Finally: (emphasis mine)
Three men — including two in their 50s — have been arrested in the investigation into the firebombing of an uptown Ottawa bank last month.In the Friday morning raids, Ottawa Police arrested one man downtown, and a second at his home in nearby Stittsville, Ont. A third man in his early 30s has also been picked up. His name is Matthew Morgan-Brown, of Ottawa. He is a well known activist. He was arrested before the 2007 Montebello summit and charged with assaulting police. He was also arrested in 2004 for vandalizing downtown buildings during an antiwar protest.
Claude Haridge, 50, of Stittsville is in police custody, charged with arson and mischief. Days after the firebombing, which was filmed and posted online in a “catch-me-if-you-can” video, the 50-year-old accused was arrested in an unrelated investigation. In that probe, the accused firebomber was charged with careless storage of ammunition.
The 58-year-old accused is Roger Clement a retired federal public servant, is also in police custody and charged with arson. Detectives believe he rented a 2010 SUV, which was used as the getaway car.
The licence plate of the truck was caught on security video, which led detectives to check rental car records.
The Citizen has learned that Clement used his own credit card and driver’s licence to rent the truck.....
The “homegrown terrorists” have said they firebombed the bank because it sponsored the Vancouver Olympics, which they say was staged on stolen Indian land.
Brilliance and terrorism never mix, apparently.
It took twenty-five years but an inquiry into Canada biggest terrorist attack has yielded some official answers*:
The behaviour of those who booked the tickets and checked the bags should have sounded alarm bells, the report found, but in accordance with the "customer service mentality" that governed at the time, airline staff were not instructed to watch for signs of harmful intent. An anti-sabotage measure called "passenger-baggage reconciliation," which matches passengers with their bags to prevent unauthorized luggage from being place on board, was not used -though it could have prevented the tragedy. "Canadian airports were plagued by a lax security culture," the report found, noting restricted areas were not adequately protected, personnel who screened luggage were not properly trained, and individuals with known associations to Sikh extremist groups had access to highly sensitive areas at the Vancouver International Airport. "Air India ought to have known that the security measures it was using were inadequate to prevent a bomb being placed on its aircraft," the report noted.
I find it extraordinary that no one said anything (or, if they did, it was not heeded) about unaccompanied baggage. It is also extraordinary that areas which should have been secure were completely unguarded.
Further: (emphasis mine)
The report concluded government agencies possessed significant pieces of information that, taken together, could have demonstrated the extreme risk to Flight 182. Yet the process of sharing information between government agencies, including CSIS and the RCMP, was "wholly deficient," the report found. A CSIS surveillance team that watched Sikh extremists conduct a test explosion in Duncan, B.C., in June 1985, failed to include that information in a threat assessment provided to the RCMP and Transport Canada. The RCMP, in turn, "failed to identify, report and share threat information," including a Telex message warning of the possibility of bombing with time-delayed devices that same month. "Excessive secrecy in information sharing prevented any one agency from obtaining all necessary information to assess the threat," the report found....
The RCMP often discounted intelligence leads prematurely, the report found, if those leads failed to conform to the force's primary theory of the case. One suspect, for example, was ruled out because observations of his hair two years after the bombing did not match an imprecise composite sketch of the suspect who had checked the luggage. The RCMP prematurely dismissed source information based on preliminary assessments of credibility, the report found. And by failing to appreciate the continuing threat of Sikh extremism or sources' fear of co-operating with police, "the RCMP often alienated sources, including sources who had previously been willing to speak to CSIS, because of the manner in which it treated them." The RCMP also failed to protect witnesses, the report found, including Tara Singh Hayer, whose name appeared on a "hit list" and who was ultimately murdered....
CSIS frequently failed to disclose information relevant to the RCMP's criminal investigation in a timely fashion, or when it did, critical details were missing. "CSIS was mesmerized by the mantra that 'CSIS doesn't collect evidence,' and used it to justify the destruction of raw material and information," the report stated. CSIS erased tapes of coded conversations that may have related to the bomb plot and destroyed notes from sources related to the Air India disaster, compromising the prosecution. On the RCMP side, police failed to make either a verbal or a written request to preserve the tapes until months into the investigation, when material was already removed. It cannot be determined what information was lost due to the tape erasures.
Unbelievable. If I didn't know better, I would suggest that the RCMP and CSIS made it their mission to screw up this case from the word go. Why legitimate threats were ignored and why evidence was destroyed is beyond me.
(*Note: there is a marvelous book out by Kim Bolan which details the tragedy of Air India Flight 182 and is worth a read.)
Excuse me if I don't believe her:
A woman who drowned her four-year-old daughter in a bathtub six years ago told a Toronto court yesterday she hoped to have children in the future -- then walked out a free woman.
"I still want to have a baby. I won't kill another baby," said Xuan Peng, 38, in between sobs after she pleaded guilty to manslaughter.
Peng was sentenced to five years in prison. Since she had already been in pre-trial custody for 30 months, Peng was given two-for-one credit for time served and was released yesterday afternoon.
She was originally convicted of second-degree murder in March 2008 and was sentenced to life in prison with no eligibility for parole for at least 10 years. The conviction was quashed and a new trial ordered last December, when it was revealed Superior Court Justice Mary Lou Benotto erred in her instructions to the jury.
In a statement of facts submitted to the court, the prosecution and the defence agreed to a manslaughter charge and the lenient term noting the significance of Peng's bipolar disorder when coupled with raising an autistic child.
There are several things wrong with this. Canadian courts have been particularly lenient when it comes to parents killing their disabled children. By doing so, they've assigned a value to those particular children's lives. The system fails to adequately address difficulties families have when dealing with disabled children (just ask Dalton McGuinty). Asia, in particular, is extremely wanting in care for the mentally ill:
Asia's mental health is, more than ever, in a perilous state. The Global Burden of Disease study commissioned jointly by the World Bank, the World Health Organization (WHO) and Harvard University predicts that by 2020 depression will be the leading cause of disability in Asia, measured by the number of years a person lives with a debilitating health condition. Already, mental illnesses account for five of the 10 leading causes of disability in Asia, including disorders such as depression and schizophrenia. That's a bigger health burden to the continent than cancer. A WHO study found that as many as one-quarter of all Indians currently suffer from some sort of mental illness. The region also boasts some of the highest suicide rates in the world. In China, for instance, suicide is the No. 1 cause of death among those aged 18-34, according to the Beijing Suicide Research and Prevention Center. At least 250,000 Chinese have killed themselves each year since the mid-1990s.
Yet only a small percentage of these troubled individuals ever seek help—or even possess the opportunity to do so. In Asia's most developed countries, ordered, Confucian cultures are loath to confront mental illness. Its victims commonly endure workplace discrimination, receive scant family support and feel obliged to hide their symptoms for fear of unsettling the people around them. Du Yasong, a psychiatrist at the Huashan Hospital in Shanghai, estimates that as many as one-third of all people who go to general practitioners in China are actually suffering from mental-health problems expressed psychosomatically through symptoms such as headaches or insomnia. Yet 95% of those with depression in China are untreated, according to Ji Jianlin, a medical professor at Shanghai's Fudan University who advises the central government on mental-health policy. Japan has the highest number of hospitalized, mentally ill patients in the world, yet psychiatry is still considered a crackpot discipline by many doctors there. "There is so much stigma when it comes to mental health," says Osamu Tajima, a leading psychiatrist in Tokyo. "The perception that it's a personality weakness prevails not just among 'normal' people. I've heard many doctors tell patients to stop complaining and tough it out."
Even when the severity of the problem is acknowledged, treatment is hampered by a disastrous lack of resources. This is especially true in Asia's poorer countries, where conditions for the mentally ill are often horrific. Many patients are locked up in hospitals no better than prisons. At the Panti Bina Laras Cipayung mental-health center in east Jakarta, just 10 minutes off a modern expressway, the air is thick with flies and the stench of feces. Originally intended for 200 patients, the government-run facility is crammed with 305 inmates. Most are naked, some are shackled or chained to window bars. Others, emaciated or showing oozing lesions, curl up on the soiled floor of the latrines. A doctor stops by the center only once a week for two to three hours; he has numerous other similar institutions to attend to. Though the center's number of patients has nearly doubled since 1996, its funding has not increased because of the weak economy—less than $1 is spent on each patient per day.
Miss Peng is going back to China where mental illness is ignored AND they drown baby girls.
This won't end well.
No:
John Oakley is seriously entertaining the question of whether Canadian judges should give those who commit "honour" killings a break because they have different "cultural practices" and may not be aware of our norms and laws; defence attorney Lawrence Ben-Eliezer thinks judges should take these differences into consideration because we have "multiculturalism".
Not just unthinkable but- as many have put before me- "racism of lower expectations". Why expect an immigrant to learn and conform to the practice of NOT killing one's offspring? As much as the West has embraced a culture of death in all its forms, other parts of the world have had it embedded in their culture for centuries. Statistically, so called honour killings occur more in Muslim, Hindu or Sikh circles than in other circles. Is the horrific practice still going to be carried out though far from the cushioned environs of their apologists? One hopes not.
Funny pic.
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