By Dennis Gruending

Richard Colvin, a Canadian diplomat who served in Afghanistan, has blown the whistle on our government’s complicity in the torture of Afghans taken prisoner by Canadian soldiers and turned over to the notorious prison authorities. The International Red Cross, Amnesty International and the Dutch military have had similar concerns. The Conservative government responded to Colvin’s allegations, in the words of The Globe and Mail newspaper, with a strategy of “deny, delay, disparage.” Defence Minister Peter McKay has been bobbing and weaving, saying at first that he never saw Colvin’s dispatches from Afghanistan, then admitting he did but that what he saw contained no useful information. The Prime Minister, as is his wont, went into full attack mode, describing Colvin as a dupe of the Taliban. Similarly, three military generals, including Rick Hillier, former chief of defence staff, were trotted out before a parliamentary committee to deny Colvin’s allegations and to dump on his competence – what else would we expect generals to do in a time of war?  Colvin was a trusted civil servant and following his tour in Afghanistan he was placed as an intelligence officer at the Canadian embassy in Washington, but one now wonders for how long.

Canadians have seen through the lies and personal attacks. A poll taken by Harris-Decima as the controversy raged in November indicated that 51% believed Colvin’s claims and only 25% believed the government’s spin that Colvin was not credible. On the other hand, it is disturbing to read letters to the editor and online responses indicating that some Canadians really don’t care what happens to Afghans taken into custody. These letter writers appear to agree with Rick Hillier that our troops are dealing with “scumbags” – although even Hillier would have to acknowledge that this is occurring in their country, far from our shores.

“Illiberal democracy”

The point here is not so much to rail at obfuscation, lies and character assassination accompanying this tawdry affair, but rather to say that when Canada is engaged in a war our habitual democratic practices are inevitably one of the casualties. The eminent British writer John Gray says in his book Black Mass that in the post 9\11 era the United States is an “illiberal democracy in which elections take place against a background of diminished freedom.” The so-called war on terror, which is so broadly conceived that it may well lead to a state of perpetual conflict, provides the excuse for the American government to do almost anything: to invade and occupy other countries; to kill and main civilians as the inevitable collateral damage; to hold prisoners for long periods without trial, as has been the case in the Guantanamo prison; to torture prisoners directly, as the Americans have done, although they won’t admit it; to turn prisoners over to other regimes that specialize in cruelty and torture; to spy on America’s citizens at home; and to trample on their hard won civil liberties. It is not a pretty picture and Canada is deeply involved.

John Gray describes the war on terror as a dangerous delusion. It is used as a pretext by governments, he writes, to “demand freedom from the constraints that have developed over many centuries to curb the exercise of power.” In Canada, the Chretien government passed the Anti-Terrorism Act in December 2001, allowing police to arrest suspects without a warrant and detain them without charges.  The law also allowed a judge to compel a witness to testify in secret in the interest of protecting national security. The legislation was in force for five years and had to be reviewed at the end of that time. The Harper government wanted to extend the bill’s provisions in 2007 but was unable to do so in the face of opposition from other parties in a minority government.

It was the RCMP in Canada, in cooperation with the FBI, that sent Maher Arar to be tortured in Syria, and it took a full public inquiry to get to the bottom of the lies and stonewalling engaged in by our police force, bureaucrats and politicians. The Liberals were in power when Arar and several other Canadians of Arab descent suffered similar, if less serious, ordeals. These people include Abousfian Abdelrazik, a Canadian citizen who travelled back to his native Sudan, was accused of having ties to terrorism, and spent years living at the Canadian embassy because our government would not allow him to come home. Eventually, in 2008 a Federal Court judge ordered Abdelrazik returned within 30 days, saying that the government had breached his constitutional rights by not giving him an emergency passport to fly home.

The list goes on. Adil Charkaoui, a Morrocan-born Canadian, was arrested by the Canadian government in 2003 under a security certificate, which prohibited him or his lawyers from examining evidence used to issue that certificate. He was detained without charge or trial but later released from prison. His bail conditions included a curfew and electronic monitoring and 24-hour police access to his home without warrant. The Supreme Court eventually ruled that his charter rights had been violated and he was ordered released from his curfew and electronic monitoring.

War without end

When Canada went to war in 1914 and in 1939, the enemy was clearly defined as Germany and Austria-Hungary in the first case, and Germany, Italy and eventually Japan in the second. Our government issued Draconian wartime measures, including conscription and the internment of Japanese and other citizens. Now we are in a war not against states but against shadowy sub-state actors and it is quite possibly a war without end.

We have been in Afghanistan almost eight years, a period longer than our engagement in either of the world wars, and we are not planning to leave until 2011, if then. Our government even refuses to tell us the cost of the war, citing national security reasons. But an estimate provided in 2008 by the independent budget officer for parliament concluded that the total cost would be between $14 and $18 billion by the planned withdrawal in 2011. To put that in context, the entire budget of the province of Saskatchewan for 2009-10 was $10.2 billion.

Our complicity with torture in Afghanistan is unsavoury at best and contravenes international conventions. Toronto Star columnist Thomas Walkom says the Afghan prisoner scandal, at bottom, is about who Canadians are. “Are we the kind of people who don’t care when people are tortured? Or are we the kind of people who do?” It is entirely possible that our government and its agencies will become even more cynical, manipulative and authoritarian. It’s something for citizens to think about and to oppose. We Canadians talk glibly about our democracy as if it were a perfect system set in place for all time. That is not necessarily the case.

By Dennis Gruending

Although I have attended Remembrance Day ceremonies at the National War Memorial in Ottawa in the past, I decided this year to support a smaller event whose theme was peace and reconciliation rather than war. On November 10th, I was one of about 300 people who heard an agonizingly sad but ultimately hopeful speech by Dr. Izzeldin Abuelaish. He is a Palestinian paediatric physician and peace advocate whose house in Gaza was struck by Israeli tank shell on January 16, 2009.

Abuelaish, a widower, was home on that day with his eight children and other family members and was scheduled to give an interview on Israeli television via cell phone. A shell fired from a tank killed three of his daughters, aged 14, 15 and 21, along with a 17-year-old niece. Shada, another daughter, and a second niece were injured. The journalist who called moments after the attack found the doctor sobbing inconsolably. “My girls, O God, They are dead,” he said and pleaded for help. The video clip was broadcast around the world. Abuelaish and his family became the face of the human suffering of Palestinians in Gaza. A ceasefire was declared two days later.

The New York Times describes Abuelaish as “a rarity, a Gazan at home among Israelis.” He told his Ottawa audience that he practiced medicine in both Gaza and Israel and that he has delivered as many Jewish babies as Palestinian ones. His tragedy has not deflected him from the path of peace and reconciliation. “I am Muslim but we have to go beyond that to think about humanity and what brings us, Muslims and Jews, together,” he told his Ottawa audience. “I believe that God is good and even tragedy is good. I assure you I am looking forward. I believe that everything is possible other than having my daughters back.”

Ed Broadbent, former leader of the New Democratic Party and a human rights campaigner, was the evening’s moderator. “As a Canadian, a father and grandfather,” Broadbent said to Abuelaish, “it is almost impossible for me to conceive of losing these children as you have lost your daughters.” Broadbent then said to the audience: “It would be easier to understand if Dr. Abuelaish came through that with dreams of vengeance. He continues to reach out to those who might be considered his enemies but he does not see them as such.” Abuelaish was nominated for the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to bring peace between Israelis and Palestinians.

He was in Ottawa as the guest of Potlucks for Peace, a group of about 30 Jewish and Arab people who gather monthly to share food and talk about peace in the Middle East. The group’s members do not always agree on solutions – whether, for example, there should be one state or two states in the region, or whether Israeli settlements pushed into the Palestinian West Bank are justified in the name of security. I have, at previous of their events, sensed tensions over the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands on the one hand, and anxiety about Israeli security on the other. The potluck group appears to hold it all together through mutual respect and discipline. “We believe that out of the willingness to engage in dialogue, solutions can arise,” the group says on its website. “We hope that our very existence sends a positive message.”

Abuelaish’s story has a Canadian twist. He had been invited to the University of Toronto for a three-year medical residency and was making plans to move his eight children to Canada when his home in Gaza was shelled and his three daughters killed. Abuelaish did come to Toronto in March 2009. His 17-year-old daughter, who was injured in the attack, spent four months in hospital and is now studying computer engineering in Canada.

Abuelaish draws many of his peace analogies from his practice of medicine. “As a physician, I am not allowed ever to give up hope on a patient. We must act and we must forgive each other,” he said. “No one is perfect. We make mistakes. Forgiveness allows us to move forward.” He also said: “As a doctor, I know that hatred is a toxin. The path of light in the long run is the more efficient choice than to live with hate and be consumed with revenge”

He is an inspirational speaker in the best sense, but his response to questions indicates that he is not a politician or diplomat and is unlikely to be one those negotiating land for peace or the future of Israeli settlements. When asked during the question period if he is in favour of an economic boycott of Israel similar to that against South Africa in years past, he did not answer that question but spoke about his high hopes for peace initiatives driven by the Obama administration. Asked whether he favours a one state or a two-state solution for the region, he said the question was theoretical and fell back on a medical metaphor. “Survival is most important at the moment. The first action is to stabilize the patient. One state or two states is theoretical. There is a Palestinian nation and an Israeli nation and they must live together in peace.”

I did not attend the Remembrance Day ceremony at the National War Memorial but I watched it on television. It is always moving to see the veterans but less so the fly bys, march bys and the firing of canons. As I watched and heard the television commentary, it was all about us: our freedom, our sacrifice, our families and our heroes. Even the armed forces chaplain who spoke could invoke God’s caring and sympathy only for us. In this ceremony, there was no compassion for the other – the bride and groom and their guests in an Afghan wedding procession, for example, who were bombed to bits in 2008 by an air strike called in by NATO soldiers. No one on Remembrance Day recalls the deadly mess of war that remains for others to clean up after the troops have withdrawn – the unexploded land mines, the buildings and fields in ruins, the shrapnel embedded in flesh and the body burns from white phosphorous.

Potlucks for Peace and Dr. Abuelaish attempt to reach across a divide of fear and hatred to acknowledge and embrace the other. Our officially planned and sanctioned Remembrance Day ceremonies do not.

By Dennis Gruending

Canada’s long gun registry could soon be scrapped thanks to a vote on a Private Member’s Bill that passed in the House of Commons on November 4th. Candice Hoeppner, a Conservative MP from Manitoba, introduced it with the blessing of the prime minister, who sees it as a timely wedge issue to shore up his base, mainly in rural and northern areas. The bill will now go to a committee for further consideration and it will have to come back before the House for another vote, as well as passing in the Senate prior to becoming law. It is ironic, to say the least, that this vote occurred just a few weeks prior to the 20th anniversary of the December 6th Montreal massacre, when Marc Lepine mowed down 14 young women at Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal with a semi-automatic weapon. Although this bill will not touch the ban on handguns, it will, if it becomes law, eliminate the requirement to register the type of people-hunting firearm that Lepine used in 1989. It was that gruesome killing which prompted the then-Liberal government of Jean Chretien to pass the Firearms Act in 1995, requiring gun owners to obtain permits and to register their guns. The act did not prevent people from owning and using rifles and shotguns, but they were legally bound to register them.

Supporters, including Canada’s police chiefs, believe the registry is a valuable tool for preventing gun violence, often arising from criminal activity and domestic disputes. Some people can be denied ownership of a gun if they have a record of instability or violence. With a registry, police arriving on the scene of disturbances can find, by running a computer check, if there are registered firearms at the address. In fact, death and injury from firearms have declined by over 40% in Canada during the era of stronger gun laws. The Conservatives opposed the registry vociferously in opposition. In government, they have refused to enforce the registry’s provisions and are now poised to get rid of it altogether.

Opposition to the original registry was centred in the Reform Party led by Preston Manning and among fellow travellers in gun, wildlife and hunting lobbies. Manning was able to turn the issue to his advantage. The registry’s implementation went badly, a saga that involved large cost overruns and expensive computer software that didn’t work – but that wasn’t the main reason for the opposition. As with many issues in the culture wars, the gun registry became a proxy for something much larger.

Guns in the trenches

I have considerable experience in the trenches on the guns issue. I was a candidate in four federal elections in mixed urban-rural constituencies in Saskatchewan and the gun registry featured in every one of those campaigns. In 1997, I was a candidate in Saskatoon-Humboldt, the area where I was born and raised. One day I was campaigning in a small town that was clearly suffering from the rural economic crisis. The rail line had been removed and the two tall grain elevators at the head of Main Street were being dismantled.  The town’s business buildings were shabby and much of the housing stock was run down. I came upon a man who was backing his truck out of a driveway. He recognized me and said that he knew my sister. “I haven’t got much time,” he said. “I just want to know one thing. What is your position on gun control?” I asked him if that issue was more important to him in an election than the fact that his town had lost its rail line and its grain elevator. “You bet it is,” he said. I lost that election by 221 votes to the Reform Party candidate.

I have asked myself many times since why people would base their vote on something that has little or nothing to do with their personal well-being and that actually makes their communities more prone to gun violence. Then in 2004, I read a book that provided a good part of the answer. It’s called What’s The Matter with Kansas and was written by Thomas Frank. He says that Kansas has changed. In the early 1900s it was a hotbed of agrarian radicalism. People took on the banks and the railroads and the business and political Establishments who they believed were ripping them off. In this way it was very much like Saskatchewan in the same era, and at least a bit like the Saskatchewan in which I grew up. In Kansas today, the rich vote Republican as they always did, but they are not nearly such fervent supporters of arch-conservatism as are farmers, elements of the middle class and even the poor. How can this be? Frank says these people are angry. They are in backlash mode. And who are they angry with? Not with greedy bankers or industrialists or right wing politicians who lie to them in every election.

Frank writes: “The backlash mobilizes voters with explosive social issues – summoning public outrage over everything from busing to un-Christian art – which it them marries to pro-business economic policies. Cultural anger is marshalled to achieve economic ends. And is these economic achievements – not the forgettable skirmishes of the never-ending cultural wars – that are the movement’s greatest monuments.”

I found this analysis instructive about Saskatchewan. There was a lot of anger among the gun crowd aimed at what they called big government — and the firearms registry was a new government program. These people said they were good, law-abiding citizens and that the government was treating them like criminals. There was anger at bureaucrats, at liberals and anger directed against big city dwellers. The people most opposed to the gun registry were generally from towns, smaller cities, and rural areas. The people most in favour were from larger cities like Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver. The people against the gun registry did not want a bunch of city slickers telling them what to do. Some also feared that the government wanted information about their guns so that it could take them away, and then do bad things to them. They said they had the right to have guns to protect themselves and their loved ones, a ludicrous argument that sounded as though it may have been imported from a Montana militia.

There was another sombre overtone here. The Reform Party made good mileage in the West by being anti-Quebec and the party also contained anti-feminist elements. My experience in four election campaigns was that you got nowhere with people opposed to the gun registry if you said that the Montreal massacre was a reason why firearms should be registered. That argument left them cold. There was rarely, if ever, any acknowledgement or sympathy expressed for Marc Lepine’s victims.

Guns a symbolic issue

To summarize, the gun registry issue became a symbolic issue, even a metaphorical one. This was no accident because the Canadian right, borrowing from the National Rifle Association and the gun lobby in the United States, framed the debate. They constantly talked about “gun control” by a big, bad government — but the issue was really about registering firearms, and if you had no criminal record or record of violence or instability you could register your gun. We register cars, boats, mortgages, even bicycles and dogs. What is so sinister about registering firearms?  The right coined the phrase “gun control” and many of us fell into the trap of using their language. When you do that, as American linguist George Lakoff tells us, you have lost the debate.

Lakoff also describes how political conservatives in the United States made a conscious decision in the 1970s to spend the money to build an intellectual culture for the right. For example, wealthy people financed think tanks and set up professorships and scholarships at many universities, including Harvard. “These institutions have done their job very well,” Lakoff says. The right deliberately transformed the language of American politics and in Canada the right has borrowed techniques and language on guns and a range of other issues.

Safe communities

The Conservatives talk constantly about safe communities, but what they mostly mean is locking people up. How can they, in good conscience, believe that our communities are safer with unregistered guns, and presumably more of them? This position is simply bankrupt and immoral. A nurturing vision of a safe community is one where women, children and men do not have to fear gun violence, or any other violence. We want to keep our families safe so let’s have fewer guns around, and if we are to have them let’s certify and register them.