Teaching Hate

Julian Assange is now on American terrorist trading cards in a kid's coloring book:

The sales blurb:

We Shall Never Forget 9/11 - Vol. II: The True Faces of Evil - Terror Graphic Coloring Novel - Terrorist Trading Cards

Price: $6.99
Item Number: SCB-WSNF2
Manufacturer: Really Big Coloring Books, Inc.

We Shall Never Forget 9/11 - Vol. II
The True Faces of Evil - Terror A Graphic Coloring Novel
Including Terrorist Trading Cards!
Truthful - Factual - Honorable - Indifferent to Political Correctness

The We Shall Never Forget 9/11 Vol. II The True Faces of Evil - Terror, rated PG-13, is about the real world. It is about being human: Good vs. Evil. There is no fantasy in this book. Designed as a consumer friendly, family publication for use with children and adults, this excellent graphic coloring novel helps expand understanding of the factual details and meanings in the War on Terror.

Inside this edition are several pages of perforated, removable card-stock terrorist trading cards. Inspired by real people, real life and reflecting the truth, Vol. II presents terrorism in direct open simplistic terms: what it is, what it looks like and what it means. In this book you will find names, dates, numbers and locations exposing the men, women and governments behind terror as we begin to hold them accountable. Details include a letter from within the Department of Homeland Security signed by five current Congressional Leaders a service organization page directed to the public and family friendly action notes, and The Congressional H.R. 847, the 9/11 Health & Compensation Act. Also in the book is a recap of the original 9/11 Coloring Novel published in August 2011.

Composed with a clear message the graphic coloring book novel calls out for open and honest discussion. We educate children about something besides the "TMZ Society" which bombards them with "important" news. Truthful and honest education about serious subjects for youth is an essential part of learning and considered a critical step in beginning to comprehend the world in which we live.

In describing the inherent bad nature of a terrorist we have included their horrific crimes. This is Good vs. Evil. We Shall Never Forget 9/11 Vol. II Terrorist Trading Cards clearly identifies the evil that may sit next to you on an airplane, or it could be an avowed Atheist in the parking lot of your local grocer on a sunny morning.The world should look at them, make fun of them, name them - shame them, recognize who they are and rid the earth of them. No comic book published, nor any nightmarish fiction written, can compare to the absolute evil pictured in this book. And realize as well "They" are not finished. Imagine a terrorist with a nuclear bomb.

Source: www.coloringbook.com/NeverForget9/11TerroristTradingCards

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Meanwhile, here's a really interesting article on Assange in the Guardian: The bizarre, unhealthy, blinding media contempt for Julian Assange

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The Bizarre, Surreal Persecution of Julian Assange

Earlier today, Britain said it might revoke Ecuador's diplomatic status and stage an assault on the embassy to get Julian Assange out. (link)

This is over an extradition request by Sweden on a charge that even if true would not be a crime in Britain... and there is much evidence that it is not true.

How far will Britain and Sweden go to help the US get their hands on Assange? So far:

• A dozen US financial institutions, including MasterCard and Visa, blocked transfers of money to WikiLeaks.
  
• Sweden is pursuing obviously false trumped up rape charges with a vigor that is never seen even for real, serious rape charges.
  
• Sweden refused to interview Assange about the charges over video phone or in the UK, and insisted he return to Swedish soil.
  
• Interpol issued an arrest warrant - unheard of for someone wanted for questioning in a case like this.
  
• Sweden demanded extradition, and spent over a year in court
  
• Britain puts Assange under house arrest for over a year, and eventually decides to extradite him.
  
• When Assange takes refuge in an embassy, Britain threatens to revoke Ecuador's diplomatic status and storm the embassy!
  
• Britain has 50 police outside the Ecuadorian embassy, making sure Assange doesn't escape.

All because Assange embarrassed the US. This is the most outrageous anti-democratic event of the century. We the people need to stand up for Julian Assange. The US has made a massive effort to discredit him, but his work stands for itself, and the world will be a poorer place if he is stopped from persuing his work of exposing the secrets of big corrupt organizations. Even I have to wonder: What will the US do to me for writing this? Where is free speech now? ###

Setting Off a Bomb of Revolutionary Ideas

When WiliLeaks began releasing its latest batch of documents, 250,000 US diplomatic cables, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called the act an attack on the US. Since then the US has been trying to find a way to prosecute WikiLeaks chief Julian Assange. There has been talk of using the Espionage Act. There is proposed Senate legislation targeted at Assange. The Justice department is said to be scrambling, trying to find legal grounds to get him.

The dubious Swedish sex charges appear to be part of plan - the idea being that once Assange is extradited to Sweden, it will be easier for the US to extradite him to American soil. Or maybe they're purely designed to discredit, distract and embarrass. Whatever the intent, the plan seems to be going off the rails a bit, with a Swedish police leak ironically providing proof that the charges are bogus.

But you have to wonder how clearly the Americans are thinking. If they manage to find a way to try Assange in the US, they provide a bully pulpit for him to communicate with the American people. Currently, most Americans dismiss Assange as an egotist, an anarchist, a criminal, a hacker. Even if American prosecutors managed to muzzle the man, journalists could find his voice in his published writings: his blog from 2006-2007, his articles, and a growing host of interpretations of his work.

I've been dipping into the Assange oeuvre this week, and even if his enemies killed him today, he has written enough to change the world. In fact, killing him could be the second most effective way to rapidly disseminate his thinking (not that I'm advocating it, mind you) - but trying him in the US would be the most effective dissemination method ever. That would ensure that his ideas are popularized in the country he is most targeting for change.

It's not that Assange's ideas are particularly new. I think he's brilliant, but it's not even that. He is very thoughtful, and he describes his theories in a compelling way. His importance is that he's inspiring. Assange's thoughts could form the basis of a powerful popular movement.

Assange doesn't just write about how to save the world, he writes about what it is to want to save the world. He muses about his personal valuation of idealistic activism over moral agency. He sometimes falls into a mystical way of talking, and even writes political poetry.

Assange creates new language for political analysis. Legitimate forms of government are described with the terminology of illegitimate forms, which allows us to be more objective about how they work, how they do bad things, and how to force them to change. He uses popular analogies to explain his thinking. For example, he compares the US government to a group of drug dealers in the TV show The Wire... and he does it very well.

Assange's goal is not regime change, but regime behavior change. It's not anarchy and it may just be doable. In fact, you might argue that if it's not done, the US will decline into an impoverished, despotic, desperate superpower that is ultimately the greatest threat to freedom in the world.

I can't claim to understand him yet. I'm not even sure if Assange sees the leaks as a way to force change in the behavior of governments, or whether he sees them as an end in themselves - an extension to freedom of information laws.

But I betcha we'll be hearing a lot more about what he thinks we should do. Jail is not the end of Assange; it's the beginning.

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Why the World Needs WikiLeaks

Bribing Canadian Politicians

Richard Fadden, the head of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), is in the news this week spilling some very important information: the Chinese government is paying Canadian politicians to spy for it.

It seems clear to me that this was no mistake: he went to the CBC interview to give this information. He must have known that he was risking his career to say this. I suspect he felt it was important for the public to know. Why would he do that? Because we vote in politicians, and once in office there's little that can be done to prevent this sort of thing. The head of CSIS probably weighed his options and decided that the only way to successfully address the issue was to make it public.

The news spin has been about everything but the main issue.

On The Current this morning, Anna Maria Tremonti focused on how this is a slur on the Chinese community in Canada.

Today's Globe has a column about how heads should roll at the CBC because they delayed broadcasting the interview until the eve of the arrival of the Chinese head of state.

Maclean's attacks the whistle blower, saying that his backpedaling is "awkward" and a "ragged retreat".

Is this willful denial, or are serious news outlets - as I hope - sending out investigative journalists to follow up on this story and get us some facts?

And kudos to the CBC for airing this interview just before the G20, when it will get picked up by international media. They may have realized that Canadians wouldn't be able to see the forest for the trees.

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1984

The scariest thing I ever read is an account (I read decades ago) of a torture training session in a Latin American country. Prisoners were used to demonstrate and practice methods of torture, which took the inhumanity of torture to an even higher level than the torture itself.

That level of inhumanity is almost matched in recent revelations about the Bush government's policies on torturing Muslims suspected of anti-American activities. Every act was scrupulously proscribed, monitored and reported. There was little random abuse. Every detail, down to the number of calories a day they were kept alive on, the temperature of the water used to torture them, and the number of hours they could be kept in various sized boxes, was detailed.

As details of the practices leaked, the public rose in angry protest, to no avail. The Bush administration even ignored a 2006 demand by the the US Supreme Court to stop torturing prisoners and follow the Geneva Convention.

It's a tricky political road for one president to preside over the prosecution of his predecessor (as we have found with our inability to prosecute Brian Mulroney), but Obama must bring justice to this case. As a New York Times editorial says today, "Only by making public officials accountable under the law can Americans be confident that future presidents will not feel free to break it the way Mr. Bush did."

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He's Gone

Rat in a drain ditch, caught on a limb,
You know better but I know him.
Like I told you, what I said,
Steal your face right off your head.

Now he's gone, Lord he's gone, he's gone.
Like a steam locomotive, rolling down the track
He's gone, he's gone, nothing's gonna bring him back...
He's gone.

Nine mile skid on a ten mile ride,
Hot as a pistol but cool inside.
Cat on a tin roof, dogs in a pile,
Nothing left to do but smile, smile, smile!

Now he's gone, Lord he's gone, he's gone.
Like a steam locomotive, rolling down the track
He's gone, he's gone, nothing's gonna bring him back... He's gone.

Going where the wind don't blow so strange,
Maybe on some high cold mountain chain.
Lost one round but the price wasn't anything,
Knife in the back and more of the same.

Rat in a drain ditch, caught on a limb,
I know better but you know him.
Like I told you, what I said,
Steal your face right offa your head.

Now he's gone, Lord he's gone, he's gone.
Like a steam locomotive, rolling down the track
He's gone, gone, nothing's gonna bring him back... He's gone.

Ooh, nothing's gonna bring him back.

Words by Robert Hunter; music by Jerry Garcia
First recorded on the Grateful Dead's album Europe 72

They wrote it about Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart's father, who had been their money manager but stole from them and took off, but it could have been written for Karlheinz...


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Questions about Imagine Adoption and Conservative MP Gary Goodyear

Further to my previous post.

The police are now conducting a fraud investigation of Imagine Adoption. I have some questions I'd like answered about the possible involvement of Minister of State for Science and Technology Gary Goodyear.

Background:

Gary Goodyear (a chiropractor by trade) and his wife Valerie Goodyear own a company called Constant Energy. This company owns a property at 382 Queen Street West, Cambridge, which it has rented for the past three years to Imagine Adoption for a fee of $3,000/month. The property is occupied by the Hespeler Community Chiropractic Centre. Constant Energy has apparently not collected any rent from Imagine Adoption.

Valerie Goodyear is a senior employee at Imagine Adoption. It seems that the directors of Imagine Adoption have been into some serious fraud. Their big salaries, luxury cars and first class travel are one thing: using agency funds to renovate their homes, take non-business related trips, and buy clothes and horses is another level of inpropriety - and all the information we have so far is just from reported expenses.

Questions:

1. Is Goodyear (through his company Constant Energy) claiming a tax loss on the unpaid rent on 382 Queen Street West?

2. How much rent does the Hespeler Community Chiropractic Centre pay, and to whom?

3. What is Goodyear's relationship with the people at the Hespeler Community Chiropractic Centre?

4. What about the other properties Imagine Adoption rents but doesn't use?

5. Do Gary Goodyear, his wife or their companies own any other properties?

6. How much salary did Goodyear's wife Valerie get from Imagine Adoption, and what were her expenses?

7. What about the other charities owned by Susan and Rick Hayhow?

8. What is the real policy of our federal government on ensuring ethical behavior by cabinet ministers?

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Minister of State Gary Goodyear Moves From Small Time Scandals to the Big Time

It's a story that has all the hallmarks of a full-blown political scandal: small children in desperate need, millions of dollars in fees paid by would-be adoptive parents, the Christian fundamentalists who run the adoption agency diverting funds into their own pockets - and finally, a federal cabinet minister (married to one of the principals at the agency) who got on the gravy train in the form of $3,000/month rent for offices the agency didn't use.

It's a scandal that's exploding, with stories in papers across Canada and the United States. Meanwhile the three directors of Imagine Adoption (also known as Kids Link International) are out of the country and out of touch, leading to speculation that they'll disappear with the money (both from a recent mortgage on a home renovated with the agency's funds and, possibly, fees diverted from the agency).

Macleans magazine has a good, brief summary here. Local papers have stories today here and here. There is a lot more digging to do: Conservative MP Gary Goodyear is a chiropractor, and the office he charged the adoption agency $3,000/month to rent is 382 Queen Street West, Cambrdige, a chiropractic clinic. Also, it appears that early estimates about the amount of money involved are understated: the agency has about 450 adoptive families paying an average of $15,000 each, plus some sizable charitable donations, which may bring revenues closer to $10M than the $800,000 initially reported.

Those of us who live in or near Goodyear's Cambridge riding are not all that surprised at his involvement in this distasteful business. Goodyear's political career has always had a shady undertone.

This isn't Goodyear's first scandal involving rent. In his first election campaign in 2004, Goodyear took a campaign contribution kickback to lease his campaign office. (His campaign manager later admitted to this, although he provided a dodgy explanation that avoided prosecution.)

In his first major parliamentary appointment (as chair of the Procedure and House Affairs Committee subcommittee on Parliament Hill Security), Goodyear behaved so badly that the committee ousted him with a vote of non-confidence.

After being named Minister of State for Science and Technology by Stephen Harper, Goodyear was asked about evolution, and answered, "I am a Christian, and I don't think anybody asking a question about my religion is appropriate." Later he clarified, saying he does believe in evolution, but later he clarified his clarification, saying he doesn't believe that evolution was the process by which we were created. This controversy unfolded as Goodyear oversaw $150M in funding cuts for science, including massive cuts to Genome Canada, with both controversies creating widespread outrage in the scientific community.

Just recently Goodyear was back in the news, using his cabinet clout to interfere with academic freedom. James Turk, executive director of the Canadian Association of University Teachers, said, "I'm not aware, (in) the history of granting councils in this country, of any minister doing what Minister Goodyear has done. Almost everyone understands that's crossing the line."

Prior to revelations of Goodyear's involvement in the adoption scandal, I chalked up a lot of his mistakes to inexperience and mediocrity. After all, here's a guy who bombed out of university and is a small businessman, thrown into a political arena where he was clearly out of his depth. Harper has a well-established practice of appointing loyal but incompetent MPs to his cabinet - it's the only way he has to keep such a strong grip on all portfolios. Harper's government has consequently had a much higher than average number of cabinet scandals, and in the end you have to blame the boss, not the dupes who take the fall for him.

But this scandal has the potential to really do in Gary Goodyear. Unless he can explain why a company he owns is charging his wife's employer $3,000/month for an office they don't use, it looks like he is not just associated with crooks, but a crook himself.

Update: MP Goodyear linked to bankrupt agency (The Record, July 22)

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Executive Compensation

The Globe & Mail published their most bone-headed editorial ever this week. The logic was so assinine that I wonder if they were trying to undermine their own argument.

It went like this: People are concerned about executive compensation. That concern was justified when CEOs didn't, on average, make less bucks last year after share prices fell - so people are saying there's not enough of a link between pay and performance. But wait! "The good news" the Globe says, "is that such a link is becoming the holy grail of compensation design."

At which point thoughtful readers everywhere started thinking: Well that's not right. Canadian CEOs weren't responsible for the biggest financial crisis ever to strike the five inner planets. When crisis hits, do we not need the best CEOs we can get to protect us? Performance metrics are a pretty sucky idea.

Of course performance metrics are just one aspesct of a huge issue of behavior so unethical it should have serious jail time attached. The Globe might have mentioned that fifty years ago, CEOs made 20 times what frontline employees made while today they make 300 times frontline wages. They might have cited the growing cries to create some legal protection for shareholders and employees, say by reducing the ability of the guys at the top to remunerate themselves, or by putting firm limits on how much they can suck the corporations dry... viz a maximum wage. Noone would expect the Globe to say that as long as the CEO-director cabal continues to run major corporations as a giant cookie jar for their own super-sized enrichment, we're not living in capitalism but just a corrupt oligarchy... but it seems rather pertinent too.

I'm not saying there's anything wrong with making $919M in one year, like the CEO of Och-Ziff Capital Management. There are situations in which making a bundle is perfectly ethical. For example, if I were ever to publish my collection of poems about bi-valve evolution, it would of course sell many copies and I would become very wealthy. If I got $2 per book in royalties, I might make, what... about $200 million in the first year. (I'm not completely acquainted with the income of poets but it's something like that.) I don't think there's any issue of unfairness in that income - after all it's volume that caused the figure to be so high.

But the incestuous little community of CEOs and directors, who set their own remuneration levels and move from company to company scratching each other's backs, is hoovering up vaster and vaster percentages of profit purely because they have the power, balls and lack of shame to allow them to grab other people's money. I'm not saying that they aren't qualified or that they shouldn't be well compensated, just that (1) they shouldn't have the nearly-unfettered ability to take as much as they like and (2) no-one deserves labor income in excess of $100,000 a week.

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Harvey Cashore on the Delays in Investigating Airbus

As Geoffrey Stevens put it, getting an inquiry into the Schreiber-Mulroney deals took "15 years because the people who had the most to hide were able to use the law to keep the truth hidden."

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Mulroneyism

New word suggested over at the comment section of ITQ's coverage of the Oliphant inquiry today.

Mulroneyism – A statement that is legally accurate, but that intends to mislead on the central issue.

Example
Question: Did you have dealings with him?

Mulroneyism: We met for coffee a couple of times. (Truth: We had a secret business relationship and he gave me envelopes full of thousand-dollar bills during several clandestine meetings at which I also drank coffee.)

Usage
"Bollocks! That is such a Mulroneyism."
"What a liar you are. Everything that comes out of your mouth is a Mulroneyism."

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The Unasked Question

An interesting twist at the Oliphant Inquiry: Brian Mulroney is pretending to have no knowledge or responsibility about his own taxes. He is saying, over and over, that he didn't negotiate the late payment of taxes on the money he got from Schreiber; he has no idea what went on in the negotiations; he claims to have not even told his lawyers the years in which he got the cash.

This seems totally bizarre (a person is, after all, responsible for their own taxes) until you put it together with something else he's told us: that in his 1996 deposition he misled the court about his dealings with Schreiber because he had no responsibility to volunteer information and he wasn't asked the right questions. In his mind, when he said he had had no dealings with Schreiber he meant re Airbus, and when he said his only dealings with Schreiber were to have coffee he had no responsibility to add and collect envelopes full of thousand-dollar bills.

Now it seems that he is "not volunteering" something again. A possible explanation is that he doesn't want to say under oath that he took no more than $225,000. In his mind, he may think it's perfectly legal for him to admit to taking $225,000, even if he really took a lot more - but he doesn't want to say he only took $225K.

How much more? I'd guess $5M. Way back when, in the investigation that led to the defamation suit, the RCMP thought Schreiber paid Mulroney $5M for securing the Airbus purchase. In that suit Mulroney testified that he had had no dealings with Schreiber. Then we learned that he'd got $225K from Schreiber (and, as it happens, forensic accountants believe that that money came from Airbus). Maybe the entire original allegation was true. Who knows. It doesn't seem like Oliphant is going to get to the bottom of it.

...Or it could be something else entirely. Mulroney has played this whole inquiry fast and loose. He is obviously in damage-minimization mode. He may lose his law license and have to pay some back taxes, but doesn't seem to be jeopardizing anything else, even though his flimsy excuses for his behavior don't pass the smell test. He has tried to obfuscate as much as possible (the phony "fourth article" in the Globe series by Kaplan; the near-tears he said were caused by reporters laughing at him (refuted by witnesses); the repeated self-righteous rants about conspirators. He seems to be playing to his supporters - those loyal enough to cling to anything in the hope he's innocent.

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Questions for Mulroney at the Oliphant Inquiry

Open Ended Questions
Over and over today, Mulroney testified that back in 1996 in his law suit against the government, he said he had no dealings with Schreiber because the lawyers didn't ask the right questions. The lawyers at the Oliphant inquiry should not make the same mistake. Citing his excuse that he wasn't asked a broad enough question in 1996, Wolson should request the latitude to ask Mulroney extremely broad, extremely carefully-worded questions with several iterations to make sure that Mulroney isn't slipping in any weasel words (like "I had had"). In all your life, Mr. Mulroney, did Mr. Schreiber ever give you any money other than the three payments at x, x and x? Have you ever received cash payment on any other occasions? Have you ever made a tax disclosure in a year after your taxes? When and how much and why? And so on.

Thousand Dollar Bills
The lawyers need to drill down on what Mulroney did with all those $1,000 bills. I believe he said he gave them to members of his family: When? What did they do with them? There were, after all, either 225 or 300 of them, and they're not easy to pass. What happened to the ones he claims to have put in a safety deposit box in New York?

If he says he can't remember, the only explanation could be that he deals in huge quantities of cash so regularly that those $1,000 bills blended in with the rest. In that case, Wolson should ask him probing questions about how often he handled such large quantities of cash, and why; and about other occasions on which he had $1,000 bills. Mulroney claims he didn't have to pay taxes on the money till he spent it; does that mean that he handed out the cash in 1999/2000, when he fessed up to CRA and paid his back taxes?

The "Retainer"
Mulroney has said that his interpretation of tax law was that he didn't have to pay tax on the $300,000 he got from Schreiber until he spent it, because it was a retainer. If that's true, why did he declare the money under a voluntary disclosure law that allows Canadians to come clean about unpaid tax? Why not just declare it in the usual way?

If the questions get smart enough, I wonder if Mulroney has a Plan B: probably a faked-up medical emergency. Just a guess.

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A Likely Scenario

In the summer of 1993, rumors started circulating that Bruce Verchere, Mulroney's tax lawyer (and controller of his blind trust while PM) was skimming money from clients. On August 28, Verchere committed suicide. On August 27 Mulroney accepted his first bundle of $1000 bills from Karlheinz Schreiber.

So the big question - Why was Mulroney so stupid as to personally take envelopes of cash from an arms dealer? - could be explained this way: His bag man was dead. He wanted more money and had noone to get it for him, so he took a risk and collected it himself.

We will probably never know the truth of how much, if any, money Mulroney took "under the table" before Verchere's death. There are all sorts of indicators that he took other money:

- the Swiss bank accounts Britan and Devon that accontant Giorgio Pelossi says were opened for Mulroney by Schreiber
- the way Mulroney forced Air Canada to buy Airbus planes (including firing the entire board of Air Canada and appointing Airbus supporters)
- the overwhelming evidence that Mulroney pushed and pushed the Bear Head project for Schreiber, despite every government bureaucrat saying it was a bad plan
- the $20M "thank you" money routed through Schreiber from Airbus that hasn't been accounted for
- the $10M "thank you" money routed through Schreiber from Eurocopter and Thyssen
- the extraordinary and unprecedented access that Schreiber had to Mulroney while Mulroney was PM
- the large quantities of cash that moved through his basement safe at 24 Sussex
- the wild spending by Mila, in cash, amounting to tens of thousands of dollars a week while he was PM
- the million-plus Brian and Mila paid, in cash, to have their Westmount mansion restored in 1993-4

The Oliphant inquiry is ham-strung by only being able to investigate the Thyssen payments that Mulroney got from Schreiber. It's still a fascinating glimpse into the inner workings of a crooked government.

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August 28, 1993

From The Chronicle Herald today:

On Aug. 27, 1993, two months after Mr. Mulroney left office, but while he was still an MP, he met with Mr. Schreiber at Mirabel, where [Mulroney] received $75,000 or $100,000 in cash...

The next day, Mr. Schreiber received a fax from Mr. Doucet, this time asking directly about the Airbus commissions, along with a fax from Air Canada that showed the airline had purchased 34 planes.

"I sincerely hope that this evidence, many times stated before, is emphatically and categorically relayed to F.M." said the fax.

That same day, Mr. Verchere took his own life. Soon after, Mr. Moores called and speculated about Mr. Verchere stealing from Mr. Mulroney.

"Mulroney was poor like hell and needed badly this money," he says. "Then came this meeting at Mirabel. Then came the death of Verchere and Mulroney buys a villa, a huge villa in Westmount for $1.7 million. The rumour is he invested another million into the building. So where comes the money from? This is a joke somehow. If they say they want to clean up, and they don’t follow the money, they will never know what happened."

Fred Doucet is Mulroney's spokesman who set up the meetings between Mulroney and Schreiber where Schreiber gave Mulroney bundles of cash.

Verchere was Mulroney's accountant and tax lawyer and manager of his blind trust while Prime Minister. Verchere is a shady character known for hiding his client's money off-shore. He is almost certainly the Swiss connection - the lawyer who was referred to as taking charge of Mulroney's Swiss bank accounts.

F.M. may be Frank Moores, a Mulroney friend who lobbied for Thyssen and Airbus, and who paid out the bribe money from Schreiber on behalf of those companies.

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Early Days of the Oliphant Commission Favor Mulroney's Version of Events

Things are definitely looking up for Brian Mulroney after today's testimony at the Oliphant Commission. Three important areas were covered, all of which point towards Mulroney's original story about the $300,000 being true (that he was paid for legitimate lobbying work after leaving office). The areas are:

1. Mulroney's lawyer Guy Pratte got Schreiber to admit that he and Mulroney didn't really sign an agreement two days before Mulroney stepped down, as Schreiber had previously claimed. Mulroney and Schreiber only "agreed to agree." I don't know what the legal status of "agree to agree" is, but it sounds like it could at least be interpreted as not an agreement.

2. Pratte got Schreiber to agree that around the time he paid Mulroney, Bear Head issued a pamphlet saying that the vehicles were designed for UN peacekeeping. This might make more credible Mulroney's claim that he was lobbying the governments of China and Russia. (I don't know the details of peacekeeping, but the main complaint about the China/Russia claim is that it would violate NATO rules for Canada to sell them armaments.)

3. A smaller point, but we learned that when Schreiber met with Fred Doucet on Feb 4 2000 and Doucet gave Schreiber the draft of a letter stating that Mulroney had worked for Schreiber as a lobbyist, Schreiber edited a copy of the letter. (His scribbled copy, which Doucet presumably kept, was entered into evidence.) Previously Schreiber had said that Mulroney's friends had tried to pressure him into stating that he had hired Mulroney; now it looks like he almost went along with it.

According to Kady O'Malley's live blog of the hearings today, Robin Sears made this announcement today:

"The central matter of public trust at issue in the Inquiry was Karlheinz Schreiber’s assertion, made in his affidavit of November 2007, that he and Mr. Mulroney had entered into an agreement at Harrington Lake while he was still Prime Minister in 1993.

Today, Mr. Schreiber admitted that was not true and that the agreement was made at Mirabel on August 27,1993, two months after Mr. Mulroney had left office.

The core foundation of Mr.Schreiber’s accusations against Mr. Mulroney has been destroyed by his own testimony under oath today."

It's starting to look like the real offence here was that Mulroney initially tried to hide the money from Revenue Canada. But since he made a voluntary disclosure in 1999, he's clear of any wrongdoing there.

I have been very critical of Mulroney throughout this scandal, but if this is the truth, then we need to know it. Of course there's still lots of testimony to come, and Schreiber made a bizarre promise yesterday morning that he would reveal details of seven scandals...

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Call for Another Inquiry

Finally, finally, finally, an official body is poised to get to the bottom of at least some aspects of Mulroney-related corruption. It's 25 years after most of this stuff took place (and more, if you count the arms dealer-funded ouster of Joe Clark as party leader). It's 15 years since the Chretien government settled out of court with Mulroney for $2.1M - in a case where Mulroney's cries of innocence have been found to be untrue.

The RCMP botched the investigation thoroughly, and by dropping it they seemed to imply that Mulroney was innocent. Media, particularly the Globe & Mail, W5, Harvey Cashore and Stevie Cameron, pursued the story when half the country angrily wanted everyone to shut up about it. Year after year they doggedly recovered more and more details, until finally Mulroney had to admit to taking large amounts of cash from Schreiber, and finally even Mulroney's own party had to call an inquiry.

Stevie Cameron was pilloried, completely unfairly - caught in a world of dirty politics trying to protect their own. She has mostly backed away from the story now, and it's interesting that the last thing she posted on her blog was the original anonymous tip she got, back in 1988, a hand-lettered note saying, "FRANK [MOORE] HAS ARRANGED FOR AIR CANADA TO BUY $2 BILLION WORTH OF FRENCH AIRPLANES, AND HE GETS A COOL 5% OR $100 MILLION. OF COURSE, THE FRENCH WILL PAY THE COMMISSION, BUT $300 MILLION WILL COME FROM OTTAWA, AND YOU KNOW YOU AND I PAY FOR THAT. CHECK IT OUT." 21 years on, and it's all being proved true.

After the Oliphant commission completes its work, we need a commission into how this egregious delay was allowed to happen. I know, I know: commissions cost the earth; but we can't live in a democracy where our prime ministers and their cronies are robbing the country blind and getting away with it. There's plenty of blame to go around in both main parties, so this doesn't have to be partisan.

My main concern is the utter incompetence of the RCMP: did they bow to pressure from the political bosses of the day? Did Chretien want to cover up Mulroney's wrondoing to avoid setting a precedent that might hurt him? And most importantly: How can we avoid, in future, a situation where a prime minister can be corrupt and get away with it?

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Complacent Canada

Sometimes I despair at the inept and incompetent way Canadian politicians operate and the lazy, mindless way the Canadian public puts up with it. At the moment we really seem like the pathetic banana republic that people outside Canada often think we are.

We have a former prime minister who, while in office, dealt in massive quantities of cash - millions - that he stuffed in his basement safe and apparently didn't account for. After a great many years he was finally forced to admit that he took a few hundred thousand dollars in cash under extremely dodgy conditions from an arms dealer. We have solid evidence that millions more in bribes were provided by an airplane manufacturer - via the same arms dealer - while he was prime minister, and that he was active in securing the deal that the bribes were related to.

When the RCMP tried to investigate the situation in the early 1990s the former PM sued for defamation and got a $2.2 million settlement - and now we know that he lied about salient matters in his deposition, lies that would have resulted in no settlement.

The RCMP has never released any information of interest about their investigation. In fact, by dropping the investigation they led a lot of people to believe that there was no corruption. It fell to investigative journalists to produce the evidence, and one of those journalists has been viciously defamed for doing so.

And we can't seem to launch a proper investigation into any of it. Our current prime minister promised to create an inquiry, but apparently he lied. Parliament's Ethics committee did an admirable job looking into it, but they haven't got the teeth to get to the bottom of anything.

Twenty-five years have gone by on some of this. Some of the key people are dead. The latest news, that the former PM has refused to re-appear before the Ethics committee, has fallen into the public sphere without a ripple.

In the US there is arguably too much outrage at too many trivial things like sex scandals and false demonization of politicians, but in Canada we lean way too far the other way - into complacency and inaction. It's no wonder we have so many scandals: the criminals and creeps can get away with murder here.

Update: Shortly after I wrote this, Harper announced an inquiry. Its scope is so narrow as to be almost useless, and I'm dubious it will actually ever start, but... it's better than nothing.

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Julie Couillard: Undercover Operative for the Mafia?

Facts are still coming to light on the political and criminal connections of Julie Couillard, but patterns are starting to emerge. Increasingly the media and public are asking: which pattern is true? Is she a con artist or a police informant?

After reviewing the evidence, I am starting to wonder if she has been working for the mafia for the last 17 years. Bikers and mobsters are in the same business and are rivals. She sought out bikers after (and perhaps during) a relationship with a senior mafia figure. Two of her biker lovers turned police informants, which one could presume was in the interests of the mafia. Later, when her biker connections and money dried up, the mafia may have directed her to infiltrate the government. Far-fetched? Probably, and also complete speculation.

Here's what we know so far...

Criminal Connections
* In the period 1991-1993 she dated mobster Tony Volpato. In 1997 he was sentenced to six years in prison for his role in a conspiracy to import 180 kilograms of cocaine. The Star says Volpato "was widely considered the gatekeeper for late Calabrese mob boss Frank (the Big Guy) Cotroni, but also entertained close ties with Vito Rizzuto, considered the godfather of the Sicilian mafia in Canada."
* In the period 1991-1996 she dated biker Gilles Giguère, the right-hand man of loan-shark Robert Savard, a close friend of Quebec Hells Angels boss Maurice Boucher. In 1995 she was taken into custody along with Giguère but was not charged. In 1996 Savard and Giguère were charged with plotting to murder Laurette Lavallee. She was engaged to marry Giguère in 1996, but shortly before the wedding he was killed in a gangland execution. At the time of his death Giguere was facing trial for firearms and drug possession. According to The Star, Giguère became a police informant shortly before he was killed.
* In 1996 she married biker Stéphane Sirois, a member of the Hells Angels affiliate gang the Rockers. Couillard said she insisted that Sirois leave the gang; Sirois says he was forced to quit because of the gang's suspicion that she was a police informant. When their marriage broke up in 1998 he rejoined the gang; he says that ongoing suspicion of him forced him to become a police informant. He is now in the witness protection program.
* In 1998 her father was arrested for running a grow-op in his apartment. She visited his apartment twice a week and sometimes paid the rent on the apartment.
* In 2004 she started a 2-year romantic liaison with Robert Pepin, who was then facing charges for truck hijacking. A really interesting article in the Star shows Pepin to be a con artist and criminal. Deeply indebted to organized crime figures, Pepin committed suicide in May, 2007. While with Pepin, Couillard worked with him in his firm, DRP Investigation and Security Agency. The couple also founded a talent agency, Cinq Étoiles Casting. In 2005 Couillard set up her own security company called Itek Solutions globales.

Political Connections
* In 2004 she wrote on her driver license renewal application that she did promotional work that involved "special events such as volunteering for federal elections."
* In spring 2007 she dated Bernard Côté, a senior staffer to Public Works Minister Michael Fortier. Côté was forced to resign in June 2008 due to conflict of interest: he discussed a federal real estate deal with her that she was pitching on behalf of Groupe Kevlar Inc.
* In summer 2007 she began dating Maxime Bernier, Minister of Foreign Affairs. Bernier resigned in May 2008 when Couillard went on TV and revealed that he had left a NATO briefing book at her house. He had registered her as his official companion.
* In 2007 she took part in a Tory fundraising party for the riding of Châteauguay-Saint-Constant. She gave the riding a cheque for $1,000, which bounced.
* She said in her famous TV interview that she wanted to get into politics and had been approached by the Quebec Conservative party.

Miscellaneous facts and opinions
* From The Globe: "A former CSIS agent, Michel Juneau-Katsuya, testified that... Organized-crime groups have tried to place moles inside government institutions... and the pattern of her behaviour seemed like "a classic recruitment operation.""
* Bloc Québécois MP Serge Ménard, who is one of the top experts in the House of Commons on security issues, has said that "she represented an enormous security risk for a [cabinet] minister" and "the Hells Angels could have either blackmailed her or Mr. Bernier, or lured Mr. Bernier into a compromising situation." Menard also said that Couillard is listed in various police forces' databases of persons of interest.
* She seems to have plenty of money but it is not clear where it comes from.
* In her famous TV interview, she justified her history with bikers by saying, "I knew that [Giguère] knew people who knew bikers, but I didn't take the bikers seriously. To me they were just tough guys who rode motorcycles. The real criminals were the Mafia." A few weeks later it was revealed that she dated a mobster before she started dating bikers. I think we should disregard everything she said in that interview: she is simply not credible. But I also wonder if she was playing some subtle games: again, pure speculation, but she seems too clever by half.
* Hells Angels chief Mom Boucher told the Globe & Mail that in 1996, when Couillard started dating Giguere, he suspected she was a police informant trying to infiltrate his inner circle. His claim is corroborated by testimony in a biker trial that he had considered killing her because of his suspicions. Sirois has also said that Boucher was very suspicious of Couillard. (Note that the media remains focused on the biker angle, and has not explored the possibility that the mafia might have directed her actions.)
* In 2004, the Quebec provincial police force cleared her to obtain a licence to conduct security and investigative work. The Globe says "She used her licence to work with DRP Investigation and Security Agency, run by her boyfriend and convicted criminal Robert Pépin." Some people see her ability to gain clearance as evidence that she was a police informant. I'm not convinced: she has never been convicted of anything, but Pépin has. The real question is why the Sûreté allowed Pepin`s company to get a provincial contract to transport prisoners.