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MacKay grovelling before the warmonger, who will be given pride of place at the Halifax International Security Forum
Blog posts reflect the views of their authors.
Defence Minister Peter MacKay bestows an honourary doctorate upon U.S. warmonger Sen. John McCain at the Canadian embassy in Washington, June 18, 2013. | CP /HO-Canadian embassy
Haligonians rally against threats of war against Syria, September 7, 2013
THERE is no alternative but to call things by their name. Anyone with minimal common sense can observe without much effort how little national dignity remains in Ottawa, where all kinds of antipatriotic actions, national treason and political double-dealing reign supreme and any kind of moral and civic obligation to the Canadian people and their country is denied.
Normally we do not post photos of reactionaries, but this one is so repulsive, disgraceful and treasonous that it must be seen to believed, especially by those who doubt or camouflage the servile relationship between the Harper quislings and the USA and its black content. Many newspapers in Canada carried brief news items of the event in question but, perhaps worried about a hostile response from readers, suppressed the photo. The event itself was swept aside by the media’s drum roll on the Syrian crisis – and as if Canadians should simply accept this as a normal event in which they should have no stake or concern, and which they cannot change in any case.
On June 18, 2013 then Defence Minister Peter MacKay went to Washington to consult with his new master, U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel. News agencies carried brief reports that the topics included Canada’s participation in Obama’s Asia Pivot strategy and the continued deployment of Canadian warships and aircraft to the Caribbean and off the Pacific coast of Central America. MacKay reaffirmed this commitment in a keynote address to the Inter-American Defense Board of the OAS, also meeting in Washington that same day.
The Defence Minister also used the visit to bestow an honourary doctorate of military science from the Royal Military College (RMC), of which he was Chancellor in his formal capacity as Defence Minister, upon that ignorant warmonger U.S. Sen. John McCain at a small ceremony held at the Canadian embassy.
McCain was exalted for his alleged “dedication to our countries’ bilateral relationship and to his extensive work in promoting international security,”MacKay’s office said in a release. MacKay called McCain “a great friend to Canada, truly one of the great men of our generation.”
Both individuals were adorned in multi-coloured academic raiment. Dr. Joel Sokolsky, RMC Principal and a theorist of “interoperability” or military integration with the U.S. armed forces, and Major Ray Stouffer, Registrar, added lustre to a ceremony so outrageous that it was deliberately not held at the host institution, which is the norm when awarding honourary degrees.
Doctor of Law is an honourary and esteemed academic title. It can never be bestowed on demagogues and criminals who prepare war and intervention in violation of international law and be justified. Nobody having an ounce of self-esteem, conscience and culture would commit such a serious lapse in ethics.
Military science is a dedicated and disciplined field of enquiry, the theory and practice of enhancing military capability in conformity with the defence needs of one’s nation. No legitimate national defence college motivated by the ethics and ideals of defending the sovereignty and territory of one’s homeland would honour the proponent of naked aggression and the use of military force as the method to solve conflicts between countries and peoples.
“A great friend of Canada”
What can Canadians possibly expect from such a “dedicated” advisor and such “a great friend to Canada? With respect to Canada, McCain has attacked the health care system, commented that Obama should not be campaigning in a bus made “partly” in Canada, and said that the 9/11 terrorists came from Canada. He would reinforce security on United States borders, not just for the entry and exit of people, but also for the products that enter the country. He thinks that immigrants must speak English. He promised to reduce dependence on foreign energy. He is in favour of the death penalty, the growth and build-up of the armed forces, and the expansion of the Free Trade Agreements.
McCain, cast in the glorious robes from the Canadian military academy of the “noble struggle for freedom” and for “international security,” is an unbridled advocate of war, subversion, and even more atrocities for the long-suffering peoples of the Middle East. According to the same Canadian Press report, “McCain says military intervention in the Syrian conflict is necessary,” thereby declaring the naked feudal philosophy of his empire that Might Makes Right in its attempt to make us believe in its “democratic,” “pacific,” “altruistic” and “honest” nature. And of the Canadian defence ministers and military scientists? It is well known that “an apple never falls far from the tree.”
MacKay’s awarded McCain his embossed scrap of paper the same day that he secured marching orders from the new U.S. Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel to the Harper War government. The actors and bases in the Syrian crisis were being prepared, as revealed by Harper’s strident warmongering during the Syria crisis later in the summer. In August the Canadian warships were deployed to the Caribbean and the Panama Canal once again (“Op Caribe” and “Panamax 2013”) under the drug-smuggling and anti-terrorism pretexts.
At the Halifax International Security Forum (HISF)
Further, MacKay dutifully formalized Hagel and McCain’s attendance as lead speakers at the fifth annual Halifax International Security Forum (HISF), aka the Halifax War Conference, November 22-24.
The HISF has emerged as one of the conduits or mechanisms through which U.S. imperial agencies are determining the Canadian foreign and military agenda, at an out-of-the-way meeting ground for the U.S. and its NATO bloc, and a platform for televised warmongering.
The HISF itself operates from a Washington-based office funded with over $7 million Canadian taxdollars supplied by the Department of National Defence in a straight payout to the U.S. A visit to the office does not appear on MacKay’s itinery.
With respect to the Halifax conference, McCain for the past four years has been its most vitriolic advocate of the global “war against terrorism.”
As co-leader of the U.S. Congressional delegation, the senator is given pride of place during the opening ceremonies of the forum to speak, following on the heels of the U.S. defence secretaries. Each November for the past four years McCain has used Canadian territory to call for an invasion against Iran and Libya and military aggression against Syria, Venezuela and Bolivia, etc.
The Doctor of War and Military Science shone in his participation at the 2011 HISF when he was the first U.S. state official to issue a public call (on November 19) for formal recognition of the Syrian National Council and its proxy army of mercenaries and jihadists as the official U.S.-NATO instrument for destabilizing Syria. McCain – who was the Godfather of the Ahmad Chalabi’s Iraqi National Congress – now serves as the Godfather of the SNC. At the 2010 HISF he and fellow U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham openly called for the “neutering” of Iran. In 2009 McCain insisted that the Iraqi surge can be replicated in Afghanistan and that within the next year to 18 months, “We can turn the situation around.” Time has issued the verdict on that boast.
“Truly one of the great men of our generation”
The Doctor of War continues to support the disastrous war in Iraq as if it was an American triumph. He would continue in Iraq until victory and insists that as with South Korea, Germany or Japan, American forces could remain in Iraq “for ‘a thousand years’ or ‘a million years,’ as far as he was concerned.” He believes that the threat of Afghanistan, Iran and North Korea and the growth of Russia and China oblige the United States to strengthen its nuclear attack force. As Obama himself put it in 2008, “[T]his is the guy who sang, ‘Bomb, bomb, bomb Iran,’ who called for the annihilation of North Korea.” McCain said of the rebels dismembering Libya under the lethal rain of NATO bombing, “they are my heroes.”
The U.S. Senate’s roving war-inciting trio of McCain, Graham and Joseph Lieberman visited the border of Turkey and Syria as far back as April, 2011 and met with the Free Syrian Army’s General Mustafa al-Sheikh and Colonel Riad al-Asaad (the ranks they formerly held in the Syrian armed forces), with McCain issuing the following inflammatory comment: “Make no mistake. The situation in Syria is an armed conflict. This is a war…”
McCain’s dangerous role as an agent provocateur was made clear in 2008, when he was in close communication with Georgia just before and just after its illegal invasion of Ossetia and Abkhazia in August, 2008, a war confirmed by Wikileaks cables as having been started by Georgia. As the fighting raged, McCain quickly announced, “We’re all Georgians now.” His top foreign policy advisor, Randy Scheunemann [1], was the paid U.S. lobbyist for then president Mikheil Saakashvili, receiving $290,000 in fees, speaking to McCain on no less than 49 occasions on the topic of Georgia. On January 25, 2005, McCain and Hillary Rodham Clinton nominated Viktor Yushchenko (then president of the Ukraine) and Saakashvili for the Nobel Peace Prize. In 2006, McCain gave a speech at the Munich Conference on Security in Germany (attended by MacKay) in which he said Georgia and Ukraine should enter NATO as part of the Euro-Atlantic strategy to plung a sharpened dagger deep into Russia’s heart. These incitements became a proximate cause of the war between Georgia and Russia in 2008 and stoking conflict between the Baltic states and Russia. For his role in that war, Saakashvili in 2010 bestowed upon McCain the honour of “National Hero of Georgia.” The Harper gangsters are in good company.
McCain is the advocate of the plan to replace the United Nations with a separate grouping of states called the League of Democracies against the equality of nations in the world, which provides ideological and political nourishment for the Harperite’s own condemnation of the UN,
Captain (r) of the U.S. Navy and trained as a war pilot based on his physical attributes for flying an attack plane, McCain is the son of the Admiral who commanded the Sixth Pacific Fleet during the U.S. aggression against Indo-China. He comes with his pre-designed image as a hero for his bombing raids on North Vietnam and his period of captivity in what he sarcastically called the “Hanoi Hilton” – an image so well tailored that many American veterans have publicly questioned the veracity of his tale.
Arizona State Republican Senator since 1987, McCain was a candidate in the GOP primaries for president in 2000 against George W. Bush, but lost. In 2008, he was nominated the Republican presidential candidate and again lost. In 2010 he won his fifth term in the U.S. Senate and is still the most powerful voice in the Senate consistently advocating policies calling for the United States to use military force around the world. War is the most profitable business of all: the ex-pilot now boasts a personal fortune estimated to be worth from $9,249,289 to $22,785,990
Subversion and coups
McCain’s résumé on the front of “international security” has an even darker page. Since 1993 McCain has been Chairman of the Board of the International Republican Institute (IRI), the international arm of the Republican Party. Lorne Craner, the former assistant secretary of state for democracy and human rights and labor in the George W. Bush administration, is IRI president. Cramer, a former National Security Council official “helped conceive and implement the Bush administration’s new Middle East democracy policy,” according to the IRI website. The IRI Board of Directors is filled with other Republican Party operatives, many of them former state and government officials, as well as representatives of big U.S. monopolies. Much of its funding comes from the U.S. State Department, U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).
Precisely one month following the MacKay-McCain duet in Washington, Canada’s new Minister of State for Foreign Affairs Lynne Yelich announced on July 18 that it will be directly funding McCain’s agency through the approved budgets for the Canadian Department of Foreign Affairs and the the Global Peace and Security Fund, specifically for one of two projects in the Middle East and North Africa aimed at organizing electoral coups. The combined cost of the two projects is $971,200.
The Harperites, who cashiered the Canadian government’s “arms-length” human rights organization Rights & Democracy, now provide straight payouts in the millions of dollars to the U.S. agencies of “democracy promotion”, such as the International Republican Institute, which will be implementing the aforementioned project, as well as to other U.S agencies such as the NED and Freedom House Inc. for projects in “regime change.”
The IRI, operating under NED and USAID, coordinates financial support to political parties and NGO s involved with the international right to work in Washington’s interests and is working with other parties and groups against international law in Latin America, the Middle East, Central Asia and other parts of the world.
John McCain has classified Venezuela as an enemy of the United States, villifying the late President Hugo Chávez as a dictator. The IRI, under the leadership of McCain, funds and trains several opposition groups in Venezuela, including mainly the neoconservative party Primero Justicia Un Nuevo Tiempo, which participated in many actions to destabilize the Venezuelan government. IRI maintained an air bridge between Caracas, Miami and Washington, sending politicians, union leaders and corrupt community in the United States to meet representatives of extreme rightist organizations and establish contacts with officials of the Department of State. The board of the IRI congratulated the perpetrators of the armed coup in against President Chávez in April 2002 through a public statement, showing their support for anti-democratic movements in that country.
The IRI is also one of the main funders of the different organizations and shock groups involved in the colour revolutions in Ukraine, Georgia, Serbia, Belarus, Iran and other countries.
McCain’s International Republican Institute financed the executors of the coup d’état against President Aristide in Haiti in 2004. In February 2004, the IRI, assisted by Secretary of State Colin Powell, USAID and the CIA, kidnapped Aristide and his wife and transported them to the Central African Republic as “cargo” in a plane normally used to “render” terrorists for torture outsourced by the U.S. to Egypt, Morocco and Uzbekistan.
In March 2005 McCain introduced a bill entitled “Advance Democracy Act of 2005”, authorizing funds, reinforcing subversion, establishing new structures and proposing additional mechanisms to exert pressure on Cuba. At a hearing on Cuba which he held on May 21, 2002 – of the Subcommittee on Consumer Affairs, Foreign Trade and Tourism of the Science and Transportation Committee – he reiterated that Cuba poses a threat to the United States because of its capacity to produce biological weapons, something James Carter demonstrated to be ridiculous.
John McCain is no friend of the Canadian people who hold him in the greatest contempt. The presence of this war criminal at the Halifax International Security Forum will surely be vigorously condemned.
Not In Our Name!
War Criminals Out of Canada!
Endnote
1 Scheunemann, who is also a regular at the Halifax War Conference, even smoothed the way for a U.S. energy monopoly, Worldwide Strategic Energy, to score lucrative deals with the Georgian government to assist in the development of its “hydrocarbon industry.”
If and when I have time, I will add references.
All Out to Oppose the Halifax War Conference!
Saturday, November 23 – 1:00 pm
Halifax Peace & Freedom Park (formerly Cornwallis Park), Hollis & South Sts.
Organized by: No Harbour For War • Endorsed by: Halifax Peace Coalition, CUPW,
NSPIRG, Food Not Bombs and others
For information: noharbourforwar@hotmail.com
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Comments
I can't disagree
Submitted by Dave Sharp on Thu, 11/28/2013 - 18:36.
But do you really believe that the Lilberals will be any more above board? Trudeau has already proved to be a massive foot in mouth contender and makes political hay by instead of pursuing equality for all, massaging the ego's of various minority special interest groups. First and formost a politican must a be a man for all people, none of our politicans fit that bill any longer.
Good read though, partisanship aside.
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