statism watch

CBC News
January 13, 2009

Canadian detainee’s military counsel slams ‘circus-like’ proceedings

Legal proceedings against Canadian Omar Khadr have been thrown into fresh uncertainty after the head of the U.S. military commission process at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, secretly withdrew, then reissued charges against all defendants, Khadr’s military defence lawyer said Tuesday.

The procedure — referred to as “withdrawal and re-referral” — has the legal effect of nullifying all prior proceedings in Khadr’s case, Lt.-Cmdr. William Kuebler said in a statement.

“As of today, there is no trial date in the military commission case of Omar Khadr,” Kuebler said.

He said documents recently disclosed by the U.S. Defence Department show that Susan Crawford, the Pentagon’s top official for the military commissions, withdrew all charges on Dec. 17 and refiled them last Friday.

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Bruce Campion-Smith, Les Whittington, Toronto Star
January 13, 2009

We’re the only one of 47 nations on UN rights panel to refuse to condemn military offensive in Gaza

OTTAWA–Canada stood alone before a United Nations human rights council yesterday, the only one among 47 nations to oppose a motion condemning the Israeli military offensive in Gaza.

The vote before the Geneva-based body shows the Stephen Harper government has abandoned a more even-handed approach to the Middle East in favour of unalloyed support of Israel, according to some long-time observers.

Thirty-three countries voted for the strongly worded motion, which called for an investigation into “grave” human rights violations by Israeli forces, while 13 nations, mostly European, abstained.

The United States, regarded as Israel’s greatest ally, is not a member of the council.

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David Rowan, The Times UK
January 13, 2009

Increasing use of face-recognition technology should worry us

No social justice issue mobilises columnists more unflinchingly than their right to a prominent, contractually guaranteed byline photograph. Not me. Unlike fellow commentators whose idealised physiognomic representations remain deferentially untouched by comment editors for decades at a time, I abhor the mugshot perching smirkingly above this paragraph. Not a question of false modesty, you understand: more a desperate attempt to undermine the privacy-sapping consequences that face-recognition technologies are about to wreak on our lives.

This is the year when automated face-recognition finally goes mainstream, and it’s about time we considered its social and political implications. Over the past few days, at trade fairs from Las Vegas to Seoul, a constant theme has been the unstoppable advance of “FRT”, the benign abbreviation favoured by industry insiders. We learnt that Apple’s iPhoto update will automatically scan your photos to detect people’s faces and group them accordingly, and that Lenovo’s new PC will log on users by monitoring their facial patterns.

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