By Henry McRandall
WRISEUP.COM
It came as no great surprise when the oversight panel of Canada’s Canadian Security and Intelligence Service (CSIS) revealed this week that the spy agency had been guilty of gross misconduct in its handling of the Omar Khadr matter.
The spy group’s watchdogs reported tjhat CSIS had violated Khadr’s most basic human rights and ignored the fact he had been a child soldier at the time of his alleged offence.
But the most damning allegation was about the way CSIS shared top-secret information with the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and handed Khadr over to the Americans.
CSIS has long acted in ways reminiscent of the worst wrongdoings of the CIA.
Even before it was CSIS, Canada’s spy agency, as a part of the RCMP, had established a lengthy record of criminality and civil rights abuses.
Like the CIA, CSIS has a mandate to uphold Canada’s socioeconomic status quo. It exists not to serve the legitimate security interests of all Canadians but rather the illegitimate vested interests of this country’s (and America’s) socioeconomic elite.
Canada’s snoop community has a long record of infiltrating legitimate dissident groups and using agents provocateurs to incite acts of violence or criminality by dissidents in order to delegitimize otherwise honourable and law-abiding dissident groups and criminalize individual dissidents.
But the right of dissent is a cornerstone of any real democracy.
Freedom of speech, freedom of association and freedom of assembly are vital to the health of a democracy.
But rather than respecting legitimate dissent, the powers-that-be have used CSIS and its RCMP predecessor in an unbridled effort to squelch dissent and punish dissenters.
Labour unions, women’s and minority rights groups, environmentalists, peace activists, myriad grassroots groups working for a more just society and even the NDP, the Bloc Quebecois and the Parti Quebecois have all been victims of CSIS.
To learn now of its excessively cozy relationship with the CIA in the Omar Khadr matter, however, is the most distresssing revelation.
The CIA is quite possibly the most dangerous and destabilizing institution in the world. Lawlessness and criminality are its typical modus operandi. And subverting the legitimate interests of the masses to the illegitimate, vested interests of the country’s corporations, billionaires and mega-millionaires are its raison d’etre.
The last thing Canada needs is a spy agency that is nothing more than a bracnh plant of the f—-n’ CIA or that is equally committed to the Canadian and American corporate socioeconomic elite rather than to the legitimate interests of rank-and-file Canadians.
CSIS should either be whipped into line or abolished.