Fallout on home front

Winnipeg Free Press
Monday, September 11, 2006
Frances Russell

'THE only thing we have to fear is fear itself," U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt said in his 1933 First Inaugural Address.

He urged Americans not to allow the Great Depression to inflict a "nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror" upon the nation.

Seventy years later, another American president, George W. Bush, has flipped the equation. He is deliberately whipping up "nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror" to pursue his open-ended War on Terror. A rank exploitation of the tragic Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, his "war" now undermines democracy itself.

Bush's war is a series of shadowy engagements against an ever-changing foe. In a guerrilla conflict, where the "army" has the support of the populace, you cannot bomb and dispossess people into embracing your values. All you do is create more bloody-minded and fanatical enemies.

President Bush's famous "you're either with us or with the terrorists" has plunged the globe into a twilight zone of escalating fear, suspicion, hatred and instability, with no end. The U.S. president has enemies lists, personal and national, that he enumerates in virtually every speech he gives. Canada was cited again last week for harbouring terrorist cells poised to strike what he calls "the American homeland."

The U.S. administration knows that fear is a powerful tool for social and political control and transformation. If people are kept in a perpetual state of fear, they will sacrifice fundamental freedoms and democratic norms. Already, many of the foundations of the rule of law -- the right to presumption of innocence, habeas corpus, the right to privacy, protection against unreasonable search and seizure, safeguards against torture -- have been eroded in new police-state powers legislated in the U.S. and copied in Canada.

The terrorist attacks have had an additional and profound impact on Canada, accelerating "deep integration," the latest euphemism for American Manifest Destiny.

Sept. 11, 2001 empowered Canada's corporate, media and political establishments to turn up their assault on our culture, values and national institutions.

In her latest book, Too Close For Comfort: Canada's Future Within Fortress North America, Council of Canadians chair Maude Barlow chronicles a seminal meeting in Washington in April 2003, just 17 months after the planes flew into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Thomas d'Aquino, president and CEO of the Canadian Council of Chief Executives, whose corporations own cumulative assets of $2.5 trillion, and some of his members sat down with Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge, Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham and Pentagon military advisor Richard Perle, a Bush confidante and an author of the Project for A New American Century, the Republicans' blueprint for global military supremacy.

The Canadian CEOs were worried that the North American Free Trade Agreement would not be sufficient to keep the border open for an economy that NAFTA had rendered totally dependent upon the U.S. And Perle, ominously, confirmed their worst fears. "Canada had better realize in the future where its best interests lie," he told them. The message was clear: Security trumped all other concerns.

Barlow, director of the International Forum on Globalization, co-founder of the Blue Planet Foundation, an international movement to halt the commodification of water, and one of the Women of Peace nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, writes that 9/11 "changed everything" for Canada.

The campaign for deep integration went into overdrive. A tri-national task force involving politicians and business executives from the U.S., Canada andMexico was struck. Its Canadian members included d'Aquino, former Liberal deputy prime minister John Manley, current Canadian ambassador to the U.S. Michael Wilson and former Alberta treasurer Jim Dinning, a candidate to replace Ralph Klein as premier of Alberta.

The Task Force on the Future of North America reported in May 2005. The proposals were breathtaking. They included a North American "brand name;" a North American security perimeter incorporating air, land, and sea; common exclusion lists for people from Third World countries; joint legal responses to terrorist organizations; biometrics identification at the borders; joint planning for terrorist attacks; a North American passport; common powers for customs and immigration agents; trilateral customs and immigration; a North American currency union; elimination of all exemptions for culture and agriculture; a North American electrical grid and free trade in water.

The report said contentious issues might take time to "ripen politically," but stated that nothing -- "not Canadian water, not Mexican oil, not American anti-dumping laws -- is off the table."

The U.S. never cedes sovereignty. So whenever "North America" appears in any treaty, task force or pact, Canadians and Mexicans should simply read United States: U.S. dollar, U.S. brand name, U.S. currency, U.S. passports; etc., etc..

That task force report became the Security and Prosperity Partnership of North America and was signed by then prime minister Paul Martin, President Bush and Mexican President Vincente Fox in Waco, Texas, on March 23, 2005.

Barlow writes that the process "is much further advanced than most Canadians realize," although "the nature of Canadian politics and society is likely to be altered profoundly and irrevocably."

Another consequence of 9/11 is the rapid militarization of Canada. It burgeoned after Stephen Harper's Conservatives came to power. Billions are being poured into rearmament; the military and the police are into major recruitment drives; border guards are being armed and there are even military exercises employing live ammunition planned for the Great Lakes. And all with little or no public debate.

The expanded Afghanistan mission, Canada's tithe for refusing to join the U.S. invasion of Iraq, was pitched to Canadians as a humanitarian and reconstruction exercise. It is becoming Canada's Vietnam, an unwinnable guerrilla war in which our soldiers face the worst dangers and suffer the highest casualties. The Polaris Institute, an Ottawa-based public policy think tank, says the Afghanistan operation is heavily skewed towards the military rather than the humanitarian -- $4 billion compared to just $100 million.

No Canadian politician, general, armchair militarist or CEO ever speaks about the role the U.S. played in inciting, arming and funding the Taliban in the 1970s and 1980s to help fight an earlier war, the one against Communism and the Soviet Union.

Five years in, 9/11 and Bush's War on Terror is recasting Canada. But Canadians themselves appear to be maintaining a balance. Last week, the Montreal-based Association for Canadian Studies released a two-part survey by Leger Marketing on Canadian attitudes to Sept. 11. Fifty per cent of respondents -- a majority -- say the U.S. War on Terror has been ineffective in preventing future terrorist attacks. Only 42 per cent think it is working. And 63 per cent citeU.S. foreign policy as the cause of the attacks, virtually the same number (67 per cent) who pick Islamic fundamentalism.

Canadians recognize what 9/11 has meant to the world. But they have been deliberately kept ignorant about its implications for Canada. Only fear -- fear of elite reprisal? -- can explain the total failure of our political system to ring the alarm bells about our nation's future.

francesrussell@mts.net