- 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 in which Americans are indisputably freer than other Westerners: They can speak their minds without fear of being prosecuted for offending people. In countries such as Canada, France, England, Germany, and the Netherlands, by contrast, freedom of speech can be overriden in the name of equality and multiculturalism. Mark Steyn, the Canadian writer accused of violating British Columbia's hate speech law by saying unnice things about Islam in Maclean's, tells Liptak:
What we're learning here is really the bedrock difference between the United States and the countries that are in a broad sense its legal cousins. Western governments are becoming increasingly comfortable with the regulation of opinion. The First Amendment really does distinguish the U.S., not just from Canada but from the rest of the Western world.
In hearings before the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal, the lawyer representing Maclean's noted that the province's law gives writers accused of hurting people's feelings little recourse:
Innocent intent is not a defense. Nor is truth. Nor is fair comment on true facts. Publication in the public interest and for the public benefit is not a defense. Opinion expressed in good faith is not a defense. Responsible journalism is not a defense.
An attorney with the British Columbia Civil Liberties Union (which is siding with Maclean's) explains the Canadian attitude this way:
Canadians do not have a cast-iron stomach for offensive speech. We don't subscribe to a marketplace of ideas. Americans as a whole are more tough-minded and more prepared for verbal combat.
In the face of Canada's enforced niceness, it is refreshing to hear someone defend the principle that people should not have to justify their opinions to the government, period. Ezra Levant, another Canadian journalist who faced a human rights complaint (since retracted) for offending Muslims, put it this way during an encounter with an inquisitor from the Alberta Human Rights and Citizenship Commission:
I reserve maximum freedom to be maximally offensive, to hurt feelings as I like....The only thing I have to say to the government about why I published [the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons] is because it's my bloody right to do so.
That's from my February column about Canada's human rights tribunals. Last week I noted that the French government, which is so keen to defend the country's secular and feminist values that it's prepared to violate Muslims' rights to freedom of religion and freedom of contract, nevertheless defends their "right" not to be offended. I should have mentioned a recent example cited by Liptak (and noted by our own Michael Moynihan): "Earlier this month, the actress Brigitte Bardot, an animal rights activist, was fined $23,000 in France for provoking racial hatred by criticizing a Muslim ceremony involving the slaughter of sheep."
Addendum: As Robert notes in the comments, the Alberta Human Rights and Citizenship Commission continues to investigate Levant for reprinting the Muhammad cartoons in The Western Standard. Although Syed Soharwardy, president of the Islamic Supreme Council of Canada, withdrew his complaint last winter, Levant reports that the commission is still considering a similar complaint from Yasmeen Nizam of of the Edmonton Council of Muslim Communities. You can keep up with the case at Levant's blog. Information about Mark Steyn's speech-related legal troubles is available here.
- The Old, Weird Niagara
From last Thursday's Wall Street Journal, here's the great reactionary radical (and reason contributor) Bill Kauffman on Ginger Strand's intriguing new book Inventing Niagara:
Ms. Strand's populist defense of the glorious disorder of the private Niagara Falls Museum is of a piece with her appreciation of the falls as God and nature intended them to be. But just as the five-story museum was leveled by the New York State parks authority and replaced by a parking lot, so have the falls, in Ms. Strand's words, been "manicured, repaired, landscaped and artificially lit, dangerous overhangs dynamited off and water flow managed to suit the tourist schedule." One can't help noticing that the "improvements" Ms. Strand deplores were almost entirely the work of government. Those overhangs were blown off by the Army Corps of Engineers, which has trimmed, blasted, dammed and fortified this natural wonder and its river. State, not commerce, was unable to leave well enough alone.
As an American patriot,
