Peace, order and good government, eh?

Shorter Jim Abbott: Even if we're complicit in torture we should get off on a technicality.

Edited to add: if Atrios ever decided to sue me for back royalties, I'd be in deep trouble. The Monsters title is another favourite of his. It fits.

Note: If you're wondering why there appears to be a change in the commenting policy, please see The spammers made me do it.

Afghan detainees still at risk: lawyer

Detainees handed over to Afghan authorities by Canadian soldiers still face a substantial risk of torture, a civil rights lawyer has told MPs.

Paul Champ, counsel for Amnesty International Canada and the B.C. Civil Liberties Association, said Wednesday he has seen no evidence to suggest torture in Afghan jails has ended.

While the Conservatives stall and the opposition sits on its hands. Why would the representative of Amnesty International Canada have any less credibility on this than government and military officials whose stories have already been undermined and contradicted?

Update:

According to Kady O'Malley the NDP's defence critic Jack Harris is going to table a motion concerning breach of parliamentary privilege this morning. O'Malley had reported in a previous post that the Bloc Québecois had already signaled support for it and we don't know about the Liberals. I guess we'll find out soon enough.

Almost instant additional up... oh the hell with it. Derek Lee beat Jack Harris to the punch. Go read Kady.

Note: If you're wondering why there appears to be a change in the commenting policy, please see The spammers made me do it.

Brian Stewart at the CBC reveals what's being kept from us by the Canadian military in Afghanistan. That includes things that the Americans and the British freely share with their citizens but in the name of operational security our military insists on keeping secret. It makes you wonder why those other countries hate their troops. Stewart concludes:

... secrecy that seems out of proportion to the actual needs of operational security is only likely to feed into the current climate of doubt and suspicion about the war.

For when people start feeling they are not getting the full picture, that is when they begin to question the pieces they do have.

I don't think the concept of "embedded" journalists was ever a good one. It turns reporters into public relations officers.

H/t M@ at Canadian Cynic.

Note: If you're wondering why there appears to be a change in the commenting policy, please see The spammers made me do it.

For the great Gaels of Ireland
Are the men that God made mad
For all their wars are merry
And all their songs are sad.

-- G.K. Chesterton

Except for blacks in North America and the Caribbean, no one has done the language that we call English greater honour than have the close cousins that the dreaded Sassenachs colonised and subjugated most cruelly, first and longest. Through the twentieth century, in literature and folk music both, the Irish taught so many how to speak and how to sing with wit and soul.

Liam Clancy, Tommy Makem, and some Clancy brothers singing one of the greatest of those sad songs, "Carrickfergus," followed by a little bit of blarney. Happy Saint Paddy's Day tae ye, and that's a Scot sayin' all this.

Note: If you're wondering why there appears to be a change in the commenting policy, please see The spammers made me do it.

There's been a fair amount of coverage of what this CTV article refers to as a "feud" between the United States and Israel. But there's a bit of background I read last night that hasn't been reported in the major media outlets as far as I've seen. This is from Foreign Policy magazine and describes a briefing prepared at the request of CENTCOM commander Gen. David Petraeus and presented to Adm. Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The 33-slide, 45-minute PowerPoint briefing stunned Mullen. The briefers reported that there was a growing perception among Arab leaders that the U.S. was incapable of standing up to Israel, that CENTCOM's mostly Arab constituency was losing faith in American promises, that Israeli intransigence on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was jeopardizing U.S. standing in the region, and that Mitchell himself was (as a senior Pentagon officer later bluntly described it) "too old, too slow ... and too late."

Perhaps that helps to explain why Vice President Biden was dispatched to the region to try and kick-start peace talks.

Federal Court asked to rule on Kenney's refugee claims

Last June, Immigration Minister Jason Kenney publicly questioned the legitimacy of refugee claims made by Roma coming from the Czech Republic, saying they faced no real risk of state persecution.

Only a few weeks earlier, Mr. Kenney had described asylum claims by US war deserters as "bogus," and accused Mexican refugee claimants of systematically abusing the Canadian refugee system.

...

... now a Toronto-based lawyer has asked a Federal Court to rule on whether the minister, by making the statements, has interfered in the Immigration and Refugee Board's independence.

The lawyer in question crunched the numbers and determined that prior to Kenney's public comments, the acceptance rate for refugee claims from the Czech Republic was 81%. In the first full quarter following Kenney's remarks that had dropped to 30%. It's true that correlation is not causation but what else has changed?

The Harper government has made a habit out of undermining agencies that are supposed to operate at arm's length and without direct ministerial interference. And at this point, Kenney could be the poster boy for the propensity of members of this government to allow their partisanship and their ideology to influence the way they do their jobs in ways that aren't appropriate. But it seems that cabinet ministers no longer resign no matter how inappropriate — or incompetent — their behaviour. Harper himself has shown no interest at all in holding his ministers to account so it should be no surprise that people are increasingly looking to the courts to do it.

I'll leave you with a quote from one Peter Showler who is a "former [Immigration and Refugee Board] chairman and director of the refugee forum at the Human Rights Research and Education Centre at the University of Ottawa."

"The minister's conduct has been outrageous," Mr. Showler said. "He has made statements that no immigration minister, either Conservative or Liberal, has made in the last 15 years."

H/t to The Jurist.

Note: If you're wondering why there appears to be a change in the commenting policy, please see The spammers made me do it.

After dying down to almost nothing, the comment spam has increased in frequency since around the first of the year. And the spammers have learned that less is more. Where they used to pack 10 or 20 links into a comment which made it easy to set a filter to catch it, now they settle for one or two links which lets it fly under the radar. Where they used to hammer you repeatedly from the same IP address and relentlessly flog the same domain, now they hit you from different addresses and promote a different domain with almost every comment. It makes it much harder to figure out which IPs to ban and which keywords to add to the blacklist.

We've had an open comment section for over six years but when someone spammed us earlier this week to promote a twitter feed and I caught myself contemplating adding twitter.com to the blacklist, I decided it was time to do something. So after I publish this, I'm going to enable comment authentication and commenter registration. Assuming it all works, I'll update this post with anything you might want to know. And I'll keep bumping this post through the weekend and into Monday. I apologize for the inconvenience. And I do hope those who regularly comment here will put up with it.

Updated on the flip.

Thou met'st with things dying, I with things newborn

-- The Winter's Tale, III.iii.112-13

I don't usually know my cats' precise birthdays, although almost all of them have been spring kittens, but I remember the day that Minerva (the all-black) and Mathilda (b+w) were born.

The phone rang very early that morning. A reporter we knew in London wanted Rik to tell him everything he could about Dunblane, a douce wee toun in Scotland that had suddenly become a very sad place. Dunblane was a family home to Rik, so on and off through the day he talked the reporter through a race to the airport and then the drive from Glasgow to Stirling and north.

It was wrenching to learn what had happened in just the sort of place you imagine everyone will always be safe.

Bring me my whiskey, I wanna get mean
Bring me my whiskey, I will tear up a scene

This is Moreland & Arbuckle with Date With the Devil.

It seems like a while since I saw a reason for optimism anywhere except Venezuela and maybe Bolivia. The bad guys keep doing worse things--ruining everything, then successfully claiming that the reason things are bad is that they weren't allowed to ruin everything thoroughly enough. I need a break from that, so I bring you positive change in India:

I remember when I first talked about the miracle brought about in village Pannukula in Andhra Pradesh, many thought I was simply trying to romanticise agriculture. How farming can be done without the use of chemical pesticides, I was repeatedly asked.

. . . more than 318,000 farmers in 21 out of the 23 districts of Andhra Pradesh have discarded the intensive chemical farming systems, and shifted to a more sustainable, economically viable and ecologically friendly agriculture. A silent revolution is in the offing. In Kharif 2009 (the monsoon season), some 1.4 million acres was covered with what is now known as Community Managed Sustainable Agriculture (CMSA).

As I write this in the first week of January 2010, the area had expanded to 2 million acres . . .

I normally like Tonda MacCharles' work in the Toronto Star but I think this one is a bit of a stinker. It reports on a poll that apparently tells us how conservative Canadians are becoming. The poll was conducted by Harris-Decima and was commissioned by the Manning Centre for Building Democracy. That would be Preston Manning's conservative think tank in case that's not clear.

The reason I'm so critical of this piece is that this poll is supposed to be news but what you won't find is any sign of the questions. Or the numbers. Instead we're presented with the interpretation by Allan Gregg and Andre Turcotte of the meaning of responses to questions that we don't know in numbers we don't know. This isn't really a news story about a poll; it's an interview with two pollsters who base their opinions on information we're denied. And who else thinks that Harris-Decima reporting to the Manning Centre that Canadians are becoming more conservative amounts to telling the customer what he wants to hear?

H/t to Greg and The Jurist.

I remarked recently that I felt our government was overly optimistic in its economic forecasts and didn't seem to be considering the possibility that something might yet cause the recovery we're all supposed to be experiencing to stall. Perhaps someone should ask Jim Flaherty what he thinks about this from the Washington Post.

The housing market is facing swelling ranks of homeowners who are seriously delinquent but have yet to lose their homes, and this is threatening a new wave of foreclosures that could hit just as the real estate market has begun to stabilize.

About 5 million to 7 million properties are potentially eligible for foreclosure but have not yet been repossessed and put up for sale. Some economists project it could take nearly three years before all these homes have been put on the market and purchased by new owners. And the number of pending foreclosures could grow much bigger over the coming year as more distressed borrowers become delinquent and then, if they can't obtain mortgage relief, wade through the foreclosure process, which often takes more than a year to complete.

Is it just me, or has Flaherty been talking as if he's either completely unaware of this or thinks that our own economy will be completely immune to a problem like this involving our largest trading partner?

H/t Atrios.

As the Conservatives prepare to re-introduce their law and order agenda, let us bear in mind that the original War on (Some) Drugs™ was a creation of the Reagan administration in the United States. Michelle Alexander in The Nation:

President Ronald Reagan officially declared the current drug war in 1982, when drug crime was declining, not rising. From the outset, the war had little to do with drug crime and nearly everything to do with racial politics. The drug war was part of a grand and highly successful Republican Party strategy of using racially coded political appeals on issues of crime and welfare to attract poor and working class white voters who were resentful of, and threatened by, desegregation, busing, and affirmative action. In the words of H.R. Haldeman, President Richard Nixon's White House chief of staff: "[T]he whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to."

Any number of people have argued — correctly — that the policies Conservatives propose have already been proven failures if the goal is really to reduce crime. That argument doesn't gain any traction with Conservatives because that isn't the goal. The situations in the two countries may not be directly comparable but this is still all about politics.

H/t John Ballard at Newshoggers.

Edited slightly for clarity.

Thomas Walkom on the government's proposal to have a third party review the documents pertaining to the Afghan detainee file:

Politically, Ottawa's decision to hand off the Afghan prisoner scandal to retired Supreme Court Justice Frank Iacobucci serves both Stephen Harper's Conservatives and Michael Ignatieff's Liberals.

Constitutionally, however, it is a disaster. It flies in the face of the bedrock Canadian principle that cabinet is responsible to Parliament and that a government - any government - must accede to the wishes of a majority of elected MPs.

What, exactly, is the opposition waiting for?