Previously, polling company Harris Decima had released poll results demonstrating that a majority of Canadians believed Richard Colvin’s testimony about the likelihood of Canadian detainees in Afghanistan being handed over for torture, despite the government’s rebuttal. Some people dismissed that poll, saying that it had come out prior to testimony by key witnesses like Rick Hillier and David Mulroney (which, to some degree, missed the point as the respondents were expressing their agreement with Colvin, not the government, which had had ample time to respond).

Well, polling company Ekos has a fresh poll out that was conducted between December 2-8, after Hillier, Mulroney, and various other high level officials testified in front of the House of Commons committee (save Peter McKay himself, who spoke yesterday), showing that,

A clear majority of Canadians believe that Canadian Forces handed off prisoners with the knowledge that they might be subject to torture (61% nationally and over 70% outside of CPC supporters). Of that, the vast majority (83%) believe that transferred prisoners were undoubtedly subjected to torture.

Graphs below the jump… [Read more →]

In response to my latest post on the Canadian Afghan detainee transfer scandal, Jonathan McLeod of The Politic and Canned Goods and Ammunition offered the following thought,

By the way, if, when this all started to come out, the government had just admitted that something wrong might have happened and started an inquiry right away, I think they could have come out pretty unscathed (well, maybe not MacKay). Thoughts?

I think that is exactly right. While I am pretty incensed over the idea that my government was in any way complicit in delivering Afghans into torture scenarios, what has really angered me and undermined any semblance of trust and confidence in the Harper government is the way in which it has chosen to respond to the issue: with evasion, obstructionism, dismissiveness, and contempt.

At the end of the day, we don’t know whether anyone has been tortured as a result of the decisions of our government, and that is precisely the problem: by all accounts the Harper Government doesn’t want to find out. And finding out is of primary importance here; more than a government cover-up, more than the resignation of those involved, more than the impact of disclosure on the next election. In short, getting to the bottom of the moral situation far outweighs the importance of getting to the bottom of the political situation.

Let me be clear: If, as Jonathan suggests, the government acknowledged that there may have been something amiss and began coordinating an independent inquiry into the matter that concluded that decisions which Harper et al. made delivered Afghans into torture scenarios and that government should have known better, I would be angry. But after openly and honestly looking into the matter, my response would have been to acknowledge that they did the right thing. Had such an inquiry found that there was no wrongdoing whatsoever, Harper et al. would have scored even more points in my books for getting to the bottom of things when they had, in fact, done nothing wrong.

In short, responding as Jonathan suggests would have been a win-win situation by my lights and, honestly, I think most Canadians would have landed on this issue in a similar fashion, despite the Opposition parties’ efforts to make as much political hay as possible. What the Conservative’s actual response tells me is that they don’t trust Canadians to have reacted in that fashion — or, to put it bluntly, Stephen Harper and the Conservatives don’t trust Canadians, full stop.

That is, frankly, a sad statement about the governing party of this country.

I must say, I’ve been really quite impressed with the work that Liberal National Defence Critic Ujjal Dosanjh has been churning out on the Canadian Afghan detainee transfer scandal. All too often, National Defence flies under the radar in Canadian politics, as we just don’t exert enough influence on the world stage to make Canada’s military posturing/decision-making particularly riveting both inside and outside the country. But this whole transfer scandal has really been cut from the juiciest cloth of political intrigue.

It seems pretty important both for Canada as a country and important in the issue’s own right that we pay attention and hold the Harper government to account for both its potential involvement in handing detainees over for torture  (or least knowing that this was a possibility and failing to do anything satisfactory to  address the situation) and for, frankly, an egregiously secretive and obstructionist response to the allegations once they surfaced. My own relatively moderate perspective on Harper et al. has been utterly blown out of the water on this issue and so I appreciate the consistent jabbing that the Opposition parties in general and Dosanjh in particular have been throwing on this issue (the Liberal Party’s responsibility for getting us into the mess of Afghanistan — for which, to be fair, Dosanjh was not present in any elected capacity — notwithstanding).

Dosanjh’s latest “ethical leaking” move via Twitter has garnered some attention, but it is at the end of the day a media stunt that won’t likely come to much. But for all its seeming recklessness, the gutsy-ness of the move speaks well of Dosanjh’s character and a chutzpah that is sorely needed in Canadian politics. One of the primary things you hear about Canadians is how polite we are, be it in matters of social grace or parliamentary inquiry. And yet I think deep down, Canadians yearn for a political figure who isn’t afraid to bloody noses when the situation calls for it. Such a willingness speaks to the mettle of some of Canada’s favourite political personages: Tommy Douglas, Pierre Trudeau, and, reaching back a ways, the original Canadian bad-ass, William Lyon MacKenzie.

I’m not comparing Ujjal Dosanjh to the likes of Douglas or Trudeau per se, but his demonstrated willingness to keep firing at the Harper Government by any means necessary (even the NDP, Canada’s so-called political black sheep, is backing away from Dosanjh’s proposal in its bid to tack towards the centre and be seen as “respectable”)  is from that same vein of political courage and ferocity. So more than anything, I’m all for that kind of pugilism and urge Dosanjh to keep at it.

Not the least of which because it has become increasingly evident that just these types of tactics have become necessary. [Read more →]

Yesterday was the twentieth anniversary of the L’Ecole Polytechnique massacre here in Canada. For those not familiar you can follow the link, but it was, needless to say, an event that left an enduring scar on the country with fourteen women dead, another ten wounded, along with four men in what the assailant, then twenty-five year old Mark Lepine, called his “fight against feminism”. The December 6 massacre horrified the entire country not just because of how cold and exacting it was as an act of violence, but also because of how overt and explicit the violence was. Lepine’s stated intention was to visit violence upon women because he felt that feminism had “ruined his life”.

And yet, unless you happen to be on a Canadian college or university campus or, perhaps, directly involved with a group that works on women’s rights and issues, the significance of the anniversary seems to slip by without even a modicum of acknowledgment. It certainly seemed that way yesterday, the day just sort of slipped by with only a conversation between my wife and I marking its significance in any real way. Just how ephemeral these cultural events increasingly seem was the majority of what we talked about, which  included me noting that the mother of all cultural events, 9-11, seemed to pass by without the same degree of notice that has been paid to it in the past. I say, and said, that as someone who keeps himself pretty plugged in on day-by-day basis. On September 11 I was looking for what the reaction to the day would be and as compared to previous years, 2009 seemed, I might go so far as to say, apathetic.

To some degree, the argument that after a certain point there just isn’t anything left to say is a fair reading of things. What could I possibly hope to add to the conversation after twenty years of remembering? And after eight years of remembering, living, as we do, in a world that has been fundamentally reshaped by 9-11, isn’t there a certain point where we need to start moving on?

And yes, we do, but I fear that in so doing we fundamentally fail to miss the point of the remembering. It is less an act of contributing to the conversation than it is an act of acknowledging the rupture that these events visit upon our lives. [Read more →]

Once again, I was listening to On Point, this time checking out their review of Obama’s Afghanistan speech with Robert Kaplan and John Mearsheimer. Mearsheimer, who recently penned a critical piece on America’s involvement in Afghanistan for Foreign Policy, made a comment that immediately caught my attention. In response to a caller who voiced similar criticisms of Obama’s announcement, Mearsheimer said,

I think that the caller Tom is absolutely correct when he says that this talk was supremely political, it was all about domestic politics. Look, what’s going on here is that Obama is a smart man who understands that we can’t win in Afghanistan and that we can’t stay there for ten more years. It’s just politially not possible in the United States. At the same time, he understands that we can’t get out now because the Democrats would be punished by the Republicans greatly over time for cutting and running. Therefore, what he’s trying to do is finesse this, as Tom the caller said, “kick the can down the road.” That’s really what’s going on here.

This isn’t a serious formula for how to win in Afghanistan because nobody knows how to win in Afghanistan. We’ve been there for eight years and things are much worse than they were eight years ago. The idea that we’re going to stay there for another ten years, greatly increase the number of troops, and spend one hundred billion dollars a year given the unemployment and economic problems we have at home is unrealistic. So this is all a very sad situation and Obama is in a situation where he can’t win.

The implications here are pretty stunning, certainly enough to rock me back on my proverbial heels on my way into work this morning. In essence, if Mearsheimer’s analysis is accurate, then he’s applying the same basic analysis to Obama’s decision making with regards to Afghanistan as many have ascribed to Bush and the Rovian politics that dominated his eight years. Certainly Mearsheimer seems to be offering a much sympathetic condemnation to Obama when he says that the President, “is in a situation where he can’t win,” but the underlying motives present in the analysis are the same:you make decisions based not on what’s right or wrong, or on what seems the best course of action, or what your personal convictions are, but rather on what impact(s) your decision will have on the next election.

Of course, to a certain degree one can only say, “Hey, this is politics. What did you expect?” And there is some truth to that. Political decisions don’t happen in a vacuum and what the fallout of a particular decision might be electorally is present in the back of any elected representative’s mind, there’s no avoiding that. But to make a decision to delay the impacts of a challenge you’re facing until such a time as it has fewer potential negative ramifications on an election in which you have a stake that, at the same time, places  and additional thirty thousand soldier’s (one hundred thousand total) soldiers’ lives at risk seems as bald-faced and odious an example of realpolitik as one might imagine. And it is blatant enough that it seems like we ought not to throw our arms up and simply say, “Hey, this is politics. What did you expect?” [Read more →]

A Conversation About Climate Change

Scott: Okay, so, a little while ago you wrote a pair of posts stirring the climate change pot a bit. It might be easy for some folks to see your writing as simple rabble rousing for the sake of rabble rousing, calling an overwhelming consensus into question because, well, it is important to question our overwhelming consensuses from time to time, to question our underlying assumptions. But it strikes me that you were doing more than that with your critiques of the so-called “green movement” and, more specifically, Al Gore’s (in)famous chart.

Engaging in a bit of a distilling exercise, what is at the core of your unease with what is an increasingly broad movement around addressing environmental issues and, specifically, climate change?

Erik: I think that for years – decades really – the green movement was in shambles. It had its isolated victories (Clean Air Act) but was really a ramshackle bunch of disparate causes with no unifying theme beyond some vague notion that we should treat the earth, or animals, or fish, or water, or air, etc. better. It was largely a fringe movement because it was largely a movement about activism. Now, with global warming the green movement has become an actual movement rather than an assortment of activist groups, and it’s entered the mainstream. Indeed, it’s become the new conventional wisdom, and those who may disagree with it or with the proposed solutions to it have become the fringe.

What leaves me feeling a bit disquieted about the whole thing is the speed at which the science, which isn’t that old in terms of science, has become accepted as fact, and really as belief. If you disagree either with the theory or the proposed solutions to that theory, you’re angrily written off as a “denialist” and given a scarlet letter to wear around town. But this is science we’re talking about, and science is something that should be discussed openly and with skepticism. Especially when the science in question has major policy implications with very real economic ramifications. The “Climategate” emails simply reinforce many people’s fears that the whole story isn’t being told, something that I’ve worried about for a long time. My post about Al Gore’s misleading chart was just one piece of the worry I have over this whole global warming thing. The limitations of cap & trade is another.

Scott: But what would be the threshold for you in terms of accepting the science? I mean, it is relatively striking how broad the consensus amongst a disparate cross-section of scientists is on this issue. And, as you mention, it’s not as though those scientists were at the forefront of driving the nascent stages of the “environmental” or “green” movement, it was, again, as you mention, primarily an activist oriented movement for many years (with, of course, some scientists involved, but not the degree of involvement now seen).

Doesn’t the chronology of that evolution in environmentalism as an item of social consciousness suggest a certain neutral bias that lends support to the science? And doesn’t it also strike you that it is rarely the scientists themselves and more often the activists of the green movement that lash out at “non-believers” in the angry fashion you describe? Should the science in question be tarred by the actions of activists who have, to be fair, endured years of ridicule and dismissive posturing? [Read more →]

It’s striking, when you stop to think about it, how large an unspoken role symbolism plays in our understanding of the world and the ways in which we organize our lives. There are words, sounds, colours, images, clothing, objects, and even intonations that we don’t acknowledge on an almost second by second basis that trigger certain deeply held meanings for us and fundamentally inform how we wind up understanding a given experience. These symbols and the impact on our perception of things are so pervasive that one can stand side-by-side with a good friend, become exposed to the same set of variables and dynamics making up an experience, and interpret what happened in totally divergent ways.

That symbolism seems to operate on a myriad of levels and in an infinite number of contexts, from the tiniest of everyday interactions to the most expansive of meta-narratives. And more often than not, I think, we remain largely unconscious of this component of our perception and conception of the world. It was against the backdrop of that thinking that I happened to listen again to On Point’s November 16 podcast about the upcoming trial of Khalid Sheik Mohammed et al. and it was just that kind of thinking that has lead me to see the whole trial within the prism of a lose-lose matrix of outcomes. [Read more →]

It is true that one can argue for the delay of certain decisions with a certain well intentioned glibness. It’s not that you oppose the particular initiative or need for the decision, but rather that there is so much to do, so many decisions to make, isn’t it important to tackle each of them head on, one-by-one?

It is, I suppose, until one sees the run-off impacts of pushing the need to repeal Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell or the Defense of Marriage Act off to another day, or not having a President who believes in equal rights under the law speak loudly and clearly of the need to support marriage equality, or inviting Rick Warren to participate in the inauguration of that President in the harsh and unforgiving light of purely putative and explicitly discriminatory legislation elsewhere.

Though there is not a one-to-one relationship between one’s actions (or lack thereof) and the existence of such legislation, one wonders what degree of moral authority one possesses in order to address such issues having embraced the fierce urgency of whenever.

It is a humbling and, in some senses, chilling realization of tacit and unintended complicity.

“When we blindly adopt a religion, a political system, a literary dogma, we become automatons. We cease to grow.” – Anais Nin

I can’t help but see what appears to be the content of Obama’s immanent anouncement on Afghanistan as anything but the worst of all possible outcomes. Listen, I like Obama and on more than one occasion I’ve stuck up for his position on issues against my better judgment because I believed that he had a long range plan that he’s following and I’ve, on more than one occasion, praised his non-zero sum “both-and” thinking.

But let’s be honest, there are limits.

It doesn’t strike me that you can credibly talk about deploying an additional 30,000 troops to Afghanistan, but make the focus of your speech how you plan to wrap things up by turning the bulk of fighting over to Kabul. It seems like a rhetorical bridge too far to say that the focus will now shift to the end game in Afghanistan, while at the same time acknowledging that, “a significant American presence in Afghanistan [will] remain for a long while”.

Obama is a smart guy and a very nuanced and careful thinker, but the spin on his announcement just comes off as the worst of rhetorical hair-splitting, a fundamental unwillingness to take a position and defend it. No matter what he did on Afghanistan, Obama was going to draw criticism — welcome to politics. But this kind of “everything-to-everyone-at-all-times” game that results in flaccid, DOA decision making is precisely what has deflated every corner of Obama’s base and is going to kill his presidency, in the end.

I appreciate the desire to take all perspectives into consideration when charting a course of action for the country, I think that is not just the right thing to do, but, frankly, vital to good decision making. And as far as that front end work goes, Obama is unsurpassed. But the back end, and arguably the most important component of decision making, is to then wade through all that information and analysis, sift the options and opinions, make a determination about what seems to be the right (or at least best) course of action, and then make a firm decision to follow that course.

Increasingly, it seems like Obama’s back nine is lacking in direct correlation to the impressive and charismatic appeal of his front nine. In short, the man ain’t got no follow through. But this Afghanistan announcement just stinks of the most obvious and blatant attempt to dress a half-finished process up and call it strategic wizardry. I’ll be heartily surprised if it flies very far.

Besides, what does it say when George Will and Michael Moore are on the same page and it’s a different page than you’re on? Yeah, might be something to think about.

The newest troubling twist in the Canadian Afghan detainee torture scandal is that the chair of the Military Police Complaints Commission that was investigating Colvin’s allegation and who blasted government for, “stonewalling the inquiry by withholding the requested documents, ” (sound familiar? yeah…) will not have his contract renewed  next month despite wanting to stay on to finish his work on inquiring into the issue. [Read more →]

Now all that’s left is to see a rap-off between Tea Party hero Hi Caliber and establishmentarians Serious C and Stiltz. We should be so lucky.