U.S. Threat To Ahmadinejad

The U.S. media is creating a storm of sturm and drang about the Iranian Presidents visit to the U.S. and his debate at Columbia.

Turning Ahmadinejad into Public Enemy No. 1
Demonizing the Iranian president and making his visit to New York seem controversial is all part of the neoconservative push for yet another war.

There was joy in mudville when NYC cops, NY Port Authority and firemen rejected his attempt to place a wreath from the Iranian people at the WTC memorial. Though they probably would have objected to former mayor and Republican Presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani doing it as well, something the media did not point out in there stories.

Mr. Ahmadinejad (whose government is, according to the State Department, one of the world's leading state sponsors of terror) was rebuffed in his attempt to visit "Ground Zero," where the World Trade Center towers were destroyed on September 11. That decision was certainly appropriate. While a New York City Police Department spokesman tersely cited "security reasons" for rebuffing Mr. Ahmadinejad, the real reason why he is being kept away is the eminently justified moral outrage of the American public. To permit a man whose government funnels hundreds of millions of dollars annually to Hezbollah and Hamas, who is providing weapons to Iraqi Shi'ite militias and Sunni insurgents that are being used to kill and maim American soldiers; who has given refuge to al Qaeda terrorists; and who is funneling weapons to the Taliban in Afghanistan to visit Ground Zero would be an obscenity. This would be spitting on the graves of thousands of innocents murdered six years ago by the jihadists who are Mr. Ahmadinejad's ideological soulmates.

It seems they seem to have confused Iran with Saudi Arabia. None of the hijackers were Iranian. They were Saudi's, whom the U.S. still maintains as a bulwark Sunni State against Iran and the Iraqi Shia. And al-Qaeda has not been linked to Iran except in the imaginations and wishful thinking of the American right.

They deliberately overlook the fact that the Iranian people mourned with America after 9/11.

As part of the day of mourning, people everywhere observed minutes of silence. In Iran, 60,000 stood silently in Tehran Soccer Stadium, honouring a country their leaders have called The Great Satan.

That the U.S. media and the White House rejected even this symbolic overture shows just how intolerant and stupid they are. At least some conservative pundits got it but of course they were on liberal PBS.

As John McLaughlin took pains to point out it is not up to local cops, municipal service employees, or even state governments to determine international protocol that is a federal government responsibility one Bush shoved off onto New Yorkers.

He asks pointedly what right thinking states rights conservative would allow such a violation of that much honoured principle of American federalism. Should the case be reversed they would be outraged.

Further the disinformation machine of the American empire has been working overtime attempting to paint Iran as America's next big enemy. Even on the eve of the Iranian Presidents visit to the UN the U.S. military makes sure Iran stays in the headlines.

US Military Says Iranian Officer Under Arrest in Northern Iraq

Iran smuggling missiles into Iraq: US military

Afghan weapons came from Iran, US general says

The media and right wing pundits have further painted Ahmadinejad as a Hitler and a Madman. Terms that dehumanize him and of course make him a target of American wrath and loathing.

Protests against Ahmadinejad's visit to New York began even before the Iranian president had landed.

A group of about 40 elected officials and civic leaders gathered on Sunday outside Columbia University, where Ahmadinejad was scheduled to speak on Monday.

Some carried placards with slogans such as "Don't give a platform to hate" and "Go to hell" while denouncing Ahmadinejad as a "Hitler wannabe" and a Holocaust denier.

"There is no excuse to invite this madman, this little Hitler," Dov Hikind, a New York state assemblyman, said.

Something they can't do with Osama bin Laden the real object of their hate, because, well he ain't addressing the U.N. and they can't find him.

The worry here, and I think it is a serious one, should be; how secure is President Ahmadinejad in visiting New York?

By dehumanizing Ahmadinejad and making him the target of their wrath, he becomes an actual target when he lands on American soil today.

With all the right wing gun toting nut bars in the U.S. who have a penchant for assassination of presidents, rock stars, mass shootings in schools, workplaces, restaurants, and bombing of government buildings, I think there is a potential threat to the President of Iran.

With the jingoist media and right wing pundits and bloggers whipping up hysteria about his visit it leaves an opening for a self righteous self deluded nut to try and take him out. After all it happened to both Kennedy's and this is New York where Lennon was killed.

America is not a secure nation. It is a country of gun nuts. And many of those gun nuts have a simplistic right wing ideology; America right or wrong. And they believe America has the right to attack its enemies, and they believe a preemptive strike is self defense.

If some nut would take out his classmates for his feeling isolated on campus, what chance is there some fan of Fred Thompson or Joe Lieberman or heck even Glen Beck might decide to eliminate the world of this threat to America.

From their comments and those of their ilk they would probably applaud such an act.

The White House has set up all the conditions for war with Iran, the assassination or attempted assassination of Ahmadinejad would assure them of that wish.

Iranophobia hits Ground Zero
By Kaveh L Afrasiabi

In the run-up to Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad's visit to the United Nations in New York next week, the Iran-bashing sentiment in the US media has escalated to new, unprecedented levels, with presidential hopefuls such as former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani and the former governor of Massachusetts, Mitt Romney, adding fuel to the fire with their increasingly incendiary rhetoric against Iran.

Thus, whereas Romney has written to the UN requesting
Ahmadinejad's arrest on arriving on US soil, citing the Geneva Conventions, Giuliani has used his European tour to second the warmongering sentiment of French leaders, promising to set Iran back "five to 10 years" if it refuses to comply with demands that it suspend uranium-enrichment activities.

And as for the US media, in their seemingly stiff competition on who will win the Iran-bashing trophy, New York's Daily News was the winner, with its full-front-page photo of Ahmadinejad circled in red with the accompanying write-up that he should "go to hell" for daring to request a visit to the former site of the World Trade Center's Twin Towers in New York known as Ground Zero. [1] Another New York daily, Newsday, has been equally venomous, referring to Ahmadinejad as a "madman".


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Truth A Casualty of War

Could this be the reason

Tuesday also marks the sixth anniversary of the worst terror attacks on U.S soil, giving the administration an opportunity to link present-day al-Qaida extremists in Iraq with Sept. 11 mastermind Osama bin Laden.

For this

The idea that the Bush administration participated in the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks is not limited to fringe Web sites and conspiracy theorists, according to a poll commissioned by a Web site that promotes alternative explanations for the events of Sept. 11. The poll, conducted by Zogby International for 911Truth.org and released last week, found that 31 percent of Americans do not accept the official explanation for Sept. 11 -- that "19 Arab fundamentalists executed a surprise attack which caught U.S. intelligence and military forces off guard." Among that 31 percent, around 26 percent agreed that the American government "knew the attacks were coming but consciously let them proceed for various political, military, and economic motives." Almost 5 percent believed that U.S. officials "actively planned or assisted some aspects of the attack."

Given the White House lies equating their long planned assault on Iraq as their post 9/11 response, equating Saddam with bin Laden, lies about WMD, etc. etc. Ended up being an excuse to leave their war on Al Qaeda in Afghanistan to head off to Baghdad. The result was that gave Al Qaeda clones another front to fight them on.

Given that why wouldn't you believe in a conspiracy. After all there was one, just not the one that 9/11 Truth would have us believe.

America has a long history of Conspiracy theories in politics.

See:

Ron Paul

Saddam and the CIA

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Bin Laden Transcript

Bin Laden Inc. takes on the American Empire.(transcript)

This is why I tell you: as you liberated yourselves before from the slavery of monks, kings, and feudalism, you should liberate yourselves from the deception, shackles and attrition of the capitalist system.

If you were to ponder it well, you would find that in the end, it is a system harsher and fiercer than your systems in the Middle Ages. The capitalist system seeks to turn the entire world into a fiefdom of the major corporations under the label of “globalization” in order to protect democracy.

And Iraq and Afghanistan and their tragedies; and the reeling of many of you under the burden of interest-related debts, insane taxes and real estate mortgages; global warming and its woes; and the abject poverty and tragic hunger in Africa: all of this is but one side of the grim face of this global system.

So it is imperative that you free yourselves from all of that and search for an alternative, upright methodology in which it is not the business of any class of humanity to lay down its own laws to its own advantage at the expense of the other classes as is the case with you, since the essence of man-made positive laws is that they serve the interests of those with the capital and thus make the rich richer and the poor poorer.

The infallible methodology is the methodology of Allah, the Most High, who created the heavens and earth and created the Creation and is the Most Kind and All-Informed and the Knower of the souls ofHis slaves and the methodology that best suits them.

It is asymmetrical Imperialism versus the new Imperium. The modern manichiest duality. Bin Laden Inc. is a Muslim engineering, security and banking corporation in competition for regional hegemony with USA Inc. and it's partner's Halliburton and Bechtel. Not to be confused with the family business back in Saudi Arabia.

The Saudi Binladin Group is not liable for the Sept. 11 attacks, attorneys for the multinational engineering firm maintain, because it made Osama bin Laden surrender his stake in the company 14 years ago. Responding in federal court to lawsuits over the attacks, the lawyers wrote that in 1993, the terrorist mastermind was forced out as a shareholder in two companies his family owns.

A judge had ordered Saudi Binladin Group in July to provide additional information about where the money for Osama bin Laden's 2 percent stake in the company went.

Osama bin Laden in lecturing America sounds like Ben Bernake, lecturing on the financial impacts of the housing crisis, and the coming recession. And well he should he is the scion of the largest telecommunications and engineering family in Saudi Arabia. He is a self made man. Not unlike Donald Trump.

His anti-capitalism in the transcript is a medievalist reaction, he is one of many new prophets claiming to be the Mahdi, and he is using the Wahhabist base that is the Saudi state religion.

The Sept. 11 Commission concluded that the Sudanese government took Osama bin Laden's assets when he left Sudan in 1996.

"He left Sudan with practically nothing," the commission concluded.

"When bin Laden arrived in Afghanistan, he relied on the Taliban until he was able to reinvigorate his fundraising efforts by drawing on ties to wealthy Saudi individuals that he had established during the Afghan war in the 1980s."

Before Osama bin Laden, it might be argued, there was the Mahdi. Over 120 years ago, a messianic leader united the tribes of the Sudan in a bloody revolt against their Turkish-Egyptian masters. Proclaiming that Islam had been corrupted and defiled by "foreigners," this Islamic warrior declared a jihad against the "outsiders."

Although not alike in all significant respects--the Mahdi, for example, came from humble origins, whereas bin Laden is the scion of a Saudi billionaire--the desert warrior and the peripatetic leader of al Qaeda show some striking similarities. There is a shared connection with Sudan, from which bin Laden was expelled in 1996. Both men tangled militarily with the major power of their eras. Both believed themselves to be directed by Allah to lead a holy war, to eradicate the corrupting influence of the West from Muslim lands and, in the process, spread Islam.

The Islamic Traditions of Wahhabism and Salafiyya

And he knows how to use the media to get out his message, hence he has gained weight, changed his beard, is dressed well.

He is a businessman lecturing to his peers. He is not yet dead, nor captured the war on terror so far has been a failure, just like Iraq. This is what his spectacular appearance says.

In any case, it may be that the point of terror is not merely to disrupt spectacle by producing indigestible images, but to exceed it. Retort highlight the paradox of the vanguard Islamic revolutionaries, who deny themselves all that capitalist spectacle has to offer, and harden themselves against mundane sentiment and appetite, yet who still hold to the effectiveness of the image, and propagate images of their acts through websites.

His is not class war but global inter-Imperialist rivalry. America is in the way of his war against the current ruling classes in the Middle East. Always was.

Retort argue that the result of the spectacular defeat of 9-11 has been to push the state into actions that are as much governed by spectacle as by material considerations. Warfare has been elevated from an intermittent action to permanent imperial conflict. They claim that one frequently repeated charge of the anti-war movement "that the war was fought for oil" when taken too simply, ignores the "partially non-factual imperatives of capital accumulation." These include the effort to repair spectacle, and the drive to normalize war in the minds of citizens.

SEE:

Osama bin Laden Republican


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Osama bin Laden Republican

Osama promises that under Islamic rule, you'd be free of the Tax Man forever. "There are no taxes in Islam," he says in the much anticipated new tape, "only a limited Zakaat (alms) totaling 2.5 percent."

Wait a minute that still is a tax.




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After Katrina

George W. Bush failed to be on site in New York immediately after 9/11. He failed again when Katrina devastated New Orleans.

On September 14, 2001 he cruised over WTC site in a helicopter, shades of flying over New Orleans, and does his famous photo-op with the Firemen at Ground Zero.

==Around mid-afternoon on Friday, Bush finally appears in New York City with a large Congressional delegation and takes a quick helicopter tour of the devastated area with Mayor Giuliani and Governor Pataki as warplanes fly overhead. Afterwards, Bush visits Ground Zero, where he engages in a rare impromptu exchange with a crowd. As rescue personnel chant “U.S.A! U.S.A.!,” Bush climbs atop a small pile of rubble and uses a bullhorn to thank them for their efforts. When some workers call out that they can’t hear, Bush responds "I can hear you! I can hear you! The rest of the world hears you, and the people who knocked these buildings down will hear all of us soon!" The crowd reacts with cheers and more chants of “U.S.A.!” Workers at Ground Zero are clearly encouraged by Bush’s visit, but there is also annoyance over the two hour shutdown of rescue work caused by the extremely tight security measures. [nyt.Sep.14.2001 / cnn.Sep.14.2001 / dmn.Sep.15.2001]

After talking to state officials and emergency teams in New York, the president flew to Camp David for what a senior US official called a "decision-making meeting" later on Saturday with top advisors.

September 14: President Bush declares a national emergency. The Senate adopts a resolution authorizing the use of U.S. armed forces against those responsible for the attacks. President Bush visits the World Trade Center site. Federal officials release names of the 19 hijackers. Bush declares a "national day of prayer and remembrance." Many Americans attend religious services. Congress unanimously approves $40 billion for emergency aid, including $20 billion for New York. President Bush activates 50,000 national guard and reserve members to help with recovery and security.

After Katrina he failed to visit New Orleans until the anniversary of 9/11. Weeks after the hurricane hit. And then it was for another photo op like 9/11.

NEW ORLEANS, Louisiana (CNN) Sunday, September 11, 2005;

-- President Bush arrived in Louisiana Sunday as the official death toll from Hurricane Katrina climbed past 400 and the search for bodies continued nearly two weeks after the storm hit the Gulf Coast.

The visit is Bush's third to the region but his first chance to get a first-hand look at the streets of New Orleans, which were flooded after levees protecting the low-lying city broke.

Two days after the storm hit, Bush surveyed Katrina's destruction from Air Force One on his way back to Washington from Crawford, Texas, where he'd spent a month's vacation. He visited other parts of the region in two subsequent visits.

He was on vacation prior to Katrina as he was prior to 9/11.

“News coverage has pointedly stressed that W.'s month-long stay at his ranch in Crawford is the longest presidential vacation in 32 years. Washington Post supercomputers calculated that if you add up all his weekends at Camp David, layovers at Kennebunkport and assorted to-ing and fro-ing, W. will have spent 42 percent of his presidency ‘at vacation spots or en route.’” Charles Krauthammer, “A Vacation Bush Deserves,” The Washington Post, August 10, 2001.

Yesterday he commemorated his regimes failure to support the people of New Orleans then and now. And as usual there was no mea culpa.

President Bush and other officials observed the second anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, honoring the dead and touring still ruined neighborhoods.

However the real scandal is not that he arrived late after Hurricane Katrina, but that after two years the City has not been rebuilt, funds have been squandered.

A recent report from the RFK Center for Human Rights and the Institute for Southern Studies estimated that the Bush administration was overstating federal funding for the Gulf Coast rebuilding campaign by as much as 300%, with about $35 billion of an estimated $114 billion actually spent.

With America's largest black city and thousands of blacks stranded in the immediate aftermath of the storm the failure to rescue them smacked of racism.

That the federal government has utterly failed in these lethal days is universally obvious.

Is it because so many of these people are black and poor? Is it because Bush has successfully stolen a second term and just doesn't care? Is it because this gouged and battered organization that was once our government has been so thoroughly exhausted by war and corruption that it cannot or will not manage so basic a task as bringing the necessities of life to its needlessly dying citizens?

But to hear of dead bodies being stacked outside a professional football stadium to avoid further stench where ten thousand Americans can't get water, food or sanitary facilities.To see dazed elders who've just lost their homes or hospital rooms being laid on sidewalks to die. To watch crying children stretched out on the ground, separated from their parents, dehydrated, overheated, starving....this is too much to bear.

How utterly can our nation have failed? How totally bankrupt can we be?

And the guy in charge of all this who should have been fired; Homeland Security boss Chertoff, wasn't.

Congressional investigators lambasted the U.S. government for its response to Hurricane Katrina, saying a lack of a clear chain of command hindered relief efforts and that Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff or another top official should have been the point person on relief efforts.

The Government Accountability Office also found that the government still lacks sufficient plans and training programs to prepare for catastrophic disasters like the Aug. 29 storm that devastated much of the Gulf Coast area. But it also singled out Chertoff in several shortcomings.

Until now, Chertoff has largely escaped widespread criticism of the government's sluggish response to Katrina. By contrast, then-FEMA Director Michael Brown, the principal federal official at the disaster site, quit his job after becoming the public face of the failures.

The report said that neither Chertoff nor any of his deputies in the disaster area acted as President George W. Bush's overall storm coordinator, "which serves to underscore the immaturity of and weaknesses relating to the current national response framework."

After all Katrina was not a surprise to the administration since they had anticipated it.

Before 9/11 the Federal Emergency Management Agency listed the three most likely catastrophic disasters facing America: a terrorist attack on New York, a major earthquake in San Francisco and a hurricane strike on New Orleans. "The New Orleans hurricane scenario," The Houston Chronicle wrote in December 2001, "may be the deadliest of all."

Some critics are suggesting President Bush was as least partly responsible for the flooding in New Orleans. In a widely quoted opinion piece, former Clinton aide Sidney Blumenthal says that "the damage wrought by the hurricane may not entirely be the result of an act of nature," and cites years of reduced funding for federal flood-control projects around New Orleans.

Our fact-checking confirms that Bush indeed cut funding for projects specifically designed to strengthen levees. Indeed, local officials had been complaining about that for years.

And with a lame duck President and an administration running on the spot nothing has changed. The failures that led to the destruction of New Orleans plague the White House still.

When investigating the bungled response to Hurricane Katrina, a House of Representatives select committee cited a “failure of initiative” at all levels of government. The storm killed 1,836 people, caused an estimated $81 billion in damage, and displaced some two million people. The population of New Orleans is currently about 66 percent of its pre-Katrina level, and the city’s uneven recovery is examined in depth in this New York Times interactive feature. The Department of Homeland Security has since quadrupled its stockpiles of emergency supplies and sought to improve emergency planning at the community level. The 9/11 Commission Recommendations Act signed by President Bush in August promises to provide increased funding for emergency communications and first responders. Yet some experts believe the lessons of the disaster appear to have gone unlearned. In his recent book, The Edge of Disaster, CFR’s Stephen Flynn says the levees that failed to protect New Orleans two years ago are being rebuilt to the same standard as before, capable only of enduring a Category 3 hurricane.

Now compare Bush's slow response to President Johnson's visit to hurricane ravaged New Orleans after Hurricane Betsy. And a visit to the same lower ninth ward that Bush visited yesterday.

Lyndon Johnson received high marks for visiting the Lower Ninth Ward and victims in shelters a day after Hurricane Betsy ravaged New Orleans. ("I put aside all the problems on my desk to come to Louisiana as soon as I could," Johnson said.)

President Lyndon Baines Johnson flew into New Orleans the day after Hurricane Betsy in September 1965 and announced at the airport, "I am here because I want to see with my own eyes what the unhappy alliance of wind and water have done to this land and people."

The day after. Not a week later.

LBJ believed in the 'Great Society'. Bush believes in 'compassionate conservatism'. The latter is an ideological reaction to the former. And it has proven to be more of a failure than the Great Society ever was.


SEE:

Our Living Earth

Surge Blackout

What He Didn't Say

Soul of a City

Remember Katrina and Rita?

Katrina Mission Accomplished

Katrina: It's a Dog-Gone Crime

This is What Global Warming Looks Like

A Paradox called Katrina

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No Fly List

Will Maher Arar be on Canada's new No Fly List? After all he still is on the American one.

Once again the State implements a bad idea that is more about invading your privacy then providing public security.

No-fly list curbs privacy rights: commissioner'

Quite a nightmare' ahead for some; Stoddart

Ms. Stoddart said cases of mistaken identify are likely to occur, which means innocent travellers will experience "the rather chilling fact of finding yourself singled out."

She also expressed dismay at comments by a Transport Canada official who told the Air India inquiry this week that Canada cannot keep the new no-fly list out of the hands of foreign governments.

"I'm surprised to read about this," she said. "It doesn't sound as if it's completely well thought out."

She said Transport Canada officials had stressed how "small and precise" the no-fly list would be. "I'm a bit puzzled that now we seem to be fairly unconcerned about the way it is implemented and the fact that it could be widely disseminated."

Though people on the no-fly list can appeal to an "Office of Reconsideration," Ms. Stoddart said that's not sufficient. "It's better than nothing, but I don't think it's an adequate approach."

She said Transport Canada has yet to provide her office with any evidence that implementing a no-fly list will actually improve air safety.

Since when has Transport Canada become an arm of CSIS and the RCMP? If it is a new policing arm of the State, shouldn't it be under the Minister of Public Security.

Considering how badly they have botched Port and Airport security since 9/11 their No Fly List will turn into another paranoid security state Keystone Kops caper.

We might expect a Supreme court challenge over this, but unfortunately that program has been cut by the Harpocrites.

Canada’s No-fly List Provides False Sense of Security

“Nothing personal sir, but your packages are not allowed on passenger airlines,” said a United Parcel Service customer service agent, sitting in an American call centre. She was explaining to me that my package could not be delivered on an “early a.m.” basis from Toronto to Peterborough.

I was interrogating the agent about why this was so, since I had been using UPS without any problems since starting my practice in 1996. Initially reluctant, the agent eventually confessed that when my account number was entered into their system, the “Flight Guardian” software flashed a red signal.

“Sir,” she said, “after 9/11 we can only pick up packages if the green light is given.”

The next day I called the UPS head office and inquired about the situation. The supervisor apologized and informed me that I could use the expedited service within Canada, but that I did not have the requisite clearance to use this service to the U.S.

We will never know how many Canadians have been so specially designated on more than a dozen lists maintained by the United States. The proliferation of these watch lists around the globe has been a troubling development in the “war on terror.”

Now the Canadian government will complicate the situation even more by introducing its own no-fly list (set to be launched on June 18, 2007), which will inevitably be shaped by, and be available to, the Americans and perhaps even others.

And lets not forget that the American No Fly List is relatively useless as proven by the recent case of an American quarantined for being a TB carrier. But of course he was allowed back into the United States because despite being on a No Fly List he was White, Middle Class and male the very model of what is an American.

TB case has plenty of blame

The case involves a globe-trotting American man, with a rare form of tuberculosis, who traveled in May from the United States to France, to Greece, onto Italy, over to the Czech Republic, back west to Canada and finally home to the United States, despite health warnings he never should have left in the first place.

Though warned, Atlanta attorney Andrew Speaker was never ordered not to travel. So off he went to his nuptials and to take a wedding trip in Europe. While in Europe, he was advised that officials now realized he had a virulent strain of TB, and again, he was warned by U.S. authorities not to travel further.

But travel, he did. He flew back across the Atlantic Ocean to Canada, drove back into the United States through an official crossing, even though U.S. Border Patrol agents had been given his name on a no-fly list.

See:

State Security Is A Secure State

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Free Kadhar

The 'liberal humanist' government of Stephen Harper denounces China for holding a Canadian citizen incommunicado, without access by Canadian Embassy staff, for the use of torture, forced confession, illegal arrest and show trial. His crime is to be a Muslim who is accused of terrorism.

Yet when the US of A does it well that's okay.

US can deal with terror suspects without flouting its own laws

The facade of due process and respect for international law that United States President George W. Bush has tried to attach to the treatment of prisoners held in Guantanamo Bay slipped again this week.

The decision by a military judge to dismiss all charges against Omar Khadr will be a slight embarrassment for the Bush administration, since it was based on what appears to be a flaw in the law written specifically to prosecute prisoners held on the American base in Cuba. But it will make little difference to Khadr, at least in the short term. The 20-year-old Canadian has been held for the past five years in Guantanamo after being captured in Afghanistan where, at the age of 15, he allegedly killed an American soldier and wounded another with a grenade.

Before Khadr's trial began this week, a Bush administration spokesman made it clear that even if he were to be acquitted by the military tribunal, he would most likely continue to be held as enemy combatant for as long as the war on terror goes on.

In this case, although he was captured in combat in a country that had been invaded by the United States and its allies, Khadr was not considered to be a prisoner of war. Nor was he arrested for murder under either the laws of Afghanistan, where the death occurred, or the U.S.

Instead the administration made up its own rules, which allow prisoners to held indefinitely without charge, to be tortured -- humanely, of course --to be shipped around the world and to be denied basic legal protections given to the worst criminals in the U.S.

The Canadian Government,regardless of it's political ideology, is expected to defend it's citizens or the party in power has no right to govern if it fails it's citizens.

In this case the whole of Parliament, all the parties that make up the State, have failed to do their duty to defend an underage Canadian citizen who has been illegally confined by the Americans. No questions were raised in the House of Commons this week by any opposition party. And while their silence was deafening that of the Government roared disinterest.

While it is easy to see why Canadian politicians and officials don't want to touch the Khadr case with a barge pole, their silence has been seen by some as an unconscionable endorsement of an increasingly suspect U.S. policy.

This is particularly the case considering the very public complaints that have come from Canadian officials -- including the prime minister -- about China's treatment of terrorist suspect Huseyin Celil, a Canadian-Chinese citizen arrested while he was travelling in Asia on a Canadian passport.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper was right to take China to task over the Celil case. But he should have been just as forceful with the American government on Khadr.

Harper ignores citizen's right to due process

Canada still mute as Guantanamo circus continues

It is true that Khadr is no model citizen, coming from a family whose father raised his children to be warriors for jihad.

It is also true that everyone, no matter their guilt or innocence, deserves a fair hearing in a legitimate court of due process.

When that fails to occur for a Canadian citizen in a foreign land, it is imperative that the Canadian government stand up for that citizen's right to a proper trial.

Stephen Harper understands this, repeatedly criticizing China for its shady handling of Canadian citizen Huseyin Celil, recently sentenced in secret to life in prison on questionable terrorism-related charges.

Harper carries a much different line on Khadr. Not wanting to offend his war-on-terror pal George W. Bush, Harper and his government -- much like the previous Liberal regime -- remains silent on the Khadr matter.

The opposition parties aren't much better, apparently fearing that support for Khadr's right to a fair trial may be portrayed as being "soft of terrorism."

Liberal deputy leader Michael Ignatieff and NDP MP Joe Comartin briefly broke the silence this week by demanding the Harper regime get more involved in Khadr's file.

Here is a Law and Order government that refuses to defend it's own citizens and one who is 'underage', a mere child when he was kidnapped by the U.S. Government.

There we have it the Americans have imprisoned a Canadian underage child, kidnapping him, denying him the right to a fair trial,the very basis of common law broken, violated. Now one would think that those who profess to uphold moral virtues as politics would publicly abhor these actions.

Especially our Conservative Government which has made an issue out of both increasing the age of consent from 14 to 16 and to decreasing the age for which felonious crimes can be charged. They are so concerned with the rights of children unless of course it is Omar Kadhar.

Instead they acquiesce to the American State, and it's right post 9/11, to become a fascist state.

Report: 39 Secretly Imprisoned by US

An alliance of human rights groups has determined the U.S. is secretly detaining 39 terror suspects. Names of the so-called "ghost detainees" were published in a report released Thursday.

Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and four other groups, agreed on the list which was compiled from interviews with former prisoners and officials in the U.S., Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Yemen.

"What we're asking is where are these 39 people now, and what's happened to them since they 'disappeared'?" Joanne Mariner of Human Rights Watch said in a statement.

Factbox: secret CIA prisons in Europe

Bush to arrive in Rome during 'CIA rendition' trial

SEE:

State Sponsored Terrorism

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