Anti-Terrorist Fence in Owen Sound?!?

Your tax dollars at work: a chain-link and barbed wire fence to stop terrorist infiltration of Owen Sound.

How far will the federal government go to make people afraid of ‘terrorism’? All the way to Owen Sound from the looks of it.
The Canadian Government has build a 2 metre high, 60 metre long barb-wired fence along the east harbour wall of Owen Sound - much to the surprise of the local City government.
The Mayor and City Council of Owen Sound have written a letter of complaint to Harper. During a recent council meeting, Mayor Ruth Lovell called the fence “a big disgrace”.
The federal government is justifying putting up the fence as a way to ‘keep out terrorists’. Why terrorists would want to attack Owen Sound - a Georgian Bay city of 21,753 that only welcomes an international ship once every few years - was left unexplained.
According to Transport Canada, more than $930 million has been spent on such “marine security enhancements”.
This sort of ridiculous act would be hilarious if it wasn’t for the fact that the government uses this sort of fear mongering to keep Canada involved in the bogus ‘War on Terror’.

Jose Maria Sison Freed

Dutch attack on political refugee shows danger of “terror lists”.

Progressive Filipinos and their allies are celebrating the severe blow dealt to the Dutch government’s campaign of harassment against Jose Maria Sison. On September 11, the court in The Hague ordered the release of Sison, who had been held for two weeks on trumped-up charges of having ordered the killing of two counter-insurgency agents in the Philippines.

A poet, scholar, and respected political commentator, Sison has spent most of his life struggling for the national liberation of the Philippines. As founding Chairman of the Communist Party of the Philippines/New Peoples Army, Sison led the underground movement against the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos until his capture by the military. Following his released after the fall of the dictatorship, Sison traveled the world on a speaking tour. The government of the Philippines cancelled his passport and with the threat of assassination should he return to his homeland, Sison was stuck in The Netherlands as a political refugee for the next 20 years.

Currently, Sison is the chairperson of the International League of Peoples Struggles and Chief Political Consultant to the Negotiating Panel of the National Democratic Front currently in peace talks with the government of the Philippines to seek a just and lasting peace to the civil war that has been raging between the two parties for the past 30 years.

Rather than provide a safe haven from violent repression, the Dutch government has gone out of its way to attack Sison. It has prevented his earning any livelihood or access to personal bank accounts and denied him refugee status, even after the highest administrative court in the land ruled that he was a legitimate political refugee. During his recent arrest he was held in the National Penitentiary in Scheveningen - the same prison used by the Nazis to torture Dutch resistance ighters during WWII - without access to any media, warm clothing, or prescription medication.

Canadian activists immediately condemned the arrest and launched a Free Jose Maria Sison campaign that included petitions and rallies outside the Dutch embassies in Toronto, Montreal, and Ottawa. Similar actions occurred worldwide, with rallies held in Rio de Janeiro, Istanbul, Hong Kong, Manila, and other major cities.

Every charge brought against Sison has proven to be nothing more than empty propaganda and dismissed by courts both in the Netherlands and the Philippines. Yet Sison has been labeled a “terrorist” and blacklisted by the US and EU. When Sison’s inclusion in the EU terror list was overturned by EU courts, the Dutch government launched its attempt to criminalise Sison and the entire National Democratic movement in the Philippines and those that support it abroad.

The arrest of Sison - as well as the raiding of the NDF oices and homes of Filipino refugees in the Netherlands - is part of the Arroyo government’s campaign to demonize the patriotic national democratic movement and to cover up its own heinous human rights abuses, including the murder of over 1,000 unarmed civilians (men, women and children), the creation of over 1 million internal refugees, two stolen elections, ruining the economy by selling out national interests to foreign corporations, massive corruption and theft of state assets, and the arrest and prolonged detainment of political opponents on false charges. Instead of condemning these abuses, the Dutch government has gone along with this campaign because of its economic interests - Shell Oil (a Dutch company) is currently negotiating with the government of the Philippines for lucrative oil extraction contracts.

These crimes have been aided and abetted by the governments of the other G7 nations, including Canada. Canadian aid, rather than being used to beneit the Filipinos, has gone to death squads and supported Canadian mining irms that have caused environmental catastrophes. The Canadian government refuses to put human rights before trade in the Philippines, and continues to use it’s anti-democratic “terror lists” against any forces waging just struggles for social change. Sison’s case shows that you don’t have to actually commit any crime to get on these lists - they are arbitrary tools of repression and could be used against anyone who speaks out against the government. The Canadian people should defend Sison, not just to protect his rights, but to protect their own!

Fear and Loathing in the UK and Toronto Terror Plots

Last weeks arrests in the UK of an alleged terorist ring was accompanied by the usual hype and hysteria, as the media reprinted uncritically every apocolyptic image spun out by the British police. Massive security crackdowns were justified with images of a "new 9/11" - of thousands of people meeting their flaming deaths in simultaneous suicide bombings of trans-Atlantic flights unless flyers poured out their bottles of wine or mouthwash.

Yet there are some facts about the recent "terrorist plot" that the British government has either neglected to mention or downplayed:

* No bomb had been constructed.
* No airline tickets had been purchased.
* Many of the men arrested didn't even have passports.
* None come even close to matching the psychological profile of a suicide bomber.
* Most of the evidence against the "plotters" comes from a man currently being "interogatted" by Pakistani intellegence. Given the methods frequently used in "interogations" conducted by military dictatorships, he has probably also linked the men to 9/11, the Kennedy Assassination and the Great Chicago Fire of 1871.

Craig Murray, who was fired from his position as British ambassador to Western-allied Uzbekistan for critcizing that country's horrendous human rights record, points out:

"...the timing is deeply political. This is more propaganda than plot. Of the over one thousand British Muslims arrested under anti-terrorist legislation, only twelve per cent are ever charged with anything. That is simply harrassment of Muslims on an appalling scale. Of those charged, 80% are acquitted. Most of the very few - just over two per cent of arrests - who are convicted, are not convicted of anything to do terrorism, but of some minor offence the Police happened upon while trawling through the wreck of the lives they had shattered."

Such was the outcome of the terrorist scare in Toronto two years ago. Project Thread, carried out by the RCMP and CIC, alleged to have uncovered a "sleeper cell" of 26 Pakistani Muslims out to detonate "dirty bombs" at a nuclear power plant. Coincidentally, the arrests took place just as CSIS (Canadian Security Inteligence Service) was raising demands for more funds to "fight terrorism." In the end none of the Pakistanis were charged with any criminal offence and most were deported, their only offence having been getting ripped off by a phoney business school.

The more resent arrests in Toronto are equally suspect. Little information has been released and so far the only evidence against the accused is that they engaged in trash talking on internet chatrooms. The explosives on display by the police turned out to be props brought for the photo-op, and there is no evidence that anyone other than an RCMP agent ever had anything resembling explosives.

If the cases are so flimsy, then why the hype? It's not for public safety, but it does attempt to accomplish other important objectives:

First, to build social support for ever-greater state intrusion into our lives. The state creates fear and then paints a picture of a trade-off between freedom and security, demanding that we sacrifice the former for the latter. Of course if we accept this trade-off, we will wind up with neither. First the repression was directed against "foreigners", then the "foreign-born", then "Canadian-born of X descent". It seems we are already pretty far down the slippery slope. Second, it encourages passivity in the face of the war for empire in the Middle East. By demonizing Muslims and Third World peoples anything can be justified - be it invasion, occupation, or war crimes.

War and the restriction of civil liberties go hand in hand, so we must demand an end to both! We should have the right to privacy and security from government witch-hunts just as the Afghani, Iraqi, and Hatian people should have the right to be free of invaders and occupiers!

For additional info on these and other "terrorist" cases, see
William Blum's article on Counterpunch.