Showing posts with label circular firing squad. Show all posts
Showing posts with label circular firing squad. Show all posts

May 20, 2008

Ontario mad at Federal Government over Caledonia land claims - FINALLY

Set Caledonia deadline, Bryant urges Ottawa

Settle land claim rather than point finger at Ontario, minister says

May 15, 2008 04:30 AM
Richard Brennan
OTTAWA BUREAU

OTTAWA–The federal government is being urged by Ontario Aboriginal Affairs Minister Michael Bryant to put a deadline on land claim negotiations in Caledonia instead of letting them drag on with no resolution in sight.

"We say to the federal government with respect to this 200-year-old dispute, it's time for them to set a deadline and set it now," Bryant told the Legislature yesterday.



Carlos Osorio/Toronto Star

A man guides a Bobcat as it pushes cement blocks on the entrance to the disputed land in Caledonia in this file image from August, 2006

"We say to the federal government with respect to this 200-year-old dispute, it's time for them to set a deadline and set it now,"
Bryant told the Legislature yesterday.

Federal Indian Affairs Minister Chuck Strahl seemed taken aback, saying Bryant hadn't communicated this new sense of urgency to him.

"Certainly we have been pretty aggressive in Caledonia to try to do just that. We've tabled a $125 million offer to the First Nations there and expanded the mandate of our negotiator to explore options there," Strahl told reporters on Parliament Hill.

"We are working hard to settle it."

Bryant said tensions are growing among residents in Caledonia, a town southwest of Hamilton. They have, for more than two years, lived with the occupation of a former housing development by members of the Six Nations band protesting unresolved land claims.

"Instead of being content to sit on their hands, and actually literally point fingers at the provincial government ... it's time for the federal government to actually take responsibility for something that is their responsibility," Bryant told reporters later at Queen's Park.

In 2006, native protesters blocked the Caledonia bypass, the town's main road and the rail line after police raided the occupation site. When the bypass was blocked again earlier this month, clashes broke out between Six Nations protesters and Caledonia residents.

Bryant said claims focus on the Haldimand Tract following the Grand River "and the question is what the federal government did exactly and what the compensation is owed by the federal government to Haudenosaunee Six Nations."

Jason Kenney, Minister of Multiculturalism and Canadian Identity, caused a stir during a recent trip to Brantford when he blamed the province not reining in Six Nations Confederacy activists who have blocked projects there and demanded cash from developers.

Kenney called the activists' actions "extortion" said "the law should apply equally."

Yesterday, Strahl urged the province "to remain part of these negotiations. It's important that people understand that finding solutions to these complex issues will take time."

Hey, wouldn't it be NOBLE if these guys quit having liquid lunches and actually DID something for once?

It'll look BAD to have Canada apologize for
residential schools when you still don't settle
200-year old land claims.

About time Michael Bryant got MOUTHY !!

He's my MP, in fact, and I called them and bitched.


April 23, 2008

Books of Note: Torture Team

TOP US GENERAL HOODWINKED OVER TORTURE

GUARDIAN, UK The US's most senior general was "hoodwinked" by top Bush administration officials determined to push through aggressive interrogation techniques for terror suspects held at Guantánamo Bay, the Guardian can reveal. The development led to the US military abandoning its age-old ban on the cruel and inhumane treatment of prisoners.

General Richard Myers, the chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff from 2001 to 2005, wrongly believed that inmates at Guantanamo and other prisons were protected by the Geneva conventions and from abuse tantamount to torture. The way he was duped by senior officials in Washington - who believed the Geneva conventions and other traditional safeguards were out of date - is disclosed in a devastating account of their role. . . In his new book, Torture Team, Philippe Sands QC, a professor of law at University College London, reveals:

- Senior figures in the Bush administration pushed through previously outlawed measures with the help of unqualified and inexperienced military officials at Guantanamo.

-Myers believes he was a victim of "intrigue" by top lawyers at the department of justice, the office of the vice president, Dick Cheney, and Donald Rumsfeld's defence department.

- Myers wrongly believed interrogation techniques had been taken from the army's field manual.

The lawyers who pushed through the interrogation techniques - all of them political appointees - were Alberto Gonzales, David Addingon and William Haynes.

Others involved were Doug Feith, Rumsfeld's undersecretary for policy, and Jay Bybee and John Yoo, two assistant attorney generals. . .

"As we worked through the list of techniques, Myers became increasingly hesitant and troubled,"
Sands writes.
"Haynes and Rumsfeld had been able to run rings around him." Myers and his closest advisers were cut out of the decision-making process, so he was not given suffficient opportunity to object to measures he now says he strongly disapproved of. . .
Sands comments: "[Myers] really had taken his eye off the ball ... he didn't ask too many questions, or inquire too deeply, and kept his distance from the decision-making process."
At April 20, 2008 7:09 AM, Anonymous m said...

The way the military is structured it is possible for the torturing administration to have kept this from Myers, but the excuse that Myers presents, "that he knew but didn't know" is nonsense.

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