“Justice” in the American Imperium
A few years ago, the Canadian citizen Maher Arar was kidnapped by US officials out of the JFK transit lounge when changing planes on his way back to Canada from a vacation in Tunisia. Since he was guilty of having a semitic last name, he was "renditioned" away to Syria where the Syrian government spent a year or so attempting to torture a terrorism confession out of him. The Canadian government, after a ridiculous delay, managed to get him freed and returned to Canada, where he (and other civil libertarians) started pursuing legal actions against the governments of Canada and the USA (the case in the USA was pursued by the Center of Constitutional Rights on behalf of Mr. Arar.)
Well, just the other day a US appeals court decided to drop Mr. Arar's case on the floor. Why? Was it on the merits of the case, in that being kidnapped and taken away to be tortured by agents of the American gulag wasn't a compelling reason for legal action against the American Imperium? Oh, no, nothing as concrete as that. No, the reason why Judge David Trager dropped the case (and, incidentally, more of the international reputation that the United States of American used to have before the coup de etat in 2000) was because "One need not have much imagination to contemplate the negative effect on our relations with Canada if discovery were to proceed in this case and were it to turn out that certain high Canadian officials had, despite public denials, acquiesced in Arar’s removal to Syria."
Civil liberties? Sure, you can have all the civil liberties you want, as long as they don't run the risk of embarrassing any government officials in a state that's being governed by conservatives. Because, heavens, if the US was to blame a Canadian for turning a blind eye to the US kidnapping and torturing another Canadian citizen, Stephen Harper might have to stand up and defend Canada, which would run the risk of derailing Paul Weyrich's grand plan of exporting his jihad against gay people up to the great white north™.
Continuing the slow evisceration of civil liberties in the United States? Well, sure, because if you left civil liberties alone then the terrorists wouldn't have won and we couldn't do our next unprovoked aggressive war against a near eastern state. But this one, well, it's just a little reminder for Stephen Harper; telling him that if he doesn't play along with the Evil Party plans for a theocratic state he might be in for a quick and unpleasant end at the hands of the tory press when he has to decide whether to sell out or support Canada.