I have a confession to make which may shock many of my readers and even some of my close personal friends.
Many people do things in the hastiness of youth which later goes on to serve as a deep embarrassment for them.
Some get tattoos.
Some experiment with drugs.
I once took out a membership in the old Progressive Conservative Party of Canada.
But, allow me to explain. I met two-time PC Party leadership Candidate David Orchard on a couple of occasions and even had lunch with him and his long-time friend and advisor Maraleena Repo a few years back during one of his Ottawa trips.
I joined the PC Party (the only party of which I have ever been a member) due in large part to the principled policy positions of Orchard on NAFTA, U.S. foreign policy, Canadian foreign policy and his impressive environmental credentials.
Yesterday, I received an e-mail from David Orchard’s brother Grant which contained an Op/Ed piece that Orchard and Professor Michael Mandel have co-written and were disseminating as widely as possible. As predictable, very few mainstream media are carrying the insightful and well-argued Op/Ed (so far as I can tell, only the Halifax Chronicle Journal carried it). So, out of respect for the man who once impressed me so much that he got me to actually join the PC Party, I am posting his and Professor Mandel’s Op/Ed here for all to read.
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Afghanistan and Iraq: the same war
by David Orchard and Michael Mandel
Four years ago, the U.S. and Britain unleashed war on Iraq, a nearly defenceless Third World country barely half the size of Saskatchewan. For 12 years prior to the invasion and occupation, Iraq had endured almost weekly U.S. and British bombing raids and the toughest sanctions in history, the “primary victims” of which, according to the UN Secretary General, were “women and children, the poor and the infirm.” According to UNICEF, half a million children died from sanctions-related starvation and disease.
Then, in March 2003, the U.S. and Britain possessors of more weapons of mass destruction than the rest of the world combined attacked Iraq on a host of fraudulent pretexts, with cruise missiles, napalm, white phosphorous, cluster and bunker-buster bombs, and depleted uranium (DU) munitions.
The British medical journal The Lancet published a study last year estimating Iraqi war deaths since 2003 at 655,000, a mind-boggling figure dismissed all too readily by the British and American governments despite widespread scientific approval for its methodology (including the British government’s own chief scientific adviser).
On April 11, 2007, the Red Cross issued a report entitled “Civilians without Protection: the ever-worsening humanitarian crisis in Iraq.” Citing “immense suffering,” it calls “urgently” for ” respect for international humanitarian law.” Andrew White, Anglican Vicar of Baghdad, added, “What we see on our television screens does not demonstrate even one per cent of the reality of the atrocity of Iraq …” The UN estimates two million Iraqis have been “internally displaced;” another two million have fled largely to Syria and Jordan, overwhelming local infrastructure.
An attack such as that on Iraq, neither in self-defence nor authorized by the United Nations Security Council, is, in the words of the Nuremberg Tribunal that condemned the Nazis, “the supreme international crime.” According to the Tribunal’s chief prosecutor, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, such a war is simply mass murder.
Most Canadians are proud that Canada refused to invade Iraq. But when it comes to Afghanistan, we hear the same jingoistic bluster we heard about Iraq four years ago. As if Iraq and Afghanistan were two separate wars, and Afghanistan is the good war, the legal and just war. In reality, Iraq and Afghanistan are the same war.
That’s how the Bush administration has seen Afghanistan from the start; not as a defensive response to 9-11, but the opening for regime change in Iraq (as documented in Richard A. Clarke’s Against all Enemies). That’s why the Security Council resolutions of September 2001 never mention Afghanistan, much less authorize an attack on it. That’s why the attack on Afghanistan was also a supreme international crime, which killed at least 20,000 innocent civilians in its first six months. The Bush administration used 9-11 as a pretext to launch an open-ended so-called “war on terror” in reality, a war of terror because it kills hundreds of times more civilians than the other terrorists do.
That the Karzai regime was subsequently set up under UN auspices doesn’t absolve the participants in America’s war, and that includes Canada. Nor should the fact that Canada now operates under the UN authorized International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) mislead anyone. From the start, ISAF put itself at the service of the American operation, declaring “the United States Central Command will have authority over the International Security Assistance Force” (UNSC Document S/2001/1217). When NATO took charge of ISAF, that didn’t change anything. NATO forces are always ultimately under U.S. command. The “Supreme Commander” is always an American general, who answers to the U.S. president.
Canadian troops in Afghanistan not only take orders from the Americans, they help free up more U.S. forces to continue their bloody occupation of Iraq.
When the U.S. devastated Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia (1961-1975), leaving behind six million dead or maimed, Canada refused to participate. But today Canada has become part of a U.S. war being waged not only in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also in a network of disclosed and undisclosed centres of physical and mental torture, like Guantanamo Bay in illegally occupied Cuban territory. What we know about what the U.S. government calls terrorism is that it is largely a response to foreign occupation; and what we know about American occupation is that it is a way the rich world forces the rest to surrender their resources.
General Rick Hillier bragged that Canada was going to root out the “scumbags” in Afghanistan. He didn’t mention that the Soviets, using over 600,000 troops and billions in aid over 10 years, were unable to control Afghanistan. Britain, at the height of its imperial power, tried twice and failed. Now, Canada is helping another fading empire attempt to impose its will on Afghanistan.
Canadians have traditionally been able to hold their heads high when they travel the world. We did not achieve that reputation by waging war against the world’s poor; in large part, we achieved it by refusing to do so.
Canada must immediately, and at the minimum open its doors to Iraqis and Afghans attempting to flee the horror being inflicted on their homelands. We must stop pretending that we’re not implicated in their suffering under the bombs, death squads and torture. This means refusing to lend our name, our strength and the blood of our youth in this war without end against the Third World. THE END
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DAVID ORCHARD is the author of The Fight for Canada: Four Centuries of Resistance to American Expansionism and ran twice for the leadership of the Progressive Conservative party. He farms at Borden, SK and can be reached at tel 306-652-7095, davidorchard@sasktel.net, http://www.davidorchard.com
MICHAEL MANDEL is Professor of International Law at York University’s Osgoode Hall Law School in Toronto and author of How America Gets Away With Murder: Illegal Wars, Collateral Damage and Crimes Against Humanity. He can be reached at tel 416-736-5039, MMandel@osgoode.yorku.ca.
It’s been my experience that Marxists are a peculiar bunch. Peculiar not in a bad way necessarily, but just peculiar nonetheless. Most of the orthodox Marxists I’ve met want people to get engaged in politics; want people to get interested in politics and social movements; but we just don’t want people to be interested in what I suppose can be termed the ‘pop culture’ elements of politics at all.
In a move to appear ‘tough on terrorism’, the Democrats in the U.S. Senate have successfully moved a bill to 
So, the U.S. has claimed a total of 1,651,000 (approximately — interesting how we don’t bother to count their fatalities isn’t it?).
I recently came across Sam Carson’s fantastic posts (available 
Paulitics 
Proof of Big Brother tactics at SPP protest (pics + vid)
Published 22 August, 2007 1984 , America , American Empire , American Politics , Bush , Canada/US relations , Canadian Politics , Canadian Politics (domestic) , capitalism , Civil Liberties , current events , economics , fascism , Free Trade , International Politics , Neo-liberalism , news , News, Commentary & Op/Ed , North American Union , police state , politics , Progressive , Propaganda , Protest , Quebec , Resistance , U.S. Politics , U.S. Politics (domestic) 21 CommentsIt was easy to miss, but here are three examples of Big Brother tactics at the SPP protests this week in Quebec. One of which is your standard George W. Bush doublethink, the second of which gives some interesting circumstantial evidence of government conspiracy to crack down on protesters (and has become an internet sensation), and the third of which proves the culpability of the government and police but which hasn’t been reported anywhere that I am aware of.
#1. As many of you know, the leaders of Canada, the U.S. and Mexico (“The Three Amigos”) met yesterday and the day before to negotiate a backroom, undemocratic deal to harmonize regulations at the behest of North America’s CEOs.
This summit took place, behind closed doors and meetings were carefully arranged to transpire without public scrutinty. Afterwards, “The Three Amigos” emerged to the only public scrutiny the meetings would receive: namely George W. Bush reassuring the public that nothing offensive to public morals took place while the public was forbidden from listening in.
So, it was a boring, uneventful series of meetings in which nothing which the public would disapprove of took place, but the public was still nevertheless forbidden from seeing these uneventful meetings?
#2. The following video has recently become an internet sensation because of youtube, digg.com and reddit.com. It shows three very suspicious ‘protestors’ who come to a peaceful protest with stones and rocks in hand seeking to provoke a confrontation. It shows fairly reasonable circumstantial evidence that they were actually police informants designed to create cause for the police to crack down. When confronted with the realization that the crowd surrounding them has realized this, they ‘give themselves up’ to the police.
Now, the other part of the story that has been widely reported, is that after these three were handcuffed, a picture was shot which showed that two of the ‘protesters’ had the same boots as a police officer.
Here’s where it gets interesting.
The Toronto Star linked to the youtube video, but their report still suggested that it could have been a coincidence. They wrote that:
Clearly, it takes no time at all to see that the protestors have the same boots as ONE of the police officers. That hardly qualifies for investigative journalism. And in and of itself without further investigation, this can still be dismissed as a coincidence by the government or by skeptics.
#3. But the part of the story that hasn’t been reported is also the part of the story which proves that all this circumstantial evidence above is not merely a series of coincidence. The picture below shows that it’s not a matter of these protestors coincidentally having the same style of boots as one of the police officers, but rather that they have the exact same boots as all of the police officers.
(Original, hi-rez picture source here — look for yourself)
I made this image when I started to notice something as I was looking over the super-hi rez version of the same image. If it didn’t take me long to figure this out, no journalist worth his or her salt should have missed it.
Take a look at the way the seam of the leather at the back of everyone’s boots falls in a straight line from the ankle towards the heel. It doesn’t taper outwards away from or in towards the achilles tendon. Nor does it curve in any way around the heel and converge towards the achilles tendon. Rather it runs straight and perpendicular to the sole of the boot. Notice anything similar between everyone’s boots?
If it wasn’t just one of the officers, then all of the evidence above is not merely circumstantial. If all of the evidence of police interference in this protest is not circumstantial, then from this everything else, including the media’s complicity in this story, follows.