ACLU: Government Ordered to Release Detainee Abuse Photos

From the ACLU's site, a court decision that could have ramifications in Canada:

NEW YORK – A federal court today ordered the Department of Defense to release photographs depicting the abuse of detainees by U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit rejected the government's appeal of a 2006 order directing the Defense Department to release the photos. Today's decision comes as part of an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit seeking information on the abuse of prisoners held in U.S. custody overseas.

"This is a resounding victory for the public's right to hold the government accountable," said ACLU staff attorney Amrit Singh, who argued before the court. "These photographs demonstrate that the abuse of prisoners held in U.S. custody abroad was not aberrational and not confined to Abu Ghraib, but the result of policies adopted by high-ranking officials. Their release is critical for bringing an end to the administration's torture policies and for deterring further prisoner abuse."

Those who followed the Conservative's government's shoddy handling of the detainee abuse file in Afghanistan will recognize that the revelation of these photos could put an abrupt end to earlier claims that detainee abuse was just "Taliban propaganda" which our defence and foreign affairs department, along with the PMO and every single Con MP, used as an excuse to write off real concerns about what our military may have been involved in when it turned over prisoners to the US military (until that was stopped) and then to the Afghan government. Remember the infamous filibuster of committee testimony and the other ridiculous lengths the Cons went to trying to hide the truth? If this court decision is allowed to stand unchallenged and these photos are released, expect yet another house of cards to come crashing down.

 

O'Connor Lowballed War Costs

Canada's Rumsfeld - Gordon O'Connor. Just exactly what does he have to do before he finally gets fired?

The Globe & Mail reports that O'Connor seemingly forgot to mention that the costs involved in securing additional tanks for Afghanistan are actually double what he reported due to the service contract attached to the purchase.

As he detailed a laundry list of military hardware the Conservative government plans to buy over the next few years, Defence Minister Gordon O'Connor surprised the Commons by announcing there will be a 20-year, $650-million service contract attached to the tank deal.

“The capital acquisition is $650 million and the support for 20 years is about $650 million; about the same range,” he said in reply to an opposition question during debate over Defence Department estimates.

Quite the "surprise".

Not only that:

Also on Thursday night, Mr. O'Connor released a revised estimate on the cost of Canada's current mission to Kandahar. From February 2006 to February 2009, when the mission is slated to end, it is estimated that $4.3 billion will have been spent by the Defence Department — an increase of $400 million since the last forecast in November.

The increase is attributed to the additional cost of reinforcements, including tanks, which were dispatched to Kandahar last September by the Conservatives.

September. What that means is that the defence department apparently didn't know how to plan for what it knew was coming down the pike - for the decisions it made. An extra $400 million isn't exactly just an oversight. It's incompetence.

One thing's certain - we're never going to get the truth about this war from this government - whether it's about the detainee abuse, the costs of this war or even the real length of our future commitment, which they refuse to even talk about. They are completely untrustworthy.
 

Tories Behaving Badly - Again

- Will the real Rahim Jaffer please stand up? - redux:

Ottawa — A red-faced Tory MP is apologizing after his assistant impersonated him — and provided false information — in an e-mail exchange with a constituent over the hot-button issue of Afghan detainees.

An e-mail from Gord Brown's parliamentary office, dated May 2, claimed that every alleged case of abuse involving Afghan detainees had been investigated and proven to be unfounded. That despite the fact the Afghan government has yet to finish an investigation into the torture claims.

The e-mail to Randi Davidson, obtained by The Canadian Press, was signed by Mr. Brown, the member for Leeds-Grenville. But Mr. Brown says the note was written by his assistant, Mark King, without his knowledge.

“Those are not my views. They don't reflect my view. That staff member has been reprimanded for sending that out,” Brown said in an interview.

“He shouldn't have sent it out to begin with and he shouldn't have sent it out with my name it on. I'm not very happy about it.”

- Oh, they pretend to be "tightening the screws" on political loans but:

The bill seems equally aimed at embarrassing the Liberals, with Mr. Van Loan and Ottawa Tory MP Pierre Poilievre repeatedly taking shots at last year's Grit leadership race in which contestants relied heavily on loans to pay for their campaigns.

Mr. Poilievre noted that the winner, Stéphane Dion, received loans from wealthy supporters amounting to almost $500,000, as did runner-up Michael Ignatieff.

“Who owns the Liberal party?” he asked.

But the Tories were not inclined to discuss who “owns” Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who has never fully disclosed the donors to his 2002 campaign for the leadership of the Canadian Alliance, predecessor to the Conservative party.

Mr. Harper disclosed only 54 donors who'd contributed more than $1,075 each to his campaign. He never revealed the names of 10 large donors who wanted to remain anonymous or the more than 9,000 donors who gave less than $1,000.
[...]
The law did not require full disclosure in 2002. Mr. Van Loan dismissed suggestions that Mr. Harper, in keeping with the new spirit of transparency and openness, should belatedly open his campaign books.

- I wonder how many of those anonymous donors were active in Alberta's oil sands sector, which has just been exempted from the Tories' so-called "clean air" plan. Meanwhile, Alberta conservatives are pushing for a $6.2 billion nuclear reactor for the province.

However, the Alberta Liberals said they're skeptical about nuclear power in Alberta, while environmental groups are fiercely opposed to it, suggesting it's downright radioactive.

"It looks more and more like the Tory government has let the nuclear genie out of the bottle without ever consulting with Albertans," said Liberal Leader Kevin Taft.

Officials with the Pembina Institute, an environmental think-tank, argue concerns about how to dispose of nuclear waste outweigh the potential benefits of a reactor, such as an increased electricity supply and a reduction in greenhouse gases emitted, compared to coal-fired plants.

- Pollution, nuclear waste, why not add increased levels of pesticide to our food too?

Better break out the veggie-scrubbers: Canada is set to raise its limits on pesticide residues on fruit and vegetables for hundreds of products.

The move is part of an effort to harmonize Canadian pesticide rules with those of the United States, which allows higher residue levels for 40 per cent of the pesticides it regulates.

"Harmonize", my ass. It's called "pandering".

- James Travers has some advice for the "new" government: It is not in our interest to allow the military to become synonymous with Canada. The problem with that is the fact that conservatives actually measure Canada's standing in the world by its military involvement and the praise received from other conservative governments and right-wing organizations according to our participation in military pursuits. Good advice Travers, but don't expect Steve et al to listen.

- Tories cut peacekeeping centre funding:

OTTAWA — The Tory government will no longer pay for soldiers from around the world to train in peacekeeping at the Pearson Peacekeeping Centre in the Annapolis Valley.

Defence Minister Gordon O’Connor’s office did not return calls Monday afternoon to explain why it is cutting the program.

For the past two years, the Defence Department has paid for groups of 30 soldiers to train in peacekeeping in the United Nations Integrated Missions Staff Officers Course at the Cornwallis centre.

Dirty pool?

Defence’s decision comes five months after what appeared to have been a series of department leaks to the Ottawa Citizen trying to discredit the Cornwallis centre. At the time, West Nova Liberal MP Robert Thibault predicted trouble.

"I’m fearful that there might be some ploy within the Department of Defence to leak stuff like that and then to refuse their funding," he said. "The reports I get when I talk to people around Ottawa is that the other departments are ready to fund it . . . but that (Defence) has been balking."

- Conrad Black behaving badly. Ongoing.
 

Okay. Can we fire O'Connor NOW?

Defence minister Gordon O'Connor has been an absolutely incompetent performer. He muddled his way through the recent controversy about the treatment and possible torture of Afghan detainees like a man stuck in mental quicksand. He lied about the ICRC's role in overseeing their detention. He lost track of 4 detainees who have disappeared into thin air. His department tried to stop one of the 4 investigations into the possible abuse of detainees by Canadian soldiers. And now, military police are investigating over 100 shady defence department contracts.

Military police have been called in to investigate irregularities surrounding almost $100 million worth of National Defence transportation contracts.

The Citizen first reported last month that the department's internal auditors had raised red flags over the "vast majority" of 109 contracts for air, rail, sea and road freight transportation.

Officials now reveal one employee has already been fired as a result and the military's law enforcement arm is taking a closer look.

The audit was highly critical of how bidders were selected for work with the department, citing problems such as improper sole-sourcing of contracts and the absence of a clear method to determine winning bids.

It found that "while 89 of these contracts were technically awarded via competition, the methods used -- i.e. e-mailing or faxing requirements to at least two selected companies -- may have omitted many potential suppliers and may not have resulted in the best price.

"For air transport contracts, there was no clear method of determining how the winning bid was selected, and 18 of the 87 sampled air contracts were sole-sourced with no documented rationale."

The sole-sourced contracts ranged in value from $22,000 to $5.7 million, the audit noted, adding one air broker landed 56 per cent of the work.

Frankly, investigating this level of corruption sounds like a job for the RCMP.

Oh, and in case all of that still isn't enough to fire O'Connor, how about this on top of everything else?

OTTAWA -- A massive backlog at National Defence means that 26,000 employees have not yet completed their security screening, according to a federal audit that raises serious questions about the clearance process in the department.

Not to state the obvious, but... :

"Personnel security clearances are the first line of defence against both domestic and international security threats," the audit said.

The audit said that issuing a security clearance to an "undeserving individual could . . . render security measures ineffective, thus subjecting people, classified information, and facilities and assets to unwarranted risk." Security problems would also affect "Canada's relationship and reputation with various member states of NATO," the audit said.

O'Connor: Worst.defence.minister.ever.

Update: O'Connor announced today that General Dynamics (a company O'Connor used to lobby for) has been awarded a $30 million DoD contract. How convenient.
 

How do you measure political will?

How do you measure political will? The most familiar way is to simply take a public opinion poll. But how do you measure political will in a crisis zone? That's what the US department of defence is trying to determine and it's soliciting proposals from contractors interested in taking on that challenge on its behalf.

OSD07-T002 TITLE: Measuring and Mapping Political Will

TECHNOLOGY AREAS: Human Systems

OBJECTIVE: Design, develop and test a dynamic analytical tool for determining the presence, absence and/or degree of political will for reform and collaboration with the USG in democratization, counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism efforts within governments and/or leadership elites of crisis prone states. Develop a web-enabled/deployable training methodology and product to be used by USG policy-makers and DoD operational field leaders to learn how to apply the dynamic analytical tool in specific countries.

DESCRIPTION: In environments that are unstable, the DoD is often at the forefront of USG efforts to stabilize local and regional populations. Operational and tactical military leaders may find themselves to be the primary interface with a country’s political leaders. Gauging willingness of those political leaders to collaborate with the USG on counter-insurgency, counter-terrorism and stabilization operations/objectives is critical to U.S. success in these programs. This willingness to collaborate with the USG, specifically in efforts to reform the politico/economic environment, is what is referred to as political will.

The literatures of democratization, counter-insurgency, and counter-terrorism are replete with the centrality of political will to successfully accomplishing our national objectives. It is identified as a threshold variable in determining the relationship between the USG and foreign government counterparts. Political will is derived from the support of the people, and is vital to successful accomplishment of USG objectives and therefore of vital interest to strategic and operational leaders. Moreover, current planning efforts within both the civilian and military agencies of the USG depend on the presence of political will for establishing strategies for dealing with insurgency, terrorism and democratization. For example, current efforts of the OSD (“Ungoverned Areas”) and the National Security Council (“Safe Havens Strategy”) begin with an initial threshold question, “Does the state have political will?”

Political will is often posed in this way – i.e. as a binary variable; counterpart governments in subject states are assumed to either have, or not have it. It is typically discussed as though the government, or leadership, of the subject state is monolithic. Analyses of political will generally seem to assume that once a determination is made, it can be treated as a constant. However, this over-simplification creates a number of extreme vulnerabilities, and leads to the likelihood of miscalculation in determining the appropriate relationship with a host-government counterpart. The miscalculation of such a key variable can easily result in significant waste of resources, effort and time, and even counterproductive outcomes.

Military and other planners traditionally make instinctive assumptions about the presence or absence of political will based on a variety of subjective factors. Until now no objective framework for determination has been developed or applied. The result is that major decisions regarding collaboration, information sharing, funding and planning are based almost exclusively on individual idiosyncracy, without taking into account historical or collective experience.
[...]
This research project will de-construct and unpack the concept of political will into its constituent elements. The reduction of political will to a binary variable misses the tremendous array of intermediary positions between the poles of presence or absence. The project will establish a full spectrum of gradients between the two extremes based on the level of intensity of political will. This will enable policy-makers and field leaders to gauge just how much political will their counterparts possess.

That's quite the task and it appears to be a very sterile way to attempt to measure human behaviour that can obviously be impacted by many different variables at many junctions. In that atmosphere, is it really possible to measure political will in an objective way that provides a constant?

Crisis zones are just that: they are in a state of crisis. Trying to determine who might do what by this type of suggested modeling is bound to be rife with dynamic factors that influence how those the US government is dealing with might, in fact, react to its policies, coercions or trade offs.

Can a measuring stick based on the gradients suggested really overcome those realities?

One of the major mistakes made in past policy decisions was the lack of human intel - input from those on the ground who can get as close to the situation as possible. There's no substitute for that. Viewing these things from a distance is not enough when it comes to deciding how to proceed.

The DoD is also calling for submissions for "Training Soldiers to Decode Nonverbal Cues in Cross-Cultural Interactions".

The training goal is to prepare Soldiers to interpret and predict behavior more accurately in cross-cultural environments. Training should address the role of culture in nonverbal communication, identifying aspects of nonverbal communication that are universal, such as expression of emotion (Elfenbein & Ambady, 2002b), and aspects of NVC that are culture-specific, such as display rules, emblems, illustrators, and regulators (Ekman & Friesen, 1969).

That's exactly what would be missing in the DoD's political will scale - the human and cultural factors. They obviously realize the importance of considering face to face behaviour. Beyond that, societies in crisis can change almost in an instant. Take the example of the bombing of the Samarra mosque in Iraq in early 2006 which set off a firestorm of civil sectarian strife - civil war. In situations like that, those the US government may have been negotiating with to end the war - who had the political will at the time to do so - could suddenly become the enemy, literally overnight. We've also seen the problems the US administration has had in handling al-Maliki who at times has been cooperative while at other times has acted in outright defiance of US influence. On the proposed scale of gradients of political will he's been all over the map, so what use would such a scale be in that type of situation?

Obviously, if the US government has been measuring political will as an all or nothing phenomenon, ("Political will is often posed in this way – i.e. as a binary variable; counterpart governments in subject states are assumed to either have, or not have it."), it's been wildly off the mark. I'd like to think that sort of judgment is not what's been guiding America's foreign policy. If it is, no wonder there have been so many problems. Offering a sort of political will sliding scale though doesn't appear to be a very effective solution to gauging such fluid problems.

I guess we'll have to wait and see who this contract is awarded to and what they do to meet this challenge. In the meantime, it seems that the US government obviously needs more flexibility when it comes to understanding the political will of others. In the end, maybe they should just hire a polling company to ask the necessary questions week after week, add the results to their subjective analyses, and simply go from there.

h/t to the Infowarrior mailing list for finding this DoD contract solicitation.
 

CP: 'Harper pays peanuts for personal use of government jet'

OTTAWA (CP) - Documents show that Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his Conservatives are paying only a fraction of the cost of using the government's Challenger jets for partisan and personal junkets.

Invoices obtained by The Canadian Press under the Access to Information Act show that the Defence Department billed the Tories for three flights last year. The first flight cost a hefty $2,100 per hour of flying time.

But on the two subsequent flights, the Tories decided they would only pay the equivalent of commercial airfares, which don't even come close to covering the $9,000-an-hour cost of operating the Challenger.

One of those flights was for Harper and his entourage to attend a Maple Leafs game in Toronto.

The use of the military executive jets was a big issue for the Conservatives when they were in opposition.

The Tories, including Harper, accused the Liberals of blowing $11,000 an hour flying around the country in "flying limousines" for partisan purposes.

Oh, the irony.

I'm sure the "new government" of "accountability" will get right on top of paying its proper dues, right?

Not bloody likely.

It looks like Defence Minister O'Connor wasn't quite as forthcoming as he should have been back in October, 2006 in parliament:

Hon. Navdeep Bains (Mississauga—Brampton South, Lib.): Mr. Speaker, the minority Conservative government's obsession with secrecy and silencing public servants has spread to National Defence.

When asked by journalists to provide information on the Prime Minister's partisan political use of Canadian government jets, defence department officials were ordered by the powers to be to hide the true cost of the trip.

Why is the government muzzling defence department officials? Was the minister ordered by the PMO to participate in this Challenger cover-up?

Hon. Gordon O'Connor (Minister of National Defence, CPC): Mr. Speaker, there has been no political interference at all within the practices of DND, which were originally set by the Liberal Party. We are following precisely the rules set by the previous administration.

Hon. Navdeep Bains (Mississauga—Brampton South, Lib.): Mr. Speaker, information previously available through access to information is now regularly blacked out, just like the names on these flights. Derek Burney's name was scrubbed from the Stealth flight to Washington. The names of the Conservatives who took joyrides to Halifax and went to hockey games with the Prime Minister are gone.

Last year the Conservatives said it cost $11,000 per hour to operate these flying limousines. Now they only claim 10%. Why will the government not release the passenger list? Will the Conservative Party settle its outstanding bills?

Hon. Gordon O'Connor (Minister of National Defence, CPC): Mr. Speaker, as I said, we are following the practice of the previous government. We have paid for any flights that were not on official government business. I want to point out that the previous government was using Challenger jets at twice the rate that this government is.

Those payments, however, were "peanuts" as we now see.