RSS FeedReview of Dennis Edney’s Lecture, “The Rule of Law in an Age of Terror”
“Human rights have a dysfunctional relationship with justice. The language is certainly beautiful, but it’s all dressed up with nowhere to go,” charged Dennis Edney in a scathing lecture at the Faculty of Law at UBC on September 15.
Edney worked from 2004 to 2011 on Omar Khadr’s defence against charges stemming from the July 2002 firefight death of a US soldier. Khadr, who is Canadian, was 15 at the time. American forces interrogated him for three months in the US-operated Bagram Theatre Detention Facility in Afghanistan, before transferring him to Guantanamo Bay, where he remains. In 2005, Khadr’s chief interrogator from Bagram, US Sergeant Joshua Claus, was found guilty of offences relating to the routine torture and homicide of Bagram prisoners. Claus received a five-month prison sentence. He testified at Khadr’s military trial in 2010.
In April 2009, the Federal Court ruled that Canada was complicit in the US’s torture of Khadr and ordered Ottawa to seek his repatriation. The Federal Court of Appeal concurred, but the Supreme Court ruled 9-0 that though Canada was violating Khadr’s human rights, it was not obliged to seek his repatriation.
In October 2010, after insisting on his innocence for years, Khadr pled guilty in a military trial to terrorism-related offences, in exchange for a promise from Canada to repatriate him by October 2011 to serve the rest of his prison sentence in Canada. On September 20, the Conservatives tabled the controversial omnibus Bill C-10, which adds “additional criteria” to decisions about “whether or not to allow the transfer of a Canadian offender back to Canada to serve their sentence.”
Shortly after the trial, Edney declared that Khadr “would have confessed to anything, including the killing of John F. Kennedy, just to get out of this hellhole” and that if he had refused, Khadr would have been faced with “an unfair [military] trial based on evidence that would be inadmissible in a real court.” On Thursday, Edney said the detainees are entitled “to all kinds of international protections, but our governments are not asking for them. And by not asking, we become complicit.” There are nearly 800 prisoners in Guantanamo, but only 4 have been charged and given a trial. Detainees cannot see the evidence used against them.
In his lecture, Edney denounced the Canadian government for perpetuating a culture of fear in the camp’s defence. Edney stated that “since there has always historically been terrorism, and since there will always be terrorist threats, this war on terror – if allowed to be one – is unlike any other, because it is never-ending.” Thus, last decade has been marred by “habeas corpus being abandoned, secret courts being created to hear secret evidence, guilt inferred by association, torture and rendition nakedly justified.”
“I went into Guantanamo Bay as a lawyer and I came out as a broken father,” said Edney. “I never thought that in my lifetime I would go to such an evil place and see such evil being done.” Of the infamous cages, Edney said that “people go into those cages thinking they’re having a holiday in there.” He drew attention to Camps 5, 6, and 7. The first two are “designed for enhanced interrogation tactics: torture.” He said about Camp 7 that “We are not allowed to talk about it. We have prisoners in there who came from Europe, about a year and a half ago, and they’re going to be there forever, because there’s no one there to help.”
Edney discussed the 9/11 witch hunt, in which “the US government detained hundreds, if not thousands, of people of colour on the suspicion of terrorist activity, some of them up to a year, all without charges.” He continued that “almost none of those individuals were found to have been in any way connected with terrorism. Yet many continue to be held without being formally charged with any crime or immigration violation.” In this way Guantanamo “provides powerful evidence of how America and the West are making war on terror synonymous with the war on Islam. No white Anglo-Saxon goes to Guantanamo Bay. Any American picked up for terrorism offences gets due process in a federal court system in New York.”
One audience member suggested that the camp must serve some purpose, because otherwise US President Barrack Obama would have followed through on his promise to shut it down. Edney responded that the camp primarily functions as “an important propaganda tool.” He argued the Obama administration has in fact “systematised” the culture of torture normalised under George W. Bush, for instance by disallowing victims of extraordinary rendition from suing Washington for torture suffered overseas.
Edney was also critical of “lazy” media and academics who have persisted in “slotting events into a sort of juicy clash of civilisations story,” as exemplified by mainstream media coverage of Anders Behring Breivik’s terrorist attack in Oslo. He killed 69 people in July, avowedly to protect Europe from Muslims. Edney said, “as soon as the bomb went off, media organisations began reporting on jihadist organisations.” This, he said, “fit perfectly the story we have all been telling each other since 9/11 that who else, who else could be so hateful, so crazy, so disrespectful of life but Muslims.” He pointed out that though Breivik is a white Norwegian Christian, “we don’t hold Christians or conservatives or liberals responsible for Brievek’s despicable acts.”
He said that “since September 11 2001, race, ethnicity, and religion have become proxies for suspected terrorist activity, which in turn has become a pretext for the application of Canadian immigration laws in an unequal manner towards Arabs, South Asians, Muslims and so on.” In an apparent nod to Bill C-4, the anti-refugee bill that the Conservatives tabled on Tuesday despite widespread condemnation, he noted that “we just have to listen to media descriptions coming out of Ottawa when we talk about refugees today. We call them queue jumpers and potential terrorists.”
Edney also expressed anger at the public’s willingness to be lulled into complicity. He described the transfer of the prisoners to Guantanamo “in rows in aircraft, hooded and shackled for transportation across the Atlantic” as similar to eighteenth century slave ships. He maintained that for “the watching world, no knowledge of international humanitarian conventions is needed to understand that what was being witnessed was simply unlawful.” He blamed public apathy for “allowing anti-Muslim sentiment to become part of our mainstream conversations.” He said, “I say to you we cannot tackle manifestations of intolerance, unless we learn and understand how the constant use of fear pervades our everyday life, and how that fear is being used to influence how you and I think and how you and I act. It’s that same manipulation of fear that has allowed military escapades into countries beyond those who bombed the twin towers. It is that same message that has been exploited by participating countries to reduce civil liberties and infringe upon human rights by allowing such places as Guantanamo Bay to exist.”
The need for action had been a prevailing theme throughout the lecture. Edney returned to it at his lecture’s close: “Not only does it [Guantanamo] continue to exist, they continue building it. Guantanamo is going to be there for a long, long time, unless you do something. Unless you really do something about it.” He concluded that “the only crime equal to wilful inhumanity is the crime of indifference, the crime of silence, the crime of forgetting.”
In that vein, we cannot afford to forget that Guantanamo Bay’s precedents in the West include Canada’s own internment camps, built in BC expressly to detain Japanese-Canadians during WWII. Similarly, Bill C-4’s predecessors include the Chinese head-tax policy.
World Institute for Research and Publication (WIRP) Presentations
I presented a couple papers this morning at the Annual Meeting of the World Institute for Research and Publication – Law. You can read more about the conference over at Slaw.
The presentations, with audio and complete papers, are available on the WIRP site, or on SlideShare below:
Full Paper: Media Narratives in Times of Turmoil: Depictions of Minorities in Canada Post 9/11
Full Paper: Admissibility of Alcohol and Gaming Commission of Ontario Reports
Not All Muslims are Terrorists, But All Terrorists are Not Muslim Either
It’s a common refrain in the media, that the threat of terrorism comes from Islamic extremism.
Not true, according to a new study revealed by researchers at Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Anti-Terror Lessons of Muslim-Americans, which suggests that only 6% of terrorist attacks on the U.S. are from Muslims.
CNN describes the inclusion criteria used for the study:
To be included on the list, an offender had to have been wanted, arrested, convicted or killed in connection with terrorism-related activities since 9/11 — and have lived in the United States, regardless of immigration status, for more than a year prior to arrest.
The study also notes that strong partnerships and support of Muslim institutions are necessary to prevent the radicalization of Muslims. To date, we’ve often have initiatives that accomplish the opposite. Muslim terrorists also had very little to do with Islam,
This research confirmed what has been observed in other studies of Muslim terrorists: most of those who engage in religiously inspired terrorism have little formal training in Islam and, in fact, are poorly educated about Islam. Muslim- Americans with a strong, traditional religious training are far less likely to radicalize than those whose knowledge of Islam is incomplete.
The implications of the findings also suggest there is disproportionate attention by the media and security officials on threats that are comparatively negligible, which may actually accentuate this specific risk over time.
Placed in context with data over the past 30 years, we get a very different picture (graph sent to us by a reader):
Terrorist Attacks on U.S. Soil by Group, From 1980 to 2005, According to FBI Database
Murder in German court
This woman is dead, and her husband is in critical condition in a hospital. A man accused of screaming “terrorist” and “Islamist whore” at her on a children’s playground, stabbed the woman, who was pregnant, 18 times during his own trial. When her husband ran to protect her, a police officer shot him.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jul/07/german-trial-hijab-murder-egypt
Public speech has real consequences
Available online at The Star Phoenix
Consequences of public speech real
Kashif Ahmed, Special to the StarPhoenix
Friday, November 14, 2008
The recent decision by the British Columbia Human Rights Tribunal to dismiss a complaint against Maclean’s magazine brings to light the issue of free speech striking at the core of Canadian social cohesion and political debate.
From a strict legal perspective, the tribunal was correct, as was the Ontario Human Rights Commission, to toss out the case against Maclean’s brought by a Muslim group over an article written by Mark Steyn. Yet, the B.C. tribunal was not alone in its recognition that Steyn’s piece was riddled with an anti-Muslim message.
The Ontario commission stated that, while freedom of expression was paramount, it was concerned about “the content of a number of articles concerning Muslims that have been published by Maclean’s magazine and other media outlets. This type of media coverage has been identified as contributing to Islamophobia and promoting societal intolerance towards Muslim, Arab and South Asian Canadians.”
Although the commission did not have jurisdiction over the complaint, and even if we question its suitability to make public commentary, it still raised an important point. It was not simply one article written by Steyn. Rather, it was a series of pieces in Maclean’s that appeared to promote one single theme: Muslims are a dangerous group of aliens in western and Canadian society who cannot coexist peacefully with their fellow citizens.
It’s not the B.C. tribunal that wrongly questioned the professionalism and judgment of Maclean’s, as a recent Calgary Herald editorial suggested. Rather, the decision to publish those articles without including a legitimate discourse that entertained the views of Canadian Muslims is why the record of the national magazine is tarnished.
It is also of concern that Maclean’s chose to publish Steyn, who is unapologetic about his history of using xenophobic epithets such as “gooks,” “Chinks,” and “Japs.” (For the record, Steyn was not a respondent in the human rights complaint).
And yet some important questions are not being asked. What useful social function in Canada is served by repeatedly demonizing a minority community and making wild claims about it in the name of free speech? Does it strengthen the social fabric of Canada and bring communities together? The only result, in this case, is to increase public misunderstanding and misinformation.
The recent United States presidential race was a further example of what can occur when bigotry is not challenged. Since 9/11, years of Islamophobic rhetoric adopted by certain extreme American political elements led to “Muslim” or “Arab” becoming smear terms in the campaign. So much so, that in a response to a supporter’s false claim about now president-elect Barack Obama, Republican contender John McCain denied that Obama was an Arab or Muslim, and then said the Democrat was a “decent family man,” as if Muslims or Arabs could not possibly be decent family men.
American Muslims watched with shock as their identity was denigrated and reduced to a political slur. The smearing was finally challenged when Republican and former secretary of state Colin Powell denounced the campaign’s bigotry on NBC’s Meet The Press.
Is this a road that we, as a Canadian collective, want to go down as well? There are real consequences that result from free speech that is divisive and vitriolic, yet is not deemed by law to be hateful. Hence the apparent pontificating from the B.C. and Ontario human rights bodies on the Maclean’s case. There certainly is not an epidemic of Islamophobia in Canada, but the Muslim community and its representatives remain concerned.
Perhaps the human rights commissions should not be in the business of determining what constitutes hate speech. Many people think taxpayers’ money and human rights bodies that were created to deal largely with employment discrimination should not be used to adjudicate issues already covered by the Criminal Code — as demonstrated by the criminal trial of David Ahenakew over his alleged promotion of hatred against Jews.
Undoubtedly, freedom of expression must be closely guarded in Canada. Our treasured Charter of Rights and Freedoms and we, the Canadian public, demand no less. Yet, the debate should not overshadow the crux of the matter at hand: Our social cohesion and relations are severely undermined when us-versus-them attitudes and messages creep into the mainstream and try to divide us along ethnic and religious lines.
Indeed, our shared Canadian successes depend on our mutual willingness to reject such attempts at discord and division in the 21st century and our desire to rise above the sordid political game of suspicion.
Another Severed Foot Washes Ashore in BC
The Severed Foot Mystery continues to deepen as a fifth partially-submerged foot was discovered yesterday on a British Columbia shoreline.
AP reports that the left foot was discovered by a couple of passersby on Westham Island. The island is located in the mouth of the Fraser River, roughly 10km south of Vancouver International Airport.
As with the previous discovery, the foot was still wearing the shoe. No word yet on the brand. [Update: it's an Adidas, size 10!]
In spite of the similarities, police say it is too early to draw conclusions that link this foot to the other four that have washed ashore in previous months. While they are treating this as a criminal investigation, there is as yet no evidence that foul play is involved. The RCMP indicated that:
“there’s no evidence the feet were severed or removed from the victims’ legs by force.”
This could be just, you know, your random, run-of-the-mill floating foot. Curtis Ebbesmeyer, an oceanographer, explained that:
“the feet could have drifted from as far as 1,000 miles away. Ebbesmeyer said the feet could have been severed or detached from their bodies on their own.”
