I’m doubly convinced that while the VANOC Gestapo is concerning itself on the front lawn with ebbing peaceful protests, sweeping our homelessness and drug problems under the rug, and thwarting any attempt by commercial enterprises to steal some Olympic mojo; they’ve left the back door open for morons who might claim some affiliation to the non-existent Al Qaeda to blow up a rented cube truck filled with god-knows-what in my neighbourhood.

Reinforcing my fear of their ineptitude, today it is revealed that Kinder Morgan, the company that has brought local residents a string of oil spills over the past few years, have .. um .. misplaced at least two tonnes of ammonium nitrate which was in a truck en route from Alberta to North Vancouver sometime over the December holidays.  Kinder Morgan is attempting to play this off as a “clerical error” however we’ve heard that from them before, as oil gushed into Burrard Inlet and drowned an entire Burnaby neighbourhood in a thick black film.

They lost two tonnes of ammonium nitrate.  In Vancouver.  You can’t be serious.

As Global Security reports, ammonium nitrate is used to make about 95% of the bombs in Afghanistan, and was also the medium of choice for the foiled efforts of the Toronto 18, who had themselves obtained 3 tonnes of ammonium nitrate.  The reason for this bomb-making method’s popularity is that the recipe for making such a device using ammonium nitrate is so simple an idiot could do it.

In 1995 Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols (two complete idiots if I’ve ever seen one) used a 600-pound ammonium nitrate bomb, mixed with a fuel oil called nitromethane, to attack and destroy the federal building in Oklahoma City.  The attack killed 168 people.  McVeigh and Nichols had purchased exactly two tonnes of ammonium nitrate prior to constructing their bomb, which they assembled in the back of a cube truck.

Ask yourself this: do you trust with your safety the very same public officials who will allow a couple of tonnes of high-explosives to disappear while simultaneously announcing that you are no longer able to take books on airplanes?

UPDATE: Bob Mackin points out that Kinder Morgan’s North Vancouver dock will also host a cruise ship providing visitor accomodations during the Olympics.  Good luck with that!

A Canadian Soldier at Kandahar, 2009-11-11

If you read this year’s Remembrance Day posts [1,2] you will be familiar with the passage that I read on air for CBC’s On the Coast on November 11th.  My Great Grandfather survived Vimy Ridge largely unscathed, until he went back there in the 1980s and broke his ribs tumbling along old trenchlines, but the experience left a profound impact on him — one that jarred his preconceptions about the “adventure” and “excitement’ of going to war.  What he saw when he arrived there was not pomp and chivalry and pretense; but instead a mechanical, brutal, unfeeling slaughter wrought by men who, when push came to shove, had no particular beef with one another.

Here’s the audio:  IanB-WMP-vimy-remembranceday

His full account of Vimy makes that journey in just a couple thousand words so palpably that I recommend it for anyone whose child announces that he will take arms and join the fighting in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, or wherever fate will lead.  This is not to say that one should not go to those places — those arguments are for another time — but this is to say that one should not tread lightly or with eyes wide shut as they approach the maelstrom.

As a society if we cannot define why we are in a place of combat the stories that should emerge, and can emerge, need to be given air.  That is why I applaud the Canadian Forces in particular, for embracing different media such as Suzanne Steel’s warpoet diaries which bring emotional stories and reflections straight from the front in Afghanistan.  These stories are our conscience.  They are the feedback loop through which those who are not directly affected by the war can feel the emotion, the frustration, the horror, and yes… even the humour.  You’ll find all of those things scrawled in the words of soldiers.

Sometimes there are acceptable (to some people) reasons to go to war, but as Hemingway wrote “Never think that war, no matter how necessary, nor how justified, is not a crime.”  So let us not embark on these without solemn contemplation and reflection.

After leaving the CBC studios I met up with DaveO and recorded another session reading larger sections of Mark’s writing, which you can check out at his PodCast site, Postcards from Gravelly Beach (listen here).

During this time the practise of Policy by Press Release rose to prominence as ill-founded concepts like the “Bomber Gap“, “Missile Gap“, and “Submarine Gap” were leveraged to justify a massive expansion in military spending.  U.S. Doctrine from the end of the Vietnam era to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 was to essentially outspend the Soviets while engaging them in proxy guerilla wars in weak communist ally states and financing developing countries through the World Bank.  It is thought by many (mostly Pro-Reagan) historians that it was indeed the US Military-Industrial Complex that won the Cold War and bankrupted the Soviet Union by simply outspending them.

Nowadays, we live under the spectre of far more benign [perceived] enemies.  Most of us in the technology industry fear Microsoft’s Goliath and align with Google’s David more meaningfully than any political discourse, though we only rarely cower under our desks in fear of a Vodka-soaked phone call between Steve Ballmer and Eric Schmidt (which I am positive has happened).

Google only stumbled its way into Microsoft’s crosshairs nine years ago, whereas Microsoft’s founder Bill Gates has long sought to get in on the action on the Internet and the Web in particular.  The two are presently in a pitched battle on a number of fronts, including Search (Microsoft recently launched Bing), Mobile (Google’s Android is a pattern-cut copy of MSFT’s Windows Mobile strategy), The Browser (Chrome versus the dreaded IE), Email (Google is making inroads into institutional and corporate email services), and Productivity Applications (Microsoft Office as an app and a hosted service versus a number of nascent Google Apps).

Most recently, Google responded to the Bing launch by going after MSFT’s supposed crown jewels with an announcement about Chrome OS.  Microsoft then parried with its own vapourware announcement about Web Office.  Engaging Microsoft on another front on an increasingly expansive battlefield might seem like the smart thing to do, but as Kevin wrote, Spite is not a business strategy. This is akin to pissing in your neighbour’s yard just because he took a whiz in yours.

The Soviets, like our more modern evil empire whose Kremlin sleeps in the dales just outside Seattle, were more cagey than we might have thought in those days.  They didn’t match the US and NATO move-for-move in force expansion, and rather than counter Reagan’s famous SDI initiative with a Star Wars system of its own, they simply rejiggered their ICBMs to penetrate airspace using different methods and geared fighters up to be able to shoot down satellites from within the mundane confines of our atmosphere.

No … the Soviets didn’t join in the arms race — instead they were quite content to watch their enemy blow its own brains out, expanding US debt in leaps and bounds (US debt doubled under Reagan in a single year, mostly on the back of military spending) while their own programs pursued less lofty goals, financing battlefield weaponry and troops on the ground in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

We didn’t know it at the time, thanks to a lot of propaganda from our own leaders, but the Commies were actually the underdog.  And like any underdog, the Soviets capitalized on American fear and loathing to nurture an inflated perception of its own militarism and level of armament, hoping that the US would collapse under its own weight trying to keep up — and it nearly worked.  Some would argue that it has — and that our current and previous economic hiccups, heaped atop rampant social problems in the US, are the reckoning for decades of rampant Cold War spending — and may not be remedied anytime soon.

Google is apparently trying to match Microsoft on every front in the technology industry — but it too is an underdog.  It’s attempting to do so with far fewer employees (Google has 20K employees – Microsoft has 90K), far fewer financial resources, and no apparent profit model associated with many of these businesses.  Microsoft has also had the benefit of nearly 30 years — all supported by revenue growth in the rising tide of the PC revolution — to expand its business aspirations from its core business of supplying Operating Systems.  Furthermore I would argue that the core of Microsoft is no longer Windows, and has instead long been its much more expensive product offering, Office.

If Google is attempting to parlay its underdog status into some sort of puffer fish role, in forcing Microsoft to compete on many more fronts than search, then the insincerity of these efforts is pretty transparent to most of us.  And it will fail.  I use MS Word and Apple’s Pages, but would not even consider using Google Docs.  As a web app, it delivers a far poorer user experience at the point of my absolute maximum requirement for efficiency and dexterity.  Google’s Chrome browser isn’t much better than Firefox, and as I’ve pointed out frequently, Android is a duplicate of Microsoft’s own floundering efforts in the mobile space with little improvement.

Microsoft is likely snickering (I know I am) as it watches Google’s many flailing attempts to strike it in different arenas.  Particularly so in Operating Systems.  Slapping a GUI onto Linux, particularly when said GUI developer is Google — a company apparently bereft of UX designers — is a cynical, me-too play that will alienate the Linux Community and pale in comparison to OSX.

According to Yahoo Finance! on MSFT and GOOG, Microsoft has 3x the revenue and 20% more cash reserves than Google.  That’s an amiable war chest and revenue stream that means it’s unlikely that Google can cause Microsoft to spend itself into oblivion.  Google, on the other hand, is moving in too many areas and executing poorly in most of them.

If Google truly wants to hurt Microsoft it needs to double-down on a sincere effort to unseat Microsoft Office and Exchange and thereby dominate the ways in which we communicate at work.   Otherwise, much as the Soviet Union really collapsed due to radical downward shifts in the price of oil and lack of access to credit, Google may suffer from a decline in CPC advertising and all of the air will spew out from its puffer fish act.

In May Day parades, the Soviets would invite Western leaders to the review stand, as bombers and missile launchers would run circles past the parade ground.  These Westerners would return to their peers wide-eyed with parables of impressive arrays of weaponry and massively inflated estimates of actual force sizes.  Unlike during the real Cold War, Google’s foe is not self-invested in grandiose estimates of its enemy’s fortitude and the rest of us are quite aware that in many cases, such as the ill-fated Orkut and other flailing products, Google’s emperor has no clothes.

And unlike our former evil empire’s round-faced leader, Ballmer is under no pressure for Perestroika.

Gutfeld, who also publishes a ponderous blog called the “Daily Gut” was responding to a report issued by the Canadian Chief of Land Staff Andrew Leslie that the Canadian Military would need a break before redeploying to another hotbed in order to retrain, repair, and rebuild forces after their withdrawal from Aghanistan in 2011.

Not since they demeaned to put Rachel Marsden on the air has Faux News offended Canadians so deeply.  Gutfeld weighs in with his obviously astute knowledge and understanding of international politics and warfighting.  What he fails to observe is that Canada has so drastically overcommitted itself to a deployment in Afghanistan that it is wearing out equipment faster than it can be replaced.  It has made a number of emergency interim equipment purchases and leases including tanks, transport aircraft, tactical transport helicopters, mine-protected vehicles, and blast-resistant transport trucks.  We have spent tens of billions of dollars helping George W. Bush perform his best impersonation of Emperor Nero against increasing resistance at home as young men and women return from what can fairly be perceived as an aimless fight in bodybags.

It fairly sparked the ire of Peter McKay, Canada’s Defense Minister, who appeared on CTV to demand an apology.  Really, though, Fox needs to consider whether a program like RedEye, which as the Tyee points out, is apparently “designed to appeal to the demographic most likely to be found on a beer-soaked dormitory couch at 2 a.m.” and “is chock full of fart gags and homoerotic innuendo” is befitting something that purports to call itself a news network.  Thinning pretense of news at Fox notwithstanding, stirring up this sort of controversy is dangerous for American and global politics, as it further widens the gap and reinforces a fundamentalism of American ignorance.  If you’re going to attempt to distort the truth, at least pay your audience the respect of starting from the truth.

Gutfeld is a clown, not a journalist — without the polarizing politics that are driven by America’s right-wing Taleban who converge around Fox News, he would have neither the audience nor the medium with which to reach them.  He is proof that neither a basis in education, nor in service, nor in intelligence is required to assert the airwaves in what shred remains of American journalism.

Note the position Landing Gear Lever in one of the photos.  Hopefully that was just the ground crew exhibiting their sense of humour … though just because the lever was up doesn’t mean the aircrew forgot to cover that small detail on their checklist.  There’s still some hope that this was a mechanical failure of some sort.

As one armchair pundit put it here:

My understanding is that the first realization of a problem was when it took a very high power setting to try to taxi off the runway.

Heh.  My theory of a mechanical failure may be contested by the fact that in recovering the plane the ground crew were able to lift the plane, deploy the landing gear and actually tow the C-17 off of the runway.  Things are not looking good for the aircrew.

Crashed C-17: that'll buff right out, sir!

This isn’t the first time this kind of incident has happened at Bagram.  In October a P-3 Orion crashed after overshooting the runway, and the Navy quickly relieved the Commander (who was piloting the plane) of his post.  Only a week or so before this latest incident, the overshoot of a C-17 at Bagram resulted in minor damage and caused only limited disruption — but in 2005, another C-17 (tail #01-0196) was very nearly written-off after overshooting the runway, causing extensive damage (see below).

C-17 at Bagram in 2005: another fixer-upper

The 2005 crash resulted in a fairly remarkable recovery and restoration.  The plane was very nearly considered for a writeoff, however it was made (barely) airworthy by Boeing technicians on the airfield and then hopscotched back to Long Beach for an extensive reconditioning.  It has been flying again since the summer of 2006.

Bagram, an ex-soviet base built during that country’s (understatement) expedition in Afghanistan, is a forward operating airfield run by the US Army in a rather hotly-contested area of the country.  This means that it primarily supports A-10 attack aicraft as well as the Army’s usual complement of AH-64, UH-60, and CH-47 helicopters.  In 2007 an ambitious suicide bombing attack against the Bagram airfield claimed 23 dead and might have killed Dick Cheney while he was on a special morale-depleting visit.  That said, a town has now built up around the airfield and the base itself is considered relatively secure.

A number of other pilots have criticized aircrews of the C-17 and other non-attack aircraft of “flying hard” and using “combat zone” landing techniques when coming into Bagram.  This means landing hard, low, and fast and would certainly explain many of the overshoots.  Whatever the cause, in order to mitigate the overshoots and to make the field more usable by larger aircraft, the runway was extended in 2006 after the 2005 C-17 overshoot (C-17s can land in as little as 3,500 feet, and after the 2006 lengthening Bagram’s main (and only usable) runway is 11,000 feet long).  However, the overshoots have persisted.

The cautionary note on Bagram’s pilot’s briefing is pretty benign (for a combat airfield):

Ctl explosions and de-mining ops in vcnty of arpt, ATC will advise. Acft opr blw FL210 may experience a loss of rdo and/or radar ctc with Bagram ATC at dist greater than 30 NM. MPN-25 (ASR/PAR) PMI Mon-Fri 1930-2130Z. Hi potential for hydroplanning when rwy sfc is wet. Rwy in advanced state of decay, increased possibility of FOD. Avoid ovft 1/2 mile NE dep end Rwy 03, burn pit will cause inadvertent flare dispersal. tkof obstacle rwy 03 4900′ MSL ant , 599′ fr DER, 510′ leftof cntrln. Lit twr, 120′ AGL, Rwy 03 apch end 1,250 ft E of cntrln. Lit twr, 120′ AGL, 1,250 ‘ E of cntrln midfield Rwy 03/21. Poss 1/2 rwy width clsd for const, ctc App for status. Twy H btn twys B and E is 44 ft wide. Acft use inboard eng only to reduce FOD.

It goes on to warn that if the airfield is under attack, you should stay above 25,000 feet; and avoid flying below 1000 feet West of the airfield or you could get shot down by US air defenses.  :)   That said, though, for a C-17 to come in to Bagram these days doesn’t seem to be particularly challenging, unless you fly over the burn pit and your anti-SAM flares go off from the heat.  Baghdad’s briefing is a little more frightening.

Concerningly, the peanut gallery seems to think that this particular air crew failed to follow their checklist in the heat of .. erm .. battle and essentially forgot to deploy the landing gear.  It will take some time in order to figure that out of course, but C-17s are outfitted with cockpit voice recorders and if the pilots have anything to hide, news will come out soon enough.  Others have pointed out that hot-dogging it into Bagram is becoming a bit too commonplace.

The briefing above does contain a bit of a nugget, though:  “use inboard eng only to reduce FOD”.  In other words, pilots are instructed to run outboard engines at idle in order to prevent them from sucking in debris from the outer edges of the runway and adjacent desert (thought this might apply only to taxiing).  As Global Security points out, the thrust reversers are an integral part of the C-17’s ability to land in short distances –and if pilots are coming in hot but only using inboard thrust reversers to slow down upon landing, they’ve got 50% less thrust to use in braking.  That’s a problem.  Maybe our most recent celebrity C-17 crew just figured the easiest way to slow down in a short distance was to retract the landing gear.

In the meantime, Canada now has 4 C-17s, designated the CC-177.  If one of ours were to crash at Kandahar while the pilots were playing “Top Gun” the consequences would be disastrous to the Canadian military’s mobility, and to its budget.  Both of the badly damaged C-17s hail from Charleston, South Carolina.  Let’s hope that if the “hot-dogging” allegations have any merit, that our guys are a little more Formula One, and a little less NASCAR.

UPDATE: Welcome trolls from Charleston!  Your comments will be approved (see below)…

UPDATE 2/22: New photos popped up last week from the night of the crash… some interesting details were revealed.

According to Valleywag it seems that Jimmy Wales, creator of Wikipedia, has entangled himself where so many have been entangled before: in the gaze of the just slightly right-of-Hitler Rachel Marsden. While few of us were paying attention, Marsden happens to have vaulted her career from falsely accusing SFU’s swim coach of harassment after allegedly stalking him for months to a brief but uninspiring career at Fox News.

How the man smart enough to give us the crowd-sourced encyclopedia of everything was dumb enough to become caught in this web is beyond me.

Note to Jimmy: dude, you’re the starchild of Silicon Valley’s tech culture — lots of smart, good-looking women will probably sleep with you, I’m sure of it. There’s no need to dip into the looney bin.

Wherever Miss Marsden goes, trouble is sure to follow. When she arrived at my alma mater, Simon Fraser University, it didn’t take long for her to enmesh herself in the campus’ greatest controversy in its history. After reportedly stalking the swim team’s coach, Liam Donnelly, for months she accused him of sexual harassment and molestation, also claiming that they’d had a relationship for months. At the same time, Donnelly had been confiding to friends that her aggressive and persistent advances toward him were concerning, and that they jeopardized his position with the school.

In the end, the controversy culminated in the embarrassment of the University, the resignation of the University’s President, a lengthy RCMP investigation, a formal inquiry, and cash settlements for both parties — a blight on the institution.

We newly shamed SFU alumni thought that she would go away quietly, but boy were we wrong. Here’s a chronology of the good times as they keep on rolling:

• 1997: Rachel accuses Liam Donnelly of rape, harassment, and whatever else she can think of. Heads roll. Student body embarrassed. But apparently this started in 1993, when she was a teenager and he demoted her from the neighbourhood swim team.
• 1999: SFU threatens to evict Rachel Marsden from the campus residences for continuing to stalk Donnelly, for harassing and stalking SFU’s Harassment policy co-ordinator Patricia O’Hagan (leading O’Hagan to quit, change her number, and move) and also SFU Criminology Professor Neil Boyd, who takes his case to the RCMP. Clearly a woman with no sense of her own irony.
• 1999: Rachel Marsden’s father, then 56 years old, is suspended for inappropriate conduct toward his female students, reportedly having taken a student on dates, and showing up at the student’s workplace to give her gifts.
• 2000: Rachel Marsden’s father, Claude Arthur Marsden, is found guilty of professional misconduct. “Mr. Marsden engaged in a sexual relationship with a sixteen year old female student.”
• 2003: Marsden becomes a “Babe for Bush”.
• 2004: Marsden is fired by BC conservative MP Gurmant Grewal, where she was working under the alias “Elle Henderson”, after it is revealed she’s facing harassment charges in a BC court.
• 2004: Marsden is convicted of stalking and harassing Michael Morgan, a Vancouver radio host with whom she worked (or tried to) at radio station CFUN, according to some reports from 2002-2004.
• 2005: Marsden remakes herself as a conservative pundit with a blog, columns in the Toronto Star, and fleeting appearances on the O’Reilly Factor, plying her trade as a sort of bargain basement Hyper-Coulter.
• 2007: Marsden is escorted from the building by her new employer, Fox News, after the infamous Salon piece and after some rumours (propagated by her, it seems) that she had begun harassing the host of “Red-Eye”, Greg Gutfeld.
• 2007: Marsden accuses Tony Backhurst, an Ontario police officer and unsuccessful Tory MP candidate of “leaking security secrets to her” after he files a complaint of harassment against her and the RCMP launches an investigation.
• 2008: Marsden gets dumped by Jimmy Wales on Wikipedia, so she leaks some of their email and instant messaging conversations to Valleywag, and sells some of his stuff on eBay (I’ve preserved the auctions in PDF here and here).

The real irony is that Jimmy, apparently, had read the warning label on this explosive device but chose to meddle with it anyway — we men are so stupid. According to his own reports he had altered the Wikipedia entry for her after her repeated requests that the god of Wiki gods do so — obviously, with her notorious past following her every move, spin control was and remains a major priority.

At present, Marsden appears to be living in New York and promoting her new web site Grand Central Political, evidently a job board for conservative spin doctors and other politicos. Vexingly she continues to appear on CNN to comment on everything from the War in Afghanistan to NAFTA. But it’s quite astonishing that this tarnish hasn’t prevented her from continuing to get air time. What exactly does one have to do these days to discredit oneself in politics?

If Marsden is any precedent then clearly, other notorious right-wing political figures like Tom Delay, Michael Brown, and Linda Tripp are sitting on a goldmine of endless punditry possibility — they just need the right sort of publicist. Huzzah! According to Marsden’s personal web site, she is up for the task: “If you are looking for Public Relations or Communications/Media services, click here to contact Rachel“. Far too late for Slobodan Milosevic, I am afraid.

Obviously I’ll be updating and referencing this page for years to come. Keep up the good work, Rachel!

“You want to make sure people understand that when they see civilian suffering there, it’s in the context of a terrorist attack that caused enormous suffering in the United States.”

Isaacson later claimed that he was buckling under pressure from CNN’s corporate interests, which exclaimed that the news was “too negative”. Failing to understand his own irony, he also later stated that he didn’t want CNN to be used “as a propaganda platform.” In actual context, the number of deaths occurring on September 11th pales by comparison to those civilians who’ve paid the ultimate price in Afghanistan, to say nothing of Iraq (which now accounts for as many as 70,000 civilian deaths).

Much more disturbing, the mainstream US Media bought and then massively resold the administration’s link between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda without any hard evidence and without any further in-depth investigation. While even reporters, editors, and producers themselves were disinclined to believe the US Administration’s line they reported it breathlessly regardless of their concerns. Bushists and their army then descended upon the media to repeat the phrase “but we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud” which was an obvious manipulation of the public’s fear of a bigger, badder 9/11 — they were given a virtually infinite quantity of air time as a podium to sell the war, and very little in the way of counterpoint. In the history of mankind, there has rarely been such an abject failure of the Fourth Estate.

But today I’m not writing to indict the Bushists. Of far greater concern to me are the millions of born-again Hawks who channeled the anger, pain, and shock from the 9/11 attack into a seething, raging vengeance. Insodoing they allowed themselves to be manipulated by the dubious aims of an administration bent on war and naively seeking U.S. dominance of the Middle East (as though that is even a feasible goal).

Many of these faux-hawks (I’m attempting to hijack the phrase for comedic effect here) are now, with the benefit of hindsight, claiming that they were “lied to” and “manipulated”, as though that warrants immediate exoneration. This is the problem.

Why was I able to form an opinion, amid the froth of propaganda following 9/11 and leading up to the wars, that there was no link between Al Qaeda and Saddam, that there was likely no nuclear program in Iraq, and that there was no real justifiable reason to invade Iraq? Am I smarter than everyone else? Surely not.

The answer is simple. While I watched CNN and occasionally Faux News, I also read other articles, such as this one from Knight-Ridder. I’d also read a few books on Middle-Eastern and specifically Iraqi recent history to understand the longer-term context, and I did a hell of a lot of Googling. I read newspapers from around the world, I read and watched opposing viewpoints, and I discussed the issue with friends. I read the back pages of the NY Times and Washington Post, to where most of the cautionary reporting was relegated. In essence, I sought out perspective, and through no matter of luck I found it, and it turns out to have been the correct one.

This is the job of every citizen of a democracy — I would hazard to say every citizen of the world. I cannot forgive those who merely lapped up that which was spoon-fed to them, who were entirely governed by their emotions, and who abandoned their responsibility as citizens and voters by failing to protest — loudly — the march to war. Through inaction, and this is at times the worst crime in a civilized society, they permitted a culture which has survived for thousands of years in the birthplace of humanity to endure its most trying disparagement.

A hockey coach of mine once said that the hardest-working player on the ice should always the guy who just screwed up. That rule also applies here. If you succumbed to the rhetoric of the Bush sycophants and joined the march (to send other people) to war only to realize your mistake later, you owe more to your fellow man than to simply claim you were lied to. You need to, at last, take action to stop the injustice in which you were complicit.

Paint a sign, write a blog post, march in a parade, or simply raise the quality of your discourse among friend. Do anything to combat this blunder and make up to your fellow patriots and world citizens alike. No President or Congress can instigate a war without the support of the population. So whose fault is the current Iraqi debacle?

Well, maybe it’s yours.

-Ian.

As the Stanley Cup playoffs rage on, a select crew of Canadian players whose teams are out of the running are over in Moscow defending Canada’s great cultural hockey tradition at the IIHF Hockey World Championships. The 2007 team, which was given a pass this year by past, current, and future greats like Sidney Crosby, Joe Sakic and Ryan Smyth so they could lick the wounds of a tough NHL season, is led on the ice by one Mr. Shane Doan.

But as the quest for the cup continues and the Worlds are well underway, they’re both being overshadowed by another Canadian cultural tradition: the self-promoting protestations of… what, exactly? by Canada’s official cultural muckraker, Liberal MP Denis Coderre. Apparently Shane, during a heated battle in Montreal where the calls by four francophone officials were definitely not in his team’s favour he is alleged to have had the audacity to say something nasty about them. In a hockey game, no less, which are of course known for the pleasantries and politeness exchanged among the league’s dainty, sensitive skaters.

Here, dear friends, is the offending quote (cover your eyes, kids!):

“Four French referees in Montreal, Cuje, figure it out.”

That’s what he said, as was determined by the NHL investigation, including testimony from goaltender Curtis “Cujo” Joseph, conducted after the December 13, 2005 game. But of course that’s not what linesmen Michel Cormier, from 30 feet away or what Coderre, several electoral ridings away, heard. Their imaginative ears inferred far fewer syllables: “f$cking French”. A fitting synopsis, perhaps, but not what he said.

In any case, either statement may be on record as the mildest response to having the opposing team run your goalie without receiving a penalty in NHL history.

But of course, this isn’t really about what he said or didn’t say, is it?

And this isn’t the first time Coderre, formerly the Liberal cabinet member responsible for sport, has gone after Doan. The first time was in early 2006, when Doan was called to play for the Canadian olympic team — and when Coderre was fighting to be re-elected in his fiercely Québécois riding of Bourassa, the Bloc Québécois candidate nipping at his heels as they have throughout his career. What a tidy coincidence that Doan made himself such a worthy target for the Liberals, whose government was under siege for having siphoned millions of dollars in graft to their Quebec constituents. Actually that number likely tops hundreds of billions, but that’s another issue. The battle between Denis Coderre and Shane Doan has raged ever since through defamation lawsuits.

It would be foolish to deny that in hockey circles there is a palpable animosity between anglophone and francophone hockey players in Canada — friends of mine who played bantam and junior pored over their French textbooks looking for worthy insults to utter as they lined up for faceoffs against kids from Quebec. Even the CBC show “Making The Cut” (now on GlobalTV), which searched for the top 6 unsigned hockey players in its first season, aired the fiery utterance by one of the anglophone players against a Québécois competitor who’d slashed him during tryouts: “that’s typical cheap french bullsh#t.” He later apologized, but the reality is that when insults fly out on the ice, no matter how harsh they might sound, they are rarely sincere.

It would be much more foolish to give credence to this “affair”, as it will inevitably be called, which drags Hockey Canada chief Bob Nicholson to testify before a bogus parliamentary committee as the Bloc Québécois clamors to ring in on the subject and defend le Quebec Libre, while Coderre plays the jubilant ringmaster. He must be thankful that someone has said something mean about his constituents so that he can rise to defend their honour against the slightest .. er .. slight.

But the whole process is, in the grand Candian parliamentary tradition, a farce. Hockey Canada is not even a federal agency, though it receives funding from the ministry responsible for promoting sport. What’s more, it is illegal for Parliament to accuse a Canadian citizen of a crime (is there a crime here?) for which he has never been convicted — this is called a Bill of Attainder and it’s been rejected by most western democracies since, oh, the 19th century. But this waste of time serves a grander purpose that makes it easy for our honourable MPs to pack the bandwagon full of proponents: it’s distracting the nation from the fact that 8 more Canadian soldiers died last month in Afghanistan, and that the violence (and our inability to cope with it) is escalating.

Nope. This isn’t about hockey, racism or ethnic slurs. It’s about grandstanding, and the age-old Canadian sport of politicians capitalizing on a societal victim mentality which has ingrained itself in the minds of Canada’s francophone minority. This is about the politics of culture, and Shane Doan is a pawn in a perpetual cycle pandering to and exploiting the irrational fears of a distinct society by Canada’s politicians, Nationalist and Separatist alike.

Those of us who understand and play the sport of hockey, which was originally promoted by Lord Stanley to unify the budding Canadian nation, believe and respect the fact that what happens on the ice stays on the ice.

In this case it is clearly the gross misconduct of politicians, not of hockey players, that shames our nation.

-Ian.

Halliburton: All In The Family* April 27, 2003

After dropping more than 28,000 bombs on Iraq, the United States has now begun the business of rebuilding the country.

And it promises to be quite a business. With at least $60 billion to be spent over the next three years, the Iraqi people won’t be the only ones benefiting. The companies that land the biggest contracts to do the work will cash in big-time.

Given all the taxpayer money involved, you might think the process for awarding those contracts would be open and competitive. Well, so far, it has been none of the above. And the early winners in the sweepstakes to rebuild Iraq have one thing in common: lots of very close friends in very high places, *correspondent Steve Kroft* reports.

One is Halliburton, the Houston-based energy services and construction giant whose former CEO, Dick Cheney, is now vice president of the United States.

Even before the first shots were fired in Iraq, the Pentagon had secretly awarded Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown & Root a two-year, no-bid contract to put out oil well fires and to handle other unspecified duties involving war damage to the country’s petroleum industry. It is worth up to $7 billion.

But Robert Andersen, chief counsel for the Army Corps of Engineers, says that oil field damage was much less than anticipated and Halliburton will end up collecting only a small fraction of that $7 billion. But he can’t say how small a fraction or exactly what the contract covers because the mission and the contract are considered classified information.

Under normal circumstances, the Army Corps of Engineers would have been required to put the oil fire contract out for competitive bidding. But in times of emergency, when national security is involved, the government is allowed to bypass normal procedures and award contracts to a single company, without competition.

And that’s exactly what happened with Halliburton.

“We are the only company in the United States that had the kind of systems in place, people in place, contracts in place, to do that kind of thing,” says Chuck Dominy, Halliburton’s vice president for government affairs and its chief lobbyist on Capitol Hill.

He says the Pentagon came to Halliburton because the company already had an existing contract with the Army to provide logistical support to U.S. troops all over the world.

“Let me put a face on Halliburton. It’s one of the world’s largest energy services companies, and it has a strong engineering and construction arm that goes with that” says Dominy.

“You’ll find us in 120 countries. We’ve got 83,000 people on our payroll, and we’re involved in a ton of different things for a lot of wonderful clients worldwide.”

“They had assets prepositioned,” says Anderson. “They had capability to reach out and get sub-contractors to do the various types of work that might be required in a hostile situation.”

“The procurement of this particular contract was done by career civil servants, and I know that it’s a perception that those at the very highest levels of the administration, Democrat and Republican, get involved in procurement issues. It can happen. But for the very most part, the procurement system is designed to keep those judgments with the career public servants.”

But is political influence not unknown in the process? In this particular case, Anderson says, it was legally justified and prudent.

But not everyone thought it was prudent. Bob Grace is president of GSM Consulting, a small company in Amarillo, Texas, that has fought oil well fires all over the world. Grace worked for the Kuwait government after the first Gulf War and was in charge of firefighting strategy for the huge Bergan Oil Field, which had more than 300 fires. Last September, when it looked like there might be another Gulf war and more oil well fires, he and a lot of his friends in the industry began contacting the Pentagon and their congressmen.

“All we were trying to find out was, who do we present our credentials to,” says Grace. “We just want to be able to go to somebody and say, ‘Hey, here’s who we are, and here’s what we’ve done, and here’s what we do.’”

“They basically told us that there wasn’t going to be any oil well fires.” Grace showed /*60 Minutes */a letter from the Department of Defense saying: “The department is aware of a broad range of well firefighting capabilities and techniques available. However, we believe it is too early to speculate what might happen in the event that war breaks out in the region.”

It was dated Dec. 30, 2002, more than a month after the Army Corps of Engineers began talking to Halliburton about putting out oil well fires in Iraq.

“You just feel like you’re beating your head against the wall,” says Grace. However, Andersen says the Pentagon had a very good reason for putting out that message.

“The mission at that time was classified, and what we were doing to assess the possible damage and to prepare for it was classified,” says Andersen. “Communications with the public had to be made with that in mind.”

“I can accept confidentiality in terms of war plans and all that. But to have secrecy about Saddam Hussein blowing up oil wells, to me, is stupid,” says Grace. “I mean the guy’s blown up a thousand of them. So why would that be a revelation to anybody?”

But Grace says the whole point of competitive bidding is to save the taxpayers money. He believes they are getting a raw deal. “From what I’ve read in the papers, they’re charging $50,000 a day for a five-man team. I know there are guys that are equally as well-qualified as the guys that are over there that’ll do it for half that.”

Grace and his friends are no match for Halliburton when it comes to landing government business. Last year alone, Halliburton and its Brown & Root subsidiary delivered $1.3 billion worth of services to the U.S. government. Much of it was for work the U.S. military used to do itself.

“You help build base camps. You provide goods, laundry, power, sewage, all the kinds of things that keep an army in place in a field operation,” says Dominy.

“Young soldiers have said to me, ‘If I go to war, I want to go to war with Brown & Root.’”

And they have, in places like Afghanistan, Rwanda, Somalia, Kosovo and now Iraq.

“It’s a sweetheart contract,” says Charles Lewis, executive director of the Center For Public Integrity, a non-profit organization that investigates corruption and abuse of power by government and corporations. “There’s no other word for it.”

Lewis says the trend towards privatizing the military began during the first Bush administration when Dick Cheney was secretary of defense. In 1992, the Pentagon, under Cheney, commissioned the Halliburton subsidiary Brown & Root to do a classified study on whether it was a good idea to have private contractors do more of the military’s work.

“Of course, they said it’s a terrific idea, and over the next eight years, Kellogg, Brown & Root and another company got 2,700 contracts worth billions of dollars,” says Lewis.

“So they helped to design the architecture for privatizing a lot of what happens today in the Pentagon when we have military engagements. And two years later, when he leaves the department of defense, Cheney is CEO of Halliburton. Thank you very much. It’s a nice arrangement for all concerned.”

During the five years that Cheney was at Halliburton, the company nearly doubled the value of its federal contracts, and the vice president became a very rich man.

Lewis is not saying that Cheney did anything illegal. But he doesn’t believe for a minute that this was all just a coincidence.

“Why would a defense secretary, former chief of staff to a president, and former member of congress with no business experience ever in his life, not for a day, why would he become the CEO of a multibillion dollar oil services company,” asks Lewis

“Well, it could be related to government contracts. He was brought in to raise their government contract profile. And he did. And they ended up with billions of dollars in new contracts because they had a former defense secretary at the helm.”

Cheney, Lewis says, may be an honorable and brilliant man, but “as George Washington Plunkett once said, ‘I saw my … seen my opportunities and I took them.”

Both Halliburton and the Pentagon believe Lewis is insulting not only the vice president but thousands of professional civil servants who evaluate and award defense contracts based strictly on merit.

But does the fact that Cheney used to run Halliburton have any effect at all on the company getting government contracts?

“Zero,” says Dominy. “I will guarantee you that. Absolutely zero impact.”

“In fact, I wish I could embed [critics] in the department of defense contracting system for a week or so. Once they’d done that, they’d have religion just like I do, about how the system cannot be influenced.” Dominy has been with Halliburton for seven years. Before that, he was former three-star Army general. One of his last military assignments was as a commander at the Army Corps of Engineers.

And now, the Army Corps of Engineers is also the government agency that awards contracts to companies like Halliburton.

Asked if his expertise in that area had anything to do with his employment at Halliburton, Dominy replies, “None.”

But Lewis isn’t surprised at all.

“Of course, he’s from the Army Corps. And of course, he’s a general,” says Lewis. “I’m sure he and no one else at Halliburton sees the slightest thing that might look strange about that, or a little cozy maybe.”

Lewis says the best example of these cozy relationships is the defense policy board, a group of high-powered civilians who advise the secretary of defense on major policy issues – like whether or not to invade Iraq. Its 30 members are a Who’s Who of former senior government and military officials.

There’s nothing wrong with that, but as the Center For Public Integrity recently discovered, nine of them have ties to corporations and private companies that have won more than $76 billion in defense contracts. And that’s just in the last two years.

“This is not about the revolving door, people going in and out,” says Lewis. “There is no door. There’s no wall. I can’t tell where one stops and the other starts. I’m dead serious.”

“They have classified clearances, they go to classified meetings and they’re with companies getting billions of dollars in classified contracts. And their disclosures about their activities are classified. Well, isn’t that what they did when they were inside the government? What’s the difference, except they’re in the private sector.”

Richard Perle resigned as chairman of the defense policy board last month after it was disclosed that he had financial ties to several companies doing business with the Pentagon.

But Perle still sits on the board, along with former CIA director James Woolsey, who works for the consulting firm of Booz, Allen, Hamilton. The firm did nearly $700 million dollars in business with the Pentagon last year.

Another board member, retired four-star general Jack Sheehan, is now a senior vice president at the Bechtel corporation, which just won a $680 million contract to rebuild the infrastructure in Iraq.

That contract was awarded by the State Department, which used to be run by George Schultz, who sits on Bechtel’s board of directors.

“I’m not saying that it’s illegal. These guys wrote the laws. They set up the system for themselves. Of course it’s legal,” says Lewis.

“It just looks like hell. It looks like you have folks feeding at the trough. And they may be doing it in red white and blue and we may be all singing the “Star Spangled Banner,” but they’re doing quite well.”

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