by Linda McQuaig | The Toronto Star, Nov 18, 2008
Isolated, repudiated by his people and even shunned by his own party, George W. Bush – the lamest of lame ducks – still seems able to count on the support of at least one world leader: Stephen Harper.
And so it was on the weekend, as it has so often been in the past two years, that our prime minister provided rare support for Bush as the soon-to-be former president battled against a chorus of world leaders urgently calling for a set of badly needed reforms.
Just as Harper backed Bush’s effort to block global progress on climate change, this time he helped Bush stymie European-led efforts at the G20 summit in Washington to restore regulations to international financial markets.
It was the rollback of these regulations that allowed Wall Street to transform itself into a giant casino where tycoons made billions playing fast and loose with the life savings of ordinary citizens.
Harper’s resistance to European calls for tighter regulations is ironic, since he has the luxury of presiding over a country that’s been spared the worst of the financial meltdown, largely because of the Canadian tradition of tighter domestic financial regulations.
This has allowed Harper to ride out the current financial storm politically unscathed, even gaining re-election in the middle of it.
In fact, although Harper’s record on this has received little attention, his government had started to push Canada down the dangerous road toward looser financial regulation.
In its first budget in 2006, the Harper government changed the rules in ways that effectively opened up the Canadian mortgage market to U.S. insurers. Finance Minister Jim Flaherty noted that these “new players” would bring “greater choice and innovation” to the Canadian mortgage market. Unfortunately, they did just that. They introduced risky products – like mortgages amortized over 40 years with little or no down-payments.
The new mortgages quickly caught on. With their lower monthly payments, they made houses seem more affordable. In reality, however, they dramatically increased the cost of a home, roughly tripling it.
As the implosion of the U.S. housing market provided a vivid example of the pitfalls of looser mortgage regulations, Flaherty finally intervened last summer, tightening CMHC’s rules.
The Harper government has been even more aggressive pushing financial deregulation on developing countries.
Ellen Gould, a Vancouver-based trade consultant, notes that Ottawa has pressed developing nations to open their economies to the “supposedly superior services” offered by the financial institutions of the advanced world.
At the World Trade Organization negotiations in 2006, Canada played a leading role in pushing developing nations to accept rules that would allow their domestic banks and insurance companies to be taken over by foreign financial institutions – like the ones that have been collapsing on Wall Street recently.
The Canadian push for “financial liberalization” predates Harper. It was keenly advocated by Liberal governments as well. But the Harper government has continued to push for this sort of deregulation long after it should have known better, as recently as the WTO ministerial in July 2008.
One can draw solace perhaps from the realization that Canada doesn’t shape the course of world events. Still, it’s disappointing to realize that we’re using what little influence we have at organizations like the G20 to help the exiting Bush administration do this last bit of disservice to the world.
Peace and Justice Post 
No Amnesty for Cheney, et al, Say Torture Opponents
November 27, 2008Ali Gharib | Inter Press Service
WASHINGTON, 25 Nov (IPS) – Judging by the rare leaks from President-elect Barack Obama’s transition team, investigations and prosecutions of high-level George W. Bush administration officials for torture and war crimes are a distant prospect. But likely or not, that won’t stop pundits from debating the question of whether those officials responsible should be held accountable.
Irrespective of whether Vice President Dick Cheney, former Secretary of Defence Donald Rumsfeld or others are dragged before juries, one glaring change seems absolutely certain: Obama stands unequivocally against torture, and the practice is likely to come to an end under his administration.
‘Even though I’ve been disappointed in other presidents in the past, I do listen and I do believe Obama when he says we won’t torture. I think that’s crucial,’ said Michael Ratner, the president of the Centre for Constitutional Rights.
But foreswearing controversial and harsh interrogation methods may not be enough to permanently reestablish the moral high ground that the Obama administration has promised to bring back to the U.S.’s interactions with the rest of the world.
If Obama doesn’t take on torture that occurred, as opposed to simply discontinuing the practice, the door may be left open for future administrations to resurrect the harshest of interrogation techniques, said Ratner at a recent forum at Georgetown University Law School.
‘If Obama really wants to make sure we don’t torture, he has to launch a criminal investigation,’ said Ratner, the author of ‘The Trial of Donald Rumsfeld: A Prosecution in Book.’
He said that the targets of such an investigation would be the easily identifiable ‘key players’ and ‘principals’ in the Bush administration who hatched plans to allow and legally justify harsh interrogation methods that critics allege are torture, including the controversial ‘waterboarding’ simulated drowning technique.
Those pursued, said Ratner, would include high-ranking administration officials such as Cheney, Rumsfeld, and former Central Intelligence Agency chief George Tenet, as well as the legal team that drummed up what is now regarded as a sloppy legal justification for torture.
Key Bush administration lawyers involved in providing legal cover to harsh practices, including the roundly criticised ‘torture memo’ from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), include former attorney general and earlier White House counsel Alberto Gonzales; Cheney’s chief of staff and former legal counsel to the vice president’s office David Addington; and the University of California, Berkeley law professor and former OLC lawyer John Yoo.
If the characters behind the questionable techniques are not held accountable for violating U.S. and international laws, said Ratner, presidents after Obama may simply say, ‘well, in the name of national security I can just redo what Obama just put in place. I can go torture again.’
Ratner also spoke to the concern that, from the view of the rest of the world, ‘to not do an investigation and prosecution gives the impression of impunity.’
But opposing Ratner on the dais, Stewart Taylor, Jr. argued that an investigation and prosecution were not appropriate.
‘The people who are called ‘war criminals by [Ratner] and others do not think they acted with impunity,’ said Taylor, a Brookings Institution fellow and frequent contributor to Newsweek and the National Journal.
In the Jul. 21 edition of Newsweek, Taylor called for Bush to preemptively pardon any administration official who could be held to account for torture or war crimes. Taylor’s rationale was that without fear of prosecution, a full and true account of what he called ‘dark deeds’ could never come to light.
Furthermore, at the Georgetown Law event Taylor said investigation and eventual prosecution would ‘tear the country apart’.
That may be the thinking of Obama, who, in addition to hints he wouldn’t investigate Bush administration malfeasance, declared his intention to govern as a political reconciliation president in his election victory speech.
In Grant Park in Chicago on Nov. 4, Obama rehashed a quote from slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr., but instead of rhetorically bending the ‘arc of history’ towards ‘justice’, as King did, Obama called for it to be bent ‘toward the hope of a better day.’
But Ratner said that the country was already divided, and that divide is exactly what a future administration could politically exploit to reinstate torture. He said that Obama must close the divide and doing so is not rehashing the past.
‘You’re making sure that in the future, we don’t torture again,’ Ratner said. ‘This is not looking backwards.’
Another potential problem with investigation and prosecution, says Taylor, is that the Bush administration officials ostensibly had sought to find out whether the methods they were about to approve were justified, and, indeed, they were told they were in the legal clear.
‘There is no that high ranking officials acted with criminal intent,’ he said. ‘They were relying in good faith on the advice of legal counsel.’
Taylor said that since the legal advice originated from the Department of Justice, it would be wrong for the same Justice Department to ‘turn around’ and prosecute people for actions that its previous incarnation had explicitly told were legal.
But Taylor’s point misses two issues: that the crimes were allegedly given a legal green light because of collusion with the White House, and that Ratner proposes to investigate those selfsame Justice officials who were involved in giving approval.
Despite referring to John Yoo as a ‘gonzo executive imperialist’, Taylor said that ‘those officials, like them or not, were honourably motivated’ because they were ‘desperately afraid’ of another terrorist attack.
Ratner insists that the officials, part of a ‘group, cabal or conspiracy’, may be culpable because they were ‘aiders and abetters’.
‘[OLC] was not giving independent counsel,’ insisted Ratner. ‘They were shaping memos to fit a policy that had already been determined.’
And while Taylor was quick to point out that many U.S. administrations had been accused of war crimes by various sources, Ratner replied that it was the first time that any administration had actually ‘assaulted the prohibition on torture’.
That could be one reason why, if the U.S. does not take care of its own house, Bush administration officials will likely be pursued on charges in Europe and elsewhere.
In international courts, said Ratner, those officials will not be able to hide behind the legal shields of internal government memos or executive decrees.
‘They have no defence in international law,’ he said. ‘They’re finished.’
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Tags:Alberto Gonzales, Bush administration, Donald Rumsfeld, George Tenet, George W. Bush, John Yoo, Michael Ratner, President-elect Barack Obama, Vice President Dick Cheney, war crimes and torture
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