ON TARGET: COVID 19: We Must Brace for the Economic Impact

By Scott Taylor

Whenever there is a crisis involving death and destruction one of the first reactions of the media is to describe it as being akin to “a war zone.” A tornado rips through an urban center and we are told that the wreckage looks ‘like a war zone.’ A train derails and bursts into flames and we are told that the blazing debris is ‘like a war zone.’ 

Now as the global COVID19 pandemic engulfs the planet we are once again being told that this is a ‘war.’ True enough the casualty count continues to mount and our health care services are overextended in the battle to contain the spread of the virus. However the analogy that this is a ‘war’ against COVID19 may set us on a false course for dealing with the impact of the massive economic crisis that is sure to follow this initial health crisis.

Wars by their very nature stimulate economic activity. As armies are mobilized, factories ramp up production in order to equip them with weapons and munitions. Strict controls such as rationing of vital supplies like fuel and food are implemented, and governments impose wage and price controls to prevent rabid inflation.

With the COVID19 crisis we have the exact opposite course of action in that we have strictly enforced idleness for all but essential workers. Across the entire globe we have the unprecedented shut down of the world’s economy. 

The Canadian government has already announced a stream of financial assistance packages to drip feed businesses and workers for the duration of the shut down in the hope that they will help jump start the economy when normal life resumes. What was originally announced to be a $1 billion crisis-fund from the federal government was soon increased to $27 billion and within days that number increased to a staggering $200 billion and counting.

As for the length of the work stoppage, that was to have been a 14-day shutdown of schools and non-essential workplaces. Now we have the official cancellation of major events like parades and conferences right through to the end of June. 

Even with the current government drip-feed of financial aid to suspended businesses, it is not clear how many small enterprises will survive to be able to reopen their doors once this storm abates. 

Another hazard in describing the current crisis as a ‘war’ is that people then have a heightened expectation that the Canadian Armed Forces somehow have a role to play in this crisis. A recent poll conducted by the Conference of Defence Association Institute and IPSOS determined that nine out of ten Canadians expect the CAF to be involved in somehow defending Canada from the COVID19 pandemic.

While there may eventually be some logistics support and security enforcement tasks performed by the CAF, this is not a war: It is a health crisis. Doctors, nurses, paramedics, cleaners, grocery store clerks, gas station attendants and truck drivers are the frontline soldiers in the battle against COVID19. Not our combat troops.

The present prediction is that even with the strict rules in place for self- isolation and physical distancing, some 30-70 per cent of Canadians will contract the COVID19 virus, and of that number a small percentage will die from the disease. Those numbers could translate into tragic proportions in even a best case scenario. 

However one thing is for sure and that is that when the second shoe drops – the economic crunch which this crisis has caused-every single Canadian will feel the impact on some level. 

We need to be planning now for how best to restart the economy even as we struggle to flatten the curve and curb the spread of this deadly contagion.

ON TARGET: The Humpty Dumpty Syndrome: Military Not Needed Yet in COVID 19 Battle

By Scott Taylor

Late last week U.S. President Donald Trump caused a diplomatic flap when he proposed sending American troops to the Canadian border. Trump was of course simply pandering to his voter base by acting as some great protector deploying combat soldiers to keep COVID-19 infected Canadians from sneaking across the mutual boundary.

As soldiers with weapons cannot stop a virus that has already taken hold in the U.S. this deployment of Trump’s martial might would have been for purely diversionary optics.

This can be described as the ‘Humpty Dumpty’ syndrome wherein when a giant egg breaks, the king marches around all his men and horses. No one ever asked how in the hell all these horses and men would put Humpty Dumpty back together again, but it did give the impression that at least the king was attempting to do something about the broken egg crisis.

But Trump’s presumption that stricken Canadians would attempt to illegally cross the border in order to enter the already overloaded U.S. health care system simply makes no sense.

However, on the subject of Humpty Dumpty syndrome, it turns out that Canadians are no more immune to it than our southern neighbours. 

A recent poll conducted by the Conference of Defence Association Institute and IPSOS, determined that nine of every ten Canadians believe that the Canadian Armed Forces should be deployed to play a role in combatting the COVID-19 pandemic. 

While it is admittedly a refreshing vote of confidence in the professionalism of the CAF, this poll result also illustrates just how out of touch the public is with regards to the role, responsibility, structure and equipment of our military.

It is true that some military medical personnel were used to repatriate Canadians exposed to COVID-19 in foreign countries and the facilities at CFB Trenton were briefly used to quarantine a large number of these same citizens.

However the limited scale of the CAF means that it does not have much of a surplus of medical resources beyond what is necessary to protect and treat its own serving personnel.

Unlike the Chinese and U.S. militaries that contributed 4,000 military medical staff and 2,000 ventilators respectively to the COVID-19 battle, such resources simply do not exist in Canada.

To date there has been no indication of civil disobedience or violent chaos in the streets. By and large a petrified Canadian population has unquestioningly abided by the strict rules of self-isolation and quarantine. Any minor transgressions have been easily quelled by local police forces or in many instances unarmed security guards such as those who are now employed by liquor stores in Ontario to ensure physical distancing between clients. 

So if the CAF is not deployed to administer health care or to augment law enforcement, then the question begs just what role would people like to see them perform?

At present and for the foreseeable future the global supply chain remains functioning with no predicted critical shortages of essential goods. There is also no shortage of transportation and delivery means available. While it might be visually reassuring to see army trucks and uniformed soldiers delivering supplies to COVID 19 test centres, this would be a completely unnecessary misuse of our military resources. 

The civilian delivery system is more than capable and replacing them with soldiers would only be another kick to one of the few sectors of our economy that are still functioning. 

This applies also to the suggestion of using transport aircraft from the RCAF to repatriate stranded Canadians who remain trapped in locked down foreign countries. 

As long as civilian charter flights can be arranged it means our battered airline industry still gets the cash flow, albeit a non-sustaining minuscule drip feed.

That said, I count myself among the one in ten Canadians that does not want to see our military employed to battle COVID-19.

If it does come down to Canada employing our resource of last resort – the CAF – then we will need those personnel to remain healthy. A premature, public relations, optics only deployment of the CAF is not going to help fix this broken egg called COVID-19.

ON TARGET: Now Is Not The Time For Trump to Be Punishing Regimes

By Scott Taylor

One would like to imagine that in the face of a global threat of the magnitude of the current COVID19 pandemic that humankind would be unified into a common defence.

Just like the plot line of the classic 1996 Hollywood action movie Independence Day wherein planet earth is threatened by invading aliens. In order to defeat the threat all pre-existing squabbles between nations are set aside.

It is a Hollywood production so naturally it is Americans who create the first dent in the alien forces’ armour. However it is then up to the Russians, Chinese, British, French, Germans, Israeli and every other modern airforce (sadly with no reference to the RCAF) to collectively eliminate the alien fleet of spaceships.

The COVID 19 pandemic is not a sophisticated enemy from outer space, but it is a deadly threat to the human race. It also sees no artificial borders, nor does it discriminate by race or social status.

Given the latest data from China which puts the disease’s lethality rate for those infected at 1.4%, it is fourteen times more deadly than the common influenza. While these are not doomsday apocalyptic numbers, if the projected potential infection rate of 40% to 70% of the population materializes that will result in the death of tens of millions worldwide.

Despite the potential severity of the crisis there has been no sign of our world leaders finding common ground and the unity, which was forged in Independence Day. Instead we have the U.S. President deliberately stigmatizing the disease as the “Chinese virus” in both his speeches and social media posts.

The World Health Organization strongly recommends against naming viruses after specific locations to avoid creating undue fear and racism. Donald Trump petulantly maintains that he is deliberately using the term “Chinese virus” because he “didn’t appreciate the fact that China was saying that our military gave it to them.”

In response to Iranian claims that the U.S. military was responsible for the COVID 19 outbreak, U.S. Secretary of State MP Mike Pompeo referred to it as the “Wuhan virus” and accused the Iranians of helping to spread the disease. “They know the truth: The Wuhan virus is a killer and the Iranian regime is an accomplice,” Pompeo stated at a press conference.

Going far beyond this exchange of accusations, the U.S. is using the health crisis to maximize its political pressure on Tehran by increasing sanctions against Iran.

With its health care system already struggling to cope with the COVID 19 pandemic due to the strict economic sanctions imposed upon it since 2018, Iran appealed to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) for $5 billion in emergency relief funds.

In order to bring maximum pressure on the Tehran regime, Trump is using the U.S. veto to block the funds from IMF.

Similarly, sanction ravaged Venezuela also requested $5 billion from the IMF to help them deal with the COVID 19 pandemic. As of 17 March there were 33 reported cases in Venezuela and President Nicolas Maduro has ordered the entire country to enter into quarantine.

The reason that the IMF denied the funding request from Venezuela was because there was “no clarity” among the IMF’s member states as to who is actually the leader of that country. The elected Maduro maintains firm control over Venezuela, but the Canadian-led Lima Group of 14 states recognized Juan Guaido as the president of our choice in January 2019.

As a result of this impasse the poor people of Venezuela will suffer the ravages of COVID 19 without the requested relief funds.

In Canada, the enormity of the challenge posed by COVID 19 led to the almost unprecedented political bipartisanship to enable the Trudeau minority to announce an $82 billion national emergency expenditure with virtually no opposition.

One has to hope that our international leaders will quickly realize that you cannot close the borders to a virus that is already expanded to all corners of the world.

This is not the time to punish regimes by denying their people financial assistance to battle COVID 19.

We have a common enemy. Together let’s defeat this thing.

ON TARGET: Canada Has No Stake in Iraq’s Civil War: Bring Our Troops Home

By Scott Taylor

Almost completely forgotten amidst the avalanche of news concerning the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic is the ongoing conflict in Iraq.

Canadians should be aware of the deteriorating situation because we still have some skin in the game to the tune of approximately 850 military personnel.

On Wednesday 11 March as many as 18 Katyusha rockets slammed into the Allied base in Taji, Iraq killing three coalition personnel and wounding a dozen others.

No Canadians were reported injured in the attack, but Canadian military trainers are based in Taji. For security reasons the Department of National Defence does not identify exact numbers of personnel deployed to Iraq.

It was believed that the rocket attack was perpetrated by an Iranian backed Iraqi Shiite militia known as Kataib Hezbollah.

This incident supports the 9 March testimony made by Canadian Lt. Gen. Mike Rouleau before a House of Commons Committee. Rouleau told the committee that Iranian backed, Iraqi Shiite militia are his number one concern in Iraq because “Daesh has been defeated militarily.”

Astoundingly, Rouleau’s statement caused not a ripple of response despite the magnitude of what his words mean.

Canada first deployed troops into Iraq in September 2014 to assist in the U.S. led coalition effort to defeat Daesh (aka ISIS, ISIL or IS). At the time, our soldiers were employed as trainers to assist Kurdish militia in the fight against Daesh.

Allied with us in that effort were a large number of Iranian backed, Iraqi Shiite militia. One of the reasons for this was that the U.S. trained and equipped Iraqi government army had simply melted away the minute Daesh appeared on the battlefield.

Now Rouleau is saying that our erstwhile allies in the successful battle to defeat Daesh are Canada’s biggest threat. The question begs, when did Canada authorize our troops’  participation in an inter-factional civil war in Iraq?

In addition to an ill-defined role for Canadian Special Forces personnel in Iraq, Canadian troops are deployed to that country to assist in a NATO led initiative to train Iraqi government forces.

This initiative involves approximately 250 Canadian soldiers and the overall NATO mission is commanded by Canadian Maj. Gen. Jenny Carignan.

Carignan and the majority of those trainers have been relocated to Kuwait since early January following the U.S. targeted killing of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani.

Iran vowed revenge and this sentiment was echoed by the Iraqi Shiite militia which Soleimani once commanded.

It was considered best to suspend the training in Iraq and have Carignan and company sit things out in Kuwait until the dust settles. The DND website assures us that these personnel “remain ready to return to their mission when conditions are right to do so.”

Even if rooted in blind optimism, that statement runs in stark contrast to reality of the situation on the ground in Iraq.

The Canadian led NATO training mission is tasked with training an Iraqi government army. The problem with that equation is that Iraq does not have a functioning government. When last summer’s parliamentary election failed to produce a verifiable result it was determined that a recount be conducted. Before that could happen the warehouse containing the ballots burned down.  I kid you not.

Last November Interim Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi was forced to step down following nation-wide violent protests. In recent weeks it appeared that a man named Tawfiq Allwai was set to form a government and serve as Prime Minister. Internal dissent collapsed those plans on 2 March, extending the power vacuum.

At present, the most powerful figure in Iraq is the Shiite warlord Muqtada al-Sadr, who leads the coalition of Shiite militia.

If they are now the biggest threat to Canadian military personnel it is time we walk away from this conflict.

The U.S. does not have the luxury of walking away from this mess because they set it in motion in 2003 when they invaded Iraq under the pretext of securing non-existent weapons of mass destruction. Like the sign says in the China shop “if you break it, you bought it.”

Canada did not break Iraq

Bring our troops home now.

ON TARGET: Canadian Armed Forces on the Front Line in Battle Against COVID19

By Scott Taylor

Last Wednesday, Canada’s Chief of the Defence Staff, General Jonathan Vance told the audience at the Conference of Defence Association’s annual forum that the Canadian Armed Forces are in the ‘pre-pandemic’ planning mode in response to the global spread of the COVID19, Corona-virus.

Vance explained that the CAF’s approach to this planning was two fold in that the military first has to determine how best they can protect their own personnel, and secondly how they can then be of assistance to the general public.

Most Canadians are aware that the military has already played a minor role in dealing with the COVID19 crisis in that service members were involved in the repatriation of Canadians potentially exposed to the virus from Wuhan, China and Japan.

Those Canadian civilians repatriated from Wuhan spent their compulsory 14-day quarantine at the base residence in CFB Trenton. Those taken off the cruise ship Diamond Princess were transported from Japan through CFB Trenton before being bused to the government owned NAV centre accommodations in Cornwall, Ontario.

This means that outside of health care workers, Canadian military personnel have been part of the first line of contact with those Canadians returning home after possible exposure.

It does not take much imagination to realize just how challenged the military would be to contain an outbreak in their ranks. As a profession, our military is often housed in close quarters in barrack blocks, tents or aboard warships.

Meals are consumed in the communal setting of mess halls and ablution stations are shared.

An outbreak aboard a Canadian warship or submarine would be far more problematic than what has been the experience on civilian cruise ships – and those cases to date aboard civilian ships have been devastating.

Those familiar with the close confines aboard warships and subs will realize that quarantine would be next to impossible. Sailors on operational duty would also be hard pressed to simply call in sick and sit idle in their bunks for two weeks.

Likewise, activities such as basic training involve marching drills that do not allow for two metres of separation. Ditto for proximity of combat personnel operating in cramped armoured vehicles.

One of the measures being implemented now by the CAF are restrictions on any unnecessary travel for personnel. This curtailment only serves to highlight just how much mandatory travel Canadian service members routinely undertake.

We presently have troops posted to the forward NATO Brigade in Latvia, we have trainers and Special Forces operators in Iraq and Kuwait plus several hundred troops acting as trainers in Ukraine. Add to that RCN ship’s companies making foreign ports of call and multi-national training exercises, and it is clear that international contact is something, which will be impossible to eliminate for our military personnel.

As for the CAF’s ability to assist the Canadian public should COVID19 evolve into a full blown pandemic, we must be cognizant of the fact that our military has finite resources. The medical branch of the CAF is of a structure and size to treat serving personnel with a limited surge capacity to meet an increased operational tempo if necessary.

They are certainly not staffed or equipped to augment hospital system on a nationwide scale.

General Vance also noted that there has been a 1000 percent increase in the CAF’s commitment to disaster relief since 2004. While providing troops and equipment to deal with natural disasters such as floods and massive snowfalls has become an all too frequent occurrence that is not the primary function of our nation’s military.

Too often what should be the resource of last resort – the CAF – has become the tool of first response.

In the case of a COVID19 pandemic I’m not sure Canada’s military can offer us much in the way of protection. I just hope they are successful in protecting themselves, because as an institution the CAF will undoubtedly be one of the most at risk.

ON TARGET: Latvia’s Holocaust Legacy Revisited

By Scott Taylor

There is a new exhibition set to open this week at the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa. It is entitled “The Latvian Tragedy 1941” and the promotional material defines it as a depiction of a very dark chapter in that nation’s history.

Stalin’s Soviet Union had occupied Latvia the year before and in June 1941, Hitler’s Nazi forces invaded. The Latvian people suffered terrible consequences at the hands of both of these brutal regimes.

This exhibition is billed as a joint venture between the Museum of the Occupation of Latvia and the Museum of Jews in Latvia. The Latvian historians that assembled the exhibits are quoted as stating they wish to emphasize their prime objective: “The Republic of Latvia, restored in 1991, condemns all perpetrators of crimes against humanity in the tragic year 1941 and the years that followed.”

If the Latvian authorities wish to condemn “all perpetrators’ of murderous crimes during World War Two, then that list will need to include many of their own homegrown Nazi sympathizers.

When Hitler’s forces rolled into Latvia in the summer of 1941 many locals greeted them as liberators. While many Latvian’s were indeed happy to be free of Stalin’s tyrannical occupation, others were rabid anti-Semites who whole-heartedly embraced Hitler’s policy of Jewish genocide.

One of the most prominent of these Latvian holocaust perpetrators was a policeman named Viktor Arajs. In June 1941, as the Soviet Army retreated and Hitler’s war machine approached the city of Riga, Arajs unleashed his ‘kommando’ on a pre-organized methodical round-up and extermination of Latvian Jews.

On 30 November in that same tragic year of 1941, the Arajs’ commando led an operation, which became known as the Rumbula Massacre. On another occasion the Arajs’ Latvian Kommando drove hundreds of Jews into the Riga Synagogue before setting the building on fire and incinerating the occupants.

Arajs did not shirk away from his murderous deeds as he boastfully self-described himself as ‘Arajs, the Latvian Jew killer.’ According to historian Andrew Ezergailis in his book ‘The Holocaust in Latvia, 1941-1945,’ Arajs would describe at dinner parties that his method for killing Jewish babies was to throw them in the air and shoot them.  In this manner explained Arajs, the shooter was  not put at risk of a ricochet.

Arajs’ adjutant in the Kommando was a prominent pre-war aviator named Herbert Cukurs. As a pilot, Cukurs had set aviation world records for solo distance flights, the most notable being non-stop trek from Riga to Tokyo.

However, it was in that tragic summer of 1941 that Cukurs earned his immortal infamy as a bloodthirsty Jew killer.

Cukurs’ legacy included the burning of the Synagogue, the drowning of 1200 Jews in a lake and the massacre at the Rumbula forest in which 10,600 Jews were killed. His war time moniker was the Hangman of Riga.

In 1943, as the fortunes of war were turning against Adolph Hitler’s Third Reich, it was decided by the Germans to create an SS Latvian Legion. While some members of the SS Legion were conscripted, the core of its membership was composed of Arajs Kommandos – including Viktor himself. While this unit did conduct combat operations against Soviet forces, their war record also includes the execution of mentally ill patients and fighting against fellow Latvian’s who were resisting Hitler’s occupation as partisans.

Arajs survived the war but was eventually captured and convicted of the murder of 13,000 Jews. He was sentenced by a German court to life in prison and died in captivity in 1988.

Cukurs also survived the war but was hunted down by Israel’s Mossad and executed for his Holocaust crimes in Uruguay in 1965.

As for the other members of the SS Latvian Legion, their memory is now honoured every March 16 with a parade through the streets of Riga. That’s right folks, Latvia is the only country in the world that brazenly commemorates perpetrators of the Holocaust.

Last year the Canadian government officially condemned these SS parades, but the Latvian government allow them to proceed under the proviso that the parade is an exercise of ‘free speech.’

Last September Latvia’s defence minister Artis Pabriks drew international scorn when he proclaimed the SS Legion to be ‘heroes.’

We presently have a Canadian Armed Forces battle group in Latvia to show solidarity with a NATO ally, and protect our ‘shared values.’

The last time I checked Canada did not glorify people who swore allegiance to Adolf Hitler, and those who helped perpetrate the Holocaust.

ON TARGET: Afghanistan War: When Will Canadians Be Told The Whole Truth?

By Scott Taylor

There is a trend happening in the U.S. wherein the media are starting to aggressively uncover the failures made by the political and military leadership in recent conflicts. One of the most potent examples of this would be the Washington Post’s recent lawsuit, which forced the release of what are now known as the ‘Afghanistan Papers.’ This treasure trove of official documents revealed that senior American officials knew they were losing the Afghan war, and instead of admitting the truth, they lied to the U.S. public.

Last October a former U.S. military public affairs officer – Ben Brody – released a book entitled ‘Attention Servicemember’ detailing his two tours of service in Iraq as well as his time later on in Afghanistan. In a recently published interview with online journal Task and Purpose, Brody admitted that he and his public affairs colleagues were state propagandists whose task was to shape the story of the Iraq war.

“A good example is we would photograph hospital openings. Or cut the ribbon on this hospital we just spent a lot of money on,” said Brody. “I knew and everyone there knew, there weren’t any doctors left in the area. No one was going to work in this hospital. It was going to be looted immediately and taken over by squatters. But of course the story and the press release would be one of building capacity and setting conditions for increased security and all these sort of double speak buzzwords.”

What is refreshing about Brody’s words is his belated honesty.

In Afghanistan, embedded Canadian journalists would be escorted to numerous such ribbon cutting ceremonies – usually a new school house with Afghan girls positioned in the front row for maximum propaganda impact in the photo-op.

In 2007, at the height of Canada’s combat deployment in Kandahar I visited the local high school. Our documentary film crew – which included Ottawa Citizen reporter David Pugliese – was operating unembedded, with no military escort.

What we found at the school was the principal and a couple of his cronies playing cards and drinking tea. Although there were 4000 students registered and it was a school day, not a single student was on the premises.

The reason for this was that all the teachers had left to join the Afghan army or work for foreign military forces as interpreters, where they could earn three times a teachers’ salary.

Contrary to the off-repeated official line that we were ‘one schoolhouse building away from victory’, our presence and NATO’s sole focus on security issues actually stymied what little education was available in the Kandahar region.

So the question now is when will we see similar honest admissions from our Canadian military public affairs officers?

When the damning story of the Afghanistan Papers first broke in the U.S. media, Canadian officials were quick to distance themselves from the whole affair. The Canadian claim was that our officials handled things differently. That claim simply makes no sense.

The vast majority of all the intelligence shared within the NATO-led ISAF force came from U.S. sources. That means we were sharing the same lies with the Canadian public for the same reasons of maintaining popular support for the war.

The only difference is that Canada concluded the combat mission in 2011 and brought the last of our troops home in 2014. As the architects and initiators of the Afghanistan invasion, the U.S. feels duty bound to remain until they can negotiate a peace deal with the Taliban. Yes folks, after nineteen years of fighting the Taliban – which the U.S. declared defeated in 2001 – the Americans are in talks with them now to end the war.

Canadian soldiers who served in Afghanistan displayed the courage, discipline and professionalism one would expect from one of the finest militaries in the world. The problem was that the war was unwinnable from the outset, and our senior leadership knew it.

Here’s hoping that a Canadian officer follows Ben Brody’s lead with an expose on Canada’s propaganda machine. Maybe that would spark the call for a full parliamentary inquiry into just who was responsible for leading us into such a quagmire in Afghanistan. And more importantly reveal who was responsible for telling the lies of false progress that kept us there.

ON TARGET: Omar Khadr was a Child Soldier not a Terrorist

By Scott Taylor

On Monday 10 February, Omar Khadr gave a keynote speech at Dalhousie University in Halifax. The talk was organized by the Romeo Dallaire Child Soldiers Initiative and not surprisingly, Khadr spoke about having been himself a child soldier in Afghanistan.

This was the first time Khadr has spoken publicly on the subject and to say that he has become a polemic character in Canada would be a massive understatement.

Naturally enough Khadr’s appearance at Dalhousie blew up yet another storm of controversy.

For those firmly in the ‘hate Khadr’ camp, the belief is that Khadr was an al-Qaeda terrorist who committed treason against Canada and then was subsequently rewarded by the Trudeau government with a $10.5 million settlement for having been a traitor. Based on that set of facts one would wonder how anyone could be sympathetic to this individual.

However, lost in the powerful emotion of hate is the fact that Khadr was just 15 years old at the time he was captured by U.S. Special Forces in Afghanistan on July 27, 2002.

It was Khadr’s father who brought young Omar to Afghanistan to fight against the American-led invasion. The father bears the guilt of exploiting his own son and 15 year old Omar was simply an exploited victim. A minor. A child soldier.

To allege that Khadr was a terrorist would imply he was guilty of committing an act of terror. Yet the circumstances surrounding Khadr’s capture were instead that of conventional warfare. The U.S. military was attacking Taliban fighters in the village of Ayub Kheyl. Airstrikes preceded the attack before U.S. Special Forces moved in to mop up the village.

During that phase of the operation a grenade was thrown which killed U.S. Sergeant first class Christopher Speer. Although there was never any conclusive proof that Khadr threw that grenade – eye witness accounts differ – a severely wounded Khadr was the only Taliban survivor of that clash. Thus Khadr was labeled a ‘murderer’ and it was also erroneously claimed that Sgt. Speer was a medic, which therefore made his murder a ‘war crime’.

The fact is that Speer was a U.S. Special Forces operative with a medical specialization. During the firefight he was armed and apparently dressed in local Afghan garb meaning he was not targeted or deliberately murdered because he was a medic. It was a battle, not a terrorist attack. Speer was a professional soldier, not a doctor.

Following his capture, Khadr would spend the next 10 years as an inmate of the U.S. military’s detention center in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

In October 2010 Khadr plead guilty to “murder in violation of the laws of war”. However he subsequently renounced that confession stating that it had only been made in order to secure his eventual release from Guantanamo Bay.

In September 2012, Khadr was repatriated to Canada to serve out the remainder of the U.S. military imposed eight year sentence. He was out on bail by 2015 and on 25 March 2019, the Alberta court of Queen’s Bench declared his sentence complete

This brings us back to the matter of the Canadian government authorizing a settlement of $10.5 million to Khadr in 2017. The payment was to settle a lawsuit brought by Khadr against the government for failing to respect his rights as a Canadian citizen under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

The lynchpin of the case was a Supreme Court of Canada ruling which stated in 2010 that Khadr’s treatment in Guantanamo Bay ‘offend[ed] the most basic standard [of] the treatment of detained youth suspects.”

He did not get a payout because he was a terrorist. He was paid compensation for the decade that the Canadian government left a victimized child soldier to rot in a U.S. detention centre.

Let’s let Khadr speak about the victimization of child soldiers, for on that subject he certainly knows whereof he speaks.

ON TARGET: Women Have Come a Long Way in the Canadian Armed Forces

By Scott Taylor

Those readers old enough to remember may recall an advertising campaign from the late sixties promoting Virginia Slim cigarettes. The theme behind this series of television commercials and magazine ads was to illustrate just how far feminism had advanced throughout North American society.

The plotline was consistent wherein we were reminded of how, not so long ago women had to covertly enjoy a cigarette, and if discovered would be punished by an irate husband. This was then offset by images of very stylish women in the latest fashion, smoking an elegant looking Virginia Slim cigarette. The catch phrase was “You’ve come a long way baby.” Because now women not only had the right to vote, they also had cigarettes designed specifically for females that were slimmer and therefore easier to “slip into a purse.

While this sort of message may seem ludicrous by today’s standards, it only helps to illustrate how much further feminism has indeed advanced over the past half century.

I point this out because at present the Canadian Armed Forces are struggling to achieve a self-imposed goal of having 25% female representation by the year 2026. The current composition of the military stands at just 14.8% women.

Much scratching of heads and commissioning of studies has yet to produce a clear strategy as to how to find the magic formula to suddenly encourage the necessary waves of women to enlist

There have been an abundance of media reports – often based on internal analysis – of widespread sexual misconduct within the ranks, something which would run counter to enticing young women to make the military a career choice.

Personally, I am opposed to any sort of quota based recruiting policy based on gender. First of all, this would lead female recruits to question their own capabilities – were they selected based of their competency or were they simply let into the club to meet the 25% quota. Similarly such a quota could lead to resentment among their male colleagues who could believe the same thing.

This brings us back to the Virginia Slim’s marketing angle and how it might be a more successful tactic than an imposed quota. No, I’m not suggesting that the military promote smoking or refer to women collectively as ‘baby’.

However, women in the Canadian Armed Forces have indeed come a long way in a remarkably short period of time. It was not until the late 1980’s that women were allowed to serve in combat arms units, serve on warships and to pilot fighter planes.

Since those first pioneers broke down the barricades and proved themselves in a formerly male-only domain, women have steadily risen in rank and responsibility. To date we have had women hold the rank of Lieutenant-General, we currently have a female brigadier commanding a NATO mission in Iraq, we had a female commodore command the NATO squadron in the Mediterranean, female pilots have flown in combat, female soldiers were killed and wounded in Afghanistan, women command infantry battalions and currently serve as Regimental Sergeant Majors.

There may still be a lot of advancement to be made, but in spirit of our ‘brothers and sisters in arms’, it is true now to say “we’ve come a long way sister.

Here’s hoping that one day that statement too will be as outdated as the old Virginia Slim adverts.

ON TARGET: Holocaust Remembrance And Nazi Glorification Don't Mix

By Scott Taylor

Last week, in honour of the 75th anniversary of the Liberation of the Nazi concentration camp in Auschwitz and the coincidental international Holocaust Memorial Day, I attended a concert in Ottawa, organized by the Jewish War Veterans association.

I did not expect it to be a joyous occasion yet I was still not prepared for how deeply disturbing the performance actually turned out to be.

The concert consisted of a series of mournful songs, many of them in Yiddish, some about life inside concentration camps, others about the loss of loved ones.

What made the 90-minute performance so gut wrenching was that for the entire duration actual footage and photo images played on the screen at the back of the stage. These visuals showed in graphic detail the individual identities of the victims offset by the dehumanized machine-like precision of Hitler’s extermination apparatus.

I have long studied World War II history, and as such I have a fairly good grasp of the scale of the genocide perpetrated by the Nazis. However I have never before spent over an hour-and-a-half straight, looking at a steady stream of photo evidence of the depths of evil to which Hitler’s followers could stoop.

Many in the audience openly wept as the enormity of this tragedy played out on the screen. Many of those in attendance were foreign diplomats and members of the Jewish community, so they were also presumably well aware of the horrors of the Holocaust. Yet still it moved them.

I can only imagine the impact such a concert would have on fellow Canadians – who according to recent surveys – the majority of whom could not name a single Nazi concentration Camp.

What is even more difficult to fathom, once reminded of just how terrible the Nazis were, is the fact that in many European countries revisionists are not only trying to deny the Holocaust – they are actually holding ceremonies to glorify Hitler’s executioners.

There was an honorary funeral held last week in the town of Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine for a former veteran of the SS Galician division. Mykhalo Mulko’s burial was attended by re-enactors wearing WWII SS Galician uniforms.

As a member of the Ukrainian SS, Mulko would have sworn an oath of allegiance to Adolf Hitler, and he would have been under the overall SS command of Heinrich Himmler.

In the town of Ivano-Frankivsk, some 40,000 Jews were executed by the Nazis in 1941. Unbelievably, the mayor now plans to name a street after Mllko.

Every March 16 there is a parade in Riga, Latvia to celebrate the exploits of the SS Latvian Legion. Last year the Canadian government officially condemned this blatant glorification of Nazis – yet the Latvians defiantly persist in staging those events.

Similarly it has become a tradition for thousands of Croatians to gather in Bleiburg, Austria every May to commemorate the memory of Croat Fascist Ustase soldiers.

Few people realize that Croatia committed its own extermination of Serbs and Jews during World War II. The notorious death camp at Jasenovac sprawled over 210 square kilometers and was the largest such camp outside of Nazi German control.

Recently independent nations such as Ukraine, Latvia and Croatia are striving to define their national identity. What I truly do not understand is why in this effort are they so intent on celebrating individuals who participated in the mass killing of Jews? Why are they not holding parades for their scholars, poets, musicians or artists instead of rallies and celebrations to honour Hitler’s eager collaborators?

What true democratic country would want to honour individuals who murdered defence-less men, women and children? 

Holocaust revisionism is akin to denial, and after sitting through that 90-minute concert, I assure you the horrors of Hitler’s Holocaust were all too real.

ON TARGET: Holocaust Remembrance is Vital to Counter Nazi Glorification in Ukraine

By Scott Taylor

Today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day and this year it commemorates the 75th Anniversary of the Liberation of the Auschwitz – Birkenau Nazi death camp.

It is estimated that more than 1.1 million Jews perished at Auschwitz and when you add in the death tolls of the other notorious concentration camps such as Treblinka, Bergen-Belsen and Dachau more than 6 million Jews were executed on Hitler’s orders for the simple reason that they were Jewish.

The Holocaust was a crime against humanity that has no historical equivalent.

The frightening fact is that as time marches on, the horrors of the Holocaust are being forgotten, diminished and more and more frequently out right denied.

A recent study in France conducted by Schoen Consulting revealed that some 25 per cent of French Millennial’s and Gen Z youth had never heard of the Holocaust – and France is home to the third largest Jewish population in the world.

Twenty percent of French youth responded that holding anti-Semitic views was ‘acceptable’, which was twice that of the percentage of the French general population.

Before we isolate this as a case of French ignorance its should be pointed out that a recent study by this same Schoen Consulting found a similar level of Holocaust unawareness among Canadian and American respondents to the survey.

In fact a disappointing 49 per cent of Canadians could not name a single Nazi concentration camp. Ignorance among our youth lies with our education system and therefore it can and must be corrected.

However, there are those who seek to manipulate this knowledge vacuum through the total revision of this very dark period in mankind’s history.

In early January both Israel and Poland issued a joint statement from their foreign ministries condemning Ukraine for its public glorification of Holocaust perpetrators and ‘anti-Semitic ideologues.’

The incident which sparked the Israeli and Polish rebuke was Ukraine’s public celebration of the 111th birthdate of Stepan Bandera. As the WWII leader of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and its military arm, the UPA, Bandera collaborated with Hitler’s Nazis.

Holocaust historians hold Bandera responsible for the deaths of thousands of Jews and over 100,000 Poles.

In response to the joint Israeli and Polish condemnation, Ukrainian Ambassador Gennady Nadolenko warned Israel to stay out of “internal issues of Ukrainian politics.”

Undeterred, the Israeli Foreign Ministry shot back the statement that “individuals responsible for the murder of Jews in the Holocaust and in the pogroms, as well as the anti-Semitic ideologists of the Ukraine National movement have recently been subject of public glorifications in Ukraine.” The Israeli Foreign Ministry “condemns those phenomena.”

It may be recalled there was some controversy last August when uninformed Canadian soldiers were paraded at a monument dedication in the Ukrainian village of Sambir. What made this incident controversial was the fact that the monument was being dedicated to 17 members of Stepan Bandera’s OUN fighters, which Israel and Poland vehemently condemns as Holocaust collaborators.

It is one thing for Canadian citizens to have a collective ignorance of the extreme horrors of the Holocaust, it is another matter altogether when Canadians in uniform are paraded to honour the memory of those Ukrainian Nazi sympathizers who perpetrated this atrocity.

May we never forget, never revise and never deny the magnitude of the inhumanity of Hitler’s Holocaust.

ON TARGET: Ukraine Airlines Flight 752 Tragedy: Impossible to look at Missile Strike as an Isolated Incident

By Scott Taylor

Last week Canada hosted a five nation meeting at the High Commission in London UK to declare a united front in confronting Iran over that nation’s admitted complicity in the downing of Ukraine Air Flight 752.

The participating nations included host Canada, Ukraine, Sweden, UK and Afghanistan and collectively these five countries lost a total of 85 of their nationals aboard that ill-fated flight.

As 57 of those 85 were Canadian citizens it only seems correct that Canada is taking a lead role.

Thus far all of the demands are being made against Iran, with this collective group of five demanding inclusion in the investigation, punishment for the perpetrators and compensation for the victim’s families.

The problem with this particular course of action is that it is limiting the scope of the investigative probe into one singular incident – the downing of flight 752 – in what has been an interwoven series of related events involving another major player in this scenario – namely the U.S.A

How can one disassociate the American assassination of Iranian general Qassem Soleimani with the escalated tensions, Iranian reprisals against U.S. targets in Iraq and the subsequent Iranian blunder of shooting down a civilian airliner?

Already the U.S. claims of self-defence in the killing of General Soleimani are beginning to unravel, as President Donald Trump’s assertion of Soleimani plotting an imminent attack on American targets could not be substantiated to U.S. congress.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau took a lot of flak from U.S. lawmakers when he suggested that the murder of Soleimani, and resultant increase in regional tension may have contributed to the tragedy.

If Iran had a history of just randomly shooting civilian planes out of the sky over their own capital or if anyone could offer a plausible theory as to how downing flight 752 punished America, I might accept that this was indeed an act of terrorism.

However, this was the first time the Iranian military has made such a tragic error and not a single U.S. citizen was aboard that aircraft.

Following the killing of Soleimani and the mass public funeral mourning for this popular commander, the Tehran regime had vowed vengeance on America – the Great Satan.

On the night of Jan. 8, Iran military forces attempted to do just that when they launched a number of surface-to-surface missiles at American military bases inside Iraq.

Those strikes resulted in damage but the U.S. reported there were no causalities. Only hours later, the Iranians shot down an unarmed airliner filled with Iranian civilians.(Iran does not recognize dual citizenship, so according to Tehran media reports 145 of the 176 total victims were Iranians.) None were Americans.

Although Iran originally denied responsibility for this tragedy, they subsequently did admit to the blunder and have allegedly made arrests in this case.

Contrary to every pundit’s prediction, Iran has also agreed to allow outside oversight – including Canadian – into the investigation of the Ukrainian airline tragedy.

Whether or not justice is ever fully served, or if Iran agrees to properly compensate the families of the victims in this tragedy remains to be seen.

However, if we really want the full truth and accountability for the fate of flight 752 then this five nation collective should be also demanding access to the U.S. Intelligence files upon which Trump ordered the death of Soleimani which undeniably set this most recent tragic sequence in motion.

While we’re at it maybe we can look at holding accountable those individuals in the U.S. Intelligence Service that falsified the claim that Saddam Hussein possessed Weapons of Mass Destruction back in 2003.

I cannot even begin to imagine how the U.S. could possibly pay out proper compensate to the families of the victims caused by the invasion of Iraq based on that lie about Iraq’s non existent WMD’s.

ON TARGET: There is no logical reason that Iran shot down Flight 752 intentionally

By Scott Taylor

Last Thursday when Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced that the downing of Ukrainian Airlines flight 752 was believed to have been caused by an Iranian missile, he was immediately denounced across social media platforms for "kowtowing" to the Tehran regime. What sparked this public derision was the fact that Trudeau stated that such a scenario of a missile strike was likely “unintentional.”

The most aggressive hawks among Trudeau’s critics view this cautionary tone to be a weasel-worded submission to the terrorist regime that rules Iran.

There were 57 Canadians killed on that airplane and a total of 138 passengers on that flight had a connecting flight via Kiev Ukraine to Toronto.

This makes this incident a Canadian tragedy, and an outraged public are demanding that Trudeau hold the Iranians feet to the proverbial fire.

At first the authorities in Tehran vehemently denied that their military air defence caused the crash and they demanded that the U.S. and Canadian Intelligence agencies reveal their evidence of such missile strike claims.

On Saturday, in a surprise about-face, the Iranians acknowledged that the Ukrainian airliner was indeed shot down by one of their missiles, albeit in a case of ‘human error’.

The Iranians have also stated they will allow independent transport authorities — including Canadians and representatives from Boeing the aircraft manufacturer — to participate in the crash inquiry.

Whatever the actual cause of the incident —  the Iranian Revolutionary Guard now being the admitted culprit — I can fathom no reason why the Iranians would have intentionally shot down this flight.

According to Iranian news sources there were only two Canadians on board that Ukrainian Airlines flight. The reason for the huge discrepancy is that Iran does not recognize dual citizenship.

According to the Iranians the death official toll included 147 Iranian citizens and 30 foreigners (which includes the nine Ukrainian Airlines crew members).

To quickly recap events; on Fri. Jan. 3, U.S. drones target and kill Iranian Major General Qassem Soleimani outside Baghdad airport in Iraq. While Soleimani was reviled in the west as a terrorist he was revered inside Iran for having successfully defeated the Daesh (aka ISIS) terrorists in Iraq.

His funeral processions drew millions of mourners into the Iranian streets and Tehran threatened to kill Americans in revenge. On the night of 7/8 January that revenge manifested itself in the form of rocket attacks against U.S. bases inside Iraq. The Iranian leadership describes these rocket strikes as a ‘slap in the face’ to the U.S.A.

Then the hawks here in Canada would have us believe that just hours later, at 6:10am local time, the Iranians deliberately targeted and destroyed a civilian airliner, filled with what they regard to be mostly Iranian citizens, in the skies above the Iranian capital. That simply makes no sense.

The attacks against the U.S. bases in Iraq were meant to be a show of martial defiance. Blowing up a defenceless plane, filled with your own people inside your own sovereign airspace sends no such message.

If the missile launch was indeed unintentional, as is the most likely scenario, it is understandable that Tehran did not initially want to admit to such a colossal military blunder.

Those of us old enough to remember will recall that the U.S. Navy obfuscated their own military blunder back on July 3, 1988. It was on that date that U.S.S Vincennes under the command of Captain Will Rogers engaged and destroyed Iran Air Flight 655. As a result of that missile strike 290 Iranian civilians, 66 of them children, perished above the Persian Gulf.

In the aftermath the U.S. Navy claimed that the Iranian aircraft had been mistaken for an Iranian Air Force F-14 fighter plane and it was diving towards the U.S.S Vincennes in what appeared to be an attack mode.

The U.S. Navy also claimed that the Iranian Airbus A300 was transponding on the military Mode II code.

A subsequent full board of inquiry which included the recordings of the Vincennes shipboard Aegis Combat System revealed that in fact Flight 655 was ascending at the time, flying in a designated commercial air lane, while transponding clearly on the civilian Mode III channel.
We all know the U.S. military would never deliberately kill foreign civilians. It was clearly an unintentional military blunder in a dangerous war zone.

Let’s afford the Iranians that same level of potential martial ineptitude rather than jumping to the assumption that they intentionally killed off 147 of their own people plus 30 foreigners.

Will Soleimani's execution drag Canada into a senseless war?

Originally published by NOW Magazine

By Scott Taylor

In the immediate aftermath of the U.S. assassination of Iranian General Qassem Soleimani, American pundits and politicos took to the airwaves to justify the state-sponsored extrajudicial execution.

These cheerleaders tell us that Soleimani was the terrorist of all terrorists and has been for the last two decades. Some trumpeting Soleimani’s death claim his assassination was a bigger blow to global terrorism than the capture and killings of Osama bin Laden, mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, and Abu Bakr al Baghdadi, the Iraqi-born leader of the Islamic State of Iraq (IS aka ISIS).

Some pundits went as far as to claim Soleimani was directly responsible for the death of more than 500 American servicemen and women in Iraq. Furthermore, it was claimed by President Donald Trump, who ordered the assassination, that U.S. intelligence services had evidence that Soleimani was plotting more attacks against the U.S., and therefore his murder was essentially a pre-emptive strike in the interests of national security.

If all these claims are true – and why would anyone ever question information from U.S. intelligence? – then why was the rest of the world not aware of what a top-notch scumbag Soleimani was until Trump and the Pentagon had him greased in an airstrike?

There is no question that Soleimani commanded Iran’s elite Quds force. This would be the same Quds force that entered Iraq at the request of the Baghdad regime in 2014 when ISIS overran Iraq’s Sunni Triangle, and the U.S.-trained and -equipped Iraqi army simply dissolved into thin air

Soleimani’s Quds fighters and their Iranian-backed, Iraqi Shiite militia not only stemmed the rising ISIS tide but helped eliminate its proclaimed caliphate in Iraq.

One of the reasons that Soleimani has such a high public profile in Iraq is because he was regarded as the commander of the allied ground forces that eliminated ISIS’s last major stronghold in the city of Mosul.

Those who closely follow events in the Middle East will recall that Canadian Special Forces acted as advisors to Iraq’s Kurdish militia who were directly involved in that same siege of Mosul. Does this mean Canadian soldiers were closely allied to a force commanded by the alleged terrorist Soleimani? Crazy stuff.

There are currently some 850 Canadian military troops in the Middle East as part of the ongoing Operation Impact. At least 300 or more are inside Iraq. These troops are divided into two separate missions – one to advise and assist, and the other is a command role in NATO’s military mission to train Iraqi security forces.

Most Canadians are unaware that Canada maintains such a large contingent in Iraq, and it's committed to remain there until at least November 2020. One reason for this is that, thankfully, we have not taken a single causality in Iraq since the March 6, 2015, friendly-fire incident that killed Sergeant Andrew Doiron and wounded three other Canadian Special Forces members.

Another reason for the public ignorance surrounding this mission is that there have been zero successes to report. In fact, since last September, Iraq has been embroiled in a series of violent protests resulting in bloody clashes between civilians and security forces.

Hundreds of Iraqi civilians have been killed and tens of thousands wounded in those riots by the very same security forces that the Canadians have the command role in training.

The Iraqi protestors are demanding an end to the corrupt regime in Baghdad while our Canadian soldiers are training Iraqi soldiers to prop up that same cabal. It sounds like Afghanistan all over again.

Some Canadian military pundits questioned whether or not, as America’s close ally, Canada was consulted before Trump ordered the assassination of Soleimani. As it seems that Trump did not even seek approval of the U.S. Congress before committing an act of war, you can bet he did not place a call to Justin Trudeau to ask Canada’s permission.

Canada has no dog in this fight, and at the end of the day we will have no seat at the table that will plot the future redrawing of the Middle East map. Now that the titans of Iran and the USA are rattling their sabres, it's time for Canada to admit that we are in way over our heads, and get our troops out of Iraq.

Trump’s illegal assassination of Soleimani is all the excuse we need to pull out of yet another unwinnable, senseless war.

ON TARGET: U.S. and Canada Lied About ‘Success’ in Afghanistan

By Scott Taylor

Almost lost in the media storm south of the border, which is focused on the President Donald Trump impeachment, was the startling revelation that the American government has been lying about the war in Afghanistan for nearly two decades.

According to a treasure trove of official documents uncovered by the Washington Post, everyone in the U.S. chain of command from the Presidential Commanders-in-Chief to junior field officers – has been deliberately misleading the public about the war’s progress since 2001.

These explosive and revealing documents - now dubbed ‘The Afghanistan Papers’  - detailed how top U.S. officials were reporting ‘progress’ when there was none in order to prop up popular support for a war that they themselves knew could not be won.

The Americans played the lead role in Afghanistan. They alone invaded that country and along with their dubious allies known as the Northern Alliance, toppled the Taliban.  

It was at that juncture that the U.N authorized what became known as the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) and NATO eagerly stepped up to command the alliance forces.

Canada contributed what was to be a single battalion for a single six-month tour of duty. The Taliban had been defeated, the U.S had appointed Hamid Karzai as the new President and now NATO and Canada were simply tagging along for the victory lap.

The original plan was to quickly build a self-sufficient Afghan security force, hold some democratic elections and have our boys and girls home by Christmas. Needless to say, things did not quite work out as planned.

In the end, Canada sent more than 30,000 troops into Afghanistan, before we finally cut our losses and withdrew from the mission in 2014.

During those 12 years Canada lost 158 soldiers killed, another 2000 wounded or injured and untold thousands who suffer from the invisible wounds of PTSD. The dollar figure spent is estimated to top $20 billion by the time all the long-term health care costs are factored in.

As for the current situation, the Afghan security forces remain no match for their insurgent counterparts and still rely heavily upon U.S. and NATO combat troops in support.

The opium trade, which the U.S. has spent $9 billion to eradicate, is at an all time high, and the long ago defeated Taliban are currently negotiating a peace deal with the U.S. in Doha, Qatar.

Given this reality it seems that the explosive ‘Afghanistan Papers’ are only confirming what even the most self-delusional war hawk already knew: We aren’t winning this war and we never were.

This is what makes the reaction to the ‘Afghanistan Papers’ by Canada’s Defence Minister seem a little bizarre. Harjit Sajjan served three tours of duty in Kandahar as an officer in the Canadian Armed Forces.

Instead of taking exception to the fact that the U.S. military leadership was “at war with the truth’ as concluded in the ‘Afghanistan Papers’, Sajjan seemed to double down on the false narrative. In a recent interview with the iPolitics news site, Sajjan claimed, “I would say the insights the Canadians provided were actually very useful. That’s the one point I’m trying to get across here.”

Sajjan went on to say, “Canadians were providing a very good perspective, and very early on, to have a much more, I would say, accurate account of what is happening.”

As one who covered the war in Afghanistan closely from the outset, I call ‘bullshit’ on Sajjan’s claim.

The senior Canadian officials painted just as rosy a picture of events as their American counterparts, and they were just as false.

In fact, it was considered to be unpatriotic for journalists to question any aspect of the war in Afghanistan. The slogan of the Canadian war hawks was “if you don’t support the mission, you don’t support the troops.” Turns out they were lying to us all along about the mission.

A full parliamentary inquiry into how Canada’s leadership alone stumbled into such a costly fiasco is long overdue. Our troops at least deserve the truth. They paid the price.

ON TARGET: SNC-Lavalin may have committed Corporate crimes against Libya….The West destroyed Libya as a Country

By Scott Taylor

On Wednesday Dec. 18, a division of SNC-Lavalin quietly plead guilty to having committed crimes while operating in Libya. In exchange for admitting guilt, the Montreal based engineering firm was placed on a three-year probation and ordered to pay a $280 million fine over the next five years.

The allegations of wrongdoing date back to the period between 2001 and 2011 when SNC-Lavalin secured approximately $1.7 billion worth of construction contracts from the Libyan government. They have now admitted to the court that $50 million was paid as a bribe – often in the form of prostitutes, parties and a yacht – to Saadi Ghadafi, the son of former dictator Moammar Gadhafi.

However it was the 2018 request by the SNC-Lavalin legal team for a deferred prosecution agreement (DPA) that generated a crapstorm for the Trudeau Liberals.

When Justice Minister Judy Wilson-Raybould refused to grant SNC-Lavalin the DPA, senior officials allegedly pressured her to reconsider. This eventually led to Wilson-Raybould’s resignation, and not coincidentally that of Trudeau’s senior advisor Gerald Butts.

At the time it was believed that without the DPA, a guilty verdict in the case would cost SNC-Lavalin the ability to bid on any future federal government infrastructure projects.

Such a circumstance would be crippling to SNC-Lavalin and company officials had advised Trudeau’s office that this would result in the loss of some 9,000 jobs in Canada and the relocation – out of Quebec – of their SNC-Lavalin corporate headquarters.

However, in last week’s court proceedings, SNC-Lavalin plead guilty to crimes against ‘various Libyan’ authorities’ rather than the ‘Crown.’ This little loophole will allow SNC-Lavalin to still bid on future Canadian government contracts, albeit under the conditions of the three year probation.

So in the end, the engineering company gets slapped with a stiff fine, SNC-Lavalin and the 9,000 jobs stay in Quebec and Canadian law makers can claim that our independent Judicial system withstood the test of attempted political interference.

Lost in all this discussion about Ottawa backroom skullduggery and political maneuvering is the magnitude of what was actually transpiring along the timeline of the original allegations of criminal behavior by SNC-Lavalin.

There is a reason that SNC-Lavalin’s Libyan contracts ended in 2011, and that would be the start of the Libyan uprising against Moammar Gadhafi.

The bribe money paid, and the profits realized by SNC-Lavalin in Libya amounts to almost exactly the $280 million fine, which the company has been ordered to pay. That money was taken from the citizens of Libya.

At the very least, the fine money paid by SNC-Lavalin over the next five years should be forwarded to the Libyan government in compensation. The only problem with that plan is that there is not one Libyan authority in control of the country. There are instead three separate, equally impotent self-proclaimed governments along with hundreds of disparate warlords and Islamic extremists.

Canada played a lead role in NATO’s 2011 intervention in Iraq with Canadian Lieutenant-General Charles Bouchard commanding the entire allied war effort.

We helped bomb the crap out of the Libyan infrastructure, we decimated the Libyan security forces and we ensured that Moammar Gadhafi was overthrown.

The once high flying Saadi Gadhaffi, recipient of the SNC Lavalin bribes spent seven years of brutal captivity at the hands of the Canadian backed Libyan rebels.

It was alleged that he was tortured in captivity before being acquitted on murder charges. His fate was better than his father Moammar who bled to death in the streets of Sirte after being sodomized with a tent spike.

Since Canada’s victory over Libya in 2011, (the occasion being marked with a full victory parade on Parliament Hill,) Libya descended into complete anarchy. It remains awash in violent anarchy.

What SNC-Lavalin did in Libya was wrong and the company deserves to be punished. What Canada and NATO did in abandoning the Libyan people after ousting Gadhafi is a far greater crime.

ON TARGET: Canada In Iraq: Yet Another Unwinnable War

By Scott Taylor

The western media reports of late have been quick to condemn authoritarian regimes for their excessive use of force against civilian protestors. For more than six months now Hong Kong riot police have battled the pro-democracy mobs of this former British colony.

The pro-democracy protestors have expressed their anger at encroaching control over Hong Kong by the Beijing China authorities, through a steady stream of violent riots.

Pro-democracy activists retorted to pelting riot police with petrol bombs and even engaged them with bows and arrows. The world condemned the Hong Kong police for aggressively arresting these pro-democracy types even when protestors shut down the Hong Kong airport for days and occupied a university campus.

Far more effective in making their case for democracy was the recent landslide victory for Hong Kong’s anti-Beijing majority electorate in the civil election. Despite this clear message being sent to the Hong Kong administration that reform is necessary, the protests continue.

While it is true that the Hong Kong police have employed clouds of tear gas and riot batons against these protestors, the fact is that to date, there has not been a single fatality in all of these clashes on either side of the battle lines.

While we are quick to condemn the Chinese for their ruthless response, I would hazard a guess that if U.S. rioters hurled petrol bombs at American police, there would be gunfire, and lots of it.

For weeks now, Iran has faced a widespread outbreak of civil unrest. Iranians are enraged at the suffering they must endure as a result of the USA’s embargo against the Tehran regime. That regime has not shown as much restraint in their security forces’ use of lethal force. It is estimated that hundreds of Iranian youth have been killed in the unrest with thousands more injured.

So a deserved condemnation is due to Iranian leadership for allowing their population to be so brutally oppressed in this manner.

This then brings us to the situation in Iraq where we have a total of 700 military personnel deployed – some 250 of them working as trainers to the Iraqi security forces. Almost unreported in the western media has been the fact that for the past two and a half months, Iraq too has been awash in violent unrest. The initial response from the Baghdad regime was to deploy the NATO trained security forces to restore order. Like Iran, the Iraqi force did not show the restraint of the Hong Kong police, and escalated almost immediately to shooting protestors with live ammunition.

The genesis for the current upheaval stems from an almost universal fatigue on the part of Iraqi youth to cope with the intrinsic corruption of the Baghdad regime. Yes folks, that would be the same corrupt Baghdad regime that Canadian troops are deployed to support.

Unlike many of Iraq’s previous violent clashes, which involved intersectarian violence between Sunni and Shiites – this time it is a unified front against corruption.

To date some estimates put the death toll at over one thousand with 10,000 injured.

In a rare move, Iraqi’s Chaldean Christian Cardinal Louis Raphael Sako last week declared they were cancelling Christmas in Iraq to stand in solidarity with the Sunni and Shiite protestors.

Further complicating the matter earlier this month, Iraq’s Prime Minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi stepped down to appease the protestors, but all this accomplished was to leave this embattled country leaderless.

In a bizarre understatement, Major-General Jennie Carignan, the current Canadian commander of the NATO mission in Iraq told the Globe and Mail “we can see there is some work to do on now [Iraqi officials] structure and organize themselves for crisis management.”

The security forces we trained are greasing protestors in the streets by the hundreds to prop up a vacant regime and Carignan’s observation is that there is room for improvement?

No crap Sherlock!

Canada should never have deployed to Iraq. Our mission there was never clear and now it has lost all meaning. If we wish to maintain the moral high ground to chastise brutal regimes like Beijing and Tehran, Canada needs to stop propping up one in Baghdad.

ON TARGET: Trump’s Misplaced Ire at NATO Summit

Photo: Nicholas Kamm / AFP

By Scott Taylor

The fact that Canadian pundits are still pondering the potential fallout from what was labeled Justin Trudeau’s “gaffe” at the NATO Summit speaks volume to the actual state of Canada – U.S. relations.

The incident in question arose from some candid comments by Trudeau at a Buckingham Palace reception. Trudeau was explaining his tardiness to fellow world leaders Emmanuel Macron and Boris Johnson as being due to Donald Trump extending his press conference to a full forty minutes. Trudeau also shared with Macron and Johnson the fact that Trump had made some unscripted comments, which had caused the President’s staffers to drop their jaws in surprised response.

Trudeau’s comments were caught by the press pool camera, along with our Prime Minister’s slightly theatrical imitation of those jaw dropping.

The footage soon went viral with commentators claiming these world leaders were mocking Trump behind his back.

British tabloids proclaimed Trudeau’s gaffe to be a “diplomatic disaster.” Analysts and pundits in Canada speculated wildly that this will come back to bite us. In other words, this careless comment would anger the gods and bring down hellfire upon us.

If, as Trudeau alleged, Trump had arbitrarily extended a joint press conference longer than scheduled, then the U.S. President was being his usual boorish self.  For Trudeau to mention this to peers at a reception seems a natural enough response.

There was nothing inherently insulting about the chatter and as for Trump shocking his staffers with surprising comments, it seems that this is something in which the U.S. President delights.

However, when asked about the Trudeau comment, Trump retorted “well, he’s two faced.” Although the U.S. President hastened to add that finds Trudeau “to be a nice guy” he was later caught on an open microphone bragging “that was funny when I said that guy was two faced.”

Trump also told reporters that he thought Trudeau’s comments may have been the result of him having publicly admonished Canada’s Prime Minister for failing to spend 2% of our Gross Domestic Product on defence.

This was after all a NATO summit, and back in 2014 the alliance had undertaken a collective agreement to target that magical 2% of GDP on defence. In Trump’s mind any NATO member not spending 2% is seen as delinquent and he conceded that Canada was only “slightly delinquent.” 

However, Trump has also threatened to start punishing those delinquent countries with trade tariffs until such time as they start paying their due.

The problem with this logic is that not all GDP’s are created equal, and there are no guidelines linked to a definitive combat capability generated as a result of those expenditures.

To meet the 2% threshold Canada would need to spend an additional $11 billion annually on defence. In theory we could simply double the salaries of our military personnel, not add a single gun or bullet to our inventory and we could thus meet that magic percentage.

Turkey spends about two-thirds of what Canada spends in terms of real dollars on defence, but they do meet the 2% marker due to their much smaller GDP. They also have a much larger armed forces as they rely upon conscription.

For approximately $14 billion, the Turks can field 355,000 regular forces personnel and 378,700 reservists. That is a lot of bang for the buck.

Bulgaria on the other hand has a tiny military and a minuscule GDP. As a result of them buying just 8 F-16 fighter jets, Bulgaria’s defence budget soared to a whopping 3.2% of GDP, second only in the NATO alliance to the USA itself.

It is also pointless if a NATO member spends the requisite 2% and maintains an effective military capability – but never deploys their forces into harm’s way.

As Trudeau pointed out to Trump during their discussion at the NATO summit, Canada has consistently been at the forefront of supporting the alliance. Canada currently has a lead role in the NATO Iraq training mission and the battle group deployed to Latvia.

If that makes us ‘slightly delinquent’ then so be it.

ON TARGET: Trump Is A Wannabe Warfighter

Gage Skidmore/Flickr

By Scott Taylor

In recent days U.S. President Donald Trump has embarked upon a bizarre rash of pardoning and protecting U.S. service members who were convicted or accused of war crimes.

In doing so, I’m not exactly sure to which demographic Trump is trying to appeal.

These soldiers were not tried and convicted by some malign foreign actors trying to smear the good reputation of the U.S. military, but rather they were accused, investigated, charged and convicted of these crimes by that very same U.S. military institution in which they serve.

Soldiers in western democracies know that there are rules in war – such as the Geneva Convention, and by abiding by those rules we set ourselves apart from the evildoers who do not.

One of Trump’s most prominent beneficiaries of this presidential protection has been U.S. Navy Seal Chief Eddie Gallagher. This decorated veteran was court martialled last June on a number of charges, including the stabbing death of young wounded Daesh fighter in U.S. captivity in Iraq.  

Those accusations were leveled at Gallagher by other decorated U.S. Navy Seals in his unit. While the murder charge was dropped when a prosecution witness, testifying with immunity confessed to the crime, Gallagher was convicted of having posed for photos with the deceased’s corpse. 

The ink was barely dry on that guilty verdict when Trump weighed in with a pardon and orders to restore Gallagher to his previous rank and pay grade.

The Navy subsequently undertook a review seeking to revoke Gallagher’s status as a member of the elite Special Forces community. In response to this Trump tweeted “The Navy will NOT be taking away warfighter and Navy Seal Eddie Gallagher’s Trident Pin. This case was handled very badly from the beginning. Get back to business.”

U.S. Navy Secretary Richard Spencer was forced to resign over how the Gallagher case was handled and the controversy continues to dominate headlines.

Obviously Trump as Commander-in-Chief can pull rank in this instance, but such actions actually do a disservice to the reputation of the U.S. military.

In singling out Gallagher for not only protection but praise, Trump had frequently criticized those fellow Navy Seals who testified against him. Trump went so far as to describe the top Seal commanders as ‘morons.’

While Trump was unfortunately exempted from military service in the Vietnam war due to bone spurs on his feet, he does profess to have a great sympathy for the brave men and women in uniform who do put themselves in harm’s way. The crazy thing is that Trump thinks the way to show his sincere support for the military is to pardon and protect the very individuals that the military has convicted and removed from its ranks for violating their institution’s own moral code of conduct.

On 15 November, Trump made good on a Memorial Day promise by issuing two more pardons; one to a convicted U.S. military war criminal; the second to a soldier awaiting court martial on murder charges.

The case of First Lieutenant Clint Lorance, like Gallagher, originated with allegations being leveled at him by his own comrades.

Lorance’s men had been ordered to fire on unarmed Afghan civilians, which left two civilians dead. Following an investigation Lorance was charged, court martialled and convicted of the crime. In his defence, Lorance claimed the Afghans had been revving their motorcycle engines in a threatening manner. Eye witnesses stated the unarmed Afghans were in fact hundreds of meters away. In 2013 the military judge sentenced Lorance to serve a nineteen-year sentence. Trump just set him free.

The case against Major Mathew Golsteyn will never get to trial, despite the fact that he is accused of murdering an Afghan, burying him and then reburying the corpse in an attempt to hide evidence.

In justifying his decision to issue these pardons Trump tweeted “Our great warfighters must be allowed to fight.” And he described major Golsteyn as a “U.S. military hero.”

Without realizing it, Trump is sending the wrong message to his own military; that they are beyond reproach even from their own Chain of Command. Soldiers know the difference between heroic acts and criminal acts. Trump apparently has the two confused.

ON TARGET: Soldier alleges he faced reprisals for helping female colleague

Cpl. Casey Brunelle/Facebook

By Scott Taylor

Almost lost in the swirling news storms surrounding the controversial firing of sportscaster Don Cherry, the naming of Justin Trudeau’s new cabinet and the daily revelations regarding U.S. President Donald Trump’s road to impeachment, there was a startling report about a Canadian soldier taking the military to Federal Court.

Corporal Casey Brunelle, an Ottawa based reservist in the Intelligence Branch, alleges that he faced reprisals and punishment from his chain of command. What is shocking about this case is that Brunelle claims his career took this bureaucratic nosedive after he had supported a fellow soldier with a sexual assault claim.

That assistance later resulted in Brunelle testifying at a court martial against the accused – which happened to also be a fellow soldier in 7 Intelligence Company.

The initial alleged assault took place during a training course at CFB Valcartier in 2013. The female soldier involved confided to Brunelle that the accused had among other things, removed her socks, sucked on her toes and then ejaculated on her feet.

Brunelle convinced her to report the incidents to the military police, and in late February 2014, charges were laid against the accused. Those charges included sexual assault, attempted sexual assault, two counts of behaving in a disgraceful manner and a single count of conduct to the prejudice of good order and discipline.

While Brunelle was not an eyewitness to either incident, he was called as a prosecution witness for the January 2015 court martial.

According to the accused’s defence, the female soldier involved had in fact put her feet on his crotch while he sat on a couch. She had rubbed his penis with her feet for approximately five minutes before he unzipped his pants and proceeded to ejaculate on the sofa. He was adamant that no semen went on her feet.

As for a second allegation that the accused had appeared at the end of the female soldier’s bed in the middle of the night and exposed her feet, this was explained away as simply a middle of the night error in navigation. The accused had gotten up to relieve himself and returned to not only the wrong bed but the wrong end of that bunk.

In the end the accused’s version was the one the trial Judge believed and as a result he was found not guilty on all charges.

In my view the admission of ejaculating on government property – in this case a barracks room sofa – should have at least warranted a guilty verdict on the charges of behaving in a disgraceful manner – and I’m pretty sure the poor cleaner of that barracks would agree.

But I digress.

Once the verdict was delivered, Brunelle soon found himself to be a pariah within his unit, facing an immediate administrative backlash from 7 Intelligence Company superiors.

When the charges were first laid and leading up to the court martial, the accused had been suspended from duty. Brunelle had warned his superiors that in the event of a not-guilty verdict, him having testified against the accused would make it difficult to work alongside this individual again.

Makes sense.

However, once the accused was cleared, Brunelle’s superiors gave him three options; he could get out of the military, he could transfer to another unit, or he could drop his so-called ‘ultimatum’ about not wishing to serve alongside the former defendant.

To further press home their point Brunelle was accused of having misused public funds during his travel to appear at the court martial, his Personnel Evaluation Reports were revised to reflect his alleged unreliability and he was threatened with a security review.

Brunelle fought back with the saga winding it way up the chain of command until it reached the Chief of Defence Staff Gen. Jon Vance and the Military External Review Committee (MERC) at about the same time.

Carolyn Maynard of the MERC concluded in her report by recommending “the [CDS] acknowledge that the unit should not have threatened [Brunelle] with a (security) review and express regret for the somewhat misguided actions of the unit at the time.”

On 15 May 2019, Vance issued his final verdict in which he ignored most of Maynard’s recommendations. There would be no apology to Brunelle, because according to Vance there were no reprisals.

This past June, Brunelle requested a federal court review on Vance’s decision. To date this corporal has incurred $45,000 in legal fees trying to defend himself from doing what he still believes was the right thing.