By Eric Pettifor An important story over at WikiLeaks concerns what appears to be the slaughter of innocent civilians by American forces, including two Reuters news staff, in Iraq . I should warn you that the video is very disturbing, taken as it is from the Apache helicopter doing the firing. I’ll leave it to […]
Iraq
Abdelrazik: Let the questions begin
By Alison@Creekside Justice Minister Rob Nicholson announced in Question Period Friday that the government will comply with, rather than appeal, the Federal Court decision ordering it to repatriate Abousfian Abdelrazik, stranded in Sudan since 2003. Good. As Chris Selley writes: “It’s all over but the thousands of unanswered questions”Here’s one. How much did this July […]
Don’t ask, don’t know
By Alison@Creekside Big hullaballoo following CSIS lawyer Geoffrey O’Brian’s testimony before the public safety committee, in which he said that Canadian intelligence agencies would make use of information obtained by torture from foreign agencies in the “one-in-a-million” eventuality that “lives were at stake.” In fact, said O’Brian, who has been with CSIS since its inception […]
Iraq in Ontario
There is at least one difference between Americans building up justifications to invade Iraq in order to grab its natural resources and Europeans invading Canada several hundred years ago to harvest the natural resources here. We are significantly more polite about it. Plus, we have decided to forget that we did it. As I write […]
Manufacturing dissent
Two images that hit the media in the last two weeks really creeped me out: Hugo Chavez shutting down an opposition television station in Venezuela and a scene of Shia schoolgirls in Sadr City, a Shia suburb of Baghdad, learning English by rote. There is a lot to like about Hugo Chavez. He is a […]
When it comes to hate, Imus is an amateur
By Frank Moher So, Don Imus has been fired from both his CBS and MSNBC gigs because he referred to the Rutgers women’s basketball team as “nappy-headed hos.” Stupid? Yes. Racist? Certainly. A firing offence? I’d say so. Then again, Rush Limbaugh once told a black caller to “Take that bone out of your nose,” […]
Dingbat of darkness
Nobody wants to hear defence critic Denis Coderre holler for the referee when the Liberal record is criticized. Especially when the criticism is more than fair. It is General Rick Hillier’s duty to report the state of Canada’s armed forces, even if he uses inflammatory language like “decade of darkness” to describe the cuts that […]
Peace, 10 minutes at a time
There is a way through the mess in Iraq. But it will require patience and impulse control, something that — like my kids — Americans currently seem to lack. It will require talking to people who dislike each other intensely. Americans have been able to do this in the past: Nixon opened China and Reagan […]
Hussein should not hang
Saddam Hussein should not be killed, and not for rational or political reasons but simply because hanging him will be barbaric and wrong. The rational debate centres around whether killing Hussein will reinforce rifts among Iraqis, further empower insurgent forces, and so on. Hussein’s own theoretical stance is that when you kill somebody, you had […]
We belong in Afghanistan
The Canadian Peace Alliance, Canadian Labour Congress, and Canadian Islamic Congress are wrong when they say that Canadians in Afghanistan are fighting an American war. Afghanistan is not Iraq — though that bloody civil mess is hardly a U.S. solo turn either. It was the British who decided it would be a good idea to […]
