Lots of noise is being noised about the Supreme Court's 5-3 decision ruling the military tribunals contrary to military law and the Geneva Convention. Some folks seem to be under the impression that this means the end of Gitmo, or that the Administration has been told that everything it's doing is Bad and Wrong.

It isn't, and it hasn't.

What the Administration has been told -- and admittedly quite sternly -- is that it acted without the support of the law. That is, Congress never told the Bush administration it could set up tribunals like this. The Uniform Code of Military Justice does not contain any definition that can be applied here. It's also been told that its information gathering methods are a violation of the Geneva Conventions and that the Conventions do apply to these detainees.

Right, so, where was I. Oh, right...

Canada

(Thanks to Jocelyn Wirth and her unnamed co-worker for some fact-and-sanity checking on this section, and some insight into the current state of affairs. Any errors of fact, however, should be assumed my own, not theirs)

Prologue: The Sponsorship Scandal

Canada is in the grips right now of a messy money scandal generally referred to the 'sponsorship scandal'. It has its roots in the governing Liberal Party's reaction to the 1995 referendum in Quebec on independence—a referendum that failed. However, the federal government decided to try to reduce the chances of future referenda—or at least improve the chances of such referenda continuing to fail—by initiating an advertising campaign within the province.

By 1999, there were already some concerns in the Chrétien government that the money was being misused, an investigation was begun. A couple years later, the minister responsible for the program was quietly replaced and sent to Denmark as ambassador.

An investigation was finally completed and a report issued in late 2003. It did not become public knowledge yet, however, because Prime Minister Jean Chrétien prorogued Parliament for the winter, thus preventing the report from being tabled. Chrétien retired while Parliament was still recessed, leaving Paul Martin, until then the Finance Minister, as Prime Minister, with the dubious honour of getting to make the whole mess public and deal with the fallout.

Parliament reconvened in February 2004 and the scandal thus became a public one with the tabling of the report. The report made it clear that lots of money had been spent for work that had never actually taken place, and that an alarming number of government departments, Crown Corporations, and private entities were involved. The report did not directly finger either the former or the new Prime Minister, but the public was left wondering how such a broad scandal could have been missed. It was a classic no-win scenario, particularly for former Finance Minister Martin. If he was involved, obviously that was bad. If he had no idea, it made him look like an incompetent overseer of the nation's money.

Martin countered this impression by insisting that Chrétien, long a rival within the Liberal Party, had kept him out of the loop on many policy issues—notably issues involving national unity. His take was that the entire mess was perpetrated by a small, well-organised cadre within the government who kept their doings carefully hidden from their bosses. Initially, his remarks attempted to shield Chrétien as well, but over time, this shifted to a position where the former PM was blamed for involvement.

An investigatory commission, headed up by retired Justice John Gomery, was convened almost immediately, and has been active ever since. A preliminary report was released in early November 2005, seeming to exhonorate PM Martin.

Meanwhile, Martin allowed himself to be pursuaded to go to the polls to secure a proper mandate for his government in the wake of the February 2004 report, and asked the Governor General to dissolve Parliament and call an election for June 2004. The electorate delivered something of a rebuke to the ruling Liberal party—enough to keep them out of the majority in Parliament, but still giving them the largest block. The result was a minority government, rather than a coalition: the Liberals retained full control over the government with the backing mostly of the New Democratic Party (NDP), but the NDP did not actually join the government. This is fairly rare in most modern Parliamentary states, and turned out to be as fraught with peril as it sounds.

The Current Situation

The official plan was always that Paul Martin would call another general election after the release of the Gomery Report, scheduled for February 2006. The various opposition parties appear to have become impatient, however, and so Canada is going to the polls before this crucial report on government corruption is released.

If you're beginning to suspect that the report, and the scandal it's about, might all just be flimsy excuses to force a new election, you might be right. Hang on a sec and we'll get to that.

They're also going to the polls in the dead of winter. In Canada. Think about that for a minute, especially if you live in any northern climate, like I do here in Minnesota.

Unsurprisingly, the Canadian populace—or at least, the Candian press—seem to be unamused by the idea of slogging through the cold and snow of a Canadian January to vote, and equally unimpressed by the idea of having their Christmas &c season made all the more irritating by political campaigning. In fact, they seem rather unimpressed by their politicians in general.

Reading between the lines of a speech Mr Martin made on the first day of the election season, he appears to be counting on the electorate to blame the three opposition parties—the Conservaites, the New Democrats, and the Bloc Quebecois—for the timing of the election. Strictly speaking, I suppose, he's correct. The No Confidence motion was introduced by Stephen Harper, leader of the Conservatives. However, the motion seems to have been the end-game of a series of negotiations attempting to reach a compromise over the originally-intended post-Gomery-Report elections. Since it's arguable that Mr Martin, as a minority PM, should have recognised he was in no position to be inflexible unless he wanted to cause a fuss, the fuss thus caused is at least as much his fault as Mr Harper's.

At any rate, the campaign so far is covering a pretty intense range of issues—tax reform, possible reform of the Canadian Senate (Canadian Senators are appointed by the Governor General on advice of the Prime Minister; they serve until they're 75 or dead, whichever comes first), some really messy ideas for child care and child sports credits. There's some US-bashing going on (in fact, the US Ambassador to Ottawa told them to stop using the US as their bogeyman, and Paul Martin told him to stuff it). There's posturing on gay marriage.

You'll notice there's very little in there about the Gomery Report, or the scandal that it's about, or about reforms to prevent that sort of thing happening again. Curiously, nobody seems to want to talk about it—not even the opposition, which really would have been better served waiting for the report and using it to tear the Liberal Party to itty, bitty pieces, when you think about it.

(Note, this is not an anti-endorsement of the Liberal Party. I'm not Canadian. I don't much care who wins as long as they're smarter than the monkey in charge here in the US, which all the candidates appear to be. It just seems odd to me that the opposition parties didn't wait, that's all).

Meanwhile, surveys are turning up some interesting results. Keep in mind that the Liberal Party has governed for most of the century, with a few stints of Tory government. The New Democratic Party has never governed or come close to it.

Except that at the moment, in Manitoba at least, the three parties are running close to even! Specifically, the Liberals and Conservatives are slipping and the NDP is climbing.

There's still several weeks, of course, and the campaign is quite intense—as you might imagine when there are only a few weeks to do it in and a holiday in the middle of it. Lots could happen, and there's really no clear telling who is going to wind up the next Prime Minister of Canada....

Today, after nearly fifty years of pressure and five years of negotiation, a Third Additional Protocol to the Geneva Conventions was agreed. The protocol adds fourth—and final, dammit— symbol to denote non-combatant aid workers under the Geneva Conventions. The official description is a white background with an open red square on edge: the Red Crystal.

To date, various national societies that make up the Red Cross-ish Movement have had the choice of being represented by either the Red Cross (white background with a red Swiss cross), the Red Crescent (white background with a red Islamic crescent), or the Red Lion and Sun (white background with a stylised lion and sun in red). The latter has not been used since the Iranian Revolution, and was really exclusively Persian. The official images can be seen here.

The problem is that not every nation identifies itself as being Christian or Muslim, obviously; and the only nation that could identify itself as Persian prefers not to any more. America, while it's never had a direct objection to using the Red Cross, is not Constitutionally Christian, for example. But the real sticking point comes from organisations like Magen David Adom¹, the Israeli equivalent organisation, which adheres to a charter that's fully compatible with the Red Cross/Red Crescent Movement, but cannot formally become a part of that movement as long as they persist in using religious symbols it finds objectionable. To date, the MDA has used a red Magen David—that is, a Red Jewish Star— on a white field, but of course, this isn't universally recognised.

The Movement has been very conservative about allowing a proliferation of additional symbols. While they're largely sympathetic with the MDA's stance on the matter, they fear that if they allowed every national organsation to come up with its own symbol based on its own values, the purpose of having a single (the original ideal) or at least a small set (since World War I) of recognisable symbols that mean "Don't Shoot Me!" would be lost. However, just about everyone —including, now, the Palestinian Red Crescent—except the rabid anti-Semites, agree that not having the Magen David Society directly participating in the Movement is a farce.

Contributing to the issue is the fact that the American Red Cross has, in solidarity with the MDA, withheld its ICRC dues for the last 50 years, to the tune of 35 megadollars US.

And so, a compromise was reached. Diplomats from signatory contries agreed to add a completely neutral symbol to the pantheon, and allow national societies to chose it or not depending on their needs and politics. Initially, only the MDA is actually expected to do so, but several other nations have expressed interest in using it, possibly displaying a Red Cross or Crescent inside the voided lozenge of the Red Crystal.

The story is not yet over. The next step is a conference that will bring together the ICRC, the various national Red Cross and Red Crescent societies, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, and diplomats from the Geneva signatories. That conference will be aimed at amending the charter of the so-called Movement to formally include the new emblem and recognise universality as being an official goal. It is still at least theoretically possible that this stage will get scuttled by remaining arch-conservatives, thus delaying the entry of the MDA into the Movement yet further. But this seems unlikely.

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¹That's really the site for the US 'boosters' of the MDA. The MDA's own site is in Hebrew, which most of my readership doesn't know how to read!

We interrupt our calm review of the electoral situation in various other nations to take a look at something more specific and a bit less calm.

Today, the US Administration made perfectly, brazenly clear what its principles are in persuing Mr Bush's War, and they can be summarised more or less thusly:

• We don't torture. No, really. Honest. Although it may depend on how you define 'torture'.
• But we do abduct people we've decided are 'enemy combattants' and take them places we're not going to tell you about.
• What we're doing is legal by US law, and that's the only law we actually care about.
• These people have information. No, we don't know what information they have—if we knew that, we wouldn't need to...um...talk to them
• This is the kicker The information we've pried...er...extract...er...obtained from these people has helped save European as well as American lives, and therefore the Europeans should shut the fuck up.

That, in a nutshell, is the message that Secretary of State Condaleeza Rice is carrying on her trip to Europe. The very last part in particular. Not, "Hrm, OK, I see you have some concerns here. You're all democratic nations and your demos are pretty pissed, so maybe we should talk about this." But, "Shut the fuck up, and tell your people to shut the fuck up. We're the Global Police and we're keeping you safe."

Now, I'm not known for being much of an internationalist. I don't believe there's any such thing as international law, I don't believe the UN is much more than a corrupt money sink that hosts an occasionally useful debating club, and I don't believe that all uses of force are inherently bad or wrong.

But how in hell can we claim to want to spread democracy when we're doing everything we can to suppress it, manipulate it, or discredit it?!

The politics in various Western nations are undergoing some interesting upheavals right now, some of which are getting press, some of which aren't. Here's a bit of a round-up (with my own opinions, of course :-) ).

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland

On the surface, there's not much new going on here -- Tony Blair is still Her Majesty's Prime Minister, and is slated to be for a little over four more years¹. His Labour Party still commands a majority in Parliament. For the most part, he's able to get stuff done.

For the most part. That's where things get interesting.

You see, Tony Blair made two interesting decisions—one recent, one a bit longer ago—that are making his life a bit festive. The more recent decision was to announce ahead of time that this would be his last term in office. This essentially makes him a five-year-long lame-duck.

This shouldn't be problem. Five years is more than enough time to develop and implement meaningful policies that will improve the lives of Her Majesty's subjects and, more to the point, keep Labour in power for a while. If Blair were in firm control of a united party, there's probably be no issue at all.

But Mr Blair is not in firm control of a united party, because of that other decision he made a few years ago.

That decision being to support Mr Bush's War.

Much of Labour have never forgiven Blair for that. They support him because they have to, because they want to remain the party in power, and Blair has that Clintonian charisma that keeps him popular even when some of his policies are dodgy. The war doesn't really have much support in the UK, but neither do the Tories, yet, which also helps Labour cling to their majority.

But it may not help Blair cling to the PM's seat for his full term. His Government was recently (well, a couple months ago, now) handed a defeat on a bill that was very important to Blair—a bill reforming the National Health System. It faces an uphill battle on an education reform package coming up, and on its budget proposals. And just recently, a new firestorm broke out when Mr Blair announced that he would consider giving up a portion of the 'rebate' the UK currently receives from the European Union as part of the Byzantine financial arrangements of the EU (see sidebar).

The upshot is that Mr Blair is in trouble inside his own party. His announcement that this is his last term already had many in the party clamouring that he should at least start indicating whom he would like to succeed him. Many think that he should step aside significantly before the next set of elections, so that a new PM has a chance to establish himself and his programme ahead of those elections, and pick up that glow of incumbency. And now, it's increasingly clear that for many in his party, 'significantly before' means, 'today would be nice'.

Federal Republic of Germany

Germany has just finished an extraordinarily bruising political season, one that ultimately resulted in a significant change in its leadership. Parliamentary elections held back in September resulted in a photo-finish, with the vaguely conservative Christian Democrats and Christian Social Union², headed up by Angela Merkel, barely edging out the vaguely liberal Social Democrats, led by then-current Chancellor, Gerhard Schröder.

The result bore some striking similarities to our own electoral crisis in 2000, when the election between Messers Gore and Bush was neck-and-neck, although the machinery behind the mess was very different, because of the fundamental differences in the electoral processes.

The problem here was not only that both the ruling SDP and the opposition CDU/CSU polled almost equally, but that the CDU/CSU's narrow combined victory was not enough to establish a majority in the Bundestag. This left both the incumbent party and the party with a narrow plurality scrambling to find coalition partners that would put them over the top.

The problem is, that wouldn't work, either. If the CDU/CSU had maintained their early lead, they would have wound up either with a clear majority on their own, or a majority in combination with their closest natural ally, the Free Democrat Party. As things actually fell out, however, this combination was left just shy of a majority—36.9% for the CDU/CSU and 9.9% for the FDP, for a combined 46.8%.

Similarly, the SDP had manged to stay in power in recent years by bonding with its closest natural ally, the Greens—not actually all that good a fit given the SDP's more centrist view these days, but as close as they could get. In final polling, SDP wound up with 36.2% and the Greens with 8.3%, for a combined 44.5%.

Oddly enough, nobody wanted to caucus with the so-called Left Party, whose leader, Oskar Lafontaine, is highly controversial, and whose antecedants include the East German Communist Party. The Left Party, in turn, didn't really want to caucus with any of the others, either, proclaiming they preferred opposition to alliance with either currently-major party.

Througout the early stages of the debacle, Merkel and Schröder both claimed the right to be the next Chancellor—Schröder by right of incumbency and a track-record he stands behind, and Merkel by right of electoral plurality. This delayed the inevitable—talks between the SDP and CDU/CSU to form a Grand Coalition—for several weeks. Negotiations, once entered, dragged on this point, along with several more salient differences between the two parties as to how the Government should be composed and what its policies should be.

In the end, Merkel prevalied, and on 21 November was installed as Chancellor, presiding over a mixed left-right government that will pursue a watered down version of the CDU/CSU platform. Schröder is, for the moment at least, out of politics.

Next Time...

A look at Canada and Israel...

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¹The British Parliament sits for a maximum of five years, as per the Parliament Act of 1911. The Prime Minister can ask the Queen to dissolve Parliament and call a new General Election any time before that, however. This is somtimes done if either a bill significant to the Government fails, but usually only if a formal motion of no-confidence makes it clear that the PM no longer commands a majority in Commons.
²Minnesotans will be familiar with this concept: the Christian Democrats have no direct presence in the state of Bavaria; instead, they have a 'sister' party, the Christian Social Union. In Minnesota, we have a similar thing, where the Democrats are actually the Democratic Farmers and Labourers Party.

So, we in the United States had another Erection...er...Election Day yesterday. It's a necessary ritual, and in some cases honestly instructive and interesting. But really, this year's election produced no surpises, and while some people will be looking for any signs -- any signs whatsoever -- for hope that our long national nightmare is nearing an end, this election really didn't provide it.

On the off-chance that anyone from outside the US is reading this, this year was what we call an 'off-year' election, meaning that it was focused entirely on local and state business, rather than federal business. School board elections, local tax referrenda, mayor and city council races, ballot initiatives, a couple state governor races, that sort of thing.

It's the sort of Election Day that pundits hope will give some guidance toward the next federally-focused election -- in this case, November 2006, when all of the US House of Represenatives and 1/3d of the US Senate go back to the polls. Specifically, there are an awful lot of people hoping for signs that the next great political revolution is coming and that the Bush Doctrine of cronyism, executive privilege, warmongering and lying about it, is about to be trashed out by the American Electorate.

For those of you wondering just how much hope there is for this sort of thing, I refer you to this editorial from 8 November 2005's New York Times, in which we have the interesting specatcle of one of the world's most respectable newspapers coming right out and saying that the king and his cronies are finks. No beating around the bush (pun intended) here. They're all but openly calling for Bush and everyone associated with him to resign. They know it won't happen, but the gauntlet was thrown.

The point here is that, for good or ill, no such signals got sent by yesterday's election.

[Click 'read more' below to, well, read more :-D ]