that the authorities confront danger on a daily basis, but the use of the Taser, and how it has been promoted, must be placed into proper context.

A gun is a serious weapon, one that is only employed in this country as a last measure, or when an officer’s life, or that of another, is in peril. Police officers understand the ramifications of using their side arms because their employment constitutes the use of deadly force, be it completely justified or not. Tasers, on the other hand, have been promoted as tools that do not have the same seriousness attached to them. Therefore, the use of a Taser is not seen as employing deadly force, but that of a controlled, non-lethal deterrent. Unfortunately, the psychology behind that results in a greater frequency of use; turning to the Taser as an initial measure rather than being a measure of last resort.

Of course, many who claim that the authorities are routinely placed in harms way, and have ever right to protect themselves in dangerous situations, commonly justify their use. And while there is no question that they do find themselves in such situations, it cannot be overlooked that that has been the case for quite some time, certainly long before the Taser became an option. In short, the Taser allows the authorities to ability to forgo thinking on their feet, of reading a situation, and simply employing force to deal with that situation. And that is a very dangerous and scary precedent.

One of the more unfortunate aspects of police work has always been the use of physicality. But does the use of the Taser now allow police officers the ability to forgo that aspect of their profession? And if so, what has the primary goal of police work become? Self-protectionism or the job?

November 25, 2007 42 Comments