- Canadian Freedom
Will Wilkinson draws attention to one result of the latest Cato/Fraser Economic Freedom of the World Report: Canada is now ranked as freer than the U.S. of Archie; 7th freest compared to our 8th.
I'm not prepared to argue with their economic calcalations; still, Canada certainly remains a bad place to speak your mind about certain things.
In other Canada freedom news: amazing and celebrated alt-cartoonist Chester Brown is running for parliament as a Libertarian.
Many years back, I wrote an article that generated more hate mail than anything I ever wrote--over 200 emails--for the website suck.com. (Sorry, the late, lamented website Suck.com.) It was a bit of japery mocking Canadian attempts to distinguish themselves from America. I never thought "more freedom" would be one of those distinguishing characteristics.
- Maher Arar May Get to Sue His Abducters
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit has resurrected Maher Arar's lawsuit over the U.S. government's decision to ship him off to his native Syria, where he was imprisoned for a year and tortured. Arar, a Canadian telecommunications engineer, was mistakenly linked to Al Qaeda by the Canadian government, which shared this misinformation with U.S. officials, prompting them to detain Arar while he was switching planes at JFK in 2002. While the Canadian government has apologized to Arar and paid him $10 million in compenation, the most the U.S. government has been able to muster was Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's concession last year that the case was not "handled as it should have been." In June the 2nd Circuit dismissed Arar's lawsuit, which names former U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft, FBI Director Robert Mueller, and former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge as defendants. Two judges on the three-judge panel concluded that U.S. courts did not have jurisdiction to hear the case because Arar had never officially entered the country. The third judge dismissed that premise as "a legal fiction," saying Arar "was, in effect, abducted while attempting to transit at J.F.K. Airport." The full court's decision to rehear the case is highly unusual, especially since no one asked it to do so, and suggests a majority may ultimately decide to let the case proceed.
I wrote about the Canadian government exoneration of Arar in a 2006 column.
- Ezra Levant Is off the Hook That Never Should Have Been Hung
After a year-long investigation that never should have happened, the Alberta Human Rights and Citizenship Commission has rejected a complaint against Ezra Levant, former publisher of the now-defunct Canadian magazine the Western Standard, over his decision to reprint the controversial Muhammad cartoons that originally appeared in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten. Levant declined to celebrate:
This censor approved what I wrote. His decision is not that I have freedom of speech. His decision is that I have his approval. I'm not interested in his approval. The only test of free speech is if I can write what he disapproves of with impunity. That's what freedom of speech is, to piss off some second-rate bureaucrat like Pardeep Gundara [the commission official who recommended against a hearing on the complaint] and know that you have the right to do so, because you're in Canada, not Saudi Arabia.
Yasmeen Nizam, a director of the Edmonton Council of Muslim Communities, which brought the complaint, told the National Post:
We thought this was a good way to bring our concerns to the attention of the public. Obviously we didn't want this to continue, so [another goal was] perhaps to discourage people from further maligning our prophet and our religion... We wanted this to have a deterrent effect.
Presumably the "this" she does not want to continue is speech that offends Muslims, and she may get her wish. Even without a hearing or a formal penalty, this sort of investigation, which costs the target time, effort, and money, is indeed apt to "have a deterrent effect."
Matt Welch noted Levant's case in January. I wrote a column about it in February and followed up in a post a couple months ago.
[Thanks to J sub D for the tip.]
- You Call This an Interrogation?
Lawyers for a Guantanamo Bay detainee have released a video of a Canadian military official interrogating their client, 16-year-old Omar Khadr (now 21). Khadr, a Canadian citizen, was 15 when U.S. forces captured him after a firefight in Afghanistan, during which he allegedly killed a U.S. soldier with a grenade. Khadr's interrogation is about as explicit as a Miley Cyrus photo shoot, but it's disgusting nonetheless considering that he probably didn't throw the grenade. It's also important to note that while the video blacks out the faces of Khadr's interrogators, a Toronto Star article reveals that they were the worst of the worst:
Khadr's interrogators included members of a unit implicated in the December 2002 beating deaths of two Afghan detainees, named Dilawar and Habibullah, [Navy Lt. Cmdr. William Kuebler] said.
Kuebler showed the judge a photograph of Khadr after his capture, with two gaping exit wounds in his chest from gunshots to his back, and said he would have been particularly vulnerable to coercion when he arrived at Bagram.
I'm starting to wonder if the military wanted this to get out in the hope that viewers would question the legitimacy of reports like this one.
Read the Rolling Stone profile of Omar Khadr here. Al Jazeera International footage below:
- Basil Parasiris Acquitted
Parasiris is a Quebec man who shot and killed a police officer during a botched drug raid on his home. Parasiris' wife was shot in the arm, and his two children witnessed the exchange of gunfire. Last week, a Canadian jury acquitted Parasiris of murder charges. The Montreal Gazaette editorializes:
Laval police conducted the raid in the belief that Parasiris was involved in a local drug ring. Unfortunately, as Superior Court Justice Guy Cournoyer ruled, there was little proof to back this belief, certainly not enough for a search warrant to be executed in a surprise, pre-dawn raid. Such a raid should be carried out only in an emergency.
Parasiris was wakened by his wife screaming shortly after 5 a.m. on March 2, 2007. Seeing a shadow at the doorway to his bedroom, Parasiris picked up one of four loaded guns he kept in his bedroom and fired off at least two shots. He said he believed his home had been invaded.
In a way, it had been. Nine police officers forced Parasiris's front door open with a battering ram. Five officers sprinted up the stairs to the bedrooms. Within less than a minute, Tessier lay dying, Parasiris's wife was shot through the arm, a second police officer was hit by a bullet from Parasiris's gun and Parasiris's two children were traumatized.
Both sides seem to have panicked. It was an inevitable reaction on the part of the Parasiris family. But for the police to have fired off so many rounds suggests a lack of training in general and of planning for this raid in particular.
A search warrant for "dynamic entry" should not, on the evidence, have been issued in this case. Police could have arrested Parasiris under calmer circumstances.
A man is dead as a result of an apparently ill-planned raid. Only vigorous corrective action by the authorities can add anything positive to this tragic series of mistakes.
It's nice to see a sensible outcome to one of theses cases, even if it had to come from Canada.
- Violating Human Rights to Defend Them
At a time when the U.S. government is often (and often justly) criticized for compromising civil liberties in pursuit of terrorists, New York Times legal writer Adam Liptak reminds us of one respect
