Stephen Harper and the Whispering Way to War

Golly. What a difference a day makes. On Wednesday Stephen Harper was loudly taunting the opposition.

And all but inviting the terrorists to attack us.

But yesterday he was suddenly more subdued, as if realizing what might happen if they did attack us. And Canadians blamed him.

So he was barely whispering as he met with security officials, and prepared to turn Canada into a police state. 



Canada’s spy agency will be granted the authority to intervene and disrupt threats to national security in a massive expansion of its powers as the federal government tries to make it easier to thwart terror plots at home and abroad, sources say.

The new power would lift a fundamental restriction on CSIS’s activities and gives the agency a measure of authority that’s currently reserved for police forces.

So now if you oppose his sinister agenda, you too can be a terrorist.

The legislation is also expected to: criminalize the advocacy or promotion of terrorism; lower the threshold for preventative arrest or detention of suspected extremists; relax the requirements necessary to prevent suspected jihadis from boarding a plane; grant government departments explicit authority to share private information, including passport applications, or confidential commercial data, with law enforcement agencies; make it easier for authorities to track and monitor suspects.

While making sure he won't be in Parliament to answer any questions.

The legislation is expected to be tabled around midday Friday, and Prime Minister Stephen Harper will address it from a community centre in Richmond Hill, Ont.

And trying to make sure that neither will the opposition.



A briefing tomorrow for MPs regarding the government's proposed anti-terror legislation is set for a rather inconvenient time: the middle of question period.

Public Safety Minister Steven Blaney's office sent an invitation to MPs on Wednesday to tell them the briefing on the latest anti-terrorism measures will be held at 11:30 a.m. Friday, just down the hall from the House of Commons.

Because he'd rather nobody asked too many questions about that badly flawed bill.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper said last weekend that new anti-terror legislation to be introduced on Friday will, among other things, “criminalize the promotion of terrorism.” Such a move, however, could have a chilling effect on freedom of expression in Canada and would not necessarily contribute to effectively fighting domestic extremism, according to legal experts.

Which isn't really needed, and could actually end up helping rather than hurting the terrorists.

"Sometimes these things can become wins for extremists and terrorists," says Scott Stewart, vice-president of tactical analysis at Stratfor, a U.S.-based private intelligence and consulting firm.They are trying to provoke further attacks and if the response reinforces their perspective on the state of the world, then it ends up helping their cause."

And because as Michael Harris points out, he'd rather whisper his way to war. 



True to form, Stephen Harper has not declared himself in an open way on Canada’s disputed military mission in Iraq. He has slipped a blindfold over the eyes of Canadians and hoodwinked Parliament — going to war on a lie. And now that he has been outed, he is trying to cover himself with the last refuge of scoundrels: jingoistic patriotism. He is turning Canadian politics into a bad Kipling poem.

For crass political purposes.

Mr. Harper politicizes everything he touches. Now he is playing politics with war. Playing off the Charlie Hebdo atrocity, he will stir the pot, fear-monger and falsify to leave the impression that war is inevitable — that only he knows how to practise “hard power,” to save Canadians from jihadists bent on decapitation.

So he can turn the country into a police state, turn himself into George Bush.

While the PM morphs into George W. Bush on his publicly subsidized weekly political infomercial, 24/7, Canadians are reminded once more that truth is the first casualty of politics in Harperland.

And murder the truth.

And the good news? It's all a little too obvious. Canadians have seen this story before. Seen all the mistakes the United States made in its Great War on Terror.

His fascist bill which will do nothing to make us safer, will allow him to keep trying to provoke a terrorist attack on Canada, while claiming he did everything to protect us.

But it will also make a lot of Canadians, including some of his own libertarian supporters, wonder who is a greater threat to our freedoms, the terrorists or Stephen Harper?

And in the process of trying to destroy his enemies and the truth.

He could end up destroying himself...



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