Democracy Gone Astray

Democracy, being a human construct, needs to be thought of as directionality rather than an object. As such, to understand it requires not so much a description of existing structures and/or other related phenomena but a declaration of intentionality.
This blog aims at creating labeled lists of published infringements of such intentionality, of points in time where democracy strays from its intended directionality. In addition to outright infringements, this blog also collects important contemporary information and/or discussions that impact our socio-political landscape.

All the posts here were published in the electronic media – main-stream as well as fringe, and maintain links to the original texts.

[NOTE: Due to changes I haven't caught on time in the blogging software, all of the 'Original Article' links were nullified between September 11, 2012 and December 11, 2012. My apologies.]

Thursday, January 28, 2016

Did Harjit Sajjan read his mandate letter?

In Justin Trudeau's mandate letter to defense minister Harjit Sajjan he ordered him to "end Canada's combat mission in Iraq and Syria." But as former defense minister Jason Kenney, who has bravely served this country as a four-star collector of World War II paraphernalia, pointed out with this graphicon Twitter, our airstrikes continue. 

Of course he was missing a few statistics, like how many civilians our 500-pound iron fragmentation bombs have killed. Up to 27 civilians may have been killed in a single Canadian airstrike, as reported by left wing rag The Pentagon. They also reported that Canada's military lawyers said there are "no obligations for the Canadian Armed Forces to conduct an investigation" of the incident. We're peacekeepers, not record keepers. 
So there's no obligation to the families of those civilians, but we do feel an obligation to the American government, who started this perpetual war in 2003. And to the Kurds and Iraqi security forces, who have been accused of unlawful killings, abductions, and revenge attacks against civilians. And to our noble allies in Saudi Arabia, who are indiscriminatelybombing civilians in Yemen and also arming a group that includes Al Qaeda.  
And this deep sense of obligation to our benevolent allies led Minister Sajjan to worry that fulfilling his mandate would leave a "capability gap" for the coalition. But a capability gap is what Canadians voted for, because some of them are capable of learning from history that dropping bombs will only lead to more anger, more hate and more violence.
Original Article
Source: rabble.ca/
Author: SCOTT VROOMAN

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