During that Q & A at last night’s event I was asked about the recent poll in which 78% of Afghans polled nationally believe that “things are generally going in the right direction”. Of course, when one reads that, and doesn’t delve any deeper analytically, it looks automatically fantastic, and to those that support our continued role in combat operations it is ‘proof positive’ that we’re succeeding. 1,758 individuals were questioned for the poll conducted by Environics. In Kandahar, where we are currently militarily focused, ...More »

As expected, both the Bloc and the NDP will not support the Throne Speech, leaving it up to the Liberals, who are in a state of national disarray, to decide if a federal election is to be called or not. Personally, I don't think the Liberals will bite, though stranger things have happened. One of the most important aspects of the speech was the government’s assertion that Canadian military participation in Afghanistan last until 2011, claiming that objectives within the country should be reached by then ...More »

We’ve been here before. The first time was with Maher Arar. This time it’s with Abdullah Almalki, Ahmad El Maati, and Muayyed Nureddin… “Three Arab-Canadians who allege Canadian officials contributed to their torture overseas called on Prime Minister Stephen Harper on Friday to make the federal inquiry into their cases fully public. Headed by former Supreme Court justice Frank Iacobucci, the inquiry is examining the cases of Abdullah Almalki, Ahmad El Maati and Muayyed Nureddin, who say they were wrongly labelled as terrorists by Canadian authorities and ...More »

“You have been sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of god, go!.” - Oliver Cromwell, April 1653. There’s nothing better than a good old fashioned dust up in the House of Commons. Tempers flare, fingers are pointed, rounds of applause drown out the beginning of rebuttals, and all of it in two languages. While some might argue that the job of being the President of the United States ...More »

If freedom is worth fighting for, then surely peace is its greatest vice. Since the end of the Second World War, every conflict that the West has involved itself in has been justified by claiming it necessary to safeguard freedom and liberty. Of them, how many have? It could be argued that the Cold War was fought in numerous ways to protect the free world from the ravages of Communism. Interestingly, there are only a handful of examples that the West can point to as actual successes ...More »

Earlier this month, the Iraqi Parliament signed a proposed bill seeking the United States to declare a defined timetable for withdrawal and asked that US troop limits in Iraq be frozen and not bolstered. While President Bush has announced plans that more American forces are headed for Iraq, today he remarked… “US President George W Bush, who has warned that a hasty US pullout from Iraq would be catastrophic, said on Thursday that US forces would leave if the fledgling Baghdad government asked them to. "We are ...More »

The Vice President of the United States who, in many respects, is actually the President of the United States, recently made a trip to the Gulf. During the trip he visited Baghdad, where, as one might expect, he expounded on illusions of success and progress. Not surprisingly, according to Arabic media sources quoted by Juan Cole… “Al-Hayat writes in Arabic that US Vice President Dick Cheney was greeted, on his surprise visit to Baghdad, by a rain of mortar shells on the Green Zone and by ...More »

The issue of Canadian forces rendering detainees to Afghan authorities known for their use of torture heated up again today as The Globe & Mail continued to delve into the complicity of high ranking Canadian officials with regards to their knowledge of such practices or unwillingness to ensure that detainees being transferred were being treated properly. According to the Globe… “The Department of Foreign Affairs was pushed to the sidelines when Canada struck its detainee-transfer deal in Afghanistan, two senior government sources have told The Globe and ...More »

For information about entries in this series, refer to the Table Of Contents. The impetus behind writing this series of entries was sparked by the discovery of Canada’s complicity in handing over Afghan detainees to Afghan authorities known for their use of torture, as detailed in Graeme Smith’s article published on the 23rd of April by The Globe & Mail. I have made a series of entries about this matter, all of which you can find using either the search function and entering the keywords Canada, ...More »

Ceasefire Press Release - This image is linked back to my flickr page, so click here to go to the Ceasefire page prompted by this graphic. The online advocacy web site, More »