Respondent's Record

Original request for information, received in Ottawa by the Department of National Defence, December 14, 2006







Respondent's Record (sealed) filed in Federal Court in Ottawa by the Minister of National Defence, as represented by the Department of Justice, December 19, 2008

"US to harness Afghan militias against Taliban"

OK, who's paying off The Guardian?

A "UN backed plan"? Show us the document. The only legal basis for this insanity would be UN Security Council Resolution 1386, itself dubious on the basis of subsequent events, about seven years' worth of plagues, toads, Cheneys, and miscellaneous other unnatural disasters.

Has Julian Borger sold his soul?

The Wonderful Optimism of Dr. Doom

Or, How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love the Apocalypse

I'm just waiting around for the Minister of National Defence to file his Respondent's Record in T-680-08.

OK, so Nouriel Roubini, “Dr. Doom”, has been right on the money, literally. He’s called it from the beginning, giving the lie to “no one saw this coming”, Dr. Doom having spelled it out in words of one syllable. Not only that, he’s got a prescription, which also makes sense, even to the uninitiated, the prescription having been tried out by Sweden some ten years ago, for which there is evidence, evidence being in short supply in the current febrile climate in Washington and New York.

Some parts of the world like Canada and Europe started off by viewing the current strife as a purely American problem, but that delusion lasted only days, perhaps hours. Here in Canada we’re in the midst of a Federal Election, the governing Conservative Party having deigned to release its “platform” some 7 days before the vote – if you don’t have a platform, why did you call an election? – and our feeling of safety is disintegrating by the hour as it becomes clear that our own stock market is going south and there is no telling where the “bottom” of the American export market is going to be, and therefore the commodities market, and the North American car market is already a disaster which lands Ontario in Deep Serious from the get-go. What is a get-go?

The thing is, I’m a doctor myself, and I constantly have to explain technical things to patients so that they can make informed decisions, not that we doctors necessarily understand the technical things ourselves, but we do have experience and we try. Dr. Doom explains things so even I can understand the gist of what he says – which in medicine is a mark of talent, anybody can be obscure – and even though I don’t know the difference between a Credit Default Obligation and the London Interbank Overnight Rate, I get what he says.

The basic problem is, as I understand him, that the American economy is currently built on Funny Money, the United States spending more than it makes. This is not an advanced concept. At some point, as I understand Dr. Doom, somebody suggested that the Emperor Had No Money, at which point the Funny Money disappeared, and it got down to basics like food, essential services, and shelter. That point is right now. The thing is, the world can probably come up with food, essential services, and shelter for its population, but there happens to be a small group of people in the world who want a whole lot more than the basics (which is also fine, I have no desire to live in a 36 room mansion in the Hamptons or Muskoka, or fly falcons in Afghanistan from an air-conditioned tent while drinking champagne) but as it turns out this group is not interested in the large number of people who are hungry, without essential services, and homeless.

But back to Dr. Doom, who in my opinion shows the signs of an expert clinician. I mean, I’m all for a holistic approach to health, but if I develop Hairy Cell Leukemia say, just to pick a random example of horrible things that can happen to people without explanation, I don’t want some guy coming at me with magic crystals and acupuncture. I accept that the placebo effect is real, but I don’t happen to believe that crystals are gonna fix leukemia so I’ll take the advice of a hematologist who has been there and done that. I’m only saying that Dr. Doom shows signs of a clinician I’d trust. He’s not judgmental, although he’s been quite caustic in his analysis of the Economic Powers That Be, the Fed, the Hapless Henry, and so on, and he’s not smugly righteous either: as all his predicted disasters come to pass, he’s got a prescription. Even though the patient has ignored competent economic advice up to now, Dr. Doom is still in there slugging with the patient’s best interests at heart, rather than his own reputation.

He also, dear to a clinician’s heart, cites evidence. As with medicine, this disaster is not a bolt from the blue, it’s happened before, and there is evidence – clinical experience – as to how to deal with it. What stands out is that banks have to be re-capitalized before normal interbank lending resumes. This seems to be fundamental – like having a patent airway in cardio-pulmonary resuscitation – but yet ignored by Henry Paulson and the financial gurus who increasingly appear to be wizards who have relied on smoke and mirrors.

Here in Canada the turkeys are also coming home to roost, Canadian Thanksgiving occurring, in parallel with the two federal elections, some weeks earlier. Dr. Doom’s prescriptions, like all good treatments, don’t recognize national boundaries.

Terrorism and The English Language*

* Apologies to everyone who used that title before I did, particularly Lorraine and Anna. I've been writing this thing for years, so messed up on giving appropriate credits. However, the fact George Orwell's essay needs more publicity needs no apology.NK

Update:  January 2014.  Just discovered this first use in December 2001 in a thoughtful essay by John Pavlus.

There are a lot of people who are screwing around with the English language, generally to create what I believe the CIA refers to as "mindfuck".

Quite a few of such people seem to have axes to grind in Afghanistan, where foreign military forces (generally referred to as "NATO", "ISAF", "Coalition forces", or "UN mandated forces") are fighting people who are usually called "insurgents", "militants" or "Taliban". The fight is framed, often literally, as The Good Guys vs. The Bad Guys.

As Orwell said: "If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought." The current Afghan military operations could also be framed as the Afghan "resistance" fighting to rid their homeland of "foreign occupation troops". It looks quite different that way round. I'm not saying it's one way or the other, only that it's probably not one way or the other, it's more complicated.

So I wrote this thing Terrorism and The English Language which is a rip-off of Orwell's "Politics and The English Language", but Orwell's magazine has gone out of business. George, however, is on the web. So if it's good enough for him, it's good enough for me, and having been rejected by respected journals like Harper's, Walrus, Frank etc., I decided to post it myself**. There are indeed problems about publishing things without proper editing or peer review, but as has been shown vividly over the past eight years, there is also a problem publishing things in respected journals like the New York Times, whose editing of Judy Miller seriously misled the entire population of the United States. And there is also a big problem in not publishing critical reviews of the "rationale" for say, the Iraq invasion, critical reviews easily available on the web and, as it turned out, entirely accurate.

**The embedded links on Google Docs somehow disappeared in the Great Google Blogger Meltdown of 2011. I shall restore these links in the fulness of time. They exist. It is not possible to make this stuff up.

I wrote to Orwell in high dudgeon.

Cool justice...

From a decision of the Federal Court of Appeal

2008 FCA 401

Paragraph 20.

"I understand the Supreme Court of Canada to say that deference and comity end where clear violations of international law and fundamental human rights begin."

Justice Desjardins

Tet 2008

Wall Street isn’t the only game in town for Orwellian disaster hounds. Now we have the US “deciding” to arm local militias in Afghanistan. The “announcement” came from Robert Gates, hard on the heels of the “decision” to send 20,000 or 30,000 new American troops to Afghanistan.

In these broad brush strokes, Mr. Gates has painted out the cartoon-like characters said to have responsibility for military operations in Afghanistan (the United Nations Security Council, NATO, the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan’s central government, whatever) but left the stage empty. It’s not clear that either Bush or Obama has any influence over Mr. Gates. But Cheney?

Fast backward to Tet, 1968. Under cover of the lunar New Year, a massive assault was orchestrated by Võ Nguyên Giáp on American targets in Vietnam, effectively demonstrating that the American public relations campaign saying how well things were going was precisely an American public relations campaign saying how well things were going. In fact, from the point of view of the American administration, things in Vietnam were going spectacularly badly. On the other hand, important lessons were learned: New Year is a good time to cause trouble. And then, there’s the business with the Reichstag Fire and the Weimar Republic.

So if I was Dick Cheney here’s what I’d do. Events are clearly out of hand, something the Founding Fathers could not have foreseen, now being the Foundering Fathers. The United States needs to be rescued from the prospect of an uppity….person….in the White House and a Communist Congress. All the achievements of the last 8 years are about to be squandered. Desperate times need desperate measures.

Fast forward to New Year’s Eve, 2008. Spectacular fireworks are planned in Washington. Obama is in Hawaii or Chicago, wherever. As midnight approaches, fire alarms go off in the Capitol, probably an accident. However, it turns out there is a real fire at the Capitol, probably some small isolated incident. As events unfold, the fire is bigger than previously thought, and the Department of Homeland Security is drawn into the response. There is evidence that incendiary devices have been set. Terrorism is back. Panic ensues. A major conflagration is shown on FOX News to be going on in the Capitol, and regular programming is interrupted. The Vice-President appears on network television from a secure bunker to say that both the President and the President-Elect are also secure.

The security of all 9 Justices of the Supreme Court has also been established on the order of the President.

Martial law is declared and Congress suspended. The Constitution is also suspended, as per Executive Signing Authority Whatever.

You’ve got to admit, Orwell saw all this coming. You’ve got to admit, it’s happened before. You’ve got to admit, Gates is a lousy Caesar. You’ve got to admit, Cheney is a lousy Giap. If you’re going to be corrupt, it hurts to be second rate.

All Bent Out of SHAPE

NATO as Farce

I hadn’t realized that NATO’s executive decisions are made in Chicago. It’s difficult to keep up, particularly if you think international law means something. I think international law means everything, so I can’t keep up. The good news is that we’re getting somewhere; slowly, painfully, but definitely.

And now: the bad news. The bad news is hilarious, particularly if you have a sick sense of humour. The bad news is that 20,000 new American troops are to be sent to Afghanistan, which is 20,000 troops America doesn’t have, paid for with money America also doesn’t have, the money to be provided by China. I guess Obama works it out on the basketball court. There’s no way 20,000 Americans are going to make any difference to the fate of Afghanistan, given at a minimum that the current Chief White Halfoat, Dan McKiernan, said that 400,000 troops would be required to “pacify” Afghanistan, meaning occupation. We’re back to Eric Shinseki’s estimate of the troops required to occupy Iraq. So even with 20,000 additional troops – surge, escalation, call it what you will – we’re only up to some 200,000 troops, half of what is required, even if “it” was legal.

As I understand Tom Lehrer to have said, political satire died the day Henry Kissinger got the Nobel Peace Prize.

Neverthe-dogboned-less, Walt Kelly is an authentic American hero and facts must be faced. Even if Afghanistan was peaceful, prosperous, and democratic – somebody paint me a picture of what that would look like – there would still be this problem of the “border with Pakistan”, the Durand Line, which cuts through the middle of the Pashtun “tribal belt”, the Pashtuns not being a people who take kindly to strangers. This brings us to the problem of Pakistan, a nation that might not be one, a nation in which revered leaders live in Oxbridge and Boston while the majority of the population exists in dirt-poor subsistence.

And then there’s the problem of Saudi Arabia, an oil-producing nation that shares our “values” – which as Bird and Fortune pointed out, are an enthusiasm for oil revenues and an abhorrence of corruption inquiries – a “nation” that supports a Royal Family of overwhelming excess and a clergy of savage repression – a problem not unlike Alberta: a one-party state where all decisions are made behind closed doors and everyone is better off.

So let’s get back to International Humanitarian Law, the point at which we allegedly came in: how does that fit in with the “announcement” of 20,000 or 30,000 additional troops for Afghanistan? Apparently, General Dan McKiernan “requested” them, but whether as commander of ISAF, or Operation Enduring Freedom is not made clear. Also, the role of the alleged Afghan government, widely reviled as corrupt, is also not made clear, but since it provides the legal cover for NATO involvement in Afghanistan, the political involvement of SHAPE in Brussels is crucial, particularly if one is looking at the whole thing from the perspective of a war crimes trial, which is precisely what I am doing, and specifically as it relates to Canada’s role in this tragedy. So did the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan request additional NATO or American troops to deal with the “insurgency”? Is the increase covered under United Nations Security Council Resolution 1386? Is the United Nations in legal command of troops in Afghanistan? Is NATO?

So, Canadian troops are on the ground in Kandahar until 2011. Who is the legal commander of these troops? According to the Globe and Mail, command goes to the nation that has the most troops. Is this a sandbox? Who is making up these rules? What are the rules? What makes most sense is George Orwell, who said that there’s only one rule in power politics, which is that there are no rules. What’s going on in Afghanistan is a joke, a very bad joke, and Canada should bang heads together in Brussels or get out. NATO is an American invention, and Canada can withdraw on twelve months’ notice. The alternative is to continue to be a Canadian branch plant of the American military-industrial complex, a corporatocracy careening along a path of unchecked devastation, an engineering colossus that has taken over British nuclear weapons production from the inside, a Rube Goldberg enormity that turns common sense into “human terrain mapping” and leaves death and destruction in its wake.

All of this fabulous American and Chinese industry and imagination would be better employed putting people on Mars; Dick Cheney, for example. Or the entire House of Saud. There’s water on Mars, so maybe there’s oil, too. I’m not sure whether the International Criminal Court has jurisdiction on Mars, but maybe it won’t matter.