Seeing the forest instead of the trees

One more comment on the Vancouver Three.
Some commenters on POGGE's good post -- Peace, order and good government, eh?: Turnabout is fair play -- as well as some of the other Emery posts around the blogosphere, as well as various editorials here and there are, in my opinion, getting all tangled up among the trees. People are arguing about how maybe Emery deserves it and whose laws were being broken anyway and how if we want the US to listen to us we have to respond to them, and how illegal is it really and maybe pot isn't so bad but after all...
Here is the forest:
For the sake of principle, morality and sovereignty, Canada should not be sending three of its own citizens, one of whom is a political leader, to spend a decade or more in a maximum security prison in the United States for breaking a law which Canada itself thinks is so trivial we cannot be bothered enforcing it.

Back to the future

Sort of pathetic, isn't it, how much things have changed in the US.
The President wants creationism taught in the schools.
The Vice-President doesn't want Congress to pass legislation banning torture of prisoners.
A US Senator talks about how the Supreme Court decision which legalized birth control was wrongly decided, because states should be able to pass whatever laws they want.
Most dangerous of all, Americans may well be on the verge of losing their right to privacy.
Today, John Roberts got nationwide publicity just because he isn't prejudiced against gay people. Is being prejudiced against some of your fellow citizens now considered a desireable trait in someone being considered for the Supreme Court? Maybe so.
But Liberal Oasis looks today at a more important qualification -- whether Roberts would overturn Supreme Court decisions giving people the right to privacy. I guess the argument against privacy goes that because their Bill of Rights doesn't specifically SAY that government should not intrude on personal decisions or private behaviour, therefore governments should be able to interfere with personal decisions any way they want -- make birth control illegal, arrest people for sodomy, prevent women from having abortions, deny people the right to die, and so on and so on.
LO writes

We already found out last week that John Roberts believes there are “judicial excesses embodied in Roe v. Wade” and that Roe is an example of “unprincipled jurisprudence.” And now we just learned that Roberts refers to the constitutional right to privacy as the “so-called ‘right to privacy’.” Everyone knows what one intends to convey when one adds the “so-called” moniker: that whatever follows “so-called” is bunk.

These guys don't want to just go back to the 60s, before abortion was legal, or back to the 50s, when beating prisoners was OK -- they want to go back to the 1920s, when birth control was illegal and or back to the 1860s, before Darwin ever postulated evolution.
Back to those good old days before that awful Civil War, when everything was just so perfect.

There's no one like Raeside

One of the things we miss about Victoria is not seeing Raeside's cartoons every day.

The Sgt Schultz Defense

To my surprise, Arianna Huffington and the Huffington Post are rapidly becoming daily 'must reads' for me. The news judgment shown in the Post articles, and Huffington's own writing, are both pretty impressive.
Here's her latest -- The New Know-Nothings:

There's an old saying that when the facts are against you, argue the law. But the Bushies have gone one better: when the facts are against them, they argue the very existence of facts. As pretty much every fact has turned against the administration in Iraq, the fallback position has increasingly become: well, who can really know anything? Everything is so complex. You've got Sunnis, you've got Shiites, you've got Kurds...the truth is...well, the truth is that we can't know the truth...so how can we be held accountable when nothing is really knowable? . . . while Rumsfeld and his chums claim that nothing concrete is really knowable, they are -- somehow -- sure that we are winning. It's just that any fact or statistic that might disprove this assertion is dismissed as invalid in a complex, postmodern world. But if you set all facts aside, you will be totally certain that we're making progress. Looking back, it's fascinating how sure they were back when they were lying about WMD. Then it was all about solid facts, and aluminum tubes, and Tenet saying "slam dunk" and Cheney saying "no doubt." But now that all that has vanished, so too, it seems, has our ability to know anything about anything. Bush claims he's going back to his ranch after his presidency, but perhaps a Distinguished Chair in Postmodernist Theory at an Ivy League university might be more appropriate. Maybe it'll happen. Who can really know?

I hadn't realized it before, but she is absolutely correct -- this Sgt Schultz "we know nothing, NOTHING" defense is the new Bush administration talking-point party line spin about Iraq.
And of course the great thing about the Sgt Schultz Defense is that you can apply it to just about everything, from Karl Rove ("who can know if a law was really broken?") to creationism ("who can know if evolution is actually the right theory?") to the Supreme Court ("who can know what cases they might be asked to decide in the future?") They may have finally found the all-purpose defense they need for all the Bush administration screw-ups.

Great line of the day

The Poorman writes a brilliant post titled In reverse, which describes Bush's attempts to turn back the clock, and concludes with Bush's recent endorsement of teaching creationism instead of actual science. Poorman says "The silver lining is that school is going to be a lot less stressful when the answer to every question on the midterm is "because it is God's will." So there is that. "

Emery support blog

I cross-posted the Vancouver Three post at Kos and commenters led me to a petition and support blog.
Marc Emery is a Political Prisoner is a petition from a Dalhousie law school graduate Jason Cherniak, who has also been on the Young Liberals executive and so may have a little more Ottawa influence than your average 20-something. At least, I hope so.
To send a message to Justice minister Irwin Cotler, go to the Justice Canada website here.
To find the address for your MP, click here.
UPDATE: From the Comments, here is the Petition

Defend the Vancouver Three

Canadian anger is going to increase.
I heard the beginning yesterday, when a local radio talk show host here expressed concern about Canadian sovereignty with the Emery case. Today, a lawyer wrote a column in the Globe also raising the sovereignty issue.
The basic question for Canadians is this: why should Canada send the Vancouver Three -- Mark Emery, Greg Williams and Michelle Rainey-Fenkarek, all Canadian citizens -- to serve at least ten years in prison in the States for a so-called crime which has not even been prosecuted here for the last 37 years? It is a betrayal of both Canadian sovereignty and Canadian citizens if the Canadian government allows this to happen.
Now, to focus on the basic question, some irrelevant arguments have to be cleared out of the way.
First, Canada cannot accept the prosecutorial fiction that they are just being extradited for a trial.
They will be found guilty because they ARE guilty. US prosecutors will have no problem proving to the satisfaction of a Seattle jury that they have been selling seeds, and I don't think jury nullification is a realistic expectation.
Second, Canada must realize that each of the Vancouver Three will serve at least a decade in a US prison, maybe twice that.
The mandatory minimum sentence for each of the two marijuana charges in the States is 10 years. A mandatory minimum sentence means the same thing in the US as it does in Canada -- neither a prosecutor nor a judge has any discretion. So there is no way that our Justice minister could accept any US prosecutor's assurance that they would not be sentenced to at least 10 years in prison, perhaps twice that.
And third, Canada must understand that this is a political prosecution.
Canoe quotes Kirk Tousaw, the Marijuana party's campaign manager, saying "Virtually all the money from the seed sales went into political activism in Canada and the U.S. That's exactly what drew the ire of the Drug Enforcement Administration. There are many seed sellers in the U.S. and Canada. You see Marc Emery being targeted because he's a political activist, the leader of a political party. It should shock the conscious of all Canadians that he would be deported to face unjust penalties in the U.S. for something that in Canada he wouldn't even get jail time for." The Globe quotes John Conroy, Emery's lawyer -- "Far from being a marijuana mogul, Mr. Conroy argued, his client is largely a political activist who lives hand to mouth . . . Mr. Conroy argued that his client has openly sold his seeds for years in Canada with no interference from authorities here. 'Here we have a situation where they turn a blind eye locally, and now they're in a position of assisting the U.S. to try to have him extradited to the U.S., where the penalties are substantially greater than here,' Mr. Conroy said."
Sending the Vancouver Three to the United States means we are sending them to prison in the US until at least 2016. This is just wrong -- I would call it, in itself, a criminal act.
If Canadian prosecutors want to charge them under our own law and see if they can be convicted here, go ahead.
If US prosecutors want to charge Americans who purchased Emery's seeds, go ahead.
But it is cowardly and immoral for Canada to send the Vancouver Three to prison in the United States.

"Canadians - have you no heart?"

Once again, it sounds like our immigration service has kept out of the country some people who need our help desperately and who would make a great contribution to the country!
Sorry, I don't mean to sound so cynical and critical, because I know Canada's immigration service does better than many other countries in the world. But still, we need to do more, and do it better. I was shocked at the cavelier approach to tragedy attributed in this story to our immigration officials.
NYT columnist Nicholas Kristof has written a two-part column: Another Face of Terror and A Pakistani Rape, and a Pakistani Love Story, the story of the rape of Dr. Shazia Khalid and her rejection by her country when she sought justice rather than killing herself. To save her life she escaped Pakistan, with her husband but without her son: "Pakistani officials put Dr. Shazia and Mr. Khalid on a plane to London, without their son. As soon as they arrived, Dr. Shazia inquired about asylum in Canada, where she has relatives and friends. But a Canadian bureaucrat rejected the asylum application on the ground that they were now safe in Britain. (Come on, Canadians - have you no heart?) Dr. Shazia and Mr. Khalid are now living in a one-room dive in a bad neighborhood in London, while applying for asylum in Britain."
Kristof concludes his column by telling his readers what they can do to help. " Since they are lonely and isolated in London, but have friends and relatives in Canada, the single thing that would help the most is if Canada reconsidered its refusal to grant them asylum. You can suggest that by writing to Joseph Volpe, Minister of Citizenship and Immigration, Ottawa, Ontario K1A 1L1, Canada. You can send e-mail to Minister@cic.gc.ca. If Canada gives Dr. Shazia asylum, this love story can still end well; otherwise, I'm afraid it'll be one more tragedy."
We should open our doors to this woman and her family.

Using chemical weapons in Iraq

POGGE has linked to this story -- Blacklist bootlick: Feds' barring of Iraqi doc speaking on Fallujah massacre has made-In-USA feel -- noting that Canada refused to give this doctor a visa, perhaps because he is critical of the War in Iraq.
I wanted to focus on a different aspect. The story says that "Though [Iraqi doctor Salam Ismael] can't prove it, he believes many of the injuries he saw were consistent with an attack with chemical weapons."
I pulled together evidence from several news stories and photo websites on this question. The US confirmed in August, 2003 that they were using an upgraded version of napalm against military positions during the Iraq invasion. And if you can bring yourself to do it, look at the horrific photos on this website showing unidentified victims in Falluja, whose photos were taken apparently so that they might be identified. I don't know who could identify even their own child from photos like these, where bodies are blackened, flesh burned away, limbs missing, faces obliterated -- some of these bodies do look like chemical warfare victims. If everyone left in Fallujah last November was considered to be an insurgent, then I guess it would have been possible for the military to consider all of Fallujah as a military target where chemical warfare is apparently permitted under their rules of engagement.

Bolton the Boor's first slapdown, UN style

The words of UN diplomacy are quietly spoken, subtle, and quite lethal.
Kofi Annan, as quoted in the AP story Bush names Bolton to UN, has already slapped Bolton down in just 32 polite words.
The story says "UN Secretary General Kofi Annan welcomed Bolton's appointment and steered clear of the controversy over whether Bolton would be weakened by the recess appointment. 'We look forward to working with him as I do with the other 190 ambassadors, and we will welcome him at a time when we are in the midst of major reform,' Annan said."
Yeah. Here's the actual message from Annan to Bolton:

Listen up, fella. You may think you are going to bluster and bombast your way into the UN and start telling everyone what to do. Think again, Einstein. You are just one of our 190 members, and ajunior one at that, and don't you forget it. Don't you start thinking that you are more important than anyone else. And as for that "UN reform" you think you will be in charge of, forget it -- we're already doing it, and we don't need any of your bullying. Running down the hall screaming isn't going to faze us, buddy.

I thought it was unlikely that either Bolton the Boor or his rabid supporters would even realize they have just been insulted and marginalized. But I note that a different AP story shows the reporters understood Annan's words quite clearly -- Annan: Bolton Must Cooperate with Envoys.

And another great line

Here's another great line this week, in James Wolcott's Let the Recriminations Begin. Discussing Pat Buchanan's piece about how the US is pulling out of Iraq, Wolcott describes the piece this way: "Buchanan, hearing the bustle of mice scurrying at the Pentagon, [says] we're moonwalking to the exits."

Great line of the day

In describing why the dishonest neocon foreign policy approach is worse than the Realpolitik approach, Digby writes: "It makes me miss Kissinger. At least he didn't sing kumbaya while he was fucking over the wogs."

Compare and contrast

Are they talking about the same guy?
The Seattle Times AP story makes Mark Emery into a criminal master mind: "Prince of Pot" Canadian marijuana activist arrested on U.S. indictment:

A Canadian marijuana activist known as 'The Prince of Pot' was arrested today in Canada on a U.S. indictment targeting his alleged multimillion-dollar marijuana seed business. Marc Emery, 47, of Vancouver, B.C, is charged with conspiracy to launder money and distribute marijuana and marijuana seeds, the U.S. attorney's office said. Conviction on the charges would carry a sentence of at least 10 years in prison. Emery claims to make $3 million a year from selling marijuana seeds online and by mail, along with equipment for grow operations and instructions on raising pot plants, authorities said . . . Prosecutors say three-fourths of Emery's seeds are sent to the United States and have been linked to illegal cultivation operations in Indiana, Florida, California, Tennessee, Montana, Virginia, Michigan, New Jersey and North Dakota.

The Vancouver Sun story, on the other hand, emphasizes the Canadian perspective, and the unproven nature of the charges: Uncle Sam orchestrates Vancouver pot busts:

Pot advocate Marc Emery was arrested Friday in Halifax after his marijuana-seed shipping business on Hastings Street was shut down by police as part of a sweeping investigation instigated by U.S. authorities. Vancouver police raided Emery's multi-million-dollar business on a request from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), while angry protesters gathered outside chanting "Go home USA." Emery, 47, referred to as "The Prince of Pot" on the search warrant, was arrested by the RCMP and police in Halifax. He is charged in the U.S. with several drug-related charges, including conspiring to distribute marijuana seeds and launder money . . . about 25 chanting protesters banged on makeshift drums outside. Two American flags were hung upside-down on a nearby fence. "This is a place where people could pull out a joint and not have to fear being reported to the police, and that was okay with Canadians," said David Malmo-Levine, who was one of the four protesters later arrested. "It's really an attack on our sovereignty." The search was requested by the U.S. government through the Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters Act, a federal law administered by the Department of Justice. The warrant was authorized Thursday in B.C.'s Supreme Court, based on an affidavit provided by a Vancouver police officer. U.S. authorities say the warrant was the result of an 18-month investigation of Emery's international seed-selling business. The investigation involved about 38 DEA offices across the U.S. and allegedly linked marijuana seeds sold by Emery to indoor grow operations in several states, including New Jersey, Michigan and Florida. Jeff Sullivan, assistant U.S. attorney, alleged Friday during a news conference that more than 75 per cent of the seeds sold by Emery were sold to people in the U.S., and Emery was making about $3 million a year selling seeds and marijuana-growing equipment.

Note, in particular, how the US paper says it is Emery who claims to make $3 million a year, while the Canadian paper clarifies that this is just what the US Attorney alleges. The Sun notes the protests as well, which the Seattle paper, like other American papers, does not.

What would make Hans Island Canadian?

By Cam Cardow, Ottawa Citizen

Gonzo in the silly season

Here's what passes for hard-hitting investigative journalism during the summer silly season - PM's travels paid for by taxpayers. The boondogle of Paul Martin's recent jaunt to Timmins is fearlessly exposed by the Globe and Mail. And reporter Gloria Galloway is shocked - SHOCKED! - that Paul Martin isn't even embarassed about such a horrendous and inappropriate waste. She writes "And he admits without hesitation that his travel was paid for by the taxpayers of Canada."
The story notes that Jack Layton and Stephen Harper have been travelling this summer too. Layton's tour "has been financed by his party and by using the limited travel points that are alloted [to MPs.] Other expenses have come out of MPs' office budgets" while Harper, says the article "has made extensive use of a party-funded minibus". So it sure sounds to me like taxpayers are funding at least a portion of their expenses too, though the article tries its best to bury this information through the use of obscure terminology for taxpayer's money ('travel points' and 'office budgets').
Basically, just another gonzo story.