By John Klein (aka Saskboy)

How can I write this without sounding, well, paranoid? I believe the RCMP is watching too many people, and abusing its resources. There are plenty of signs this is taking place. And proliferating tech gadgets and social media are only making the matter worse.

It worries me.

The police should not be monitoring Canadians unless they have a reasonable suspicion that criminal acts are imminent or are taking place. We don’t pay them to watch all activists, especially ones who peacefully oppose prevailing political governance. Are we not a society free to disagree with our government?

Here’s an incomplete, but startling, list of reports that suggest the Mounties are getting their man by putting everyone, innocent people too, under a microscope:

RCMP spied on BC natives protesting pipeline. The Yinka Dene Alliance is not a terrorist organization.If the report had said RCMP were monitoring “Polish Canadians” (as a random example), do you think there would be more outrage?

RCMP interrogate former Conservative candidate for passing documents from anonymous source to Ethics Commissioner in Parliament (after Parliament mail room lost first submission).

A B.C. man got a visit from the RCMP after contacting the Prime Minister.

Until the 1980s, the RCMP kept a secret list of people they considered to be Communists, and were prepared to round those people up in the unlikely event of the Cold War heating up. PROFUNC was ended by accident.

The G8/G20 brought Canada’s so-called “largest ever” police spy operation down on activists whose worst members did damage comparable to unruly drunk hockey fans in Vancouver. Meanwhile, the police assigned to watch the protests ended up being charged with crimes. RCMP “abandoned policy”, and kettled protesters, which resulted in the arrests of hundreds, to possibly over a thousand, innocent people.

Since there are no laws clearly governing the use of your personal information collected by the ruling political party into their CIMS database, they could be sharing this intelligence with the Mounties. Would it change your answer to any survey or political phone call if you knew your response could end up as a detail in an RCMP surveillance watch list?

As a political blogger, I’m pretty much screwed if the government takes an active interest in me. Even though I’ve previously worked in a job for the government where people, with less oversight and more authority than the RCMP, confirmed I’m loyal to Canada (and the Queen even) and am the opposite of a threat to national security, I have little doubt that now I’m an unhappy smiley face in CIMS, and who knows what other police-state Stasi-style databases. There’s presently nothing preventing the government from using the Conservatives’ powerful partisan database.

With social networking, it’s easy to track most of my contacts. When Toews’ Bill C-30 passes, the police will be able to do legally what they’ve probably been doing since September 11th, 2001. I also carry a cell phone, so my movements could be mapped, or conversations bugged using the phone mic. Ubiquitous technology is stacked against a free, democratic Canada.

Will the RCMP maintain the peace in Canada, or bring an end to it? Will they resist the pull of pervasive electronic monitoring of every person? I know what I hope for, but the signs are pointing in the wrong direction.

The JIG is up. 

An RCMP “joint intelligence group” —  comprised of federal, provincial and municipal police — infiltrated activist groups prior to the G20 and Vancouver Olympics in what they call ”one of the largest domestic intelligence operations in Canadian history.”

Constable Bindo Showan of the Ontario Provincial Police, one of the two principal undercover Ontario spies, is a stunning example of their intelligence at work.

Earlier this fall, Showan told the court about how he attended a meeting prior to the Toronto summit. There, a protest-planning group that included several of the 17 main G20 defendants was discussing whether to lend their support to a First Nations rally.

Adam Lewis, one of the 17 accused conspirators in the G20 case, interjected, “Kill whitey!” The group chuckled. Lewis, like all but one of his co-accused, is white.

When a Crown lawyer asked the officer what he thought Lewis meant, Showan said in complete seriousness, to “kill white people.” 

Apparently we do not have the right not to be spied and reported on by morons or covert operatives pretending to be morons.

This 2009 RCMP “joint intelligence group” statement defines their mission:

“The 2010 G8 summit in Huntsville … will likely be subject to actions taken by criminal extremists motivated by a variety of radical ideologies. These ideologies may include variants of anarchism, anarcho-syndicalism, nihilism, socialism and/or communism. These ideologies may also include notions of racial supremacy and white power … 

“The important commonality is that these ideologies … place these individuals and/or organizations at odds with the status quo and the current distribution of power in society. 

In addition to these generally held tenets, a variety of grievances exist: These grievances are based upon notions/expectations regarding the environment, animal rights, First nations’ resource-based grievances, gender/racial equality, and distribution of wealth etc.“

And it is apparently still in operation :

RCMP records suggest that the reconnaissance continues. Report logs indicate at least 29 incidents of police surveillance between the end of the G20 summit and April 2011 — more than nine months after world leaders departed Toronto.

The same document indicates that the RCMP-led intelligence team made a series of presentations to private-sector corporations, including one to “energy sector stakeholders” in November 2011.

Good to know.

After millions of dollars and 70,000 pages of Crown evidence, conspiracy charges have been dropped against the 17 activists held in jail or under house arrest for the last 18 months, but 6 of them will serve jail time for counselling mischief, with an additional charge of counselling to obstruct police leveraged against Alex Hundert and Mandy Hiscocks

Toronto Star: Behind the G20 plea deal

Below is a message from the So-Called “G-20 Main Conspiracy Group,” below. And their written statement regarding the charges can be read here. 

By Alison@Creekside

Oversight – noun

1) the action of overseeing something

2) an omission, the failure to do something

Dorian Barton was taking a picture of police horses in the park at the G20 summit in downtown Toronto last summer when he was suddenly knocked to the ground from behind with a riot shield, beaten with a baton, breaking his shoulder, and stomped in the face. He was then dragged off by his broken right arm and detained without medical treatment for the first five of a total of 30 hours in detention, after which he was charged with “obstructing a police officer.” The Crown dropped the charges against him at the same time it dropped all the bullshit charges against everyone else.

Ontario’s Special Investigations Unit, the civilian agency charged with investigating “police actions resulting in serious injury, sexual assault or death,” is reopening for the third time an investigation into allegations the Toronto police officer pictured here was one of seven who took part in the vicious assault on Barton. The photographer who took this pic is willing to testify he saw the officer blindside Barton with his shield and strike him as he lay on the ground before other officers joined in. He has provided seven photos of the assault.

SIU dropped its two previous investigations into the case in January because eleven police witnesses, one of whom was the officer’s G20 roommate and two of whom were his supervisors, declined to identify him. SIU director Ian Scott reopened it on Friday after Toronto Police Chief Blair promised to provide the name of the employee who was able to identify the subject officer.

WTF?

I’m pretty sure if me and six of my friends were caught on film beating the crap out of you, the cops would not drop the case because my boss and my roommate declined to cough up my name to go along with my photo.

According to the Ontario Attorney General to whom the SIU reports, the SIU exonerates the officer in 97% of the cases it does pursue:

“The fact that the SIU overwhelmingly clears officers should be seen by the [public] as an endorsement of good policing.”

However, in Oversight Unseen, a 2008 report on the SIU, Ontario Ombudsmen André Marin saw it differently :

“[T]he Ministry of the Attorney General has relied on the SIU to soothe police and community sensibilities and to ward off controversy. But in doing so, it has also overstepped the bounds of independent governance. The Director’s performance is subjectively evaluated and rewarded, compromising the SIU’s structural integrity and independence.

Its credibility as an independent investigative agency is further undermined by the predominant presence and continuing police links of former police officials within the SIU. It is so steeped in police culture that it has, at times, even tolerated the blatant display of police insignia and police affiliation.”

[T]he SIU often . . . adopts an impotent stance in the face of police challenge. Delays in police providing notice of incidents, in disclosing notes, and in submitting to interviews are endemic. Rather than vigorously inquiring into and documenting delays and other evidence of police resistance, the SIU deals with issues of police non-co-operation as isolated incidents.

Police interviews are rarely held within the regulatory time frames, and are all too often postponed – for weeks, sometimes even months. The SIU will not inconvenience officers or police forces by interviewing officers off duty. When it encounters overt resistance from police officials, the SIU pursues a low-key diplomatic approach that flies under the public radar. If disagreement cannot be resolved, the SIU more often than not simply accepts defeat.”

“The SIU more often than not simply admits defeat.” Good lord.

The current SIU director Ian Scott was appointed just before that report came out.

In February the Toronto Star ran a series based on 300 letters Scott sent to police forces over a 14-month period beginning in January 2009. They detail “his mounting frustration at not being able to hold officers accountable,” including the burning of evidence before he got to see it, and being generally ignored by the Ontario police forces.

Presumably this is why he is giving interviews about this case to the press, despite the fact SIU Regulation 13 forbids it.

Meanwhile, out here in BC, the local media was pleased to bits last week to report that, in response to Justice Braidwood  recommendations following from the police killing of Robert Dziekanski in 2007, we will be getting our own civilian police-oversight agency modelled on the SIU. And just like the SIU, the Independent Investigations Office will also report to BC’s Attorney General, not the Ombudsman as Braidwood had wisely suggested.

Greg Klein at the Straight:

[I]t was the AG’s Crown attorneys who exonerated the four Mounties involved in Dziekanski’s death. That was what led to Braidwood’s inquiry in the first place.

It gets worse. The government added that incidents or complaints involving IIO staff will be investigated by B.C.’s Office of the Police Complaint Commissioner. Almost all senior positions at the OPCC are staffed by former police officers.

An exception is police complaint commissioner Stan Lowe. But Lowe is a former Crown attorney and member of the criminal justice branch executive management that unanimously decided to exonerate the four RCMP officers involved in Robert Dziekanski’s Taser-related death. It was Lowe who made the infamous December 2008 announcement that the five Taser shocks inflicted on Dziekanski were “reasonable and necessary.”

And so it goes . . .

Kevin Annett lives in a small white house facing onto a ramshackle street in downtown Nanaimo, BC. The local RCMP detachment, with its lot full of solid, square cop cars, is just around the corner. Inside, on a watery day in mid-January, the living room is lit only by the gray light spilling in through the front picture window. An unlit Christmas tree still occupies the centre of the room.

Annett is as stripped down for efficiency as his home. Brisk but genial, he flicks on a light and sits, looking a bit mournful, for an interview. I ask him about the evidence for unmarked mass graves at the sites of former residential schools in Canada – as many as 28, according to Annett and others.

This is the sort of question that fills his days now.

“At this point, there’s three kinds of evidence,” he says. “There’s a lot of eyewitness accounts which I’ve documented over about 15 years, pointing to graves on the grounds of the former school or an Indian Hospital nearby. Second is documentation where we’ve found letters referring to these gravesites, from Indian Agents, school officials, other people.

“And finally, in a place like Port Alberni, we’ve actually gone out with a forensic team and done a survey of the ground, and they found, some of the people three years ago who did this survey, terrain very similar to what you find in mass grave sites in other parts of the world, like sinkholes and the vegetation and that.

“So there’s pretty conclusive evidence that these kids are buried somewhere around there.”

Those are the sorts of answers that have made Annett a lightning rod for controversy, opprobrium, and admiration across Canada and, increasingly, in Europe. But they pale beside some of his more recent charges. Last year, on his Vancouver Co-op Radio program “Hidden from History,” Annett claimed that Mounties had actually assisted notorious Vancouver serial killer Robert Pickton, not just by neglecting to properly investigate his crimes but by delivering women to his pig farm. His show has since been yanked from the air. More recently, his supporters and he have “summoned” The Pope, Joseph Ratzinger, and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper “to answer charges of conspiring in Crimes against Humanity before an International Tribunal this September in London, England.”

To Annett’s detractors, of course, this is all bad theatre and fabulation. “For years,” wrote BC journalist Terry Glavin in a splenetic 2008 attack in thetyee.ca, “RCMP investigators have been chasing down these stories and they always come up with nothing. But they persist, like the alligators in New York’s sewers.” Others point to Ottawa’s establishment of a “Truth and Reconciliation Commission” to deal with the legacy of Canada’s residential school system. The $60 million, five-year TRC is currently holding a series of “national events” across the country, while also gathering and recording the stories of survivors and their families.

To Annett, the Commission is a whitewash. “The way it’s established according to its mandate, and the way it’s operated in practise over the last number of months in different forums, the whole purpose seems to be to protect the perpetrators and to silence the witnesses. People are not allowed to speak freely, their testimonies aren’t allowed to be used in court, they can’t even name names. There’s all these restrictions put on people, and at the same time there’s all these indemnifications granted to the churches responsible.

“In fact, they’re not going to be held responsible and they’re not going to be prosecuted, even though thousands of children died in these schools.”

 
Kevin Annett’s long campaign for what he regards as real justice for residential school survivors has been well-documented, by no one more so than Annett himself in his books Love and Death in the Valley and, most recently, Unrepentant. As a young United Church minister in the early ‘90s, he was hired by a small parish in Port Alberni, BC, an isolated logging town 193 km north-west of Victoria on Vancouver Island. Within three years he’d been fired. His employers said it was because he “failed to maintain the peace and welfare of the church”; Annett says it was because he welcomed natives into the congregation, and let them speak freely from the pulpit about murders that had occurred at the local Indian residential school, which the United Church operated for five decades until finally shuttering it in 1973.

Annett, along with his wife and two young daughters, moved to Vancouver, where he enrolled as a doctoral student at the University of British Columbia and began digging into the microfilm. “I discovered that the entire record of Indian residential schools in British Columbia had been acquired by the UBC library system that very year,” he writes in Unrepentant. In it, he found “verified evidence that the residential schools had been an exercise in deliberate genocide – that over half of all the children in residential schools had died every year from their deliberate exposure to communicable diseases, with the full knowledge and sanction of church and state in Canada.”

But his tenure at UBC ended badly too. His wife left him, taking the kids. The faculty member responsible for handing out graduate funding and teaching assistantships turned out also to be on the executive of the United Church in BC. There would be no money for Annett. Broke, he was forced to abandon his degree — though not his research.

Eventually, the United Church “delisted” him as a minister altogether. Undaunted, he gathered his findings into a cerlox-ringed, self-published book, Hidden from History: The Canadian Holocaust (recently republished online as Hidden No Longer). Reading it, with its pages upon pages of primary documents, government and church correspondence, and first-person testimonies, it’s hard to discount Annett as a loon, if only because to do so is to discount those testimonies as well.

Witness: “The girls who got pregnant were expelled immediately. Some of them were even found dead on the grounds of the Alberni school. None of us could ever leave the school grounds, and we couldn’t mix with the boys – we couldn’t even hold hands with them – so the staff had to be the ones who fathered those kids.”

Witness: “We were playing soccer in the back field behind the school, where it was really covered in weeds. The ball got kicked among the weeds, and in those weeds I came across the remains of a body, maybe three feet long. It was decomposed and you could see a lot of skeleton . . . . After that, the RCMP came to us and told us not to say anything about what we discovered in the field.”

Witness: “One day in 1946, I was 11, and I went to the place under the stairs where I would go and sit and cry. I heard Mr. Caldwell at the top of the stairs with another little girl, a few years younger than me . . . . Mr. Caldwell was screaming at her, and then I heard this sound, like a kick, and I heard her falling down the stairs. I looked out and saw her facing me, with her eyes open, not moving or breathing. I never saw her again after that.”

Witness: “My sister Maggie was thrown from a three-story window by a nun at the school, and she died.”

Witness: “Kids had TB there and they weren’t sent away for treatment or any help. They just left them in there with us. And I remember one girl, she was just so sick, we didn’t even want to get close to her. But then the nuns told us, you know, ‘You guys get over there and play with her. You’ve got to be around her; you can’t let her be over there by herself.’”

Witness:“I think they were trying to deliberately infect us with tuberculosis, because they always made me sleep in the same bed with girls who had TB. One on each side of me.”

Witness: “Whenever we got sick in that school we were completely ignored. My mother was even forced to sleep in the same bed with kids who were dying of tuberculosis. This was common.”

Either all these people are lying, or Kevin Annett is right.

Next page: “Eventually, the station’s ‘investigation’ resulted in Annett’s program being taken off the air and his being permanently banned from the premises.”

On August 9^th, 2010, Annett took a phone call on his long-running radio show, “Hidden from History.” The caller wanted to discuss rumours of police complicity in the murders committed by Robert Pickton. “I have specific evidence of what you’re talking about,” Annett replied. “There’s a man, Les Guerin, he’s a maintenance worker down at the Musqueam Reserve, and he gave me documents about five years ago which showed that, as far back as 1989, Dave Pickton [Robert Pickton’s brother] was bringing bags out to the Musqueam Indian Reserve. And Les Guerin and another guy went in and dug up this stuff. They had it analyzed at Simon Fraser University and, sure enough, there was human remains mixed with pig bones.” He went on to explain that, though the evidence was taken to the RCMP, they never investigated.

After his show, Annett stepped from the booth and was handed a letter by Vancouver Co-op Radio staffer Daniel van Tijn, signed by all four of the station’s staff, telling him that he would be banned from the premises while an investigation was undertaken into events nearly three weeks prior. According to the staffers, they had video from a security camera showing Annett and an unidentified woman in the station’s broadcast studio during the wee hours of July 20^th, eating, drinking, and engaging in “sexual activity.” The woman was also said to have smoked what appeared to be crack cocaine. Eventually, the account went, a guard who had been watching all this on a security monitor intervened, and the visitors left at 4:22 a.m.

The station says all this was contained in the letter handed to Annett. Annett says the letter referred only to “activities that compromised station policy.” It wasn’t until two months later, he insists, that he learned exactly what might be on the video.

Which is when the story really gets strange.

“The whole thing is ridiculous because I have a solid alibi, I was sleeping at somebody else’s house that night and I have a letter from her confirming that. But this was at the tail end of a number of things that have happened, because when I was in Europe last April, after I got back, a number of the native people on the street were referring to conversations they claim I had with them during April, which couldn’t have happened because I was over in Europe. And there were suggestions like that which indicated that there was somebody impersonating me.

“Which wasn’t the first time this has happened. After our tribunal in 1998, one of our head native judges, a guy called Royce White Calf, claims that someone was impersonating him in the downtown eastside, to gather information and that. So I mean, it isn’t kind of far-fetched to suggest this.”

Well, maybe. When I ask Annett what he’d say to those who might think otherwise, he tells me they should “read more about the history of what they call ‘blackops,’ or the activities of the RCMP or the FBI. There was a program that’s still in place, actually, in America called COINTELPRO which the FBI set up in the 1960s . . . . one of the techniques they used is called ‘badjacketing.’ There’s a good book about this written by Ward Churchill.” I had a look at Churchill’s book, Agents of Repression, which refers mostly to the use of rumour-mongering and manufactured evidence to discredit radicals, rather than, say, body doubles. But then again, many unusual things happen on the downtown eastside.

Annett says that in October he ran into an acquaintance who told him that a certain woman was “flashing a lot of money around and was claiming that she made it after doing some ‘play-acting.’ And that kind of struck me as odd, so I asked him more about it, and he said, ‘Yeah, she said she was down at the radio station one night and she got payment for doing something there.’”  Annett later issued a statement in which he recounted tracking down “a sex trade worker, whom I’ll call ‘Candy,’” who gave him a notarized affidavit describing “how she was approached by men she recognized as undercover Mounties and offered $200 to engage in sex with an unknown man made up to impersonate me . . . . ‘Candy’ states that a white male let her and her accomplice into the station around midnight, where she smoked drugs and had ‘mild’ sex with him for nearly four hours, in front of closed circuit TV cameras in the central studio. Unexplainably, Portland Hotel security did not intervene until almost 4 am. She says the impersonator looked like me but had a heavy accent, and was told that no-one would interfere with them for hours, and that she would not get into trouble.

“The station staff subsequently used this video to ban me from Co-op radio, without ever allowing me to view the video or confront my accusers. Clearly, if I was allowed to view it, I would instantly recognize ‘Candy’ and the frame up would be obvious.”

I phoned Leela Chinniah, program co-ordinator for Co-op Radio, who declined to be interviewed for this article. She did say, though, before hanging up on me when I persisted in asking questions anyway (on the principle that journalistic organizations ought to be willing to talk to journalists), that Annett had been given the opportunity to view the video. He denies it.

Eventually, the station’s “investigation” resulted in Annett’s program being taken off the air and his being permanently banned from the premises. He says the real reason is that guests on “Hidden from History” had been implicating the RCMP in the murders at Robert Pickton’s pig farm. “Between July and August on a number of shows we were speaking on the air, including with an eyewitness who was out at the Pickton farm, who described seeing RCMP officers taking women out there. This one woman believed that she knows the identity of one of the serial killers, him being a retired Mountie. We were talking about all of that, and about the apparent complicity of the police in concealing that.

“In fact, only 10 days after I was banned, the Vancouver Sun had an article about how the Vancouver police admitted that they knew about the Picktons for two years and did nothing to investigate. And they’ve never explained very well why they did that – why they refused to investigate.”

A media liaison for the RCMP’s “E” Division in Vancouver called the accusations “pretty crazy” and said someone would get back to me. No one did. An e-mail to the Vancouver Police went unanswered.

 
I could probably get closer to the truth behind these conflicting stories. I could ask to speak to the friend at whose home Annett says he was sleeping on July 20^th. I could try to track down “Candy.” I could talk to the maintenance worker who says he took evidence of Pickton’s crimes to the RCMP, and place another call to “E” Division, and pursue the Vancouver Police for a response, too. But I’m not sure any of that really matters.

We can be pretty certain the RCMP and Vancouver Police would deny the claims of Annett and his colleagues, just as the United Church continues to vociferously reject many of his other charges (although not the fact of Indian residential school abuses). And whatever happened in the Vancouver Co-op Radio studio last summer is finally just a sideshow – one that has more to do with the dissension currently roiling that station than the lives, past and present, of Canada’s aboriginal people.

I expect they could care less about where Kevin Annett was that night. What they do care about is the way that they, or their parents and grandparents, were systematically abused in residential schools, whether by being forcibly separated from their family and culture, or by being neglected, beaten, raped, or killed. They care, they continue to tell us, about the fact that the majority of women who have disappeared from Vancouver’s downtown eastside, and along northern BC’s sinister Highway of Tears, have been native, and that that may account for law enforcement’s otherwise unaccountable languor in investigating their whereabouts.

And those on the front lines tell us little has changed: “An increasing number of women who are forced to live and work in conditions of extreme poverty and marginalization continue to be murdered or have gone missing,” says Carol Martin, a victim services worker at the Downtown Eastside Women’s Centre.

By continuing to draw attention to all this, however clamorously – indeed, because of the holy racket he makes, in his calm, relentless way – Kevin Annett has extended his ministry well beyond anything he could have imagined when he was in theology school, debating whether or not Jesus was a revolutionary. “As important as it has been that the deaths and crimes are finally being acknowledged,” he writes in Unrepentant, “nowhere in all the growing rhetoric and mainstream coverage of the residential schools, nor in any government or church release, or in the subsequent ‘apology’ by Prime Minister Stephen Harper, do the words ‘blame’, ‘murder’, ‘trial’, ‘churches’ or ‘genocide’ ever occur . . . . No ‘M’ word: it is not in our lexicon. It never happened. We have experienced the greatest crime in our history, yet one officially devoid of criminals.”

But not without its own chief prosecutor.

The publication ban on Project Samosa, the RCMP’s latest salvo in the war on terror, has the media scrambling to get unnamed sources and security experts to augment and substitute for accounts of court proceedings. By a happy coincidence for war on terror fans, this allows for far more pants-pissingly terrorfying conjecture than mere straight news would allow.

So far, “sources” have told one security expert, an ex-RCMP and CSIS operative quoted at CTV, that the accused:

1) “would have targeted the Parliament buildings and Montreal’s public transit system with bombs”
2) “that the ringleader went to Afghanistan and to Pakistan to receive training”
3) “some of their suspected accomplices could be in Iran or in Dubai”
4) “were assembling components for one or more bombs and had raised money for al Qaeda and the Taliban”
5) “the ringleader was about to take a trip abroad, maybe to deliver the money himself”

This last is the reported reason for the arrests. After a year of watching them:

“Police say a terror attack was likely still months away when they pounced on the plot, but they moved because they feared the men were about to start sending money to other terrorists in Afghanistan.”

Last I heard, “terrorists” in Afghanistan were already rolling in US tax dollars and drug money, but whatever.

A year ago the Star ran an excellent piece on the media’s relationship with their “sources” in the Arar case when he was the terrorist du jour: Learning from media mistakes in Arar case

Canadian Press journalist Stephen Thorne quoted an official source who linked Arar to “a suspected member of Osama bin Laden’s Al Qaeda terrorist network.”

Robert Fife, CanWest’s Ottawa bureau chief, “cited an anonymous official who described Arar as a ‘very bad guy’ who had received training at an Al Qaeda base and that intelligence received from Syria had helped the CIA avert an attack on the U.S. embassy in Ottawa.”

Craig Oliver at CTV News was “offered a photograph of Arar training in a camp in Afghanistan” Oliver: “The source wanted me to use the information without showing me the photograph. That was a very solid source . . . This experience has made me more skeptical . . . I knew these people very well.”

Ottawa Citizen‘s Juliet O’Neill was fed a story headlined “Canada’s dossier on Maher Arar: The existence of a group of Ottawa men with alleged ties to Al Qaeda is at the root of why the government opposes an inquiry into the case.”

Even after Arar’s return to Canada, “Robert Fife was once more the vehicle that Canadian and U.S. intelligence officials used to inform the public that they were ’100 per cent sure’ that Arar trained at an Al Qaeda camp in Afghanistan.”

Some of these reporters have since stated they were used and have apologised to Arar; some have not. The point is they were all used to disseminate false information from anonymous government and police sources to the public. Something to bear in mind when “sources” are once again where we will be getting most of our information on this newest batch of alleged terrorists, given it will likely be months if not years before they go to trial.

I’m doing some research right now which includes a lot of pictures from the 1870s and 1880s. Times were tough in old Canada back then; you had to be pretty rugged if you weren’t some city slicker from Ottawa. She’s an unforgiving country, though fair if you’re willing to work for her favour.

Studying these pictures, I notice a definite trend among the men: thick, black moustaches, lustrous and glistening in the winter sun — a symbol, if you will, of integrity and strength. These men had earned their stripes; they had hacked and burned and hammered their futures out of an unrelenting environment. And they wore the result across their top lip.

My father has sported a moustache for as long as I can remember. The only picture I’ve seen of him without one is a black-and-white in which he’s goofing off with some army buddies. He is 16. Once, when my brothers and I were very young, he decided to shave it off. My mother says we screamed in terror, and then cried every time he was in the room, until it started growing back.

So the moustache is, for me, an emblem of male authority. But not for me only. A couple of years ago, I grew a moustache for the benefit of a Hallowe’en costume. I was working construction at the time, and we were building a concrete highrise in downtown Vancouver, so a lot of time was spent running hoses and craning buckets of cement from street-side. My job was to land the buckets behind the cement trucks that were pulled up on the street. Ordinarily, when someone comes to a jobsite with a delivery or any administrative duties, that person heads to the office, regardless of who’s milling about on the sidewalk. However, as I had this moustache, time and again delivery guys, truck drivers, and even developers and architects would approach me as soon as they jumped out of their trucks. It was bizarre; the moustache was their automatic totem of leadership. You could almost see them thinking, “Ah, that must be the superintendent.”

Such power is not wielded easily. It’s like going into Tim Horton’s with a broadsword on your back. People fear you. It’s no accident that we associate moustaches with the police. I’ve got a book titled Mountie: 1873-1973 A Golden Treasury of Those Early Years. It’s a photographic record of . . . well, the title’s pretty informative. Anyway, the book is crawling with hard looks and black moustaches. If there’s a cop or even a citizen without a moustache in any of the pictures, he looks really young, and scared. A moustache, on the other hand, seems to cause the eyes to toughen. They squint. They gaze through you, past you. Onward to the horizon. Oh, he’ll give you directions, the mountie will, maybe even help you find a hotel for the night or a stable for your horse. But his concerns are larger than you, and you recognize this with one glance at his lip-decor.

I look around me today and I see this thing which I call the half-beard. It’s like a beard, but it’s not. In between the smooth cheeks and pink neck is this shadow region of very short, very styled hair. The half-beard is beyond stubble (don’t even get me started on the half-stubble-beard), but skin is still visible beneath: it’s anywhere from two millimetres to one or two centimetres long. There are no stray hairs top or bottom. It looks careful and time-consuming. It looks like a Lego beard.

I suppose it’s meant to portray both an inward ruggedness and an outward sense of social propriety. You, there, with your half beard. You think you look like a gold miner freshened up for a crazy weekend in town, spending some of that gold dust before heading back out into the wilderness. But I see you, man. You’re in line at the grocery store, sighing quietly to yourself and wondering if maybe you should put that second bag of Doritos back. Yes, they’re on special, but you don’t even really like Doritos. You can’t decide. Do you even have room in the pantry? You better sigh again while you think about it. It’s not like the line’s moving.

Like, come on man. Do you want a beard? Do you want to shave? Just make up your mind, because you’re annoying me. Those mounties didn’t fight crushing blizzards and scorching prairie summers and deliver diplomacy at gun-point to maintain order during the growth of this country so you could spent 45 minutes perfecting the line across the middle of your tender neck-flesh in comfort. Next time you get pulled over, tell that cop that you respect his facial prowess. And if you have a moustache or a full beard of your own, maybe you’ll both hear, faintly, the howl of a prairie wolf out there on the horizon.

I don’t claim to be any kind of authority on Wiebo Ludwig — for that you can read Andrew Nikiforuk’s Saboteurs — but in all the considerable coverage of Ludwig’s arrest in connection with six cases of explosions on EnCana’s gas pipelines, I notice the media’s accompanying history of Ludwig makes no mention of the RCMP blowing up a well site last time they were building their case against him. So here’s a reminder.

Ludwig’s war on Big Oil began with his belief that sour gas and industrial pollution was endangering the health of his family and livestock. This was confirmed for him when his grand-daughter was born dead. Unable to achieve satisfaction in the courts, Ludwig was convicted in 2001 on five charges related to vandalism of oil industry equipment and served two years of a 28-month sentence.

Okay, Operation Kabriole . . .

CBC, Nov 10, 2000 : RCMP bombed oil site in ‘dirty tricks’ campaign

The Mounties bombed an oil installation as part of a dirty tricks campaign in their investigation into sabotage in the Alberta’s oil patch.

The revelation came at the bail hearing Thursday of two farmers who the Crown says have turned their complaints that oil industry pollution is making their families ill into acts of vandalism and mischief.

CBC , Nov 10, 2000 : More details of RCMP ‘dirty tricks’ revealed

Dubbed “Operation Kabriole”, the RCMP’s intention was to help an informant get closer to the two men police suspected were behind vandalism against the oil and gas industry.

Wiebo Ludwig and Richard Boonstra were arrested and charged earlier this month.

“Operation Kabriole” was planned and executed with the direct involvement of a Calgary based oil and gas business. Alberta Energy Company has a big operation in the Peace River country.

The RCMP’s original plan was to blow up one of AEC’s trucks. The company convinced the police to change the operation even though AEC had already given its approval, offered up a truck to be bombed and said it would pay for any major damages. Company officials were having second thoughts.

According to the RCMP’s own files, the head of AEC’s northern operations met with the police to say his bosses were concerned that bombing a vehicle would cause ‘undue stress and fear’ for employees driving company trucks.

So the company offered an alternative, a shed covering one of its “out of service” well sites not far from the suspects’ property.

The bomb was set off Oct. 14, one week before AEC hosted two tense and emotional town hall meetings. Worried residents who turned out, were told by an expert, who was flown in by AEC, that they were the victims of ‘eco-terrorists’.

Tory MP Peter MacKay, the opposition’s RCMP critic at the time:

“If, in fact, the RCMP engaged in this type of activity, regardless of their motives, and regardless of the public interest here, it would be potentially fatal to the Crown’s case.”

Except it wasn’t.

This time his lawyer says he will be charged with extortion.

Extortion. Description in the Criminal Code: 346(1):

“Every one commits extortion who, without reasonable justification or excuse and with intent to obtain anything, by threats, accusations, menaces or violence induces or attempts to induce any person, whether or not he is the person threatened, accused or menaced or to whom violence is shown, to do anything or cause anything to be done.”

To do anything or cause anything to be done. That’s pretty broad.

Maybe this time he wrote a letter.

Still, an RCMP fishing expedition is better than blowing up a shed.

On Thursday, reporters doggedly tried to wring from Public Safety Minister Peter Van Loan exactly how long he withheld the RCMP’s Firearms Commissioner’s Report in favour of keeping the long-gun registry so that MPs would not have that info prior to passing the bill to scrap it. The report was released two days after the vote.

I’ve omitted PVL’s initial 12 responses here as they bore no relation to the question asked but the entire scrum is a quite extraordinary read:

“How long have you had the report from the Commissioner of Firearms?
How long have you had it?
So how long have you had it?
How long have you had it?
How long have you had the Commissioner of Firearms report?
How long have you had the Firearms Commissioner’s report, sir?
This isn’t a news conference, these are questions. How long have you had the Firearms report?
We’re asking you a question. How long have you had this report?
How long have you had it?
Has it been weeks?
How long have you had this report?
How many days?

Peter Van Loan: It’s — I received it and looked at just recently, in recent days.”

Saturday: Firearms database popular with police

“Responding by email to questions from the Star, RCMP Sgt. Greg Cox said late Friday the force submitted its 2008 firearms report on Oct. 9, four weeks ago.”

As one dogged reporter — who was that woman? — put it: “That was totally useless. Thankyou.”

Good article from Harper Index: Gun control politics revised Canada’s political map

An enthusiastic supporter of the Beijing Olympics who posted his photos online at Flickr under a creative commons licence – which allows anyone to use them for free with attribution – received a cease and desist letter from International Olympic Committee lawyers:

“Images of the Games taken by you may not be used for any purposes other than private, which does not include licensing of the pictures to third parties …

“In addition, please be advised that the Olympic identifications such as the Olympic rings, the emblems and mascots of the Olympic Games, the word `Olympic’ and images of the Olympic Games belong to the IOC and cannot be used without its prior written consent.”

Even the “O” word can’t be used now without prior written IOC consent?

I knew words like “winter” and “gold” and “Vancouver” were off-limits — but, somewhat inconsistently, not words like: boondoggle, evictions, SROs, homelessness, or cost over-runs.

Very well, have it your way. “Owelympics” it is then from now on.

Out here in BC at Owelympics Central, we’ve moved up from criminalizing 2010 Five Ring Circus protest in public places and stalking nursing students on campus who happen to know somebody who doesn’t support the Owelympics.

Now the BC government wants to remove signs and graffiti from inside your home even without your consent: (h/t Waterbaby by email for Bill 13):

Bill 13 Part 9 – Enforcement of bylaws in relation to signs

32 (1) Subject to this section and section 34, an officer or employee of a specified municipality [Vancouver, Richmond, Whistler] or a person authorized by the council of a specified municipality has the authority to enter on property, and to enter into property, without the consent of the owner or occupier for the purpose of enforcing, in accordance with subsection (4), the specified municipality’s bylaws in relation to signs.

(2) Except in the case of a significant risk to the health or safety of persons or property, a person
(a) may only exercise the authority in subsection (1) at reasonable times and in a reasonable manner, and
(b) must take reasonable steps to advise the owner or occupier before entering the property.

Now note the following wording : “if any of the following applies”

(3) A person may only exercise the authority in subsection (1) to enter into a place that is occupied as a private dwelling if any of the following applies:
(a) the occupier consents;
(b) the specified municipality has given the occupier at least 24 hours’ written notice of the entry and the reasons for it;
(c) the entry is made under the authority of a warrant under this or another Act;
(d) the person exercising the authority has reasonable grounds for believing that failure to enter may result in a significant risk to the health or safety of the occupier or other persons.

(4) A person who has entered on property, or entered into property, in accordance with this section has the authority to enforce the specified municipality’s bylaws in relation to signs by removing, covering or altering the sign that is in contravention of these bylaws.

Ditto for “graffiti”, covered in section 33.

(34) The powers in sections 32 and 33 may be exercised only during the period of February 1, 2010 to March 31, 2010.

CBC: “City officials have said the law is intended to clamp down on so-called ambush marketing, and it includes an exception for celebratory signs, which are defined as those that celebrate the 2010 Winter Games and create or add to the festive atmosphere.”

For the rest of us “uncelebratory” types, there’s the prospect of a $10,000-a-day fine and six months in jail if we don’t keep our little heads down from Feb 1 to March 31.

And if, as spun by city officials, they were only worried about “businesses trying to exploit the games logo,” why also make a separate provision for busting graffiti?

Answering questions about Olympic security back in June, city manager Penny Ballem told the Vancouver council. “The city has no accountability in terms of the role and policies of the 2010 Integrated Security Unit. We are only able to ask questions.”

A week ago I heard BC Minister of Public Safety and Solicitor General Kash Heed give the same excuse on CBC radio about the stalking of the nursing student : “There’s nothing we can do. It’s a global thing,” he said.

Fun fact: Two of the RCMP who presided over the tasering and killing of Robert Dziekanski at Vancouver airport two years ago – Monty Robinson and Bill Bentley – have been reassigned to Owelympic detail.