And so it was on Saturday night in the nation’s capital.
Journalist Glenn Greenwald was in the auditorium of an downtown high school to talk about his remarkable partnership with American whistleblower Edward Snowden, the former NSA contractor who showed the world how things really work in our spy-democracies.
Their story, involving the theft and public release of damning information about what the United States and its allies are actually up to in the world of surveillance, is the cyberworld’s version of Watergate.
It so happened that Greenwald’s visit to Canada last week, which had been planned for months, coincided with the tragic shooting of Cpl. Nathan Cirillo and the suicidal storming of parliament by his armed killer, Michael Zehaf-Bibeau.
The country (and many in Greenwald’s audience) were deep in the emotional rituals that accompany such events. Would anyone be in the mood to better understand “terrorism” with fresh, innocent blood on the granite steps of the War Memorial – particularly when another soldier — Warrant Officer Patrice Vincent — had been killed in a targeted hit-and-run just two days earlier?
Would the “too-soon-to-talk-about-it” tactics of his vocal critics blight his speech, or even deter him from making it? No. It did neither.
In a way, as Greenwald explained, it was the proper moment to tell his and Snowden’s story. It was an example of the adage: it is always necessary to tell the truth in a democracy, but MOST necessary when it is MOST uncomfortable to do so.
Greenwald noted that the Harper government moved with “shameless” and “naked” speed to use the tragedies to announce a grab by his government for more surveillance and arrest powers that further undermine the core principles of justice in this country. This was accomplished by immediately and without proof connecting the events, including the shooting of Cpl. Cirillo, with terrorism.
As events would show, there was no evidence of a connection to ISIL or Syria, and more to suggest that the murder was the act of a deeply disturbed man. The shooter was not a jihadist so much as someone who thought the devil was after him and who was unhinged – not exactly a solid basis for new, draconian legislation.
Some profoundly troubling things were on the table.
If there was no connection to ISIL, did the government really need to give the authorities more powers of arrest? Did the government, which had already given CSIS more tools to fight terrorism in 2012, including the power of preventive arrest, really need to add even more extraordinary power to this already extraordinarily powerful agency? How do you lower the threshold for preventive arrest, which already lowers the threshold of basic civil rights protection? How much lowering is enough?
After all, with the huge resources the Harper government has spent on national security since 2006, including an obscenely expensive billion-dollar new home for CSEC, this crude attack was not stopped. As the Manchester Guardian noted, this was a spectacular failure of Canadian intelligence, despite all the additional powers that community has been given by Stephen Harper.
But the emotional waters had been whipped up to a frothing cauldron by the media. On the day of Cpl. Cirillo’s murder, there were a barrage of unconfirmed reports of multiple shooters and multiple shooting scenes in Ottawa. The effect was to foster public hysteria. The coverage of the event reached an irresponsible crescendo when it was mentioned on the CBC that this could be Canada’s 9/11. It was then gravely reported by the network that everything had now “changed.” The script could have been written by the Harper PMO.
It was reported by the RCMP that Zahef-Bibeau wanted to go to Syria – surely a highly suggestive link to Islamist militants. But it was false. As his mother had told the RCMP in a taped interview, her son had wanted to go not to Syria but to Saudi Arabia – one of Canada’s coalition partners in the Iraq/ISIL bombing campaign.
It was also first reported that Bibeau was on the government’s terror watch list and had had his passport seized. In fact, Bibeau was not on any watch list and had applied for a renewal of both his Canadian and Libyan passports. He gave up the latter request when questioned by embassy officials, but the RCMP confirmed the Canadian passport application was still going through the usual process.
There was no evidence connecting Bibeau and Martin Couture-Rouleau, the man who killed Warrant Officer Vincent earlier in the week. Yet the Harper government instantly linked the two tragedies. The Prime Minister reflexively politicized the storming of parliament, describing it as a terrorist attack on all Canadians that was evidence he needed to deliver new powers for CSIS and a strengthened resolve to rout ISIL in Iraq. All of it was based on the shakiest of information.
Initial reports claimed that a picture of Zahef-Bibeau holding his rifle was taken from an ISIL related Twitter account. The public and the media immediately assumed that it was some kind of propaganda by the Islamic State to take credit for the Ottawa attack. Authorities later reported that the photo was taken from a tourism site in France.
Foreign minister John Baird admitted to the BBC that there was no Islamic State connection to the tragic murder of Cpl. Cirillo after all.
Into this maelstrom of overhyped coverage that was in part used to support the government’s self-interested overreaction, Greenwald interjected what some saw as a highly controversial element – reason.
In the wake of the hit-and-run attack in Quebec, Greenwald was struck by stories in the Canadian media that Canadians were surprised and shocked that such violence allegedly connected to terrorism could come to a peaceful country like Canada.
In an article published before the Ottawa murder, Greenwald wrote a piece reminding Canadians of an inconvenient truth; whatever anyone might make of the attack in Quebec, assuming it was terrorist-related, no one should be surprised. Canada had been making war in Muslim countries for 13 years.
Although Canadians knew many of the personal details of Cpl. Cirillo’s young life that tragically cut short , they have no idea of the identities of the hundreds, likely thousands of innocent Muslim civilians who have died in military operations inside their countries by an alliance of which Canada is a key member. Greenwald said Canada itself might be a peaceful country but it did not have a peaceful foreign policy.
Greenwald drew the conclusion. When you visit death and destruction in Muslim countries on a daily basis for over a decade, the inevitable consequence is that “blowback” eventually comes.
When it does, Western government’s have to explain why to their citizens. Greenwald reminded his listeners that in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, the dominant reaction of Americans was not anger, hatred or vengefulness; it was profound puzzlement over why anyone would want to perpetrate such monstrous violence on their country.
The official answer was irrational, dishonest, and very politically useful. The root cause of 9/11 was that the Muslim world hated America’s freedoms. There was never a mention that it was possibly tied to violent U.S. militarism around the world (Nobel Peace Prize winning President Barack Obama has ordered bombs dropped on no fewer than eight Muslim countries during his presidency), except to portray these missions as charitable exercises in nation-building.
The bare truth, Greenwald argued, is that the Muslim world doesn’t hate America’s freedoms, it hates America’s policies towards them.
He talked about a study commissioned by Donald Rumsfeld in 2004, that concluded that the root cause of terrorism was U.S. military intervention in other countries. Whether it was boots on the ground in their holy places, a medical embargo that led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of children in Iraq, the toppling of elected governments, or the carte blanche extended to Israel in the region, there was a long and bloody list of grievances in the Muslim world that western governments, including Canada’s, didn’t want to acknowledge.
In Greenwald’s view, citizens in our surveillance states have not been informed as much as manipulated.
In 2006, the Harper government decided not to lower the flags on Parliament Hill in honour of soldiers killed in Afghanistan, and to impose a media ban on showing the return of the flag-draped caskets of Canadian military personnel. It was not helpful, apparently, to the popularity of the war.
This week, though, the flags were lowered and there were cameras aplenty at Cpl. Cirillo’s funeral procession, recording many poignant images, including of his flag-draped casket.
The political requirements have apparently changed.
Original Article
Source: ipolitics.ca/
Author: Michael Harris
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