Reading through this story coming out of Iran, I find myself increasingly agreeing with Maziar Bahari about pressing engagement with Iran in terms of pointing out how the actions of the current government have “consequences”. As more and more stories like the aforementioned, along with Bahari’s Jon Stewart story come to light via the various people both inside and outside Iran pierce what remains of the veil of secrecy around Iranian culture/internal ongoings, I think we are exposed to a picture of a regime of rapidly vanishing legitimacy that is flailing in all directions to avoid/delay the inevitable.

To my mind, letting that process play out (ie. allowing the current regime to collapse under the weight of its own internal inconsistencies) while diplomatically gesturing towards the obviousness of the situation is the only sane best of all possible, if not far more challenging than it is often given credit, courses of action.

It remains true that throughout the Middle East there are real instances of attitudes and actions towards human rights that constitute reasonable causes for concern. While we might be in a place where most aren’t interested in making the Middle East over in the West’s image (were such a thing even possible), that doesn’t mean that we also cease to be concerned about the rights afforded women in Saudi Arabia or homosexuals in Dubai or the like. And if those reasonable concerns are to really be addressed and the security risks posed by animosity between the so-called “clash of civilizations” averted, then a real partner is needed in the Middle East.

Perhaps counter-intuitively, it makes sense to me that Iran represents the greatest possibility for that partner. [Read more →]

And raise you a Dick Cheney as the hawkish Republican establishment candidate. Oh how teh crazy wouldst flow…

To steal from and reformat Katrina vanden Heuvel on November 20’s On Point Week in the News segment: if there were as much passionate and vehement debate within mainstream political discourse on decisions to go to war as there has been on health care reform, something would have gone terribly right with our politics and the world would be a very different place. Discuss…

I was talking tough this morning about the League’s Canadian contingent picking up the US gobble-gobble slack, but my day took a left turn at Albuquerque. So I’m going to let the readers do the heavy lifting again. Such are the perils of a part-time blog.

Speaking of which, this is good a segue into noting that if if we happen to have any independently wealthy readers who believe the work we do here is of the utmost value and that we should be provided with seed money to make it a full-time gig for all those involved and evolve the model with which we’re working, you should feel free to email me.

In the mean time…

Jonathan McLeod has his own take on the Canadian Afghan detainee controversy.

Introducing President Kyle Matthews and his Afghanistan plan….

TD at Damnit is mad as hell and ain’t gonna take it anymore!

Buce at Underbelly reflects on civil rights and Republicans

And Nathan Origer wants you to shoplift from The Gap!

That is all, keep ‘em coming folks.

Wow, anyone who says they wouldn’t be interested in seeing how this would play out is just lying.

So it should be clear at this point that my focus for the next little bit is going to be trained fairly exclusively on the Canadian Afghan detainee transfer debate ongoing north of the border. The latest twist(s) to the story is that today some heavy hitting witnesses are set to testify in front of the House of Commons committee, including former Chief of Defence Rick Hillier, who has claimed from the get go that “no smoking gun” around Colvin’s allegations ever caught his attention, and current Canadian Ambassador to China and former   Director of the Canadian Afghanitan Task Force David Mulroney, who was specifically named by Colvin as someone who told him to tamp down on his memos.

Both testimonies will be valuable in the process regardless of whether one believes that a public inquiry is necessary or not. At the end of the day what is needed in this situation is more information and as much of it as possible. So while I understand the Opposition parties’ reluctance to cross-examine Mulroney without any of the documentation they’ve requested, I think they are making a strategic mistake by trying to delay his testimony. As a panelist on my new favourite Canadian politics show, Power and Politics with Evan Solomon, noted (sorry, can’t remember which one) if Mulroney is allowed to testify, so much the better for the information received. If, upon reviewing documents released by the government, the Committee is forced to call him back based on a discrepancy, well the Opposition wins there too.

The whole issue around the release of documents pertaining to the issue in question is another area on it’s own, though, that I find the Harper government’s tactics troubling. As reported by Aaron Wherry at MacLeans, Harper and Defence Minister Peter McKay keep saying that they will provide the Committee with all documents they are legally required to submit. That word, legally, has been sticking in a lot of craws and mine is no different.

Technically speaking, that is the correct answer. But what would have been a better answer would have been to say we will provide whatever information it is within our power to provide to clear up any allegations or misunderstandings of wrong doing. The way I read Harper and McKay’s (and by extension, the government’s) response is to say basically: we will do the bare minimum that is required of us to deal with this issue and only because we are legally required to do so. If anyone is wondering why I’ve personally been moved to the belief that a public inquiry is necessary, well, there it is. [Read more →]

Last Friday, I wrote a post about the Afghan detainee transfer scandal that is currently gripping Canadian politics and allegations that Canadian Armed Forces and the Canadian government were complicit in handing over detainees into conditions in which torture of those detainees by Afghan authorities was likely from former senior diplomat to Afghanistan Richard Colvin.

Since I wrote that post, former Chief of Defense and high profile Canadian Rick Hillier has claimed that Colvin’s memos and concerns didn’t raise any flags for him, saying, “[t]he guy said some things and, really, nothing ever caught my attention based on what he perceived he said or perceived he sent[.]” Additionally, the federal government has come out and said that it halted detainee transfer on three separate occasions in 2009 due to concerns over prisoner treatment and access to facilities. And now, a high-level federal bureaucrat who used to run the government’s Afghanistan Task Force, David Mulroney, is set to rebuff the charges.

On the other side of the coin, recently surfaced documents support Colvin’s claims that Canadian officials have been slow in alerting the Red Cross to prisoner transfers and today Amnesty International has issued a call for a full public inquiry into the matter (video from a reporter who attended the press release here).

My own thoughts are that the waters have been muddied enough and that the allegations are of a serious enough nature that the only responsible thing to do is to coordinate a full public inquiry. In my original post and in other posts at the League I have lamented the state of Canadians’ interest in their own politics and talked about the need for, lacking a better phrase, a grassroots resurgence of civil and political engagement by Canadians from across the spectrum. Given how important this issue is and how much its potential ramifications concern me, I have decided that now is the time for me to put my money where my mouth is and lead by example. [Read more →]

While spending 118 days in an Iranian prison accused of being a “Western spy”, Iranian-Canadian journalist Maziar Bahari, who at the time was in Iran working for Newsweek, tells of the most bizarre moment of his captivity and torture at the hands of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard,

One day my interrogator told me that, ‘We have video evidence of you working as a spy,’ and then when he put the DVD of The Daily Show in the laptop, I just thought, ‘Oh my God.’

The myriad of arguments against torture aside, do pro-torture advocates really want to place themselves in the same camp as folks who can’t tell that The Daily Show is satire? If there is a more relevant argument to demonstrate why the mindset of folks who support torture is not worthy of American ideals and values, I’ve not seen it.

In all seriousness, though, Bahari’s full interview with CBC’s Nancy Durham (sorry, not able to embed it) is well worth the thirty-eight plus minutes of your time.

The comment that most caught my attention was when Bahari said that it was important that the West engage Iran so Iran understands there are consequences to its decisions. Think about that for a moment: a man who was imprisoned and tortured for 118 days on clearly fictional charges of espionage, who was told regularly that he would be executed without ever having the chance to see his unborn child, whose mind and spirit became so strained that he seriously contemplated suicide thinks that engagement with Iran is the right course of action.

Perhaps the “Obama is an appeaser because he wants to engage countries like Iran” meme will ease up a bit in light of Bahari’s commentary. Or perhaps they think Bahari himself is a pro-appeasement Manchurian candidate set loose by the Iranian government. Maybe they saw it on the Colbert Report…

I’m a little stunned at how dismissively and cavalierly the Conservative government of Canada is handling the current Afghan detainee scandal it has on its hands. Though, upon reflection, I probably shouldn’t be.

On Wednesday, former senior Canadian diplomat Richard Colvin testified in front of a House Commons committee saying that it was his opinion that, and I quote,

According to our information, the likelihood is that all the Afghans we handed over were tortured. For interrogators in Kandahar, it was a standard operating procedure.

Colvin was testifying in regards to the multiple year inquiry into the complicity of the Canadian government and Canadian Armed Forces in delivering Afghan detainees into environments run by Afghan forces that likely involved torture of those detainees. The government is responding to Colvin’s claims by questioning Colvin’s credibility and calling his claims unsubstantiated. I quote Defense Minister Peter McKay,

There has not been a single, solitary proven allegation of abuse involving a transferred Taliban prisoner by Canadian forces.

The CBC further reports that, “Conservative MPs dismissed Colvin’s testimony as being based on second- and third-hand information and suggested his allegations were part of a disinformation campaign.”

These kinds of tactics are all too familiar for Canada’s Conservative government. It seems like any time any concern is raised, the inevitable response from Harper et al is to wave it off as obvious partisan politicking from the Opposition parties that is hardly worth government’s time. And, to be certain, there is an element of truth to that hand waving some of the time, this is, afterall, politics.

But Colvin’s claims are serious and Colvin himself is hardly a source lacking credibility, contra McKay, neither is he part of the Opposition. I mean, not only was he a senior diplomat in Kandahar, but Colvin is currently First Secretary and Liaison Officer in the Intelligence Liaison Office of the Embassy of Canada in Washington. Titles aside, the point is that Colvin has a pretty distinguished career of service to the country at a pretty high level and he ought not to be written off like some inconvenient nut off the street.

That remains especially true given that there are reasonable questions about how government has acted towards Colvin’s concerns prior to this point. Allegations include instructions to diplomats like Colvin advising they, “hold back information in their reports to Ottawa about the handling of detainees” after one of Colvin’s seventeen memos on the topic made its way, “to one of Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s senior security advisers.”

[Read more →]

For everyone who’s ever said that Facebook ain’t good for nothing: you are refuted thusly.

Buce at Underbelly takes a crack at what Bruce Bartlett really meant to say.

Kyle at Vogue Republic provides a first-hand account of why DADT should be repealed.

Mike at The Big Stick looks at David Frum’s frustration around doing what it takes to win.

Transplant Lawyer weighs in on the trial of Kahlid Sheik Mohammed et al.

Dennis Sanders thinks gay marriage is a big deal.

Being as that many readers of this site have blogs of their own, should you ever have a post that you think other readers would have an interest in checking out please don’t hesitate to shoot us an email with the link. We can’t guarantee that, we’ll link it every time, but speaking for myself, I can guarantee that I’ll at least give it a read through if you bother to send it.