Category: Politics

Politics

Did Postmedia attempt to smear the NDP in the @vikileaks30 affair?

After a most momentous week in Canadian politics — namely, one in which a government with an absolute majority in both the House of Commons and the Senate was at least momentarily thwarted in its efforts to pass Bill C-30 — the @vikileaks30 twitter account has been retired. It simply no longer exists. However it has had one hell of an effect, and the way in which it was reported about should definitely raise a lot of eyebrows.

For those who don’t know about this story, @vikileaks30 was an anonymous account launched on Wednesday which broadcasted certain salacious details about Vic Toews, including parts of affidavits from his 2007 divorce — largely his ex-wife’s testimony — and many interesting details of expense claims by Mr. Toews as a government minister.

Soon after the novelty twitter account appeared on the scene Ottawa Citizen tech news reporter Vito Pilieci came up with an interesting plan to figure out who was posting on it and came up with the idea to send the twitterer a web site link which was unique for that particular user. There’s nothing wrong with that technique, I’ve used it myself a couple of times, and twitter’s use of URL shorteners makes that technique discoverable only with some difficulty. The IP address which was used to visit the link turned out to have been one connected with the Parliament buildings. That much can be reliably established.

What I find a little more difficult to understand is the way that the story was reported both by Pilieci himself and Postmedia flagship paper the National Post. Starting with the title, which was surely written by a higher-up: “Vikileaks Twitter account on Vic Toews linked to ‘pro-NDP’ address in House of Commons”. Indeed the original Ottawa Citizen story used the considerably less “inciteful” (if you will) “Vikileaks30 linked to House of Commons IP address”. But this is only the start of the smear. In the story itself we see this paragraph:

Aside from being used to administer the Vikileaks30 Twitter feed, the address has been used frequently to update Wikipedia articles — often giving them what appears to be a pro-NDP bias, actions that have attracted the attention of numerous Internet observers in recent months.

I’ve taken the liberty here to put in bold type the second instance of the smear. Note the use of “weasel language” here — the author (almost undoubtedly Pilieci himself) double-qualifies the statement so as to obviate the necessity of backing that statement with actual evidence, which he indeed does not provide.

So, that’s interesting. Without any more specifics this certainly looks like an attempt to smear the party that currently holds the position of Official Opposition in the House of Commons. Now why would someone do that and be this specific about it?

Well, the Ottawa Citizen, which currently employs Pilieci, is owned by the Postmedia Network, which is a group encompassing several newspapers, including my hometown’s The Gazette newspaper and Canada’s second national daily, the National Post (which should be no surprise to you as the link shown above goes to a NatPo story). The National Post, pretty much since its inception, is regularly accused of running a pro-Conservative slant on the political stories it covers, which clearly explains why they chose to edit Pilieci’s story  from the rather more neutral “Vikileaks Twitter account traced to House of Commons” (the title of the story on Thursday) to the, well, deliberately less equivocal title they chose to run on Friday. Am I supposed to think that this is just some kind of “oversight” or absent-minded error? Maybe others can think so, but I’m not that gullible. The smear is clear and deliberate.

OK, so maybe you think, this is a one-off thing… well, no. On Friday the Citizen ran this Stephen Maher editorial, this time with a neutral, toned-down title: “Maher: Toews made himself Twitter target with ‘pornographers’ crack” about how the @vikileaks30 story started. Read the story, though, and the ugly smear rears its head again in connection with the IP address:

That IP address also was linked to some Wikipedia pages where someone had written pro-NDP comments, which the Citizen reported.

Actually I do wish that Postmedia hired better editors because what Maher is saying now is not quite the same as what Pilieci was saying earlier, but this seems to me little but a barely-disguised attempt at repeating the smear. And then not content with doing it once, Maher pipes up again soon after:

It may be that that person is a secret NDP supporter, and enemy of Vic Toews, or it may be that there is some confusion over the IP address.

Does Maher think we’re all blind here?.. this is getting pretty blatant. Again, note the use of the weasel phrase “it may be”. Overall the article is pretty weak stuff by a national  Postmedia correspondent. In Canadian print journalism this is as senior as it gets without getting bumped up to a position involving more management duties, this isn’t the young guy who writes the computer column (that would be Pilieci, who is a staff member at the Ottawa Citizen and not really staff with the Postmedia “mothership”).

But that article isn’t what really rang a bell for me on the smear question — rather, what made me see the big picture was the follow-up by Pilieci following the @vikileaks30 poster’s announcement that the account was now retired. See if you can spot the difference from the (youthful?) exhuberance of his former column:

A further look into the IP address associated with Vikileaks30 found the address had been used in a range of online activities, including to edit several entries on the Internet encyclopedia Wikipedia ranging on topics from the history of ice hockey to a biography of Whitney Houston, as well as to alter content on a variety of politically charged topics that span the political spectrum. It does not appear the poster was targeting any specific political party or affiliation.

This went to publishing after it was clear that the NDP slur had failed to gain any traction in the House of Commons or indeed with public sentiment. What a difference a day makes, I say.

It still remains a good question as to whether there was a concerted effort by the Tory-friendly Postmedia to deliberately steer hostility towards the NDP at a time when the Conservative Party was in a bit of a crisis. The coverage in the first story mentioned actually lead to quite a few angry words in the House of Commons, mostly coming (as the second story reports) from rather easily-influenced Tory attack dog John Baird:

“Not only have they stooped to the lowest of the lows, but they have been running this nasty Internet dirty-trick campaign with taxpayers’ money,” he said.

That’s the head of Canadian diplomacy shooting himself in the foot there, taking Pilieci’s story as gospel truth (his was the main story that included the smear). Oh dear.

I for one will be following further developments regarding this aspect of the C-30 story, and I certainly hope that others will start asking questions about the possibility of spin or even possible fabrications by the newspaper conglomerate that bills itself as “the largest publisher by circulation of paid English-language daily newspapers in Canada”.

Either that, or they need to take a serious look at who they keep on staff.

Note: in order to avoid any confusion if any of the three aforementioned stories should be edited or somehow deleted, I have taken screen captures of all 4:

  1. The original IP address story as it appeared on the National Post web site on 2/16
  2. The same story as it appeared on the Ottawa Citizen web site
  3. The Stephen Maher story as it appeared on the Ottawa Citizen web site on 2/17
  4. The later story by Pilieci as it appeared on the Ottawa Citizen web site on 2/17

“Lawful access” — coming very soon to a computer near you

Public Security Minister Vic Toews is planning to introduce his so-called “lawful access” bill to the House of Commons later today. So, how does it measure up?

According to Ottawa U Law professor Michael Geist, it’s going to create a panopticon society where online privacy essentially no longer exists and is replaced with a sort of Big Brother. Which is pretty funny when you consider that the Tories are also about to introduce their bill to scrap the long gun registry and proactively delete any and all data therein. Apparently guns don’t kill people, but the freedom to go about one’s own business does… that pretty much tells you what you need to know about Stephen Harper and his cronies.

And then there’s the issue of cost, which is entirely offloaded onto the ISPs themselves, who will now have to keep a record of everything you do online — well, everything you do online taking the direct route via your ISP, making it trivial to circumvent — for 90 days. I rather pity the ISPs who are going to be stuck storing all that data at their own expense. You can be certain that they’ll be glad to pass the savings onto you, of course.

So what’s the justification for this garbage? Mr. Toews, never one to shy away from stooping to scrape the bottom of the barrel, claims that either you are with him or you are siding with “the child pornographers”. Never mind that there have been a number of child porn busts recently which have not required any of the new police state powers Mr. Toews insists are absolutely crucial to fight that crime. Personally I’ve always thought that it was illegal, but apparently by senile old Vic’s reckoning it was impossible to fight this crime before! Of course it wasn’t. Mr. Toews is just pulling his Maud Flanders act, and it sells out very well out West, where evidently people ignorant or mad enough to vote for the insane old codger think “internet” is a kind of potato blight.

But why should we let Vic the impaler set the terms? I say, unless you are against this so-called “lawful access” bill, you are siding with the fascists. I guess the Conservative Party has yet another self-renaming in the works.

Assange extradition case: is the UK CPS under foreign pressure?

Like a rather large number of people I am following the legal proceedings to extradite Julian Assange to Sweden with very keen interest. It is a very unusual case indeed. The British Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) is currently attempting to extradite Mr. Assange, the head of Wikileaks, to Sweden for questioning regarding something which does not appear to be considered prosecutable in any way outside of Sweden. Of course there are additional facts which make this case particularly odd for the CPS to pursue — but pursue it it has, all the way to the UK’s highest court.

One does very well to wonder why. Mr. Assange has not been charged with any crime, in the UK, Sweden, or anywhere else. Mr. Assange has offered to submit himself to questioning at the Swedish embassy in the UK. There are strong questions of prosecutorial misconduct already surrounding the case, and rumours seem to abound to the effect that the “victim” in the affair has been coerced into declaring that there was wrongdoing at all by a particularly zealous and right-wing Swedish prosecutor.

So of course inquiries have been made as to why the CPS is taking on this case. I myself cannot think of a justification to pursue extradition proceedings against a person who is not under a criminal charge for anything. It just doesn’t make sense, unless of course the entire affair is political in nature, in which case there are strong implications that the CPS is being used by another organ of the British government for purposes which, on the outside at least, seem unethical at best and downright illegal at worst.

As I have already mentioned an inquiry was made to obtain information from the CPS as to why they are conducting this campaign, and the CPS’s response can now be published, as it has been here. The CPS is refusing to answer the question, but it’s the cited reasoning which is most interesting:

Information is exempt information under s. 27(1)(a) if its disclosure under the FOIA would, or would be likely to, prejudice relations between the United Kingdom and any other State.

Now, I’m no expert in diplomacy or foreign relations myself, but it seems that the CPS itself is admitting that it is, directly or indirectly, being pressured by a foreign government into proceeding forward with the extradition. That seems highly improper. The CPS is not, nor should it be, answerable to the Foreign Office, or indeed any other body than the Home Office. And what interest does the Home Office have seeking the extradition of a man who is not charged with a crime in the UK or abroad?

And since the response hints at foreign pressure, who is behind that? Sweden has not seen it fit to charge Mr. Assange with a crime. Which country could possibly have a vested interest in getting the head of Wikileaks out of a jurisdiction where he enjoys legal protection and into international territory where he is completely unprotected? Hmm, I wonder. Not to mention that Sweden,  nice country though it may be, hardly has the clout to tell the Brits what to do. For that you have to look elsewhere. Surely it would have to be a more influential country, perhaps one which operates several military bases in the UK, to pick only one consideration out of a hat. As it is now no question can be answered as the CPS is keeping mum on the subject.

Of course one doesn’t have to spend too long reading between the lines to figure it out…

Whatever you thought you knew about the 2008 bank bailout is wrong…

…because the reality is over 10 times worse than what was made public at the time. In fact a total of $7.7 trillion in loan guarantees and lending limits were issued by the Fed, which makes TARP seem like a trifle in comparison.

The Bin Laden Farce

Unless you’ve been living in some cave in Afghanistan for the past 10 years (harharhar) you’ve no doubt heard the news that on Sunday night Osama bin Laden, the world’s most wanted fugitive(tm) was caught and killed by US forces secretly working in Pakistan. Without a doubt it’s the most exciting thing that’s ever happened in the sleepy hamlet of Abbotabad, about an hour north of Islamabad, and it’s more than likely that the place will now go back to the obscurity and quiet charm that used to make it the ideal location for a world supervillain seeking to escape the attention of the world police.

Now some people will say that they’ll always remember what they were doing when they heard that news, and I do as well. I was sitting in front of my computer doing something or other, which is terribly indistinct from what I regularly do for up to 14 hours a day TBH so for me that’s not much of a marker. And of course being in Canada I found the news to be of relatively little interest as we had a national election scheduled the first day (which turned out to be pretty fucking disappointing). So I didn’t really get into the whole “bin Laden dead” thing until Monday night after having ascertained that my country was indeed going down faster than a $5 whore, largely out of hope that the news would cheer me up a bit.

Now those of you who have known me for a while will know that I was living in Hoboken, NJ on September 11th 2001, and that’s a short skip across the Hudson river to Manhattan. You may probably know that the office I worked at in that time was located in the Pavonia section of Jersey City and had a great view of the WTC. We were pretty much as close as you could get on the Jersey side. I wasn’t at the office when the planes hit the towers, however; I’ve never been an early morning guy and I was probably heading for my bus when the second plane hit the south tower. To top it off, if I’d been more aggressive with my personal contacts while looking for a job in the previous year I could have stood a fair chance of being employed *in* the WTC north tower (a former boss’s former boss worked for Cantor Fitzgerald, fortunately he was out on business on that day).

So when I heard that Navy SEALs had killed the man I felt… oddly indifferent. Truth be told, the Osama bin Laden whose death Americans were shown celebrating on TV, the bogeyman from Saudi Arabia, had already ceased existing quite some time ago. Be honest, when was the last time people talked about the guy as being terribly important? His very survival was a subject of much speculation since 2001, and for many (including myself) the guy was almost as good as dead for some time. In fact I rather cynically thought that if the Americans had waited even just a couple more years to kill the guy they’d have to start reminding their people of who the guy was. There was a time at which he seemed very keen on getting a message out, but as time went on these messages became more infrequent and seemed to undergo somewhat of a regression technologically speaking, going from videos to audio tapes. The message itself seemed to step further and further away from that of a guy who could tell 20 of his followers to get into planes and crash those planes into buildings full of people, too. I think his last one started talking about the environment. Which is pretty ballsy for a guy whose most famous attributed act was so dependent on the aviation industry. However I digress, I certainly won’t be growing wistful of any “good old days” when the guy was at his peak preaching terror war against America. It’s certainly not something that one may seriously doubt he had done, though, and no amount of mellowing out in his old age can change that.

As this week went on, I must say that I grew increasingly annoyed at the story. It wasn’t that I didn’t think the guy deserved it, but frankly I can’t stand the way the Obama administration is handling the whole thing. I’ve never seen such sloppy work from a team that one must hope is made up of the best of the best. It’s practically like they’re encouraging people to cast doubts on the story and come up with conspiracy theories.

Frankly anyone with a moderately healthy sense of skepticism would be a bit troubled. First there was the story of what happened to bin Laden’s body after he was killed — it was taken to the USS Carl Vinson, washed, given Islamic burial rites and then buried at sea. So, there’s no body. You can kind of understand why they did it, but that all seems a bit… convenient.

Then on Tuesday came revelations that did indeed directly contravene parts of the story that we all had been given on Sunday. The first was that bin Laden died in a firefight against the SEALs — well, actually he did, but that firefight was pretty one-sided because as it turns out the guy wasn’t armed in the first place. The latest word out is that the SEALs feared that he would reach for a weapon. We also found out that the woman killed in the firefight was not in fact used by bin Laden as a human shield — when that seemed to be a “fact” strongly established enough for John Brennan, the chief US counter-terrorism advisor, to affirm “living in this million-dollar-plus compound, in an area that is far away from the front, hiding behind a woman: it really speaks to just how false his narrative has been over the years.” Well, it goes some way to cast aspersions on what we hear from Mr. Brennan, who himself seemed to have heard only what he wanted to hear.

But then there is video of the raid and surely photos were taken of bin Laden’s body after his death?.. and making those public would in an instant erase any possible doubt that may have arisen from the White House’s previous mishandling of the situation. Well, in a 60 Minutes interview taped today Obama has made clear his decision not to release those photos.

So we have no body, a narrative which is known to have been “enhanced” in at least two substantial ways already, and now we’ve been told that there is absolute, incontrovertible truth but it’s not going to be shown to the public.

You’ve got to be kidding. What the fuck is going on at the White House? This is absolutely bizarre. Already people are trying to fill the void by combining images of other people who’ve been shot in the head with live photos of bin Laden using Photoshop. The one I’ve seen was a pretty obvious edit which anyone could spot easily, but I’m sure more forgeries will come forward if the real pictures aren’t released. And if Obama is going to stand by his opinion that the lack of official pictures will prevent “trophy pictures” from appearing, well that’s just silly. I’m sure Fark or some other site will make a photoshop contest out of it, if they haven’t done so already. You’ll get loads of “trophy pictures” out of that… and they’ll probably be thought to be real by many people, just like the old “Bert is evil” Osama pic.

Hopefully the President will come to his senses soon. At some point he’s got to put up some solid evidence of what went on, something to redeem a narrative which has been tarnished by the people on his staff who delivered it, because otherwise the GOP will soon start casting doubts that this raid killed the guy who’s said to have been killed. Frankly this reluctance to provide that solid evidence is all too reminescent of the sort of the stonewalling which I remember from Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush. And I never felt that I could trust what Bush was saying for so much as a second. I hope that President Obama is someone credible, but at this point I’m getting too old to take it on faith.

I want to believe, but I’ve been burnt too often to do so.

Interesting times

2011 has so far been a rife year for change — if anything that’s quite the understatement. So far this year two long-standing regimes have fallen in North Africa, and this seems to be fanning local flames of discontent over large parts of the middle east and northern Africa.

It’s enough to drive some people mad with fear about some kind of greater Islamic Caliphate. American entertainer (and nothing else) Glenn Beck has made it the cornerstone of his show, which has recently become a sort of festival of ranting paranoia that’s led many to question whether Beck is still sane at all — although his general message differs little from what’s coming from the American right wing (i.e. Fox News) generally. Fox News doesn’t care for brown people, that’s hardly news to anyone.

That’s one way to see things. It’s also the wrong way to see things. When you look at these uprisings more closely you find that in each country in which protests have occurred so far, the causes for the protests are pretty much purely local to the place in which they are happening, and that beyond the demands for change there is little in common between them. To claim otherwise is either foolish or dishonest.

This is not to say that each national protest occurs in a vacuum, of course. Tunisia, as the first country to revolt, has undeniably inspired protesters in the other locales by showing them the power behind non-violent resistance. When President Ben Ali resigned he had been in power for 24 years and had built a strongly repressive regime that for most of the protesters had existed for as long as they were alive. That this regime could be toppled with relatively little bloodshed has without a doubt bolstered the spirits of protesters across the region and made them realize that no matter how long a regime has been in charge of their country, it’s just not going to last forever. In fact as soon as Ben Ali’s resignation was announced I had a strong feeling that Egypt would be next to see protests.

Tunisia’s revolt came as a result of two factors: resentment against Ben Ali and his internal security forces, but especially changing government policies that caused the price of food to skyrocket in a very short timeframe. Additionally young Tunisians are a well-educated middle-class people, so long-term unemployment for many of them — it is said to have been running around 15% — was the spark by which the revolution started.

The situation was very different in Egypt, which did not see an economic downturn or sharp price reforms like Tunisia. Rather in this case the impetus was provided by simmering resentment over Hosni Mubarak’s (almost) 30-year rule of the country, particularly the complete lack of political reforms and the authorities’ reliance on brutal gangs of thugs to “maintain order” whenever there were political protests. I’m actually struck at how similar Mubarak’s Egypt was to the Iranian Mullahs regime in that respect — whether you call them “Egyptian secret security forces” or “basiji”, in both cases a brutal repressive regime used uneducated, unemployed people from the country in order to crack heads in the cities whenever the regime feels a threat. But Mubarak was not able to make much of a difference through his thugs, and it’s since transpired that he had initially ordered the army to have a Tiananmen-square style crackdown on Tahrir square and even wanted armoured batallions to just run over the protesters and retake the square by force. Fortunately the army point-blank refused to listen, and from that point on the dictator was finished.

This was just the beginning. Protests have broken out since in Bahrain against the Khalifa family, who control all aspects of political life in the tiny island nation; the biggest grievance there is that there is (apparently) widespread discrimination against the majority Shiite population by the Sunni Khalifas, as well as the (sadly usual) accusations of corruption. One especially salient point made by the protesters is that the police force of Bahrain is being supplemented with Sunni foreigners who are fast-tracked for Bahraini citizenship even if some of them do not even speak Arabic (the local language). The protests there, ongoing as we speak, materialized very quickly; they are not as big as in Egypt, but then Bahrain is a lot smaller and less populated. As an additional factor the protesters are vowing to cause disruptions during the Grand Prix of Bahrain, a Formula One race scheduled to take place in Sakhir on March 14th. Americans will also be particularly interested in the situation there as Bahrain is the home of the US Fifth Fleet.

Protests have also flared up in Iran, in a sort of “round 2” to the green protests which took place last year. There is also some unrest occurring in Algeria, Lybia, Jordan, Syria, and Yemen. In each case the protests have a distinctly nationalist nature and belie the very idea of some sort of pan-muslim uprising.

Personally it’s always been my position that repressive regimes tend to foster and stoke the flames of extremism. It’s not surprising that the bulk of the terrorists involved in the 9/11 operation generally came from places where dissent is not tolerated and political freedoms are few (ya, Saudi Arabia, I am looking at you). In that sense I can’t help but see the toppling of dictatorial regimes by democratic forces to be a fundamentally good thing and conducive to long-term stability in the region.

In that the US find themselves squarely on the wrong side of history by their long-standing habit of backing dictators who could either a)give them what they want in terms of oil and soil to build military bases on, or b)be a hired friend of Israel. Those two factors are still the cornerstone of American policy in the region, so America is clearly on the back foot and really can’t get involved much. Obama pretty much took the best line he could in Egypt, everything considered, but the point has been driven home that these uprisings are not about America or (at least so far) Israel, they are the shouts of peoples who have had enough from local despots.

Interestingly enough these local despots seem so far to have quite a bit in common. The fallen ones are both older (75 for Ben Ali and 80 for Mubarak), largely secular autocrats who have been in power for decades and seem to share a taste for black hair dye. Even in the countries which are currently experiencing protests the trend seems to be largely borne out, with exceptions of course — Syria’s Bashar al-Assad is still a youngster at 45, but Khalifa (Bahrain) is 60, Gadaffi is 68 and in power for 41 years, Saleh of Yemen is 64 and Bouteflika (Algeria) is 73.

What we’ve seen so far is only the beginning.

If you’re as interested in these things as I am, I recommend watching Al-Jazeera, either through their web site (http://english.aljazeera.net) or via the Livestation desktop application (http://livestation.com). AJ is the authoritative television station in the area and their coverage blows away all competition.

Stalwart defenders of liberty

Given the events transpiring in Egypt one may be tempted to think that Americans are united behind the Egyptian people’s desire for freedom and democracy — after all Americans can’t stop shouting slogans about liberty. But the truth of the matter is, that Hosni Mubarak has a sizeable and influential fan club in the United States and particularly in the Republican party.