It's not easy being a Canadian spook. Canadians are such nice, sucky people that our spies can't play the kind of no-holds-barred hardball that's needed to save us from the scumbags. This is the really big story that jumps out from the most recent WikiLeaks mega-leak.

Seems that one day in 2008, then-CSIS chief Jim Judd was schmoozing with a State Department official named Elliot Cohen. Mr. Cohen, who took notes, was no ordinary faceless bureaucrat. He's a high-profile neo-con who had been among the first of his species to publicly advocate war against Iraq and Iran too. Like so many idealistic neo-cons, there was virtually no limit to the amount of death and destruction he was prepared to contemplate to realize those ideals.

My heart was breaking this morning reading the report on Omar Khadr's decision to fire his lawyers in protest over the horrors he is being subject to in what he considers to be a rigged trial. "He is a young man who has lost all faith in the process," said Dennis Edney, one of his Canadian lawyers. And no wonder. Tortured as a teenager, imprisoned without conviction for years, the sole remaining prisoner in the disgraced Guantanamo Bay prison camp, and still there even after the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that his rights were violated.