Bush, torture, and politics trumping law

Human rights and anti-war activists greeted former U.S. President George W. Bush’s visit to British Columbia last month with calls for his arrest. The demonstrators correctly asserted that Canada has a responsibility to investigate Bush for his role in the torture of detainees in U.S. custody.

A visit by former Vice President Dick Cheney in September received a similar welcome, as have other visits by Bush administration officials. Already in 2004, a group called Lawyers Against the War tried to bring torture charges against Bush by filing criminal charges.

The number of voices calling for investigation and prosecution is growing and now includes several mainstream human rights organizations, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. On the political stage, federal NDP Immigration critic Don Davis urged the government to deny Cheney entry into Canada.

The evidence against Bush and Cheney also continues to mount. The Canadian Centre for International Justice teamed up with the New York based Center for Constitutional Rights to file a 70-page draft indictment against Bush ahead of his visit to Canada. The indictment was accompanied by 4000 pages of evidence that described the U.S. program of extraordinary rendition, the torture of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, and secret CIA detention sites.

Bush himself has on various occasions admitted to authorizing torture techniques, such as waterboarding. In an interview with American journalist Matt Lauer, Bush claimed…

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I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Law

Have you ever found yourself visiting someone else’s home, and upon entering, removing your muddy shoes at the door – even though you weren’t asked to? A trivial nicety perhaps – or an APPALLING DEGRADATION OF YOUR PERSONAL FREEDOMS? Shouldn’t I have the right in a free society to wear my disgusting footwear wherever I want? If someone invites me into his home, he should either make it clear that the invitation is conditional on my acceptance of certain terms and conditions (such as removing my street shoes), or accept that I can wear whatever I want. In other words, restrictions on my personal freedom should only arise through some sort of explicit consensual agreement.

The same could be said for tipping in restaurants; I never agreed to pay an additional, discretionary surcharge on top of the price of my meal, so why should I be bound to do so? In this sense, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to say that every restaurant is like a Stalinist regime (“in Soviet Russia, restaurant eats you!”). I could continue with more examples – and I will. Why do I have to greet people by smiling and shaking hands (or even “faire la bise”), instead of my preferred greeting: staring intensely at one another in silence for several minutes? It’s as if my personal interactions are regulated by some invisible totalitarian system.

It’s not…

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Finders v. Keepers

The noted archaeologist Professor Henry Jones Jr. famously adopted the mantra that historical artefacts “belong in a museum!” No one could quibble with Dr. Jones’s efforts to keep culturally significant items out of the hands of sinister private collectors or Nazis, but he also spent much of his career expropriating priceless objects from the ancient temples of Latin America and India, and bringing them back for display in first-world museums. Jones wasn’t the first to do so, but was rather continuing a long history of colonial nations unilaterally claiming the cultural property of others as their own. Today, countries around the world must deal with the legacy of this tragic past – a task made all the more difficult by the lack of any meaningful international regime for settling questions about disputed historical items.

As the old adage goes, don’t believe everything the director of the British Museum tells you. Contrary to his claim otherwise, the repatriation of historical artefacts is still a live issue today. Many major objects are being sought from European and American museums by their “parent” countries, including Egypt’s Rosetta stone (currently in Britain), bust of Nefertiti (Germany), and statue of Ramses II (Italy); Greece’s Parthenon marbles (Britain again); Peru’s Machu Picchu relics (United States); and even Korea’s Jikji – pages from what is believed to be the oldest book printed with movable…

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Fear and Loathing of E-Vegas

There’s no such thing as problem gambling. I should know – during the Winter Olympics alone I won over $7,000 by gambling, and that’s not even including my wagers on Olympic sports. Of course I spent $22,000, but you have to understand that winning comes in cycles, and I think I’m heading back into a hot streak now. It’s complicated – the point is people who enjoy gambling have things under control.

Why, therefore, do we need laws regulating or banning gambling? The fact that problem gambling is a myth takes care of a Hartian positivist/utilitarian justification. This leaves only Fuller and his “natural law”, which in this case amounts to antiquated Victorian morality. With such a foundation, I’d bet that today’s gambling laws are little different in substance from those of a hundred years ago.[1]

Such questions are all the more relevant today because of the rise of online gambling. Anyone who has watched movies on Megavideo knows that there are two rules: 1) there’s a 72-minute limit, and 2) popup ads for a certain gambling website – let’s call it “MartyMoker.com” – are ubiquitous. But are these kinds of betting sites legal? The truth is that in Canada today the answer is not entirely clear.

The situation is complex because online gambling by its nature involves cross-border transactions. It is clear that running an unregulated online…

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