July 2007
Monthly Archive
July 13, 2007
Conrad Black has been convicted on the strongest charges against him but acquitted by the jury on the majority of the charges, including racketeering.
It is obvious that the jury considered the evidence carefully and was able to distinguish appropriate payments and expenses from the truly egregious taking of corporate funds. Black was, for example, acquitted of charges relating to the “non compete” payments on the CanWest sale. There the purchaser wanted the promise of Black not to just come back and set up a new paper in competition with National Post. The jury did, however, convict Black of fraud in the taking of funds as “non compete” payments when other purchasers never asked for such terms.
Black was also convicted of obstruction for removing 13-boxes of documents from his Toronto offices. That charge carries a possible 20-year term, making it the most serious conviction Black faces.
Overall my impression is that Black received both justice and fairness.
July 13, 2007
Conrad Black has been convicted of fraud. The Chicago jury found Black guilty of three counts of mail fraud and one count of obstruction of justice. Black is now facing a possible 35-year prison sentence.
July 12, 2007
Stephen Harper gets a once-over in the latest edition of The Economist. The article examines Harper’s supposed foreign policy:
CANADIANS knew little about Stephen Harper’s foreign policy when his Conservative government took office last year, for the simple reason that he had not articulated one. They still don’t know much. Since the election, foreign policy has been dominated by just one issue, that of Canadian troops in Afghanistan. Now perhaps they are about to be enlightened.
Some Canadians see Mr Harper’s trip [upcoming trip to Colombia] as part of his general desire to be in step with George Bush. The prime minister has made smooth relations with the United States a priority. Afghanistan has become the top recipient of Canadian aid. Mr Harper’s government has given outspoken support to Israel; its relations with China have been strained. Nevertheless, this week Mr Harper announced plans to purchase up to eight patrol ships for light ice-breaking duties to assert Canadian sovereignty over Arctic seaways, which is contested by the United States.
In fact, in much of this there is more continuity than change. Relations with Latin America have been getting closer since the signing of the North American Free-Trade Agreement with Mexico in 1992. It was the Liberal government which deployed combat troops to Afghanistan; while it talked of a balanced policy in the Middle East it tended to take Israel’s side when it counted. And few Canadian prime ministers have allowed all-important relations with their American neighbour to deteriorate.
Perhaps the main innovation is plain speaking and the dropping of any pretence of an over-arching vision. Mr Harper’s foreign-policy adviser, Roy Rempel, has argued that the myth of Canadians as the world’s peacekeepers and do-gooders should yield to blunt considerations of national interest. Another interpretation is that Mr Harper has decided not to have a foreign policy, merely reacting to crises and opportunities as they arise.
This, says Adam Chapnick, of the Canadian Forces College, is in keeping with an old Conservative tradition dating back to Canada’s first prime minister, Sir John Macdonald. When trade relations with the United States were debated in the House of Commons, he apparently brought two speeches with him—one in support and one opposed—and then used the one that contradicted the Liberal stand.
There it is, obvious at last. You can’t flip-flop on foreign policy unless you first have a foreign policy. Point to Harpo,.
July 12, 2007
Former Mulroney hack, Norman Spector, is anything but non-partisan. Despite that he is capable at times of some genuine wisdom. I enjoyed his take on Harper’s Afghanistan dilemma in today’s Globe and Mail:
…with casualties mounting, the Afghan mission is badly tangled in domestic politics, and Mr. Harper’s government, too, is bleeding. Still, both the Bloc Québécois and the Liberals have hinted at some willingness to carry on in some fashion, and therein lies an opportunity.
Mr. Harper should begin by giving Canadians the unvarnished truth about the mission’s prospects.
But his fundamental challenge was best expressed by British Labour MP Aneurin Bevan in a magisterial parliamentary speech at the height of the 1956 Suez crisis: “When a nation makes war upon another nation, it should be quite clear why it does so. It should not keep changing the reasons as time goes on.”
Under Jean Chrétien, it was never made clear why Canadian troops were in Afghanistan – unless it was to make up for their not being in Iraq. Under Paul Martin, the parliamentary debate on the dangerous Kandahar deployment was a one-night affair that went virtually unreported. And Mr. Harper has been shifting his rationale for the mission, while comporting himself more like a backroom boy engaged in spin wars than a wartime prime minister.
July 12, 2007
Whatever reservations you may have about the RCMP’s first civilian commissioner, Bill Elliot has started off making a bright move – he won’t wear the uniform.
I think if Elliot had decided to dress up like a real honest-to-God mountie, it would have sent discontent racing through the force. You have to make it through Depot to be entitled to wear the hat, the boots and the red serge.
Much as it may be hoped that the force will benefit from having an outsider at the top, I would think at some point that leadership ought to revert to a veteran of the force, not a bureaucrat.
July 12, 2007
If you look at the latest polls, he’s nowhere.
An Environics poll shows Dion, at 16%, trailing both Harper, at 38%, and Layton (at 20%) when Canadians were asked to name which they would prefer as prime minister.
The only good news in the poll was that Canadians are still not willing to give Harper the majority he needs to pull off his agenda.
Dion told us he wanted to lead the Liberal Party. It’s time he showed some sign of that. Harper and Layton have taken advantage of every opportunity to get before the cameras. Crass as that may be, in politics, out of sight is very much out of mind.
People here in the West are not responsive to Stephane Dion. His message isn’t getting out. Harper ought to be an easy target but Dion isn’t firing any shots. That’s not leadership.
July 12, 2007
General Rick Hillier has told the Toronto Star that Canada’s soldiers in Afghanistan will be handing over their combat role in Kandahar to the Afghan army as early as next spring. The mission will then focus on training and supporting the Afghan soldiers to prepare them for taking on the Taliban.
With the Taliban resurgent in Kandahar province and our tactics utterly incapable of providing essential security to Afghan villagers supposedly under our protection, it makes sense to try something else.
Bear in mind that Canadian soldiers haven’t sustained a lot of casualties in actual combat. We tend to get whacked by IEDs and suicide bombers while patrolling and simply driving down the wrong road once too often.
Still, giving up a relatively unsuccessful combat role is a good prelude for either bailing out of Afghanistan altogether or moving along to some more peaceful locale.
Will the Afghan army hold up without us? Not if history is any guide. Military power in Afghanistan seems to be best fielded in ethnic militias but you can’t get to that point without in-fighting. Remember the “northern alliance”?
At least shifting to the training mode distances us from the smear of “cut and run”. Like the Americans in Vietnam, we never lost – we just didn’t win.
July 12, 2007
Sometimes it’s helpful to go back and recall what it’s all about. Okay, it’s 11 September, 2001. Four teams of al-Qaeda terrorists, mainly Saudis, all in the US legally and trained at US flight schools, hijack four airliners. Two bring down the World Trade Centre towers, one flies into the Pentagon. The fourth crashes into a field.
There it is – al-Qaeda. Osama bin Laden even came right out and took responsibility for the attacks. He brazenly attacked the world’s most powerful nation, the planet’s sole superpower. Obviously he was going to pay, or was he?
At first it was likely that al-Qaeda would be crushed. The US jumped into Afghanistan’s exhausted civil war, boosted the Northern Alliance, and rolled up the Taliban government sending the Talibs and al-Qaeda fleeing into the mountains.
The US sent powerful teams of special forces to hunt down al-Qaeda, particularly bin Laden and his top aides. They even had them cornered in Tora Bora but then paid locals to finish them off and somehow they slipped away. Then Bush, in a fit of War on Terror A.D.D., forgot about Afghanistan and chose to attack Iraq instead. The special forces tracking down bin Laden were pulled out to prepare for Iraq.
The rest is history, just not good history. The fight against al-Qaeda has now turned global ranging from Indonesia to South Asia to the Middle East to West Africa to Europe, even North America. The evil has metastasized. The infidels in Afghanistan and Iraq have drawn hordes of recruits to the ranks of al-Qaeda and similar groups. All the while Bush’s army is tied down in Iraq and deployed to the point of exhaustion.
NATO has become drawn into the whirlpool of Bush/Cheney megalomania. We’re now stuck in Afghanistan almost as securely as the Americans in Iraq. Despite the assurances of our military genius, Rick Hillier, we can’t maintain another operation elsewhere should the need arise (and it has, again and again).
Now the latest US intelligence assessment is that al-Qaeda has used the respite and all Washington’s considerable help to recover to pre-9/11 levels. They’ve restored their organization, its leadership, numbers and communications and once again they’re flush with cash. al-Qaeda is ready to rock’n roll.
Just what have we accomplished over the past six years? Not very much. The guy driving this bus, George w. hisself, keeps running us into a ditch and we keep getting back on that bus each time he does it. Are we so afraid of this guy that we can’t tell him, as far as we’re concerned, he’s fired?
It’s time to get off the bus because the only place it’s going is straight into the nearest ditch. If this joker wants to keep spinning his wheels in Iraq that should be his business, not ours.
July 12, 2007
I think this is actually a record. Bank guards at a private bank in Baghdad yesterday decided to take their jobs and shove it. Before leaving, however, they helped themselves to $282-million and they took it in US dollars, not Iraqi dinar either.
This being Iraq, there are a lot of unanswered questions and even more suspicions. Why did the bank have that much American cash on hand? How did the two or three errant guards get away with it undetected? According to The New York Times:
Several officials speculated that the robbers had connections to the militias, because it would be difficult for them to move without being searched through many checkpoints in Baghdad.
Militias? Involved in bank robbery? Really? Go figure.
July 12, 2007
Did you hear the good news? The Iraqi government has shown what the White House describes as “satisfactory performance” on no fewer than 8 of the 18 benchmarks benchmarks for progress on political and security fronts in Iraq.
Does that mean that the Maliki gang has actually met any of these benchmarks? Why, not exactly. It must means that the chronic liars and dissemblers in the executive branch have chosen to bolster their own interests by resort to the grand weasel word, “satisfactory.” Dick Cheney and George w. Bush would call crap on a stick a tasty treat if it would serve their interests.
While the White House report noted progress in the military realm, with an overall decrease in the numbers of Iraqi civilians killed in sectarian violence and in casualties from car and truck bomb blasts, some of the benchmarks have not been met in that section, such as improvements in the ability and political neutrality of the Iraqi security forces and the Iraqi government.
The administration’s decision to qualify many of the political benchmarks will enable it to present a more optimistic assessment than if it had provided the pass-fail judgment sought by Congress when it approved funding for the war this spring.
It’s all about spin – all spin, all the time. It’s worked for these clowns for six years. They’re masters at it and they figure it’ll coat them in plenty of grease to ensure they slip straight through the fingers of Congress.
Watch for the rebuttal to come from the insurgents, militias and terrorists in the form of a spike in IEDs and car bomb mayhem. Sad, really.
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