Yeow.

In April of this year, the Calgary police chief went to extraordinary ends to seize a computer owned by a civilian employee. This was not for a criminal investigation, but a civil suit. Calgary Herald, April 9th;

Calgary Police Service Chief Jack Beaton has obtained a secret court order to seize from a civilian employee of the department a computer believed to be used in creating a website critical of his leadership.
The Anton Piller Order, a rarely used legal remedy aimed at preserving evidence in specific civil court cases, was executed by several police officers Saturday at the southeast Calgary home of Jan Vahey, who is contracted to do transcription work for the police service.
The order — along with the reasons it was sought and approved by the judge — have been sealed by the court, keeping its contents secret.� Vahey said she’s forbidden by the court order from speaking to anyone about it.

This little ad appeared in the Calgary Sun September 10, 2005, Classifieds, Section 1399 Public Notice and Tenders;

Deloitte & Touche, LLP (“Deloitte”) has been engaged by the Calgary Police Commission to conduct an independent review of the Calgary Police Service public and internal complaint process. The review will assess:
* accessibility
* effectiveness
* efficiency
As part of this review Deloitte is seeking written submissions from interested parties in the complaints process. These submissions should outline:
* accessibility to the complaint process
* barriers to the complaint process
Additionally, Deloitte is interested in all parties’ views as to the effectiveness, efficiency or failings of the complaint process.
These written submissions must be received by Deloitte no later than midnight October 15, 2005.
Please send your comments to the attention of:
Brian Tario, Firm Director
3000 Scotia Centre
700 2 Street S.W.
Calgary, Alberta
T2P 0S7
If further detail is required please contact Brian Tario at 403-267-1768 or by e-mail at btario@deloitte.ca

View original
Apparently a stingy little contract they have with Deloitte, considering how small and well-buried this notice is!
Nor has it been posted�on the Commission, The CPS, City of Calgary or Calgary Police Association websites.�

By now, everyone has certainly seen stories about how FEMA, the State Department, State of Louisiana, or DHS rejected some kind of aid from someone. Some claims that aid was refused are rumors or smears, some are real. I thought it would be instructive to make a list, with brief commentary on each claimed refusal. Please note that in many cases “refused” translates as “delayed for a ridiculous length of time while people died.”

In this related post, we have the Quote of the Week:

If William Buckley were dead, he’d certainly be spinning in his grave right now. As it is, I hope he’s having a few extra belts of Glenlivet, or at the very least inviting a lovely young escort to feel around a bit inside his smoking jacket.

More in the comments.

With allegations of resume padding, this was just a matter of time. A commentor at “Poliblogger”;

if “brownie” is so dang unqualified, then why was brown overwhlemingly confirmed by the senate when it was controlled by the dems?
FEMA is a management agency which must get cooperation if it’s to be able to cut through the layers of local and state government during an emergency. it has no assets of its own; it’s a management service that can marshall in and manage vast national reservoirs of aid into counties and cities and states.
brown had a lot of legal background in the relationships between local, state and federal governments/bureaucracies before he got the FEMA job. it’s one reason he was nominated and confirmed.
ALSO: it’s easy in hindsight to say that last year’s FLORIDA hurricane season was un-extraordinary; IOW: it sure looks that way now. but ti was the worst hurricane season florida had ever had – except fore andrew. but the very fact that aid flowed in there so smoothly proves brown is NOT a total incompetent. he ran FEMA then, and NO ONE COMPLAINED. not once.
also keep this in mind: brown has done NO FINGER- POINTING. zero.

Next question: When are the Louisiana governor and mayor of New Orleans going to step up to the political chopping block?

Rusty Shackleford has been following the case of American hostage Roy Hallums for months. He writes;

As you know, The Jawa Report was the first media to report that Roy Hallums was taken hostage in Iraq. Since that time, we have done everything in our power to support the Hallums family, raise money, and keep Roy’s name in the media.

Today, Roy is alive and free..

The art of retouching.
Via primeminister.ca

More on the PetroKaz takeover by the Chinese;

China recently scored a victory in the Great-Game struggle for influence in Central Asia. On Monday, China National Petroleum Corp. reached a $4 billion deal to buy Canada’s PetroKazakhstan, which produces about 150,000 barrels of oil a day in Kazakhstan. The deal, if consummated as expected, will consolidate China’s economic presence in the energy-rich and geopolitically important region, with potential consequences for U.S. interests.
In a meeting yesterday with reporters and editors at The Washington Times, Foreign Minister Kasymzhomart Tokayev was sober about China’s rising clout. He said he encouraged a U.S. executive to bid on PetroKazakhstan, but the executive told him, “It’s very difficult to compete with the Chinese.” The difficulty for U.S. and other companies is that Chinese firms are willing to overpay for foreign assets, if those purchases will bolster China’s clout abroad and help it secure energy resources. In that regard, the companies serve as a platform for Beijing’s foreign policy goals, while U.S. firms consider market factors.
[…]
Mr. Tokayev recognized China’s ascendancy in the region. “The potential and ambitions of China are growing,” he said. China is already financing construction of an $850 million oil pipeline from Kazakhstan to China, capable of moving 400,000 barrels of crude a day. It is due to come on line in December. Also, Chinese interests own about 60 per cent of another major Kazakh oil producer. In Uzbekistan, China National Petroleum signed a $600-million oil joint venture.

Via China E–Lobby who writes;

“The unnamed executive’s timidity aside, one has to admit the Kazakhs at least tried to keep the firm out of Communist hands. As for the Canadian government, well, let’s just not go there.”

The Chinese have snagged the Canadian oil firm PetroKazakhstan.
(Another item from China E-Lobby that caught my eye; “Another Falun Gong practitioner deported: Unless someone knocked some sense into the British Home Office, practitioner Ling Na Rong was sent back to Communist China yesterday (Epoch Times). The Home Office “asserts that she does not face danger, as she is not a Falun Gong leader.” Have the bureaucrats in that office heard of the late Gao Rongrong? As the Epoch Times notes, she wasn’t a Falun Gong leader, either.”)

Burn it, I tell you – burn everything to the ground. Conditions must be made unbearable for the enemy and all his accomplices. Leave the criminal invaders naught but scorched earth to claim for their heinous aggression!

update In the comments, “Jeff in Pullman, WA” makes a darned good point –

It’s called Hans Island, so the Danes think it’s theirs. Now, if you called it “Brian Island”, or something equally Canadian, the Danes wouldn’t set foot on it.

Duh!

Andrea Mandel-Campbell in MacLeans;

Andy Xie, chief Asia economist with U.S. investment bank Morgan Stanley, points to the US$350 billion in speculative “hot money” that has poured into China in recent years on the expectation that its currency, the renminbi (or yuan), would appreciate. Much of that money has been parked in real estate as the recently privatized housing market goes through an unprecedented boom. In Shanghai, prices skyrocketed by 28 per cent last year, with sleek condo towers, office high-rises, hotels and malls being thrown up at a breakneck pace. The vacancy rate officially stands at 2.7 per cent, but anecdotal evidence suggests up to 40 per cent of the new space sits empty.
[…]
And the problems, like everything in China, are mind-bogglingly huge. At their heart is a dysfunctional, corrupt and virtually bankrupt financial system. PricewaterhouseCoopers estimates the country’s banks have racked up as much as US$800 billion in bad loans, mostly doled out to weak state-owned enterprises that churn out cheap, inferior products in a thinly veiled effort to keep millions employed in the absence of a social safety net.

Lots, lots, lots more.
h/t China E-Lobby

Via Powerline (where there is more extensive quoting and commentary);

President Bill Clinton’s team ignored dire warnings that its approach to terrorism was “very dangerous” and could have “deadly results,” according to a blistering memo just obtained by The Post.
Then-Manhattan U.S. Attorney Mary Jo White wrote the memo as she pleaded in vain with Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick to tear down the wall between intelligence and prosecutors, a wall that went beyond legal requirements.
Looking back after 9/11, the memo makes for eerie reading – because White’s team foresaw, years in advance, that the Clinton-era wall would make it tougher to stop mass murder.
“This is not an area where it is safe or prudent to build unnecessary walls or to compartmentalize our knowledge of any possible players, plans or activities,” wrote White, herself a Clinton appointee.
“The single biggest mistake we can make in attempting to combat terrorism is to insulate the criminal side of the house from the intelligence side of the house, unless such insulation is absolutely necessary. Excessive conservatism…can have deadly results.”
She added: “We must face the reality that the way we are proceeding now is inherently and in actuality very dangerous.”
White must have felt like Cassandra, foreseeing dangers that proved all too real while no one at Clinton’s Justice Department would listen. Team Clinton put up the “wall” in 1995 and it stayed up until after the 9/11 attacks.

And one wonders, why on earth would Clinton want to obstruct communcation between the CIA and FBI?

A year after PDD 24, with the new bureaucratic structure loaded with administration appointees, Gorelick drafted the 1995 memo Attorney General John Ashcroft mentioned while testifying before the 9/11 Commission. The Gorelick memo, and other supporting memos released in recent weeks, not only created walls within the intelligence agencies that prevented information sharing among their own agents, but effectively walled these agencies off from each other and from outside contact with the U.S. prosecutors instrumental in helping them gather the evidence needed to make the case for criminal charges.
…
It is no coincidence that this occurred at the same time both the FBI and the CIA were churning up evidence damaging to the Democratic Party, its fundraisers, the Chinese and ultimately the Clinton administration itself. Between 1994 and the 1996 election, as Chinese dollars poured into Democratic coffers, Clinton struggled to reopen high-tech trade to China. Had agents confirmed Chinese theft of weapons technology or its transfer of weapons technology to nations like Pakistan, Iran and Syria, Clinton would have been forced by law and international treaty to react.

Further down her Post column, Deborah Orin connects the dots.

Equally troubling is that the 9/11 Commission, charged with tracing the failure to stop 9/11, got White’s stunning memo and several related documents – and deep-sixed all of them.
The commission’s report skips lightly over the wall in three brief pages (out of 567). It makes no mention at all of White’s passionate and prescient warnings. Yet warnings that went ignored are just what the commission was supposed to examine.
So it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the commission ignored White’s memo because it was a potential embarrassment to the woman to whom it was addressed: commission member Jamie Gorelick. (White has declined to discuss the matter, and Gorelick didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment yesterday.)

Another heads up on “pig fever” . The Chinese are cracking down on press coverage;

The disease Communist China insists is Streptococcosis Suis (�Pig fever�) �has now spread to 10 cities, with at least 200 infections and dozens of fatalities� (Radio Free Asia via Epoch Times). The cadres have responded by going into full SARS-redux cover-up mode, with an order that �forbids local press from sending reporters to the infected areas or hospitals,� according to Ming Pao (cited by RFA). The World Health Organization has also been barred from examining the disease, which many believe could be a bird flu and at least one doctor diagnosed as Ebola (fourth item). Meanwhile, according to Boxun, the disease may have hit Shenzhen, the city next door to Hong Kong.

Previous post.
(That’s not the only E-Lobby item worth catching today, so keep scrolling – they’re sniffing around at Canadian energy projects from PetroKaz to Newfoundland hydropower.)

The Samand

Options: Air, Cruise, Semtex*.

More on Aly Hindy;

Here’s a story that will make you feel warm and safe; one of Canada’s most insane Islamist fanatics, a man who was not allowed to meet with Prime Minister Paul Martin, spent his earlier life designing safety measures to protect nuclear facilities in Canada and the US.

Previous.

Peter Worthington throws a pail of cold seawater on those still basking in the glow of feel good;

Fresh in memories is Prime Minister Paul Martin initially pledging $1 million for tsunami relief, then $8 million, then promising to match the $40 million Canadians donated, and finally upping the total to $425 million.
Where is that money today? It’s anyone’s guess. The government gave it to CIDA to distribute, with no check on how it was to be spent. CIDA apparently funneled it to various non-government aid groups, also with no accounting of how it would be spent.

Count on Manitoba politics to accomplish something that nobody else has been able to do – make Quebec look respectable.

Remember how the Ax redefined the core area when a federal minister to include his riding of Fort Rouge? Well, now, miraculously, ‘downtown’ includes his new riding – er, fiefdom- the U of W.
Former CBC talking head Jennifer Rattray, in her new role as University of Winnipeg talking head, could barely contain herself when introducing her boss as the man who was the “champion” of the mission to recapture Spence Street from the evil motorists. This latest social engineering project led by the man who brought us the Core Area Initiative in the Trudeau era, is built on a bewildering number of twists and turns overlooked by MSM.
This is the first time anybody other than business owners are talking about the need to address safety downtown. As you will recall, last year it was certainly never an issue under the former mayor, a stance repeated by his chosen successor who openly declared while debating other candidates on CBC Radio that downtown was safe.
The only media outlet to raise the red flag on the growing dangers to pedestrians in the U of W area was The Black Rod, last February, when we reported that security guards at Portage Place, a mere 3 blocks east of the campus, were wearing body armour [emphasis mine].
[…]
This sudden concern about security on the streets also validates the anti-panhandler initiative of Mayor Sam Katz, which, of course, is being opposed by those darlings of the campus crowd, Benham and Gerbasi. The duo were conspicous by their absence as Axworthy and hostess Rattray gushed about the cooperation of His Worship and the sudden commitment of the U of W to improving the ability of citizens to walk the streets without feeling threatened.
While the usual Liberal Party smiley-faces- Anita Neville, David Northcott, John Angus, grinned like a bunch of… well, politicians, at Axworthy blowing kisses in Katz’s direction, one of the usual suspects was not seen, nor spoken of, the entire time.
That’s because the migration of crackheads, aggressive addicted panhandlers and roving girl gangs to the University’s doorstep is the legacy of that ‘man who shall not be named.’
But we will.
Urban visionary Glen Murray, take a bow.
While the former mayor was building over-priced world- class bridges and proposing world class new deals that went nowhere, he somehow failed to see the state of the neighborhoods or to hear the panic coming from the homeowners affected by the daily deterioration of their community.
How the mighty have fallen. First the good citizens of Charleswood showed their appreciation of his civic leadership by showing him the exit door. Then the Prime Minister had to shoehorn him into a patronage position against the objections of the entire opposition. And now he’s persona non grata in the city he loved almost as much as himself.
[…]
Last month the federal government submarined Sam Katz at every turn over the New Deal’s gas tax rebate and the mayor’s insistance that the money be used to fix roads and sidewalks. Then at the event, Katz told the press the top 2 issues for Winnipeggers are the streets and safety. The feds told Katz the rules are the gas tax money must go to- – you guessed it– so-called “green projects” that carry the union label – sustainable development.
And oh look, just a week ago, what new department did Axworthy reveal was in the plans for his restructured administration? A “sustainable development” office. To coincide with — the anti-car, pro-transit, pro-bicycle — new Spence Street mall.
What fate. The federal government can address both of Katz’s priorities by handing the money, not to City Hall, but to the former Liberal Godfather in Manitoba, Lloyd Axworthy hisself.

I don’t designate many links as must read.
This is one.

This is a nifty little reference table.

China E-Lobby;

The Canadian government sullied itself and besmirched its own countrymen by deporting Xiaoping Hu, a Falun Gong practitioner and victim of Communist torture (fourth item), back to Communist China. The shockingly callous treatment of this women led many “to express their despair and indignation” (Epoch Times) outside the offices of Immigration Minister Joe Volpe and Deputy Prime Minister/ Public Safety Minister Anne McLellan. Government MPs, from Prime Minister Paul Martin on down, should hang their heads in shame.

Had only Xiaoping Hu known to attach herself to the cause of marijuana legalization, she might still be here today, legions of keyboard warriors at her side.

Good news from Afghanistan – and there’s a lot of it.

Four young Afghan students did more than merely stun their competitors when they came away with some of the top prizes at an international mathematics competition held recently in Almaty, Kazakhstan. They also changed how students from 22 other countries perceive Afghanistan.
Ahmad Mustafa Naseri and Mustafa Naseri, both 17 (and unrelated), students at the Turkish-run Afghan-Turk School in Kabul, won gold medals while Omid Sadiqyar and Mohammad Rafi Firoz, also 17 and students at a similar school in the northern Shiberghan province, were awarded silver medals following a day-long algebra competition in May.
Ahmad Mustafa said that while he was proud of his gold medal, he was saddened to discover that students from other countries thought of Afghanistan only as the home of terrorism, drugs production and internecine conflict.
“One competitor from Australia told me, ‘I was very surprised that Afghans were taking part in this competition – we always hear that Afghanistan is a major drug producer and a country for terrorists who are always fighting one another,’ ” said Ahmad Mustafa.

Now for the bad news – Arthur Chrenkoff has taken a new job and won’t be continuing the series, though I hope others have been lined up to take over. He’s single-handedly filled a vacuum created by the disgracefully superficial coverage of Afghanistan and Iraq by the mainstream media, with the exception of one. Hats off to the Wall Street Journal for providing Chrenkoff the space and recognition he deserves.