A Dime a Dozen Blog

My name has – I think incorrectly – popped up on a ranking of liberty types.  Cringe.

I can think of a hundred better people for my place on that list.  Here are two.  If you see the list, please substitute my name with one of these.

First is an American – Lt. Cmdr. William Kuebler – who is working to defend a Canadian.  He’s the court assigned military lawyer for Omar Khadr.

Without people like Lt. Cmdr. Kuebler, it would be too easy to ride over the human rights of Khadr, Arar or any number of people who, on the surface look bad.  Our natural tendency seems to be to defer to authority, to trust the police when they say they’ve arrested the bad guy, or trust the government when it says that this boy was a terrorist.  That tendency pays off most of the time, because most of the time people don’t lie.  But little lies pile up, a poison, like lead in the drinking water.  It doesn’t take much – a tiny amount of it is sufficient to spoil justice.  We need people in the system like Lt. Cmdr. Kuebler, like Doug Christie, people to take on the ugly cases.

Here, he addresses the illiberal flaws of the military tribunals:

But one of the biggest flaws he points to is that military commission cases at Guantanamo are built on confessions obtained through torture and coercion.

“They do not employ the same safeguards to ensure that that evidence is reliable, probative, that it’s voluntary,” he said. “It became necessary to create a system in which we can essentially launder that information and convict people based on something other than reliable evidence.”

“That, in a nutshell, is why we have military commissions.”

Second is Justin Trottier and the Centres for Inquiry.  I first met this person at a pro Free Speech demonstration he had organized outside the Danish consulate in Toronto (demo pictured below).  He and CFI advocate for reason, science, free speech and the separation of faith and state.  Most recently they can be found defending the rights of their political opponents in the pro-life movement who face persecution on campus.  They are one of the few groups who stand before the public and say that (VIZ state-funded religious schools, native, muslim or hindu prayers in parliament – at convocations, state funding for eastern medicine, etc…) we do need to be more open and tolerant.