Rose's Place

Out of the many many published accounts of Canada's newest domestic terrorism case, two appear to have disappeared down the memory hole.Last night the Globe and Mail published a story on authorities apprehending the child of the so-called fourth terror suspect, Awso Peshdary. He's the one who was arrested Friday and interrogated for six hours, released, and immediately re-arrested on domestic assault charges dating back to April as a result of police having bugged his house for the last six months. That G&M story read :Authorities seize child of man targeted in terror probe The six-month-old … [Read more...]

Remember that guy who was busted at G20 in June for having all his worldly possessions strapped to the roof of his car? Not even a protester, he was in Toronto to get a car window fixed. Two months later CBC reports he is still in freaking jail!The original G&M booga booga headline : "Police arrest man with arsenal of weapons near G20 zone", with a police officer at the scene calling it "pretty scary stuff", was already downgraded to "nothing to do with G20" by police a few hours later.But by then they had already freaked about his possessions - tools, an axe, a baseball bat, a sledgehammer, … [Read more...]

Last October, RCMP Commissioner William Elliott addressed a meeting of security intelligence peeps about Canada's current terrorism environment :"As far as Al-Qaeda is concerned, Canada is the enemy.We recall Osama Bin Laden’s famous communiqué to America’s allies in November of 2002, in which he asked: “Why are your governments, especially those of Britain, France, Italy, Canada, Germany and Australia, allying themselves with America in its attacks on us in Afghanistan? This is injustice. The time has come to settle accounts. Just as you kill, so you shall be killed; just as you bomb, so … [Read more...]

The publication ban on Project Samosa, the RCMP's latest salvo in the war on terror, has the media scrambling to get unnamed sources and security experts to augment and substitute for accounts of court proceedings. By a happy coincidence for war on terror fans, this allows for far more pants-pissingly terrorfying conjecture than mere straight news would allow.So far, "sources" have told one security expert, an ex-RCMP and CSIS operative quoted at CTV, that the accused :1) "would have targeted the Parliament buildings and Montreal's public transit system with bombs",2) "that the ringleader went … [Read more...]

A pretty frank discussion on how globalization has facilitated the revolving door between governments, think tanks, the military, arms manufacturers, media conglomerates, lobby groups, and international financial institutions and corporations to build transnational networks. Good guest spots by Christopher Hitchens.The top 1% of the world's richest own 40% of the planet's global wealth and the top 10% control 85% of its wealth. The top 10 corporations generate 60% of the revenues and employ 59% of the workforce overseas.One of the panelists is David Rothkopf, Bill Clinton's Deputy Undersecretary … [Read more...]

Soldiers from the Stryker infantry brigade also allegedly covered up those executions - in one case planting an AK-47 beside the body - and threatened anyone who dared to report them.No, not WikiLeaks this time.It's an internal US military investigation as reported in The Seattle Times :Stryker soldiers allegedly plotted to kill Afghan civilians..Randomly. War crimes. And not really very surprising.But what struck me in the account was this detail about one of those charged who was already suffering from "traumatic brain injury sustained in four separate explosions" :"To help him remain in Afghanistan, … [Read more...]

Dimitri Soudas, yesterday : "Two CF-18 fighter jets were scrambled to intercept Russian bombers that came within 55 kilometres of Canada’s Arctic territory, just as Prime Minister Stephen Harper prepares to make a high-profile visit to the region."Oh noes ... Steve in danger ... Last year it was Obama who was in danger : "On the eve of Barack Obama's visit to Ottawa, a Russian jet approached Canada's Arctic air space and had to be turned away by Canadian warplanes, Defence Minister Peter MacKay said Friday at a news conference on Parliament Hill.Two of Canada's CF-18 fighter jets were scrambled … [Read more...]

Another brilliant vid from Pale at A Creative Revolution , featuring the smooth but fuzzy blue sweater vocalizations of Reverend Paperboy from the Maple Syrup Revolution and the Beav. … [Read more...]

Paul Wells today on the bogus “academic” argument against Insite and the muzzling of RCMP's attempts to fix their earlier support of it."The only “research” the Harper government is prepared to rely on, as it fights Insite all the way to the Supreme Court, was not research; was secretly bought and paid for with federal tax dollars; contradicts the actual research; has been disowned internally by the police force that bankrolled it; and would have been disowned publicly by that police force if somebody at the RCMP’s highest ranks or outside it hadn’t put the kibosh on."In December RCMP … [Read more...]

Part One : Paul Jay interviews constitutional/criminal lawyer Clayton Ruby, who is defending satirist Charlie Veitch, the second person charged at G20 under the Public Works Protection Act. Because that act was amended in secret just for the G20, there was no way for the public to know how to obey it. Part Two : So do we have the right to protest, to peaceful assembly, at events like G20?Yes. Unfortunately, we have no effective way of enforcing that right. Hence, as Ruby says : "Beware the coming police state." . … [Read more...]

The August edition of Time magazine published a shocking cover picture of a young Afghan woman who had her ears and nose cut off, accompanied by the title : ‘What Happens if We Leave Afghanistan’.The story, Afghan Women and the Return of the Taliban, begins :The Taliban pounded on the door just before midnight, demanding that Aisha, 18, be punished for running away from her husband's house. They dragged her to a mountain clearing near her village in the southern Afghan province of Uruzgan, ignoring her protests that her in-laws had been abusive ... Her judge, a local Taliban commander, was … [Read more...]

Remember that two year Environment Committee study on the tarsands that was ultimately shredded because the four parties at the table couldn't agree on the wording of the witnesses' testimony? The Lib members of that committee have now released their own report on the testimony and as Andrew Nikiforuk reports at The Tyee, it is "scathing".~ Athabasca River is being polluted~12 barrels of freshwater required to produce one barrel of crude~world's largest man-made dams contain 170 square kilometres of toxic mining waste and they're leaking~steam plants could affect aquifers over an area the size … [Read more...]

The fired, the dismissed, the muzzled, the smeared, the set up, the forced out - the ones who spoke up and lost their jobs, the ones we know about :Cathie900ft JesusNext on the chopping block, according to Lawrence Martin at the G&M today, may be CRTC Chair Konrad von Finckenstein for not rubberstamping KoryMedia Fox News North's request for a Category 1 licence last month, which would require cable companies to include Fox News North as part of a basic cable package. Finckenstein's vice-chair has already been booted.On March 30, 2009, Stephen Harper, Kory Teneycke, Rupert Murdoch, owner of … [Read more...]

Norwegian freelance film maker and journalist Paul Refsdal embedded with Taliban fighters. He is later kidnapped by one of them for six days and released after he converts to Islam, the same deal offered to christians in the crusades nearly a thousand years ago.. … [Read more...]

“They don’t bother us. It’s just that they are annoying,”a "senior Conservative official" told the G&M's Dear Jane this morning about the public's uproar in reaction to the Cons' scrapping of the compulsory long-form census."Census freedom," this same anonymous Conbot amusingly called it.Apparently we the public are "annoying" to Steve now.And not just the Lib/NDP/Green/I-don't-fucking-vote-for-any-of-those-bastards public either.Not even Con voters support Steve's "Après moi, le déluge" style of government.According to Angus Reid, only 31% of people who voted Con last time "side … [Read more...]

Boris has already eviscerated Public Safety Minister Vic Toews performance on CBC, with a link to a good post by EFL also, but I was more appalled by the choice of questions CBC put to him.490 out of the 80,000 Tamils languishing in camps in Sri Lanka made it to Canada after three months at sea and here are the questions Rosemary Barton put to Toews, after an initial mention of possible terrorism :Australia managed to turn back this boat, and in our case we weren't able to turn back this vessel. Why can't we not do that?Shouldn't we be able to turn back ships before they get into Canadian waters?Are … [Read more...]

Gaza flotilla video mashup. Lyrics.. … [Read more...]

A whale will typically repeat the same phrase over and over again for about two to four minutes.Of course it doesn't sound like ridiculous bullshit when a whale does it..Harper : "The economy remains the No. 1 priority for Canadians. That is why the economy is also the No. 1 priority for our government. And it is why all spring and summer, ministers and government MPs have been tightly focused on our economy.".Well, that and whaling away on the very foundations of what we call Canada. Apart from that..(h/t waterbaby for the "new" census link). … [Read more...]

Four "Rethink Alberta" billboards in Denver, Portland, Seattle and Minneapolis proclaim the "Alberta Tar Sands Oil Disaster" is worse than the Gulf Oil Spill Disaster :There's also a vid:Alberta Preme Ed Stelmach is pledging $268,000 to mount a public relations offensive against the ads and has settled on a most unusual strategy :"Of 350 million Americans — 330 million of them probably don't even know where Alberta is," the premier said. "Let's not ramp this up too much because that's the kind of exposure the group wants."Of course not all of that $268,000 in public tax money is going to be spent … [Read more...]

Colombian ex-Pres Alvaro Uribe has been appointed Vice Chair to the U.N.’s four-member international committee investigating the Israeli commando attack on the Gaza Freedom Flotilla in which nine people were killed in international waters. The other three members are an Israeli, a Turk, and a former president of New Zealand.Interesting choice. Colombia is the US cats paw in South America in the same way Israel is in the Mid East.On the plus side : Uribe has lots of previous experience with false positives , the practice of murdering innocents and then dressing them up as enemies of the state … [Read more...]