July 2007
Monthly Archive
July 27, 2007
The whole Mulroney/Schreiber controversy just won’t die. Wouldn’t it be great if our current Conservative prime minister took a few, simple steps to put the whole thing to bed? I think so. That’s why I sent the following e-mail to Mr. Harper:
Dear Prime Minister Harper:
The Airbus affair simply won’t go away. In persuading the Chretien government to settle by paying Mr. Mulroney $2-million of taxpayer funds, Mr. Mulroney gave sworn evidence that he had never had any business dealings with Mr. Schreiber.
After CBC’s Fifth Estate obtained Mr. Schreiber’s Swiss bank accounts showing a trail of funds from Airbus to Schreiber and, hence, on to Mr. Mulroney, your Conservative predecessor changed his account and said he had received that money as a retrainer for providing legal services to Mr. Schreiber. It appears that, at the same time as the payments were exposed, Mr. Mulroney also made a voluntary disclosure to Revenue Canada of certain unreported income.
The documents alone raise a strong suspicion that your Conservative predecessor misled federal government lawyers in compelling a settlement of his defamation claim. Particularly as Mr. Mulroney was a Conservative prime minister and is linked to Canada’s New Government, you should be intent on obtaining clarification that exonerates Mr. Mulroney.
Sir, if these monies were indeed given to Mr. Mulroney as a legal retainer could you ask his firm to produce copies of its trust ledger confirming receipt and deposit of these funds? I’m sure Mr. Schreiber would agree to relinquish his privilege on this matter. Could you also have Mr. Mulroney’s then firm furnish a copy of their accounts to Mr. Schreiber pursuant to which these monies would have been withdrawn from the firm’s trust account?
Mr. Harper, lawyers are under strict obligations as to handling retainers that leave a clear paper trail. You may be aware that, until recently, Mr. Schreiber publicly stated that your Conservative predecessor rendered no legal services to him in consideration for these payments. Mr. Schreiber also described the original source of these payments, the Airbus monies, as “schmiergelder” or grease money, a bribery fund in connection with the Air Canada purchase of Airbus jetliners.
This whole business has a terrible smell, Mr. Prime Minister, and I know that Canada’s New Government has no time for political chicanery. Would you therefore please get to the bottom of this?
Regards
Note – I will of course promptly post the unedited response I receive from the Prime Minister. Once Mr. Schreiber is sent back to Germany this will all probably die on the vine. If you want these loose threads tied up, the dangling questions answered, write Mr. Harper. Or, if you like, you can copy the message above, add your name to it and e-mail it to “pm@pm.gc.ca” Then we could all share our responses.
There is every reason to believe that Mr. Schreiber is a dodgy sort of wheeler-dealer. He is a wanted man in Germany. Yet his allegations have been troubling, a blight on Mr. Mulroney’s good name. Surely this controversy can all be cleared up by the production of just a handful of documents that will corroborate Mr. Mulroney and vindicate him of any suggestions that he received tainted money from Mr. Schreiber. Then we could all just forget about this unhappiness.
July 27, 2007
This story illustrates why so many of us are angered at the current state of media concentration in Canada.
When CBC’s Fifth Estate aired its account of this story it was mentioned that, while the Globe & Mail broke the story, the National Post had it first but spiked it – deliberately chose not to publish it.
A few weeks after the Fifth Estate broadcast I visited my elderly Dad in Leamington, Ontario. The paper they get is the Windsor Star, another CanWest Global newspaper. When I mentioned the Schreiber/Mulroney story to my Dad, he’d never heard of it. He decided to find out why not and so called the Star editor. Here is the explanation he was given.
Yes the editor of the Windsor Star was aware of the story. No the Windsor Star hadn’t carried the story. The Windsor Star published what came to it via the CanWest tunnel – Asper approved – and there was nothing in that newsfeed about Mulroney/Schreiber at all and so nothing was printed in their paper.
July 27, 2007
NATO reports 50 Taliban killed along with 28 civilians. More dead civilians. Who cares? Harper? No. O’Connor? No. Hillier? No.
Nobody cares, at least not enough to do what they know has to be done to protect innocent Afghan lives. End of story.
Wait, I’ve got an idea. How ’bout we change “dead civilian” to “Civilian Inadvertently Liberated from Taliban Oppression“? There, that sounds much better, doesn’t it?
July 27, 2007
The US Congress is expected to refuse funding needed by George w. Bush to establish an interceptor missile battery in Poland. From
The Guardian:
The House appropriations committee cut $139m (£69.5m) from the $310m the Bush administration wants for preparatory work on the missile project in Europe. It approved funds for a radar system in the Czech Republic but cut the $139m Mr Bush requested to establish a missile interception system in Poland, the most controversial part of the defence system.
John Murtha, chairman of the committee, said the Bush administration has “got to convince us this is worthwhile”.
As well as reducing the budget, Congress is shifting priorities from futuristic programmes to more immediate concerns, such as improved healthcare for soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan, pay rises for soldiers and marines, and much-needed weaponry for Iraq, such as the heavily-armoured Stryker vehicles.
The committee’s pared-down budget will go to the full House for a vote next week but is almost certain to be passed.
The House and Senate have questioned whether establishing the system in eastern Europe is sensible given the extent of the opposition it has aroused in Russia. They also question its technical feasibility and the failure of other Nato countries to commit fully to it.
Are we beginning to watch the unravelling of the Imperial Presidency? If Congress chokes the beast into unconsciousness over the missile defence scheme, what’s next? Has the day of the rightwing nutbar finally come to an end?
July 27, 2007
Four decades ago, the Federal Bureau of Investigation set up four innocent men in a 1965 gangland murder. From the Boston Globe:
In a decision that was as dramatic as it was stern, US District Judge Nancy Gertner said from the bench that the FBI had deliberately withheld evidence that Peter J. Limone, Joseph Salvati, Louis Greco, and Henry Tameleo were innocent, and that the bureau helped cover up the injustice for decades as the men grew old behind bars and Tameleo and Greco died.
“FBI officials up the line allowed their employees to break laws, violate rules, and ruin lives, interrupted only with the occasional burst of applause,” said Gertner, berating the FBI for giving commendations and bonuses to the agents who helped send the men to prison for the killing in Chelsea of Edward “Teddy” Deegan, a small-time hoodlum.
July 27, 2007
The party of Shinzo Abe are called Liberal Democrats, which is sort of like branding Stephen Harper as “Mr. Accountability.” They’re actually a bunch of right wing hard-liners intent on restoring Japan’s imperial grandeur by erasing all traces of the country’s hideous past.
This Sunday Abe may take a kamikaze flight of his own. The Liberal Democratic Party and its junior coalition partner, the New Komeito, need at least 64 of the 242 seats up for grabs to maintain a majority in the upper house.
But polls indicated that the governing coalition will win far fewer than the 64 seats and that the opposition Democratic Party is likely to gain a majority.
No word yet on whether Abe will cleave to his traditionalist zeal and go out the sepuku route.
July 27, 2007
It’s probably a statement of how America’s current weakness in Iraq is viewed across the Middle East. The Saudis are getting downright uppity with Washington.
The New York Times reports that the Bush/Cheney administration/regime/junta is becoming vexed at the Saudi’s efforts to meddle in Iraq.
Bush administration officials are voicing increasing anger at what they say has been Saudi Arabia’s counterproductive role in the Iraq war. They say that beyond regarding Mr. Maliki as an Iranian agent, the Saudis have offered financial support to Sunni groups in Iraq. Of an estimated 60 to 80 foreign fighters who enter Iraq each month, American military and intelligence officials say that nearly half are coming from Saudi Arabia and that the Saudis have not done enough to stem the flow.
One senior administration official says he has seen evidence that Saudi Arabia is providing financial support to opponents of Mr. Maliki. He declined to say whether that support was going to Sunni insurgents because, he said, “That would get into disagreements over who is an insurgent and who is not.”
Officials in Washington have long resisted blaming Saudi Arabia for the chaos and sectarian strife in Iraq, choosing instead to pin blame on Iran and Syria. Even now, military officials rarely talk publicly about the role of Saudi fighters among the insurgents in Iraq.
The Bush administration’s frustration with the Saudi government has increased in recent months because it appears that Saudi Arabia has stepped up efforts to undermine the Maliki government and to pursue a different course in Iraq from what the administration has charted. Saudi Arabia has also stymied a number of other American foreign policy initiatives, including a hoped-for Saudi embrace of Israel.
American officials in Iraq also say that the majority of suicide bombers in Iraq are from Saudi Arabia and that about 40 percent of all foreign fighters are Saudi. Officials said that while most of the foreign fighters came to Iraq to become suicide bombers, others arrived as bomb makers, snipers, logisticians and financiers.
The administration “thinks the Saudis are no longer behaving the role of the good vassal,” said Steve Clemons, senior fellow and director of the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation. The Saudis, in turn, “see weakness, they see a void, and they’re going to fill the void and call their own shots.”
July 27, 2007
Say what? On at least two occassions NASA astronauts had to be warned their drunkeness constituted a safety risk to flights.
According to Aviation Week, a 12-page NASA paper soon to be released details two incidents when investigators investigators reported “ ‘heavy use of alcohol’ by astronauts” within 12 hours of flying.
July 27, 2007
Oh he was so pure. He was just the man to cleanse Canada’s parliament of the loose ways of the Liberals. Stevie was going to wash the place down with his very own Holy Water.
Remember when Harpo promised that his government – that would be Canada’s New Government by the way – would end the practice of partisan appointments to federal boards and commissions? Guess what?
It’s Harpo’s turn at the trough now and he’s going just as fast as he can to show us that he’s a complete fraud, an outright liar. Huh?
Just as Adbusters outed Harpo on the environment, Democracy Watch has now outed him on his accountability promises. From the Toronto Star:
Since the beginning of the year, the Tories have made about 800 appointments, many of them with close ties to the party, and there is still no sign of an independent public appointments commission, said Duff Conacher, co-ordinator of Democracy Watch, a group advocating government accountability and corporate responsibility.
“To lie to the voters, to mislead the voters during the last election on this issue of government accountability shows a very high level of hypocrisy and dishonesty,” Conacher said.
It has been seven months since the Tories’ much-vaunted Accountability Act was passed, with the appointments commission its centrepiece.
But critics suggest the commission will never happen because the Conservatives’ chances of being re-elected seem to be fading.
The Accountability Act, drafted by the Tories in response to the Liberal sponsorship scandal, passed the Commons and Senate and received royal assent last December, but a separate cabinet order is required for many provisions to come into force. The wording is such that there is nothing forcing cabinet to establish the appointments commission.
Let’s face it folks, Stephen Harper is an outright liar. What was it his mentor, the honourable Mulroney used to say? “No whore like an old whore,” yeah that’s it. Now, what about that global warming thing?
July 27, 2007
Brian Mulroney has been ordered to pay his fellow shyster, er- entrepreneur, Karlheinz Schreiber, $470,000. The judgment of the Ontario Superior Court of Justice effectively orders Mulroney to make restitution of three cash payments the former Tory PM received from his then stalwart buddy, a key figure in the Airbus Scandal.
The payments came in the form of three envelopes, each neatly stuffed with $100,000 in cash. Mulroney would meet Schreiber in a coffee shop and an envelope would be passed across the table. Three meetings, $300,000.
CBC got its hands on Schreiber’s Swiss bank records. They showed the cash came from money Schreiber was paid by Airbus for the sale of jetliners to Air Canada, money Schreiber called “schmiergelder” or “grease money.”
By Schreiber’s account it was dirty money, paid mobster-style, to a genuinely dodgy character.
Mulroney sued the Chretien government over the Airbus scandal and, under oath, claimed he’d never had any dealings with Schreiber. That claim was instrumental in the Canadian government’s decision to fold and pay Mulroney $2-million.
Only later, when the evidence of the payments came out, did Mulroney start scrambling. He then said the money was a “retainer” to represent Schreiber to establish an arms factory and a pasta business.
At first Schreiber denied this but, as his battle to avoid extradition to Germany collapsed, he seems to have figured he might as well get his money back using Mulroney’s own bizarre story to secure a judgment.
Now Mulroney is asking the court to set aside the judgment. He’s challenging its jurisdiction to make the order – a tactic that won’t require him to get into the facts of what actually happened. That motion is being argued today.
Personally I’d like to see Mulroney wind up with this case re-opened so he could argue the facts on their merits. Maybe Harpo could postpone Schreiber’s extradition so this saga could all play out in court. I’m sure Harper’s newfound buddy, Mulroney, would be ever so grateful for a chance to clear his wonderful name.
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