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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The Holy Cracker

So a guy took a cracker. And lo, it was a holy cracker.

I'm an atheist now, but I wasn't always one. I used to be a catholic. Way back then, before I went to university and let the brainwashing fade away, I used to love the ritualism of a catholic mass. Very fancy, very organized and planned. Everything had some kind of symbolic meaning.

This whole escapade brought back the memories. You see, catholics are actually supposed to believe that the host is literally the body of Christ. I recall, now, as everyone is making a big deal out of it, how many instances there were - in church - of a big deal being made of it.

If it is dropped on the ground, it should be covered with a cloth (lest someone step on it) and the area should be washed thoroughly after the mass is over. I remember the priest following someone back to his seat to make sure that he ate it. There are a bunch of other weird rituals for unused hosts and other things.

On the other hand, as an atheist, it's a cracker. So I can't really sympathize too much with the people freaking out over this (especially now that it's been returned) while many demand the guy who ran off with a cracker be tried for hate crimes.

Sure, you have your rituals and you have the right to them. Catholics don't come knocking at my door and preaching to me, so I don't bother much with them (although in Ontario they get my tax dollars for their schools, so I do have some issues). In that vein, I don't think it would be right to go sneaking in to catholic ceremonies and running out with their crackers. Legal? Yes. Since they're handing you the cracker, it's yours. But also dumb, pointless and antagonizing.

The route to atheism is not through crude gestures like this. It only makes the religious feel persecuted which strengthens their faith.

So yes, the religious people are dumb for going nuts like this. But, on behalf of a desire to see more people arrive at the rationality of atheism, I don't think this was in any way a productive step.

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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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Military won't obey Conservatives either

Whom does our military obey?

Ideally, the military is under the control of the people. This is a central, mandatory rule of democracy. We can't have an autocratic military leadership. Either it takes orders from us, or it ceases to exist. Period.

We found out that this isn't quite true, of course, when the military brass disobeyed our desires and sent our soldiers in to Iraq in support of the U.S. military invasion. (It was billed as a training mission, but this is mere camouflage).

One of the themes of Linda McQuaig's "Holding the Bully's Coat" is that the military brass have too much power to decide their own missions. When the Wall came down and the Soviet Union fell, the Liberal government decided to change the purpose of our military to make it the greatest peacekeeping force, and have the premiere peacekeeping training facility, in the world. The military objected and used its "think tanks" to lobby the media and government so it could continue to have all the fancy gadgets it needed to fight a land war across Europe.

One would have thought, with the Harper Conservatives in charge, with Gordon O'Connor and Peter McKay being such big spenders on behalf of the military, that the senior officers would be more obedient.

It turns out that, no, they won't be. Even though "Arctic sovereignty" was a major platform plank for the Conservatives, the military brass don't seem to give a damn:

The report says Canada Command failed to issue a set of orders that had been planned to help disseminate instructions on Operation Nanook.

Apparently our military brass don't understand how this works. If they're going to play the American Empire game, then their goal as a military is to place special importance on oil and natural gas reserves. Thus Iraq. Thus Afghanistan.

Gentlemen, you only get the latest toys if you can make yourselves useful. Peacekeeping doesn't count. It doesn't get us oil and it doesn't get you the latest toys to play with. There's a lot of oil under that Arctic ice. We just have to wait for it to melt.

I'm sure someone will explain it to them shortly and they'll come around. I just think it's neat to see the military disobeying not just the ignorant people, not just the namby-pamby naive Liberals, but also the Conservatives.

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Why did we create "Hate Crime"?

This is something that has mystified me for some time. Why did we need to create a category of criminal behaviour called "Hate Crime"?

If I hand you a knife and say "go stab that guy", it should be completely irrelevant why I told you to do it. What does the motivation matter? I'm encouraging you to go and commit an assault. Whether I did it because I believe homosexuals are evil or because Allah told me to do it is entirely beside the point.

If I stand up on a soap box in public and exhort listening throngs of people to go commit acts of violence against homosexuals, an ethnic minority, disabled people, Anglicans or abortion providers, I should also go to jail. It shouldn't have anything to do with "hatred". What matters is that I'm an accessory to violence and assault.

Now if I read this analysis, which is a legal opinion I suppose, the implication here is that - in point of fact - before bill C-250 existed it was actually legal in Canada to advocate mass murder and encourage your followers to commit acts of violence against other members of society.

Really? Is that really, honestly true that, in Canada, before bill C-250, I could stand on a box in the middle town, frothing at the mouth, and declare that all homosexuals ought to be rounded up and stoned?

If that's the case, then damn right we needed a law. I just have difficulty believing that our legal system had missed such an obvious flaw for such a long time. That's not the case for, say, dueling. The Canadian Criminal Code, article 71, punishes dueling, provoking a duel and encouraging another to provoke a duel.

What bothers me though, assuming we needed this law, are the exceptions such as:

A person could not be convicted if:
"in good faith, he expressed or attempted to establish by argument an opinion on a religious subject."

So a guy standing on a box declaring that Jews are bad for the economy and we ought to get rid of them goes to jail (damn right). But a guy standing behind a piece of wood in a pointy building declaring that all homosexuals ought to be stoned to death doesn't go jail. (Huh?)

That seems pretty counterintuitive. What if a guy argues from a pulpit that the bible says that Jews are bad and that the bible says we ought to get rid of them? Does that become acceptable speech?

It seems that if encouraging this sort of chaotic violence against other people is illegal, it ought to be illegal for anyone to encourage this sort of chaotic violence against anyone else. There ought not to be exceptions because you really, really believe god wants you to do it.

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If you don't want to be compared to Hitler ...

It's difficult to know, in an Internet debate, when it's okay to pull out the Hitler card. As a general rule, I like to say, "Never, ever, ever". It's usually childish, impetuous and a sign that you have no real arguments to go by.

But then I read that the Italian government has decided to fingerprint gypsies on the grounds that they are responsible for so much of the crime wave in Italy.

I don't think I'm really pulling out the Hitler card if the Italian government is pulling it out themselves. I mean, seriously now, they're going to fingerprint, round up and deport people from a certain ethnic group while blaming that ethnic group for the country's economic problems. Of course, first they're going to ask to see papers. This very ethnic group is even one of the groups that the Nazis went after.

Do these people even read history? How stupid are they?

Will they be rounding up the gypsies for deportation on trains? Will they get to wear any symbol of any kind to indicate which gypsies can stay and which must go? Will there be any fenced-in areas to contain the deportable gypsies while they wait for the trains?

All the while, they'll be ignoring the actual crime problems in their country because the Prime Minister of the country owns almost all of the print media. (Think about it, who does more crime in Italy? Gypsies or the mafia?)

The word I'm searching for is, "Creepy".

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Morgentaler and the Hypocrites

Why is it that the right wing people can get away with being so hypocritical on the matter of abortion?

In every other matter, the state is apparently not allowed to interfere in your actions in any way. If the government makes you belt your kids in, wear a motorcycle helmet, pay extra taxes on cigarettes, then it's immorally imposing on you. If they illegalize trans fats, it's a sign of communism. If they require an employer to stop discriminating against people who look different, it's evil secularism.

But, oh, wait! If it's a woman who wants control of her own body - if it's a woman who wants to decide whether to continue a pregnancy that was started involuntarily - then we need to lock up her uterus. Then we need to call the thing in her womb a person, give it rights and protect it with all of our energy.

Yes, people have the right to do whatever they want ... except for pregnant women.

And if a man receives the Order of Canada for protecting a woman's right to control her own body, he should be vilified. In fact, the award and the entire nation are shamed by his receipt of the award. Other people are just in denial.

You'd think Morgentaler would be a hero to the right, with all the "personal freedoms" and libertarianism they support. But no. We know that they're hypocrites. We know that personal freedoms and libertarianism are just codewords for lowering their taxes and cutting social services for the poor. These people don't care about your freedom. They just care about keeping more for themselves and too bad for everyone else.

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