It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way (K.Marx, Letter to F.Engels on the Indian Mutiny)
Saturday, August 06, 2022
Pro-golfers dirty themselves by taking blood money from Saudi Arabia
LIV Golf is a scam that’s entirely financed by the brutish family of petro-royals who ruthlessly rule Saudi Arabia
Jim Hightower / August 4, 2022 / The new Saudi-financed LIV Golf series has been fraught with controversy.
Photo courtesy Front Office Sports.
When a golfer hits an errant shot that might bonk an unsuspecting spectator on the head, the proper cry of warning is: “Fore!” But what do they shout when they hit a bad shot that boomerangs right back and bonks the golfer on the noggin?
In the polite world of golf—where there’s a rule of etiquette to cover every contingency—this boomerang shot has rarely if ever occurred, so there’s been no need for a clubhouse dictum to govern proper warning shout. Until now. This spring, a small group of professional golfers—led by former Big Name superstars Greg Norman and Phil Mickelson—decided to turn the game that has made them fabulously rich into an unsporting game of SleazeBall.
They say they want to set up an independent series of global tournaments, called LIV Golf, to compete with the PGA, the Professional Golfers Association. Fine—at its best, pro sports should be about top-quality, honest competition. But there’s the rub: The LIV series is not honest, not a sporting competition and not even about golf. It is entirely about money—more specifically about callous greed.
Indeed, LIV Golf is a scam that’s entirely financed by the brutish family of petro-royals who ruthlessly rule Saudi Arabia. The family’s grotesque abuse of the kingdom’s own citizens has made the oil-rich regime a global pariah. Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince who is the mastermind behind this multimillion-dollar golfing scheme, is the same fellow who ordered Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi murdered in 2018. But simply killing Khashoggi wasn’t enough. The prince had him cut into small pieces, packed in suitcases and tossed away. Now, his golf gambit is a blatant case of “sportswashing”—he is spending obscene sums of his family’s oil loot to buy the marquee names of a few dozen recognizable golfers to concoct a sports spectacle, in hopes of distracting attention from his government’s depravity. Hitler tried this by staging the 1936 Olympics in Nazi Germany, but it didn’t wash.
Likewise, the Saudi golf association won’t wash off the regime’s indelible ugliness. But—Fore!—it will boomerang on the money-grubbing golfers selling their once-good names to it. If you sell out your personal integrity in a vain attempt to give a patina of integrity to some notorious scoundrels, what have you gained?
Depends on your sellout price, chortle the ethically stunted professional golfers who’ve peddled both their honor and honesty to the murderous, moneyed monarchs. The golfing elites madly rushed to grab money thrown at their feet by the royal kingdom in a crude PR ploy that’s meant to buff up its public image by making them seem like generous benefactors bringing sports to the masses. Of course, a golf tournament needs golfers, but the Saudis had none of note, so they simply bought a batch. Right away, former stars Phil Mickelson and Greg Norman signed away their integrity to join, taking at least $200 million apiece. Then Dustin Johnson and Bryson DeChambeau took $150 million each from Team Saudi, and the likes of Brooks Koepka, Sergio Garcia and others quicky scrambled to get theirs.
Worse than the golfers’ unsightly money grubbing, however, is their insufferable dishonesty, trying to whitewash their taking of what is literally blood money. Mickelson faked moral outrage at the Kingdom’s rulers, gingerly calling them “less-than-savory individuals” and piously proclaiming that he did not condone “human rights violations.” But he certainly has condoned (and cashed) the checks written to him by the violators.
But Greg Norman, the former pro who led recruitment of golfer talent for the Saudis, offered the most pathetic moral excuse for selling out to such a villainous kingdom. Asked how he could link arms with a potentate so barbarous as to have had a critic of the regime murdered and chopped into pieces, Norman said: “Look, we’ve all made mistakes.”
There’s a word that describes what these golfing multimillionaires are doing: “Disgusting.” The good news is that most pros—including bigger-name stars like Tiger Woods, Rory McIlroy and Justin Thomas—have some values that they refuse to trade for dollars.
Eli Lilly Says Indiana Abortion Law Forces Hiring Out-of-State
Ian Fisher, Bloomberg News
(Bloomberg) -- Eli Lilly & Co., one of Indiana’s largest employers, said the state’s freshly passed restrictions on abortion would force the drug maker to “plan for more employment growth outside our home state.”
A growing list of companies, including Citigroup Inc., Apple Inc., Bumble Inc. and Levi Strauss & Co., are offering benefits for reproductive-care services in states that have imposed restrictions. But Indianapolis-based Eli Lilly’s announcement marks a swift escalation by a multinational that employs 10,000 people in Indiana, where the drug maker was founded in 1876.
Indiana on Friday became the first US state to pass anti-abortion legislation since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade. About a dozen other states had so-called “trigger laws” pre-approved by legislatures to go into effect in the event that Roe was struck down.
Lilly recognizes “that abortion is a divisive and deeply personal issue with no clear consensus among the citizens of Indiana,” the company said in a statement Saturday. “Despite this lack of agreement, Indiana has opted to quickly adopt one of the most restrictive anti-abortion laws in the United States.”
“We are concerned that this law will hinder Lilly’s -- and Indiana’s -- ability to attract diverse scientific, engineering and business talent from around the world,” according to the statement. “Given this new law, we will be forced to plan for more employment growth outside our home state.”
Eli Lilly reported $6.5 billion in second-quarter revenue and employs more 37,000 people worldwide.
Indiana’s abortion ban goes into effect on Sept. 15 with some exceptions, including in cases of rape or incest and to protect the mother’s life or physical health.
White House spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre called the Indiana legislature’s decision “devastating.”
“It’s another radical step by Republican legislators to take away women’s reproductive rights and freedom, and put personal health care decisions in the hands of politicians rather than women and their doctors,” she said in a statement.
Polls consistently show a majority of Americans support abortion rights, and some Republican Party strategists are urging less restrictive local laws amid signs of voter backlash. Voters in Kansas, a state won by Donald Trump by nearly 15 percentage points in 2020, rejected amending the state constitution to allow the state legislature to restrict abortion.
President Joe Biden’s Democrats, facing voter anger over inflation, are seeking to put abortion at the center of difficult midterm elections this fall.
"Help me get out”: Ahmad Manasra appeals to the world from solitary confinement
Ahmad Manasra's childhood was stolen from him by Israeli military courts. His life mirrors those of thousands of Palestinian children who have been targeted by Israel since birth.
The 20-year-old boy’s access to an Arabic-speaking psychiatrist is a major development, offering a ray of hope for Manasra, whose mental well-being has continued to deteriorate at the behest of the Israeli Prison Services (IPS) and judicial courts.
According to psychiatric doctors from the Palestinian Global Mental Health Network (PGMHN), Manasra was communicative and displayed hope at the mobilization calling for his release. “Help me, help me get out of here, because I am being driven insane,” Manasra reportedly told the doctors.
Beyond these entreaties, and despite having faced the trials and difficulties of solitary confinement and torture, Manasra also made a point to extend his thanks and gratitude to all those that have continued to advocate for his release, his psychiatric team shared with Mondoweiss.
On August 6, Manasra, whose entire teenage years were spent in prison under abusive conditions, is scheduled to have another court hearing, where his defense team persists in demanding for his release. International outcry to save a tortured child
Since March of this year, the PGMHN launched a campaign demanding the release of Manasra. The campaign garnered world-wide support and momentum with almost half a million signatories.
Yet despite these appeals to safeguard Manasra’s precarious mental health and prospects for a healthy future, Israeli authorities have been adamant in refusing the appeals to remove Manasra from high security isolation, which he has been kept under since last year.
Moreover, in June of this year, the Israeli Parole Board denied Manasra early release despite evidence of the harm that solitary confinement and imprisonment has caused to his health. Manasra has only 2.5 years left on the sentence he received when he was merely 14 years old in 2015.
“It’s quite telling that in order to rile people up for Ahmad Manasra we have to create a campaign and that’s such a high effort…It tells you how normalized oppression and the ‘un-childing’ of Palestinian children has become. It shouldn’t be this normal.”Mohammad El-Kurd
“It shouldn’t take a village to rally for Ahmad Manasra,” Mohammad El-Kurd, a writer and journalist from Jerusalem told Mondoweiss.
Indeed, Manasra’s case has long ceased to be an issue of one child and family, becoming a blatant testament of the extent to which state-sponsored crimes against children will be tolerated, supported, funded, and permitted by the global community.
Israel’s exemption from accountability sets a dangerous precedent for the harm of children across the globe, especially in light of the growing awareness that solitary confinement is considered de facto torture under international law. Manasra was subjected to violent and illegal interrogation by Israeli intelligence at the young age of 13 and 14 — without the presence of lawyers or guardians, and with total disregard to the head injury from which he was still recovering.
“It’s quite telling that in order to rile people up for Ahmad Manasra we have to create a campaign and that’s such a high effort,” El-Kurd told Mondoweiss. “It tells you how normalized oppression and the ‘un-childing’ of Palestinian children has become. It shouldn’t be this normal.”
“Systematically targeted for your own childhood”
Prof. Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, who is a Lawrence D. Biele Chair in Law at the Faculty of Law-Institute of Criminology and the School of Social Work and Public Welfare at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, as well as the Global Chair in Law at Queen Mary, University of London, has been following Manasra’s case attentively, and her coining of the term “un-childing” has become synonymous with it.
“What is happening to Ahmad is a prototype, a reflection of the criminality of the state.”Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian
“What is happening to Ahmad is a prototype, a reflection, of the criminality of the state,” she explained to Mondoweiss. “If you go back to the protocol of the Knesset when they changed the law, you can see clearly how our kids are not considered kids, but terrorist adults.”
Indeed, Manasra continues to be held in solitary confinement and imprisoned under a “terrorism” clause within Israel’s legal framework. However, the legitimization of incarcerating a child who was interrogated under duress was a result of a legal clause specifically evoked by Israeli law-makers and authorities during the Manasra trials. This allowed for creating a legal explanation to justify the imprisonment and torture of Palestinian children as young as 12.
The concept of “terrorism” is intentionally manipulated to legitimize the torture that Manasra endured and to which he continues to be subjected. It was that same justification under the pretext of fighting “terrorism” that allowed for Manasra, then as a 13-year-old child, to lie bleeding on the ground from a brain injury brutally inflicted upon him by Israeli settlers that continued to scream “die, you son of a whore, die!”
It was that same justification that allowed Manasra to continue to be terrorized after that incident through the physical distress and psychological warfare he suffered at the hands of Israeli security personnel during his interrogation, where Manasra was threatened that “they will kill him, demolish his house, and imprison him,” according to his former lawyer, Tareq Barghouth.
STILL OF FILM SHOWING 13-YEAR-OLD AHMAD MANASRA’S INTERROGATION LEAKED BY MA’AN (SOURCE: TWITTER)
“The Israeli government…they think of us as fertile ground for terrorism,” El-Kurd explains while recollecting his own childhood in Jerusalem, the city where Manasra was born and spent 13 years before his imprisonment. “They call our resistance terrorism, and so they start trying to disarm us at a young age.”
In 2013, just two years before Manasra was taken into prison, Israeli authorities detained 931 Palestinian children. The Israeli army and police continue to target Palestinian children, including strip searching them at checkpoints, calling minors and attempting to recruit them as informants for the Israeli Police and intelligence units, and employing them as pressure points to threaten and coerce Palestinian political detainees in order to coerce confessions out of them.
In reflecting on the dynamics and processes by which the Israeli state operates, Shalhoub-Kevorkian further elaborates: “Ahmad had the best lawyers, and the lawyers tried to stress the context of Ahmad.”
In a harrowed tone, she continued: “by complicating and contextualizing, the judges became more stubborn and they wanted to teach all the kids in Jerusalem a lesson.”
El-Kurd echoes a similar sentiment as he calmly recalls his childhood: “to grow up a child in Jerusalem is to be systematically targeted for your own childhood.” Palestinian kids in Jerusalem: a life made impossible
Manasra was subjected to conditions that would destroy the physical and mental well-being of any adult, let alone a child in a vulnerable position. The practices inflicted on him showcase a collective judicial, military, and civilian network that publicly enforce state-sponsored child abuse.
“To be an eight-year old in Jerusalem is to be a 22 year-old in White suburbia America, you see this in the way children behave and operate in this country,” El-Kurd opined.
Mulling over that observation, he continued: “they don’t necessarily behave as children, they behave like people who have been tasked with obligations and responsibilities that are too hefty for them to bear.”
Almost half of the Palestinian population are children under the age of 18. Within this context, Israel’s targeting of children is also seen as a direct assault on a large stratum that represents the future of Palestinians. The infliction of long-term traumatic experiences, coupled with the prolongation of Israeli military rule, must therefore not be seen solely as a string of present crimes, but as a tactic to arbitrate the future fate of an entire generation.
Shalhoub-Kevorkian emphasized the importance of taking children’s contexts into account, emphasizing that in Manasra’s case: “You need to take into consideration that it was 2015, a year packed with child arrests, packed with the abuse of children. A year when Mohammad Abu Khdair was burned alive.”
Indeed, in 2014 three Israeli settlers kidnapped and burned alive 16-year-old Mohammad Abu Khdeir in Jerusalem as they chanted “mangal,” which means grill. That same year, an Israeli border policeman, Ben Deri, was found guilty of killing 17-year-old Nadeem Nuwwara near Ofer Military camp, and was sentenced to only nine months by the Israeli courts.
“Israeli society and the Israeli government views Palestinian children as projects for de-fanging, for de-clawing,” El-Kurd said.
“You find yourself as a child in Jerusalem constantly confronting military presence and police presence that is created to entrap you,” he continued. “It’s not only the tension and the suffocation of growing up in Jerusalem, but it’s also by design.”
Mariam Barghouti is the Senior Palestine Correspondent for Mondoweiss.
Canada’s “Jekyll-and-Hyde” Masquerade as Nation that Supposedly Supports Pacifism and Progressive Principles
How Canada’s military-industrial complex sucks up to and serves the American one
by Jeremy Kuzmarov / August 1st, 2022
[Source: Justin Trudeau photo – people.com; Dr. Jekyll & Hyde poster – amazon.com; collage courtesy of Steve Brown]
LONG READ
On July 8, the Canadian government led by Justin Trudeau announced that it would send 38 General Dynamics-made armored vehicles to Ukraine as part of $500 million in military aid allotted to Ukraine that had been attached to Canada’s budget in April.
That budget saw a $6 billion increase in military spending from the $26.4 billion total in 2021, which was to be used to boost cyber security and strengthen the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), a joint U.S.-Canadian defense organization.
Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland said that “Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has reminded us that our own peaceful democracy—like all the democracies of the world—depends ultimately on the defense of hard power….The world’s dictators should never mistake our civility for pacifism. We know that freedom does not come for free, and that peace is guaranteed only by our readiness to fight for it.”
These comments display the priorities of Canada’s current leadership, which is committed to boosting defense spending by $18 billion over the next five years—when it was already ranked 12th in military spending—and to alliance with the United States against Russia and almost all of its other enemies.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau gestures while inspecting NATO troops at Adazi military base in Kadaga, Latvia, in 2018. [Source: cbc.ca]
Trudeau has also signed a $15-billion agreement to export light armored vehicles (LAVs) produced by General Dynamics Land Systems Canada in London, Ontario, to Saudi Arabia, which sustains the U.S. Empire by trading its oil in U.S. dollars.
A Montreal-based journalist, Engler has written 11 books that are mostly critical of Canadian foreign policy. In this one, he shows that the Canadian military has a long and bloody record going back to its subjugation of Canada’s native population and support for British imperial interventions in sub-Saharan Africa.
After World War II, the Canadian military became more tightly integrated with that of the United States, supplying troops for imperial interventions like in the Korean War, while developing its own military-industrial complex that served as an adjunct of the U.S.
The Canadian Army originated from the British army which conquered North America from the Indians and French with tremendous brutality. Halifax became Britain’s primary naval base in North America after the violent displacement of Mi’kmaq First Nation people who had their heads placed on stakes when they tried to resist.
The father of the Canadian army, William D. Otter, was known for his merciless suppression of Cree and Assiniboine warriors in Saskatchewan.
Otter went on to command Canadian forces in South Africa in the Boer war, which became intimately involved in some of the nastier aspects including search, expel and burn missions.
Canadian infantrymen fighting the Boers in South Africa in 1902. [Source: warmuseum.ca]
William Heneker, a native of Sherbrooke, Quebec, and a Royal Military College (RMC) of Canada trained officer who led expeditions to conquer West Africa for the British, published an influential British training manual which noted how “the great thing is to impress savages with the fact that they are the weaker, and…enforce the will of the white man.”
Nationalist mythology presents Canada as a uniquely pacifist and benevolent country; however, in World War I, which Canada joined out of its loyalty to the British Empire, Canadian troops developed a terrible reputation for violence against prisoners.
After Canadian troops invaded Russia in 1918 with five other countries including the U.S. in an attempt to quell the Bolshevik Revolution, they were rebuked by locals for the “calm skills with which they used shrapnel as a short-range weapon against [Bolshevik] foot soldiers.”
Canada’s Siberian expeditionary force in Vladivostok in winter 1919. [Source: thecanadianencyclopedia.ca]
When Canadian troops were found guilty of murdering or raping Korean civilians during the Korean War, they were usually released from prison within a year or two at most.
Fifty years later in Afghanistan—where Canadian troops fired an astounding 4.7 million bullets and deployed white phosphorus—Captain Ray Wiss praised Canadian troops as “the best at killing people…we are killing a lot more of them [Afghans] than they are of us, and we have been extraordinarily successful recently…we have managed to kill between 10 and 20 Taliban each day.”
In 1910, the Royal Canadian Navy (RCN) was established with the aim of reinforcing the British Empire. It was repeatedly deployed in the British Caribbean and in 1932 lent support to a military-coup government in El Salvador that brutally suppressed peasant and Indigenous rebellions.
First recruiting poster for Royal Canadian Navy. [Source: rcinet.ca]
Thirty years later, in 1962, the Canadian Navy participated in the U.S. blockade of Cuba, while assuming responsibility for surveillance of Soviet submarines. When 23,000 U.S. troops invaded the Dominican Republic in April 1965, a Canadian warship was sent to Santo Domingo, in the words of Defense Minister Paul Hellyer, “to stand by in case it is required.”
Subsequently, the RCN planned and exercised an invasion of Jamaica that was designed to secure the Alcan bauxite facilities from rioters.
In the 1990s, the RCN sent warships to the Middle East to enforce brutal sanctions on Iraq.
RCN vessels also enforced a naval blockade of Libya and kept the Port of Misrata open during the 2011 Operation Odyssey Dawn, a U.S.-NATO operation that resulted in the overthrow and lynching of Libya’s nationalist leader, Muammar Qaddafi.
During the Korean War in the 1950s, RCN destroyers transported Canadian troops and hurled 130,000 rounds at Korean targets, while destroying trains and tunnels on Korea’s coastal railway.
A year before the outbreak of the war, the RCN sent a naval vessel to China as Maoist forces were on the verge of victory in China’s civil war. Part of the objective was to show the U.S. and UK that Canada was a “willing partner in the emerging North Atlantic alliance.”
Royal Canadian Navy in Korean waters, 1952-1954. [Source: legionmagazine.com]
Canada has been a faithful member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) since its inception in 1949, currently providing it with about $165 million annually. Canada’s ambassador to the North Atlantic Council, Kerry Buck, boasted in 2018 that “Canada has participated and contributed to every NATO mission, operation and activity since NATO’s founding.”
Many of these missions were highly dubious, including a) NATO’s creation of underground anti-communist armies in Western Europe that carried out black-flag terrorist attacks that were blamed on communists in order to discredit them; b) NATO’s bombing of Kosovo in 1999; c) its 20-year war on Afghanistan; and d) its attack on Libya in which seven Canadian Air Force jets carried out bombing missions.
Canadian fighter pilots and ground crew in Libya during Operation Odyssey Dawn. [Source: rabble.ca]
In the 1990s, Canada strongly supported NATO enalrgement to the Czech Republic, Poland and Hungary and has sent troops to Latvia and Ukraine as part of a belligerent policy toward Russia that has provoked a new Cold War and might yet cause a world war.
Canada and the CIA
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Canada’s Defence Research Board (DRB) had a formal relationship with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which paid for classified research that was carried out by Canadian academics.
This research included CIA-funded psychological studies that were framed as a response to Communist Chinese brainwashing during the Korean War.
Canadian, British and U.S. officials met to coordinate this research at the Ritz Carlton Hotel in Montreal on June 1, 1951, where the chairman of the DRB, Donald O. Hebb, suggested that the research focus on confessions, menticide and intervention in the individual mind, which was endorsed by other attendees.
Hebb subsequently received a secret $10,000 ($50,000 in today’s money) grant from the DRB to study sensory deprivation—or isolation of human beings—which was used as an interrogation technique.
The U.S. government and CIA subsequently put up half a million dollars ($2 million today) for McGill psychologist Ewen Cameron to build on Hebb’s psychological isolation research in ghastly ways—including forced isolation and administration of electroshocks on individuals and large doses of LSD and other hallucinogens.
The expressed objective of the research, carried out at Montreal’s Allen Memorial Institute from the early 1950s until 1965, was to erase existing memories and re-program individuals’ psyches. Hebb’s and Cameron’s research ultimately influenced the CIA’s 1963 KUBARAK Counterintelligence Interrogation handbook, laying the foundation for the CIA’s two-stage psychological torture methods.
Canada has assisted the U.S. allowing its landmass and many facilities to be used to test various weapons in the deadly U.S. arsenal, including chemical and biological weapons.
According to John Clearwater, author of the 2006 book Just Dummies: Cruise Missile Testing in Canada, “no matter how bizarre the weapon, no matter how dangerous the test, no matter how contrary the weapon to stated foreign policy objectives, Canada has never refused a single testing request from the United States.”
Starting in World War II, a super-secret germ warfare research facility run jointly by the U.S. and Canada operated at Grosse Îsle, 50 kilometers from Quebec City, which produced rinderpest (a cattle virus) and anthrax spores.
During the Korean War, the Guilford Reed-led Defence Research Board laboratory at Queens studied mosquito vectors and how to produce mosquito colonies, and helped turn shellfish toxins into weapons that were subsequently used by the CIA to try to assassinate foreign leaders like Fidel Castro.
Dr. Guilford Reed in front of Queens University laboratory which helped develop weapons for the CIA that was used to try to assassinate Fidel Castro. [Source: queensu.ca]
Other biological weapons that the U.S. deployed against Cuba were also tested in Canada and, in July 1953, U.S. army planes secretly sprayed 6 kg of zinc cadmium sulfide, a carcinogen, on Winnipeg, and eleven years later did the same on Medicine Hat, Alberta.
When uproar developed in the U.S. over the testing and development of chemical and biological weapons, much of the research was transferred to a secret military research facility north of Suffield, Alberta, where the U.S. Army tested 25-pound shells filled with highly toxic sarin.
Between 1956 and 1984, more than one billion germs of Agent Orange, Purple and White were sprayed on or near a Canadian military base in Gagetown, New Brunswick.
Canadian scientists generally played a key role in helping to develop defoliants and herbicides sprayed by the U.S. in Vietnam and the British in Malaya. Among them was Otto Maass, Chemical Biological Weapons (CBW) director at Canada’s Defence Research Board and the Chairman of McGill University’s Chemistry Department from 1937 to 1955.[1]
During the Vietnam War, Canadian manufacturers sold the U.S. military significant amounts of polystyrene, a major component in napalm—a flammable liquid agent that burns the flesh.
The latter was produced during the Korean War at Canada’s Defence Research Chemical laboratories. Canadian scientists working at the time at Suffield discovered a thickening agent for flamethrower fuels (napalm), and worked on development of a flamethrower to deliver this new and improved fuel from tanks.
Napalm strikes in Trang Bang, Vietnam, in June 1972—made possible by Canadian scientists. [Source: apjjf.org]
More Complicity in War
Overall, Canadian industry sold some $12.5 billion in ammunition, aircraft parts, napalm and other war materials to South Vietnam and the U.S. for use during the Vietnam War.
American planes that dropped bombs and napalm were often guided by Canadian-made Marconi-Doppler navigation systems and used bombing computers built in Rexdale, Ontario.
The bombs could have been armed with dynamite shipped from Valleyfield, Quebec. Defoliants came from Naugatuck Chemicals in Elmira, Ontario, and air-to-ground rockets were furnished by the Ingersoll Machine and Tool Company of Ingersoll, Ontario. On the ground, American infantry and artillery units were supplied with de Havilland (DHC-4) Caribous built at Milton, Ontario.
Canadian products also included Beta boots for the troops and the famous green berets of the Special Forces which came from Dorothea Knitting Mills in Toronto.
1972 Green Beret hat manufactured at Dorothea Knitting Mills in Toronto. [Source: worthpoint.com]
Supporting the U.S. Nuclear Weapons Program
Even though Canada is not officially one of the nine countries possessing nuclear weapons, for years it has supported the U.S.’s nuclear weapons program.
Uranium from Great Bear Lake in the Northwest Territories and which was refined in Port Hope, Ontario, was used in the nuclear bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945. Subsequently, Saskatchewan and Ontario mines supplied a considerable proportion of the uranium used for the U.S. nuclear weapons program.
A miner hauls a car of uranium-bearing ore at Eldorado Mine of Great Bear Lake, Northwest Territories, in 1930. [Source: cbc.ca]
In 1952, Canadian officials permitted the U.S. Strategic Air Command to use Canadian air space for training flights of nuclear-armed aircraft. Since 1965, nuclear-armed U.S. submarines have also fired torpedoes at Canadian army maritime bases and test ranges.
Liberal Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau (1968-1979; 1980-1984) claimed to be suffocating the arms race but allowed the U.S. to test cruise missiles designed for first-strike nuclear attacks at a Canadian army base in Cold Lake—a policy continued by Brian Mulroney (1984-1993).
In September 1950, the U.S. began storing nuclear weapons at Goose Bay, Newfoundland, while in 1963, Lester Pearson’s government (1963-1968) brought Bomarc missiles to Canada and gave Washington effective control over them.
Pearson had taken power after his Tory predecessor John Diefenbaker (1957-1963) had refused to station the Bomarcs in Canada, and was then threatened by Washington and fell from power in turn.
Canada received significant U.S. backing in establishing its signals intelligence (SIGNIT) capacities. A National Security Agency (NSA) history of the U.S.-Canada SIGNIT relationship released by Edward Snowden labeled Canada a “highly valued second party partner,” which offers “resources for advanced collection, processing and analysis, and has opened covert sites at the request of NSA, CSE [Communication Security Establishment] shares with NSA their unique geographic access to areas unavailable to the U.S.”
Canada is a member of the Five Eyes surveillance network. [Source: canadiandimension.com]
America First Foreign Policy
Canada has hundreds of military accords with the U.S. The most important, NORAD, has deepened the U.S. military footprint in Canada and committed Canada to acquiring U.S. nuclear weapons for air defense.
In 1965, NORAD’s mandate was expanded to include surveillance and assessment for U.S. commands worldwide, and in the 1980s and 1990s, it assisted in the War on Drugs.
Canadians posted to NORAD have helped research space weaponry while NORAD has also cooperated in missile defense work.
Many leading Canadian generals have trained in U.S. Army war colleges as the Canadian armed forces increasingly strives for what it calls “interoperability” with the Americans.
A March 2017 dispatch from the U.S. embassy in Ottawa to the State Department was tellingly titled “Canada Adopts ‘America First’ Foreign Policy.”
Chrystia Freeland earned her appointment as foreign minister, according to a memo uncovered through a Freedom of Information request, in large part because “of her strong U.S. contacts”; her number one priority was “working closely” with Washington.
Chrystia Freeland, center, and Justin Trudeau, right, with Donald Trump. [Source: thegrayzone.com]
The depth of the Canada-U.S. military alliance is such that, if the U.S. attacked Canada as in the War of 1812, it would be extremely difficult for the Canadian Armed Forces to defend Canadian soil.
According to Engler, Canada’s defense sector ignores the threat from the U.S. because it is not oriented toward protecting Canada from aggression; rather Canada’s “defense community” is aligned with the U.S. Empire’s quest for global dominance.
U.S. invades Canada in futuristic sci-fi series We Stand on Guard. Canada has no protection if this scenario comes true. [Source: usatoday.com]
U.S. Pushes for Higher Military Spending
After former Massachusetts governor Paul Cellucci was appointed U.S. ambassador to Canada in 2001, he revealed that his only instruction was to press for increased military spending.
During a 2016 speech to the Canadian parliament, then-U.S. President Barack Obama further called on the Canadian government to increase its military spending while, in 2018, Donald Trump sent Justin Trudeau a letter calling on Canada to improve its military preparedness.
A Rogue State
Canada’s status as a rogue state alongside the U.S. is evident in its non-compliance with a UN treaty outlawing mercenaries and the UN’s prohibition of nuclear weapons, which is supported by two-thirds of UN member states. Since 2007, Canada has also abstained on a series of UN resolutions concerning depleted uranium munitions.
Protesters ask why Canada has not signed onto UN treaty banning nuclear weapons. [Source: thecanadafiles.com]
Canadian companies meanwhile have followed their American counterparts in selling weapons to countries that have carried out significant human rights atrocities including Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Colombia and Israel.
Canada has also participated in illegal U.S. coups like in February 2004 when Canadian Special Forces “secured” the airport from which U.S. Marines forced Haiti’s elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide—a populist who tried to enact laws to benefit Haiti’s poor—onto a flight to the Central African Republic.
Canadian Special Forces guarding Port-au-Prince airport during Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s kidnapping in February 2004. [Source: reddit.com]
Canada’s Military-Industrial Complex
Dwight Eisenhower’s warning about a military-industrial complex in his 1961 farewell address applies all too well in Canada.
Canadian companies produce cutting-edge weapon systems and technologies that the U.S. military requires, construct and manage U.S. overseas military installations,[2] and even train the operators of Predator and Reaper drones.
The primary arms-industry lobbying group in Canada is the Canadian Association of Defence and Security Industries (CADSI), which has 20 staff in Ottawa. It has adopted an intense engagement plan that includes hundreds of meetings with members of parliament, key ministers and the Prime Minister’s office.
Protest outside arms trade show in Ottawa in 2019. [Source: worldbeyondwar.org]
Top U.S. arms makers Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Northrop Grumman, BAE, General Dynamics, L-3 Communications and Raytheon all have Canadian subsidiaries and offices in Ottawa a few blocks from parliament.
Exemplifying Canada’s version of the revolving door, Lockheed contracted with retired Air Force Commander André Deschamps—who had helped direct the Canadian Armed Forces in Afghanistan—to lobby for military contracts in 2017, while Irving Shipbuilding hired former Vice Admiral James King to push for Arctic and offshore patrol ship contracts.
Canada’s economy is dependent on shipbuilding, aerospace, high-tech and mining industries, which all benefit from higher military budgets and tighter integration with the U.S.
The only solution at this time is for American and Canadian peace activists to link up to challenge the military-industrial complex in both countries.
Detailed plans are needed to convert the U.S. and Canadian economies away from militarism and retrain workers and engineers who currently work in the defense sectors.
Restrictions on lobbying and foreign military sales should also be an urgent policy demand along with abolishing NORAD and NATO.
Peace mural in Nova Scotia. [Source: vowpeace.org]
Additionally, the peace movement should work to try to end the glorification of all things military and boycott Hollywood films, government propaganda initiatives and educational institutions that do so, and which dehumanize racial minorities and enemy countries like Russia and their leaders.
Yves Engler writes at the end of his book that “a peaceful world is possible if we want and work for it.” This is indeed true but it will require nothing less than a social revolution to achieve.
![r/MilitaryPorn - Canada’s JTF 2 guarding the airport at Port-au-Prince, Haiti where a special Canadian Air Force flight will return Canadian citizens home. Angry mobs rampaged through the Haitian capital after President Jean Bertrand Aristide fled the country. February 29, 2004 [1800×1440]](https://i0.wp.com/covertactionmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/r-militaryporn-canadas-jtf-2-guarding-the-airpo.jpeg?resize=696%2C557&ssl=1)
