Despite being granted bail, Wikileaks founder and editor Julian Assange remains imprisoned in London, awaiting extradition proceedings to answer a prosecutor's questions in Sweden. He hasn't been formally charged with any crime. His lawyers have heard that a grand jury in the United States has been secretly empanelled, and that a U.S. federal indictment is most likely forthcoming.
Politicians and commentators, meanwhile, have been repeatedly calling for Assange to be killed.
For those considering issue triage -- picking five or six issues to focus on -- in the fight to rid the country of the current government, one area that is critical to the outcome is exposing the Harper government's construction of the national security state.
I am referring here to the commitment of the Harper government to implementing policies that increase the importance of a war-fighting military in Canadian society, its preoccupation with tough-on-crime legislation, its blank cheque for security operations like the one "protecting" the G20 Summit in June and its continued efforts to convince Canadians that they face the constant risk of terrorist attack.
About a week ago, Public Safety Minister Vic Toews overruled a decision made by the warden of Millhaven Institution, also known as Guantanamo North, and refused an interview request by the Canadian Press to speak with Omar Khadr over the phone.
This refusal was justified by the Minister's office because of security concerns.
I am still trying to figure out how speaking on the phone from a maximum security prison can pose a threat to Canadians. Does it insinuate that Khadr will speak in encrypted messages to the journalist and to some shadowy accomplices? Or does it mean the interview poses a threat to the intelligence of people?
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Most couples sitting in courtrooms are there for separation and divorce proceedings. Not so Sophie and Mohamed (Moe) Harkat, who have spent years in court because they desperately wish to stay together. The Ottawa couple have spent the past decade resisting with all their might the attempt to make their marriage a threesome by a secretive party who, in a manner that most relationship counsellors would mark as a major red flag moment, refuses to be open and honest, all the while it questions the authenticity of the Harkats' love for one another.
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Ahmad Daud Maqsudi is an Afghan refugee who's been declared "inadmissible" to this country for involvement in an organization that has been supported by Canada and the CIA. Ironically, that same organization is nonetheless viewed as threatening by Ottawa because of its alleged role of "engaging in or instigating the subversion by force of any government."
A United States Congressional committee is worried that the Chinese may be using telecommunications firms to steal U.S. secrets -- and those members of Congress would know, because there's no one better at it than the U.S. government itself.
Remember back in 2000 when then-Chinese president Jiang Zemin, ignoring protests at home, paid U.S.-based Boeing $120 million for a 767 passenger jet to serve as China's version of Air Force One?
According to Time, when the plane was delivered to him, Chinese authorities found 27 surveillance devices secretly installed throughout the president’s plane. The Americans had put bugs above President Zemin's bed and even in his bathroom.
While Omar Khadr returned from Guantanamo Bay this fall, another abandoned Canadian will shortly mark 11 years behind bars, much of that time in an Indiana hellhole known as Little Guantanamo and Gitmo in the Heartland. The case involves classic hallmarks of a national security system riven with physical and psychological torture: death threats, forced confessions leading to apparently trumped-up allegations, lengthy periods of solitary confinement, indefinite detention and the complicity of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.
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Canada has long held the unique status of being a nation that puts its secret police on postcards, T-shirts and tacky tourist trinkets. During the 1990s, that same police force also entered a five-year licensing agreement with the creators of Mickey Mouse and Daffy Duck at Walt Disney, "in response to the popularity of unlicensed products and concerns that these products were having a detrimental effect on the RCMP's reputation."
Two weeks ago, Hollywood liberal and all-around gorgeous good guy George Clooney hosted a glad-handing fundraising event that, according to the Patriot Act's broad provisions, should have landed him and fellow attendees Billy Crystal, Barbra Streisand, Tobey Maguire, and Robert Downey, Jr., behind bars for violating broadly designed material support for terrorism laws.
