Blaming The Troops Again

I guess the Prime Minister is hoping that we've forgotten all of his earlier evasions and excuses.

“He shut it down to avoid legitimate questions about the Afghan detainee scandal,” Mr. Ignatieff charged as he asked that the Prime Minister release non-redacted documents the opposition says are essential to the story.

No. The Prime Minister said thousands of documents have already been released and show the Canadian Forces have conducted themselves honourably.

There he goes again. Second verse, same as the first. Stephen Harper wants to shuffle the blame off his own shoulders on to those of the soldiers who were the unwitting recipients of illegal orders.

Every time we go through this, he and his ministers keep acting as if the question is a matter of the behaviour of the soldiers. It's not. It's about the behaviour of the goverment - Harper's government - in giving orders to the soldiers.

It was the government that told the soldiers that the Afghan authorities were moral.

It was the government that told the soldiers to hand over prisoners to the Afghan authorities.

It is the government that should be punished.

Stop blaming the troops, Mr. Harper.

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Freedom vs Money

The Canadian people, via a majority vote of their Parliament, demanded that the government release all data on the torture of Afghan detainees.

The government, in clear violation of our democracy, ignored this demand. It ignored the will of the people.

That's not a democracy. That's a dictatorship.

On the rare occasions where the Canadian people actually get a government to vote the way they want it to vote, how is it that the guy at the top can simply refuse to comply? How is it that he can then go and shut down the government to avoid more questions?

That's a dictatorship.

But Liberal MP Derek Lee wants to draw a line. He's raising what's called a "point of privilege"; a declaration that a government minister has violated the will of the people and is in contempt of Parliament.

They in fact are in contempt.

But he says that he doesn't want this point of privilege to get in the way of the budget, even though it should if parliamentary procedure is followed.

Mr. Lee., let's break this down. The Harper government doesn't want to deal with parliament. It wants to ignore it. It wants to be free to send people to other countries to have them tortured. It wants to send Afghans off to be tortured. It wants to strand torture victims and child soldiers in other countries. It wants to do a lot of illegal and immoral things.

Mostly it wants to ignore Parliament to get its agenda pushed through. If all those confidence attachments to trivial legislation didn't clue you in, I don't know what will.

The point here is that there is no point continuing with this Parliament if the Harper government continues to treat it with such contempt. There's no use presenting a budget, a throne speech or any other piece of legislation if Harper and his cronies are simply going to ignore the actual legislation and do whatever they please anyway.

The budget isn't that important.

Our freedom is.

Run your point of privilege.

Run it over everything else and get our nation back.

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The Most Juvenile of Governments

Honestly.

It's as if our government is run by five-year-olds. I could see a five year old saying something like this. "Mommy. I didn't break the vase. I just told my little brother to break it."

Oh, I get it kiddo. It's not your fault because you didn't physically break the vase yourself. Totally makes sense.

The Harper Government (for so they call themselves) wants the same kind of immunity.

"The plaintiff [Abdelrazik] alleges that the Defendant [the government] requested the Government of Sudan to imprison the plaintiff without legal grounds and shared information with the Government of Sudan to facilitate his continued imprisonment. He does not allege that the defendant directly imprisoned the plaintiff. In the absence of that material fact, there is no cause of action for false imprisonment."

That's right. Apparently the Harper Government can't be charged for the results of things they ask other people to do for them.

What a clever legal precedent. I'm sure various mafia bosses and other gang leaders will be greatly pleased to know that they are not responsible for things they ask other people to do. Another thing? Corporations can dump all the pollution they want in to rivers ... as long as they outsource it.

Brilliant, brilliant, legal precedent.

Grow up, you idiots. I know it's tough, but part of maturity is accepting the consequences of your actions. If you sent the man off to be tortured, you have to own up to it.

Otherwise, we're just going to think you're a bunch of immature cowards.

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Mealy-mouthed Traitor

That's the only phrase I can think of to describe our Prime Minister.

“The allegations are not being made – I hope – against Canadian soldiers,” Mr. Harper said in a year-end interview with the French-language television network TVA. “… Our diplomats reformed the transfer system. We are speaking here of a problem among Afghans. It's not a problem between Canadians and Afghans. We're speaking of problems between the government of Afghanistan and the situation in Afghanistan. We are trying to do what's possible to improve that situation, but it's not in our control.”

First of all, no one is accusing the soldiers of anything. That apparently can't be said enough times to sink in to the thick skulls of our leading cabinet ministers. The suspicions and accusations are against the cabinet ministers for giving immoral and illegal orders.

Second, what a cowardly way to approach to the issue.

A "problem among Afghans".

Let me tell you, Mr. Harper, how this works. I shove someone at the top of a flight of stairs. As a consequence, he falls down the whole flight and breaks both his legs. Guess what? I'm legally responsible for his broken legs. You know why? Because physical damage is a reasonably predictable consequence of shoving him down those stairs. If I went before a judge and said, "All I did was shove him near the top. The rest of the problem is between him and the stairs", the judge would either laugh at me or declare me psychotic and have me institutionalized.

Of course, the difference between me and you, Mr. Harper, is that I can't violate the law and put black magic marker over all of the evidence. Boy, that must be convenient.

No, Mr. Harper, we don't accept your latest ignorant argument. We've seen the reports from Amnesty, the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission and from Richard Colvin. We've heard that soldiers had actually photographed it happening. We - the entire nation - are slowly becoming aware that you knew what was going on.

And regardless of the evidence, you kept our nation in the immoral position of handing over more prisoners to be tortured.

If those reports were available to you, and it certainly looks like they were, torture was a reasonably predictable consequence of the actions take by your government. And that would make the bunch of you war criminals.

Best of luck at the trial.

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What Torture Really Means to Canada

Occasionally, in the middle of all of the politicking and nonsense that goes on, one person makes a simple statement. There aren't often big words in this statement. It's rarely meant to be taken as some grand pronouncement.

But somehow, it sums up exactly what the problem is.

Today, I found that statement. It was in a letter written by Richard Colvin, the much abused diplomat who blew the whistle on the government's mishandling of prisoners detained by Canada.

It's not a Colvin quote, though. It's Colvin quoting someone else.

One detainee told Canadian monitors that at first, he did not want to tell them about having been tortured because Canadians had been responsible for his detention and therefore he did not trust them.

Remember the good old days? Remember when we thought of ourselves as the world's peacekeepers? Remembered when we were well thought of throughout the world? Remember those days?

Those days are gone. Now people who are being tortured are afraid to run to us for fear that they will be tortured even more.

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Presumption of Guilt

You know what, Mr. Harper? Mr McKay? Mr. O'Connor?

I'm going to go right ahead and assume you're guilty; that you're all war criminals. That's right. I'll say it. I'm going to right ahead and assume that you're lying, untrustworthy crooks guilty of heinous crimes and deserving of jail time.

I know what you're saying: innocent until proven guilty. That's the letter of the law, right? That's how things work in this country.

Well, apparently things have changed.

You see, there's this 15 year old kid that got arrested in Afghanistan. He's been in jail for most of a decade now without a trial. You haven't even tried to repatriate him. You just went and ahead and assumed he was guilty.

Then there was that lady, I think she was in Kenya, trying to get back to Canada. You assumed that she was an impostor and forced her to prove she was innocent. You didn't assume her innocence.

There was another guy that you let the Sudanese torture. He had to get holed up in our embassy in Sudan for months before you let him come home, even after the Sudanese had tortured him and determined - under torture - that he wasn't guilty of anything. What more could a guy do?

So you know what? If you're doing away with the presumption of innocence for other Canadians, I don't see why we should presume you're innocent.

Especially since you're hiding something. Absence of evidence is, after all, absence of evidence. I'm sure you'd agree if, say, the Liberals had tried to put black magic marker over all kinds of documents related to something like the sponsorship scandal.

And that brings me to my last point. Because the Liberals were crooked too. I won't even argue. The Liberals stole my nation's money, and that made me angry.

But you, you sons of bitches, you've stolen my nation's honour. And that makes me furious.

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Wait Just a Minute, Mr. Hillier

General, I'm having a hard time understanding your statements about what you knew about torture in Afghanistan.

On the one hand, we have these quotes from General Hillier:

The former general, who was Canada's top soldier during Colvin's posting in Afghanistan in 2006-07, said he has reread all of the diplomat's widely circulated reports to ensure that Colvin's alleged concerns did not escape his notice the first time around.

"There was simply nothing there," Hillier told a House of Commons committee on Afghanistan. "There was nothing there to warrant the intervention of the chief of defence staff."

So the General is telling us that there was never anything in those reports that amounted to torture. As far as he knew, there was no torture taking place. Nada. No need for anyone to take action.

Then what's this stuff doing in his book:

Rick Hillier, when he was Chief of the Defence Staff, says he kept his political masters fully informed about the harsh conditions of detainees in Afghan prisons, even though Prime Minister Stephen Harper and cabinet ministers claim they were told nothing.

In Spring 2007, The Globe and Mail reported on allegations of abuse of detainees in Afghan prisons. Mr. Hillier acknowledged that was to be expected.

"Their judicial and prison systems were still somewhat nascent, and there was always some risk that abuse could occur," he wrote.

... "we lost confidence that basic, responsible measures were in place to ensure the humane treatment of prisoners."

Throughout the process, Mr. Hillier writes, the federal government was kept fully informed of the military's handling of prisoners, which contradicts statements from the Prime Minister's Office.

So if we put that all together, there was nothing that made General Hillier worry about torture happening, and of course he kept the politicians in Ottawa informed of the torture.

In other words, if I may paraphrase: "I was unaware that a buck needed passing, but I passed the buck right quick."

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Shorter Hillier: The Dead Didn't Tell Me

From CP and Globe and Mail:

"Hillier told a special Commons committee Wednesday that the reports by Richard Colvin in 2006 wouldn't have been passed to him because they contained only second-hand information"

Second-hand?

I suppose that, if a guy were killed through torture, Hillier would demand that the dead guy come forward and say so himself. These things are second hand by nature. The question is whether or not all of the second hand reports are corroborating.

He also finds it unrealistic that all detainees are tortured in Afghanistan. He says he would disregard any report that made that claim and that Colvin's report made that claim. "How ludicrous a claim is that?"

I guess it is ludicrous unless you listen to those bleeding hearts at Amnesty International.

"Reports of torture, ill-treatment and arbitrary arrest are so widespread in detention centres ... that Amnesty International wants NATO troops in Afghanistan to stop handing prisoners over to authorities there."

Frankly, I can't give a fig over Hillier. I don't care to go after people in the military. They were put in a terrible position and given few options. I'm after the bastards, Liberal and Conservative, who put them there in the first place and have kept them there since. I'm after the ministers who knew - or should have know if they were reading their memos - that torture was taking place. I'm after the people who gave the orders to let our nation continue to be an accessory to that torture.

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Got You Now, You Evil Lying Bastards

Got you good.

The only question is if the public will care.

Will we care about the fact that our government is made up of evil, lying, self-serving bastards who were a party to torture and crimes? Will we care as much about morals as we did about the petty dollars and cents involved in the sponsorship scandal?

I hope so.

Rick Hillier, when he was Chief of the Defence Staff, says he kept his political masters fully informed about the harsh conditions of detainees in Afghan prisons, even though Prime Minister Stephen Harper and cabinet ministers claim they were told nothing.

Evil. Lying. Bastards.

I mince no words. Not now. Not in this.

The "Harper government" told every enemy of Canada that it's okay to treat our soldiers as we treated our enemy's soldiers. That's what they're doing. They're taking away our moral high ground and endangering our soldiers. And they're responsible for torturing human beings.

"There are hundreds if not thousands of documents, reporters, memos, advice that come through all departments," Mr. MacKay told reporters outside the House of Commons.
"The fact that one report or a series of reports weren't read by a minister or a deputy minister shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone."

Condoleezza much, Peter? I know you hung around with her a bit, so this might seem nostalgic for you:

"I believe the memo was entitled 'Bin Laden determined to attack inside U.S.'."

Nothing to worry about there, obviously.

We're done with you people. We're done with your lying, your discrimination, your war-mongering, your America-envy, your lethal deregulation. We're done with you.

I only hope that my estimation of my fellow citizens' morals is accurate and they've seen enough to be done with you, too.

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But What If Torture Works?

I've already written about torture, but perhaps it bears repeating when I see the following video.



"...whether or not these techniques are immoral, or how immoral they are, surely depends on whether or not they work."

No. No, it doesn't.

I don't have to examine the possible uses of infant blood to realize that putting a child in to a tree chipper is immoral. I don't need to measure the property tax benefit to a city to see that bulldozing a homeless shelter is immoral. I don't need to examine the shock and awe created by a nuclear explosion to know that dropping an atomic weapon on civilians is immoral.

And I don't need to know whether or not "torture works" to decide it's wrong. It's wrong because we will make ourselves at least as bad as we pretend our enemies are. It's wrong because it dehumanizes people, both victim and torturer. It's wrong because it's the worst part of us and our humanity demands we stomp that part of our psyches out of existence.

Nothing we learn from torture could ever be worth what it does.

And that conclusion doesn't have a thing to do with whether or not it works.

h/t Red Tory

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O'Connor: Torturer gets Whip

I don't even want to comment on the rest of the ministers. None of it matters with the absolute iron-fisted control that Harper exercises over his ministers, preventing any of them from speaking to the press without vetting everything through his own office.

This is the one that gets me:

Jay Hill takes over as House leader and Gordon O'Connor replaces Mr. Hill as Chief Government Whip.

Whip.

The man who told our soldiers and officers that it was okay to send prisoners off to authorities that he knew were torturing prisoners - even killing them.

The man who lied to Parliament about the Red Cross being able to inform us if any torture were occurring.

The man who resigned in disgrace because of his lying.

And they make him The Whip.

I believe, in literature, they call that "over-written".

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My Riding Endorsed Torture-Man

I'm somewhere between amazed and bitter. I don't think Lewis Carroll invented a word for that as he did with chortle and gimble. Let's just say that I'm hardly mimsy.

Did the people in Carleton-Mississippi Mills realize what they were doing?

Here we have a former military officer, Gordon O'Connor, a Brigadier-General no less, who was made Minister of Defence. He told our soldiers and officers to turn their prisoners over to the Afghan authorities.

He lied to us when he told us that the Red Cross would keep tabs on them when he had to know, as an experienced military officer, that the Red Cross has never done any such thing.

He lied when he pretended he didn't know that the Afghan authorities were torturing prisoners to death. Even the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission admitted it.

He made us complicit, as the voters in this democracy of Canada, in a war crime. Certainly he committed the foul, but we committed him and so are responsible for his actions.

But until tonight, we could pretend that he did it against our will. Until tonight, we could argue that we didn't know what he was when we first elected him. We only picked him because he was Conservative in a strong Conservative riding.

But we know now. We know that he aided and abetted torture. We know that he turned a blind eye and tried to cover it up.

And then we elected him again anyway.

What does that say about us? What does it mean the next time a Canadian soldier is taken prisoner? Where now is our moral high ground when we speak of Maher Arar, Omar Khadr and William Sampson? Will they say, "You did it to ours. Why can't we do it to yours?"? What argument will we use then?

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Abdelrazik: Sudan vs. Canada

Now I will admit that I am not an expert on Sudan. I don't know much about its history, its human rights record or the culture of its people. I've just always been given this vague sense that your average de-colonialized African nation is slightly more chaotic and slightly less observant of human rights than my own country.

I guess I was wrong. Not only has my government not done anything to get Omar Khadr out of Gitmo. Not only did it acquiesce to Maher Arar's torture in Syria. Our government (two governments in a row) have upset the Sudanese by disregarding human rights.

Go here and read the timeline at the bottom of the page.

Sept 28, 2004. Abousfian Abdelrazik is being held in a Sudanese jail, at Canada's request, and a Sudanese official doesn't like it:

He repeated there was nothing against him in Sudan, stressing those last two words. He said Sudan realized however that keeping an innocent man in detention was a human-rights violation ... He thought that protest and public attention would impact adversely on both our countries ... He said he was convinced Canada could deal with this airline ban if it wanted to.

Sudan later offers to fly Abdelrazik home to Canada, but Canada apparently thwarts that too.

Doesn't anyone find it offensive that other countries are having to remind and teach Canada about human rights?

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What's wrong with interviewing Khadr?

I'm seeing a lot of these questions on the blogs, comments sections and other outlets of right wing frustration. "The agents weren't beating up Khadr. They were totally professional. Looked like a completely fair and just interview to me etc. etc."

It's not the nature of the interview that was the problem. That's ridiculous. Have these people ever heard of context? It's the fact that you have a 15 or 16-year-old boy, obviously a child soldier, obviously having been tortured and we as a nation were complicit in taking advantage of the situation.

Are these people honestly arguing that all you have do is turn your back on a torture victim while other parties beat and waterboard him and then you can go back to questioning him? "Hey, I didn't beat him up, I just asked questions in a totally professional manner."

Are we going to blame or punish these agents? Not likely. Much like soldiers in battle, they had their orders. It was a post-9/11 world and terrorists were apparently everywhere.

(If you torture people until they admit they are terrorists and then torture them some more until they tell you about other terrorists, you'll find that there a lot of terrorists. And when a 16-year-old boy starts telling you that he has no eyes or feet, maybe he's been tortured just a little too much.)

The question is this: although these agents have no responsibility, as they say here, to seek consular or welfare visits for people like Khadr, are they still bound - as human beings and agents of the Canadian government - to see to the Charter Rights of Canadian citizens?

Were they aware of what had been done to the boy and, once made aware, did their behaviour toward him change?

Our nation has an obligation, through treaties and commitment to human rights, to not take advantage of torture. Did we knowingly do this? Are we still doing it now?

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He's a Boy. He's just a boy.

So they're releasing the Khadr recordings. We can now see, in all its glory, what it looks like to interrogate a 16-year-old boy who was first brainwashed by religion in childhood, then traumatized by combat at 15 and finally tortured at 16.

Tell me that's right. Tell me there isn't something wrong with humanity when you see that child crying for relief and all his interrogators can do is say, "tough luck".

Omar Khadr isn't a Muslim. He isn't a Christian or an atheist. He's not a Canadian or an Afghan.

He's a child, a human child.

He's a crying child begging for someone in authority to pull him out of the absolute bullshit in to which he was involuntarily delivered. He's suffered like this for six years, almost the maximum punishment Canada would ever give a child who committed a crime at the age of 15.

Go ahead, watch the video. Watch the uncaring interrogators trying to play good cop, bad cop. "Do you want a chocolate bar?" "Turn on the air conditioning" Watch them walk out because they can't bear to see him cry. Watch them walk out because they can't bear to see what's been done to this poor, pathetic wretch of a child.

Omar Khadr isn't alone, not even Gitmo is alone. Children are being drafted in to military service all over the world. They're being terrorized by governments, by armies, by paramilitaries the world over. And it's our greed that's doing it. Our greed, as we scrape the bottom of every barrel for every last vestige of oil, minerals and cheap labour, is what leads to children in these situations. We have more than enough power to stop all of it, but that power is rarely used for anything but making it worse.

Let's get this boy home. Let's demonstrate to the world that we're trying to make it a better place, a safer place for children. Let's take at least one god damned step in the right direction.

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Fair Trial Would Free Khadr

Therefore, we need to give him an unfair trial.

That makes perfect sense, as long as you're a Globe and Mail Editorial writer. I'm charitably assuming they wrote this editorial at 3 a.m., wired up on espresso.

What an argument:

According to documents released by the Federal Court of Canada this week, Canadian officials who visited Mr. Khadr, still oozing blood from a six-month-old wound, reported that he had undergone sleep deprivation (being moved every three hours for 21 days) to soften him up for their visit, and would then be put in isolation for three weeks. What Canadian court would accept any statements made by a 16- or 17-year-old under such duress, and without being allowed to see a lawyer?

Right. He was totally tortured and all of his statements were coerced and therefore invalid.

Is there enough of a prima facie case to try him for murder? It is not clear that anyone witnessed him throw a grenade, as alleged, and U.S. government documents state that an adult al-Qaeda fighter was next to him.

Right, so there's no evidence he did anything wrong.

As a barometer of how our courts might view a war-crimes prosecution against Mr. Khadr, recall that the Supreme Court of Canada, in the 9-0 judgment that led to the making public this week of some Canadian documents on Mr. Khadr, wrote forceful reasons in May, asserting that Canada and the United States had violated their international human-rights obligations in his case.

First of all, there was no "war crime". Throwing a grenade at civilians, or leaving their landscape littered with mines and cluster bombs, would be a war crime. Throwing a grenade at invading soldiers (if we could ever prove he did such a thing) would be an "act of war", making Khadr a "prisoner of war". Uniform or not, if soldiers were attacking his village and there was a firefight, he wasn't committing a war crime.

Second, yes indeed, his human rights are being violated.

So what should we do? Demand his freedom? Demand that evidence be presented or the accused be set free? Demand that he be returned to Canada for rehabilitation from his traumatic torture?

Nope:

Help arrange a plea bargain with the United States and Mr. Khadr and his lawyers that would address legitimate security concerns while giving him an opportunity to rehabilitate himself at home.

What? He should cop a plea and admit guilt because there's no evidence he's guilty of anything?

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Child Soldiers can be tortured

If you capture a child, you're allowed to torture him.
You're allowed to lock him up.
You're allowed to deny him civil rights.
You're allowed to deny him his day in court, his lawyer, his due process.
You can try him with secret evidence.
You can lock him away with hardened criminals.

And the secret trick to doing all this is to hold him there for several years, long enough so he becomes an adult and you can call him "Mr. Khadr" and say he's a big, scary, dangerous, Islamic man.

You can also deny, against all reasonable evidence, logic and knowledge, that he's being mistreated in any way.

At least, if you're Stephen Harper you can do it.

The rest of us would choke on our bile just trying to get the words out.

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Latest Arar Scam in the U.S.

The United States Second Circuit Court of Appeals has decided to agree with a lower court decision that Maher Arar can not sue officials in the United States (in their private or official capacities) for sending him to Syria to be tortured.

Writes a dissenting judge, Robert D. Sack:

He had cut short a family vacation in Tunisia and was bound, he thought, for a business meeting in Montreal. What happened to him next would beggar the imagination of Franz Kafka.

Ouch.

You can read the dissenting opinion. It's well down the .pdf in to the "Courier" font area. Basically what the majority decided was that Arar was processed fairly because he was attempting to "enter the United States" from Syria and therefore it was legitimate to send him back to Syria - as an immigration matter.

That pretty much ignores all of the "we sent him there to be tortured, with a list of questions for the torturers to ask" facts that have been established. The dissenting opinion states that treating this as an immigration matter is weak - allowing the court to declare that since Arar is not a U.S. citizen, he therefore has no constitutional rights.

This should be treated, rather, as kidnapping, rendition and accessory to torture. The majority opinion basically ignores this, pretending that U.S. officials are only responsible for what happened in the U.S. The fact that they "outsourced" the torture (in the words of the dissent) is irrelevant.

As well, the majority argues that, under immigration law, a person who is not admitted to the United States legally then has no "physical presence" in the U.S. and therefore isn't entitled to "due process" (i.e. he has no real rights).

Dissenting, Judge Sack is blunt in regards to this:

But the notion that, while in New York City, Arar was not "physically present" in the United States, is a legal fiction peculiar to immigration law.

Arar sought not to enter this country, but to leave it, after transiting briefly through one of its airports. For purposes of identifying the most rudimentary of his rights under the Constitution, the fiction that Arar was not here is senseless.

So, basically, a scam has been run:

Sorry, Mr. Arar, we're not going to punish ourselves for torturing you. You're not entitled to any damages. That's because we're going to ignore all of the torture and pretend that you were attempting to immigrate to the United States and all that we did was send you back where you came from because your name was on a list.

We'll ignore that our agents sent you to Syria. We'll ignore that the torturers there asked the same questions our agents asked you here. We'll ignore any moral responsibility we had toward you. We'll ignore all of that and just pretend that this was an immigration matter.

Then we'll stick our fingers in our ears and shout, "La-la-la-la-la-la-la!"

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Who is fit to run my country?

I've never been fond of the Conservative party. If "Conservative" meant preserving our institutions and balancing our finances, I might find common ground with them. But Ernie Eves and Mike Harris never once balanced a budget and meanwhile attempted to destroy one the great democratizers in our country: public education.

The Liberals ought to be a reasonable bunch. They match progressive social ideas against the creationist, anti-gay agenda of the Conservatives. Unfortunately, they've got a bunch of pro-Iraq war ministers. They were the ones who took us in to Afghanistan and if this map is correct, most of our Canadian soldiers are coincidentally dying where the T.A.P.I. pipeline is going.

So I don't trust either the Liberals or the Conservatives. Both are mired in the pro-war, anti-peacekeeping, big business rules model of governing.

Neither do I like Jack Layton. As much as the NDP are speaking about Afghanistan, they aren't willing to speak the truth about the misuse of soldiers there or in Haiti. If you're not going to stand for the principles of peace and non-aggression, why should I trust you? While they are certainly the least of three evils, they don't seem to have the courage of their convictions.

In the meantime, we're just barely starting to work on getting Omar Khadr out of that hellhole at Gitmo. Abdelrazik is still stuck in the Canadian Embassy in the Sudan because we won't let him sign the affidavit that's just down the hall from him. And while we did eventually get Maher Arar returned to us, he was still tortured incessantly, and apparently with a wink and a nod from our government.

None of these parties or leaders deserve our trust. None of them stand up for the things in which we believe. None of deserve to be running our country.

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Again with the Torture?

Are we still doing this stuff?

I became disillusioned with our string of governments a long time ago - sometime between the invasion of Haiti and the discovery that exactly one Canadian remains on duty in Cyprus - but this is getting exceedingly stupid.

We're not doing anything to set Omar Khadr free from his detention in Gitmo, even though he was a 15-year-old brainwashed child soldier.

We let Maher Arar get beaten in Syria.

And now are coming out the allegations that another Canadian man, Abousfian Abdelrazik, holding dual citizenship in Sudan, was ferreted out by Canadian authorities and captured and tortured in Sudan. The allegations even include that agents of the Canadian government were in Sudan, questioning him, knowing that he was being tortured.

Is this what has become of my country?

I'm embarrassed.

When can we change the government again? And to whom should we hand the reins?

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