ETA: When I am posting to EW, am I a Canadian citizen abroad?

I don’t know what I think about this. In his pre-judgely life, Mosley was the main drafter of our anti-terrism act. Yet he was the judge who was charged with deciding which CSIS documents on Omar Khadr should be released, and he allowed that video of agents dealing badly with a weeping Khadr at GTMO to be made public, along with some associated memos, one of which puts a DFAIT guy in very bad light.

I really question this:

So when Canadian extremists travelled abroad – a situation never contemplated during the Cold War, but arising frequently now in places like Somalia, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and Afghanistan

Really? There’s evidence of that? I sure haven’t seen it. Who told the reporter that, and why is it just sitting there as a claim?

They’ve got another federal agency, name of which has come up here from time-to-time, called the Canadian Security Intelligence Service or CSIS – which appears to be more like the Stasi, except it’s only allowed to spy inside Canada & has to operate under this arcane primitive requirement to actually get warrants for wiretaps & stuff.

The problem appears to have been suddenly realized after 9/11 [wasn’t everything? maybe Addington clued them in].

CSIS would get a warrant to spy on some homie, & they’d be hot on his trail & suddenly the sumbitch would up decide to call his travel agent & escape the deepfreeze for some warmer clime, like Arizona or Babylonia. And then CSIS would be s.o.o.l. for the whole time the homie was off the icefloe grabbing some vitamen E — unless CSE agreed to help out; which, as the judge kind of throws in, “usually” they wouldn’t- probably because it was maybe illegal under the CSE charter.

So in addition to CSIS playing footsy with CSE, with mixed results [so their story goes], CSIS drafted CSE into playing joint footsie with the courts to get some judicial solution to the problem, like a warrant.

[You’d think maybe they’d go the legislative route to try & solve the problem; but it could be that foresightful folk like Crazy Pete, Jane Harmon, the late-if-ever Kit Bond & the-Jay-formerly-known-as-Jello, are representative of a uniquely American phenomenon.]

An earlier story shows this particular judge is a former fed who apparently drafted the Canadian counter-terrorism laws; anyway, for whatever motivation [patriotism, hubris, gratitude, whatever] he somehow was able to get around the previous failed efforts as sufficiently different that he could hang his grant on the idea that all that needed to be done was let CSIS use the CSE’s equipment, all already conveniently inside Canada, to keep on scooping up all the traffic on their targets’ cell phones [& e-mail accounts- Canadian redactions seem way lighter] whilst the homies were catching rays on the Riviera [or whereever].

Here’s the ruling:
http://cas-ncr-nter03.cas-satj…..f_en/Index

Interesting: the judge not only cites a few U.S. court decisions–he also quotes Jack Goldsmith. And oh yeah: the judge says if CSIS wants to do this again, they have to always apply for a warrant. Nice; quaint, but still nice.

Not so nice maybe is that CSE’s got equipment that spies on the whole wide rest of the world; but such nice discrete folks surely would take care to keep it all that nasty intel just to themselves.

[Though James Bamford has written otherwise, in Shadow Factory & elsewhere- repeatedly. Now maybe if I’d ever worked for the feds & was allowed to say, I might even agree.]

Yeah, right! Like that’s going to happen.

Second, haven’t we gone far beyond the point where it makes any sense to believe anything our government asks us to accept on faith? Isn’t that what we’re being asked to do? Holder sealed the deal for me when he dodged a simple question.

In the absence of independent and verifiable evidence supporting what our elected and appointed government officials and their employees say, I assume they are lying. Sad to say, but this rule hasn’t failed me yet.

God, how I loathe my government and the fascist Patriot Act.

Repeal the damn thing, NOW!

…Holder said Tuesday his “hope is that within a relatively short period of time we’re going to be in a position to release that report in as much detail as we can…”

How tantalizing. FInalizing a deal with someone? Biggus Dickus and Baby Dickus have been pretty absent lately…