Ceasefire.ca

Peace activists from around the United States gathered in Albany, NY in July to discuss a new comprehensive strategy for peace activism in the U.S. “The plan includes a new focus and some promising proposals for building a coalition that includes the labor movement, civil rights groups, students, and other sectors of the activist world that have an interest in ending wars and/or shifting our financial resources from wars to where they’re actually needed.”

Read more: David Swanson, ” Peace Movement Adopts New Comprehensive Strategy“, War Is A Crime.org, 29 July 2010

This photograph of a Japanese mother and child in the wreckage of Hiroshima was taken four months after the atomic bomb landed on the city in August of 1945. Photograph by Alfred Eisenstaedt.

Sixty-five years ago, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. The blast killed 80,000 people immediately, and injured 70,000 more. Tens of thousands of others died in the years that followed from the effects of radiation.

Three days later, a second nuclear bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, killing an additional 60,000 people.

And Canada helped the United States do it.

Ceasefire.ca is part of the global movement to abolish nuclear weapons. I hope that you will join the other 22,000 supporters of Ceasefire.ca who are taking action, today, to move the world closer to nuclear abolition.

• Sign your letter to Prime Minister Harper and other party leaders, and join more than 1000 other Canadians.
• Watch this clip from the impressive new movie on nuclear dangers,
  Countdown to Zero. Then help get it screened in your town.
• Consider participating in an event in your community. (If you are hosting an event, please post your event time and location below.)

Thank you,

Steven Staples
Ceasefire.ca

P.S. As a special “thank you” to our supporters, you can claim a free 3-month guest subscription to Straight Goods online news magazine.  Receive access to more than 10,000 articles by Canada’s leading progressive writers.

To learn how you can have this film screened in your community, visit the Countdown to Zero website.

Moldova’s Ministry of Defence destroys cluster munition stocks in a controlled explosion at Bulboaca training ground, 29 July 2010.

A global treaty that bans the use of cluster bombs, a weapon containing multiple – often hundreds – of small explosive submunitions or bomblets, will take effect today, August 1st, when the treaty, signed by 107 countries, becomes legally binding. Steve Goose, who is the co-chair of the Cluster Munition Coalition, comments that, “Nations that remain outside this treaty are missing out on the most significant advance in disarmament of the past decade.”

Canada became one of the signatories of the Convention on Cluster Munitions in December 2008, but the Harper government has not yet got around to formally ratifying the treaty.

Read more: ”Cluster bomb ban treaty takes effect worldwide“, Cluster Munition Coalition, 29 July 2010

Photo credit: Asle Huse/NPA

The Department of National Defence has confirmed that its computers were used to alter the Wikipedia entry regarding the F-35 fighter and the Conservative government’s decision to purchase 65 of them. Reportedly, the edits included “the removal of information critical of the government’s plan to buy the jets and the addition of insulting comments aimed at Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff.”

One edited entry stated that Ignatieff supported buying the F-35s, while another claimed that the Liberal Leader has six toes on each foot.

Read more: “DND computers used to change Wikipedia site“, CBCNews, 29 July 2010

Photo credit: Steve Snodgrass

Unlike the recent intercepts, this 2007 intercept actually took place in the Arctic

In an effort to bolster its claims that Canada needs the F-35 to defend Canadian sovereignty in the North, the Conservative Party is pointing to the recent intercept of two Russian Bear aircraft “over the Arctic” by Canadian CF-18s as evidence of the need for new fighters, claiming that the intercept puts Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff in an embarrassing position.

“Mere days ago,” Tory talking points gloat, “Michael Ignatieff pledged to cancel the new fighter jets the men and women of the Canadian Armed Forces urgently need. Embarrassingly for him, Russian bomber flights over the Arctic — just two days ago — underscore why our men and women in uniform need modern equipment to do their jobs.”

Embarrassingly for the Tories, however, the location of the flights appears to have been nowhere near the Canadian Arctic.  According to the Toronto Sun, the Russian Bears were intercepted “about 463 km east of Goose Bay, N.L.” (Brian Lilley, “Canadian jets repel Russian bombers,” Toronto Sun, 30 July 2010).

Which would be more than one thousand kilometres south of the Arctic Circle.

But, hey, just because the Tories don’t know where the Arctic is doesn’t mean we can’t count on them to defend our sovereignty in said region, does it? Surely not.

Left unexplained is how a bomber flight in international airspace hundreds of kilometres from Canadian territory is evidence of a threat to Canadian sovereignty — or for that matter how the successful intercept by 30-year-old fighters of 30-year-old turboprop bombers (or was it actually maritime patrol aircraft?) based on a 60-year-old design demonstrates a need for brand new “fifth generation” stealth fighters.

The Toronto Sun article does its best to hype the “threat” by reporting uncritically that the Russian aircraft “may have been loaded with [nuclear] warheads on this trip. One military analyst tells QMI Agency the Russians have been known to fly with nukes on board just to flex their muscle and prove to the world they are still a powerful country.”

This statement is complete nonsense–the Russians, and the Soviets before them, have never been known to engage in such practices–but since the claim reportedly comes from a “military analyst”, not a “peace activist”, we can be sure that Sen. Wallin, at least, will find the claim credible.

Last weekend’s National Post published a letter from Senator Pamela D. Wallin questioning the independence and expertise of three critics of the Department of National Defence’s purchase of F-35 fighter jets on the basis that all of them have ties to the Rideau Institute.

Dismissing the Rideau Institute as an organization that “routinely criticizes Canada’s military spending”, Senator Wallin insinuated that the opinions that disseminate from the “basically anti-military organization” cannot be trusted.

The letter criticized the Globe and Mail and The Toronto Star for failing to mention Michael Wallace and Michael Byers’s affiliations with the Rideau Institute in recent articles. In Wallin’s view, failure to mention the Rideau Institute risks causing confusion in the public about who is a “defence expert” and who is a mere “peace activist”.

The Senator was herself confused about about few things. Dr. Michael Wallace, a respected Emeritus Professor of Political Science at the University of British Columbia, is in fact not a member of the Rideau Institute’s Board of Directors; he is a Senior Advisor. Michael Byers, on the other hand, is a member of the Board of Directors, not merely “with” the organization. In addition to his role on the Board of Directors, Byers is a Professor and Canada Research Chair in Global Politics and International Law at the University of British Columbia and the respected author of Intent for a Nation, What is Canada For?

As Leonard Kuchar subsequently commented in the National Post’s response section, Wallin herself has a few affiliations that could be pointed out in the name of full disclosure. Senator Wallin is a member of the Board of Directors of the DND-funded Conference of Defence Associations Institute. She is also an Honourary Colonel in the Air Force.

More to the point, Wallin’s proposed dichotomy between “defence experts” and “peace activists” is nonsense.

• So-called “defence experts” gave Canada the 1987 Defence White Paper, which claimed, just two years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, that the “Soviet threat” would go on indefinitely and that negotiations with the Soviets provided only a false hope of peace. “Peace activists” disagreed and were right.
• “Defence experts” supported that same White Paper’s claim that Canada needed a hugely expensive fleet of nuclear-powered submarines. “Peace activists” disagreed and were right.
• “Defence experts” told us after the cancellation of the nuclear subs project that Britain’s Upholder-class conventional submarines were a once-in-a-lifetime bargain and that Canada should buy those instead. “Peace activists” disagreed and were right.
• “Defence experts” supported (and many continue to support) Canadian participation in the Afghanistan War. “Peace activists” disagreed and were right.
• “Defence experts” called for Canadian participation in the Iraq War. “Peace activists” disagreed and were right.
• “Defence experts” assured Canadians that Canada needed to join U.S. missile defence efforts or we would be thrown out of NORAD. “Peace activists” disagreed and were right.
• More recently, we have seen supposed “defence experts” inform Canadians, incorrectly, that there are no UN-led peacekeeping operations “left in the world today” and that “there are no Chapter 6 peacekeeping operations going on out there right now“. You don’t need to be a “peace activist” to know that those claims were nonsense.

As the witness list of the Senate Standing Committee on National Security and Defence’s farcical recent report on Afghanistan demonstrated, Sen. Wallin seems to believe that she and other people interested in defence policy issues have nothing to learn from “peace activists”. It’s a curiously incurious view for a former journalist to take.