Rushing Off In All Directions

"We will go in two directions: first one, we will file a charge at the court in Luxembourg ... secondly, we will not implement the [decision] of the interior ministers."
Slovak Prime Miniter Robert Fico

"Those who don't share our values, those who don't even want to respect those principles, need to start asking themselves questions about their place in the European Union."
French President Francois Hollande

"The decision to relocate 160,000 people from the most affected member states is a historic first and a genuine, laudable expression of European solidarity."
"It cannot be the end of the story, however. It is time for further, bold, determined and concerted action by the European Union, by its institutions and by all its member states."
Jean-Claude Juncker, Commission President

"Some people will say today that Europe is divided because the decision was not taken by consensus."
"If we had not done this, Europe would have been even more divided and its credibility would have been even more undermined."
Jean Asselborn, Luxembourg Foreign Minister

"Let's not forget that this is a mixed flow of migrants, not 'Syrian refugees' as the media tends to call them. Only one third of them are Syrians who embark on the perilous journey to their European country of choice from the refugee camps of Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan. They have already passed several safe countries before reaching Hungary, and the overwhelming majority do not even stop in rich Austria -- some not even in Germany. This is the very dilemma the European Union is struggling to find a good answer to."
Balint Odor, Hungarian Ambassador to Canada

Migrants walk after crossing from Macedonia towards Serbia, near the village of Miratovac to the overcrowded transit camp in Presevo late on September 4, 2015. AFP PHOTO / LOUISA GOULIAMAKISource:AFP

The European Union interior ministers agreed to proceed with a plan to sprinkle 120,000 asylum seekers from Asia, Africa and the Middle East across Europe. The forcing of reluctant EU member countries to accept policies they view as not being in the best interests of their countries' futures will strain the very solidarity and essence of the European Union. A union of 28 countries that never dreamed their concerns would go beyond the financial rescue of their more improvident members.

But there it is. The European proximity to another continent flush with a religion of violent conquest whose faithful have been oppressed and maltreated, threatened and poverty-stricken, slaughtered and exiled by terrorizing fear, has created the conditions whereby hundreds of thousands of people have taken active measures to separate themselves from their heritage, their lands of birth, their culture and traditions. But not their religion. This transformative ideology and its politics they bear with them.

And this is the issue that confronts Europe. Which could, under other circumstances, convince itself to embrace without reservations people capable of investing themselves with similar values, accept the prevailing laws, adapt to the culture of the indigenous populations, and become stable and reliable citizens with no intention of subverting all that they will not accept in the country that has absorbed them, to offer them a new lease on life.

There are those in Europe who transcribe with a fair degree of accuracy just how the influx of people from Islamic countries have transformed the cultures, the politics, the society which they have infiltrated as immigrants and refugees, and they want no part of it. From the livelier demands on policing to the increased welfare rolls, to the social exceptions where polygamy is practised and their populations will grow increasing numbers of Muslims through natural increase.

An increase which will lead to demographic domination and the final transformation of European countries to Islamic nations. The better European Union suggestion to transfer financial aid to Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon to aid in easing refugee camp conditions there in the hopes of stemming the tide of refugees looking for more promising territory from which to launch their futures should be extended to offers of political and military involvement in staunching the wounds of the civil war and removing its trenchant cause.

Glorifying Mediocrity

"I was trained as a spy in sort of the traditional sense of the word in that I lived and worked undercover overseas -- pretending to work in a job that I'm not -- and even being assigned a name that was not mine."
"I had a flight booked to Cuba onwards to Latin America, and I was stopped because the United States government decided to revoke my passport and trap me in Moscow airport."
"They're trying to ... distract from the totality of my experience, which is that I've worked for the Central Intelligence Agency undercover overseas, I've worked for the National Security Agency undercover overseas and I've worked for the Defense Intelligence Agency as a lecturer at the Joint Counterintelligence Training Academy, where I developed sources and methods for keeping our information and people secure ..."
American deserter-spy Edward Snowden

For taking illegal possession of countless high-value, top secret intelligence documents and spiriting them out of the country and arranging through the connivance of news agencies to publish them piecemeal to embarrass the secret intelligence agencies of his country, Edward Snowden chose to abandon his country twice. Once, when he betrayed it by making such documents public, the second time when he absconded with the documents to escape punishment for his act of treason.

Treason is rather a disturbing crime of national condemnation. It represents a total abdication of responsibility on the part of the malefactor to his national identity. And a betrayal of the values of that country's social-political covenant. Mr. Snowden could have objected to privacy intrusion practises on the part of his then-employer through other means that might have excluded theft and treason, but he chose the latter route.

More publicity, greater notoriety results from such extreme actions pleasing the celebrity-conscious wannabe, and warranting the charge of a capital offense.

He directed his flight first to China, then to Russia, deliberately selecting regimes whose values run counter to those of his own country, regimes who suppress and oppress, discriminate and harm by their disregard for basic human rights. Instead, his charges are that his country spies on entities on an international scale and within the country itself in its pursuit of national and international security. In any such large national operations there will be those who abuse their authority.

But Mr. Snowden decided he would 'sacrifice' his comfort to the larger and in his case fairly sanctimonious purpose of revealing an institutionalized miscarriage of what he insists are privacy rights. As though China and Russia would never engage in such underhanded activities as espionage. Spycraft is universal and always has been. But sympathizers hail him as a hero, laying bare the process and in some instances endangering his country's intelligence services.

"For a supposedly smart guy, that's a pretty dumb answer, frankly. He can come home, but he's a fugitive from justice, which is why he's not being permitted to fly around the world", retorted the American Secretary of State, John Kerry representing one of the more cogent responses he's made on any subject.

Those who know, including former colleagues, explain that Edward Snowden was hired initially as a security guard at an NSA-financed language research centre located at the University of Maryland.

Where his computer skills drew attention, leading him subsequently to work overseas for the CIA in Geneva, and for NSA contractors in Japan, Maryland and Hawaii.

The simple fact being that CIA and NSA employees who are sent to work overseas almost always work undercover. Which makes him both a turncoat and a dolt.

Water Purity Assurances

The worst possible contamination fears related to the process of injecting noxious chemicals deep underground in the process of gas extraction in shale known as fracking appears to have been put to rest. At the very least, the process can continue to be studied and conclusions reached that will either support the initial and seemingly rock-solid conclusion reached by the U.S. Department of Energy or refute their findings.

A "horse head" pump. Source: API

It seems fairly reasonable, even at this relatively early juncture in a recently-released statement, that there will result additional conclusions that will serve to support what the Department of Energy found. Drilling fluids marked for identification were injected over 8,000 feet below the surface of the ground at a western Pennsylvania drilling site. An investigation found that there was no detection of their presence within a zone being monitored three thousand feet higher.

The chemical substances used in fracking have the potential to be extremely dangerous if they migrated upward to contaminate water aquifers. But the tests demonstrated that the substances remained roughly a mile from drinking water supplies derived from aquifers. "This is good news" said Duke University scientist Rob Jackson, not involved with the study.

Natural gas from underground formations flows through pipes on the surface sometimes called a "Christmas Tree." Photo: NGSA

It was, he said, a "useful and important approach" to the monitoring of fracking. This first test took place in Pennsylvania. However, Professor Jackson observed, geology and industrial practice vary widely across the nation, and it's abundantly obvious that further tests will have to be conducted, more geographically widespread to represent all those areas where shale gas extraction is done.

Tens of thousands of wells have been drilled recently, many located in what is called the Marcellus Shale formation located under parts of Pennsylvania, New York, Ohio and West Virginia. Fears abounded that the chemicals utilized in the drilling process to free up gas extraction could spread and contaminate vital water supplies.

The study whose results have so recently been released was performed by the National Energy Technology Laboratory in Pittsburgh. Representing the first time a drilling company agreed to allow government scientists to inject special tracers into the fracking fluid enabling monitoring to determine whether the injected fluid spread upward toward drinking water sources.

Both state and federal regulators have supported industry in its insistence that fracking itself would not contaminate surface drinking water, because of the extreme depth at which the gas wells are found and drilled. Most of those wells are over a mile deep underground. Drinking water aquifers generally are located within 500 to 1,000 feet of the Earth's ground surface.

Turkey's "Marginal Groups"

"We will open the square when everything normalizes in the area, and our security forces completely control the area. Our children who stay at Gezi Park are at risk, because we will clean the area of the marginal groups. We won't allow our government to be seen as weak."
Huseyin Avni Mutlu, Governor, Istanbul

Back in 2010 when a handful of Syrian Sunni protesters called upon the Alawite Baathist President Bashar al Assad to extend the same courtesies of full citizenship rights to them as the privileged Shia minority population, President Assad informed international leaders that the protests represented a minor occurrence that would shortly peter out. And it might have, had the military not taken steps to arrest a handful of Sunni schoolboys who had scrawled impertinent texts criticizing the regime on their school walls.

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan fairly early on was appalled and disgusted at the reaction of the Syrian regime and his erstwhile chum Bashar al-Assad's reaction to the Syrian people's just search for democracy and fairness. He was openly critical of President al-Assad's swift and brutal reaction in attempting to swiftly quell the protests that he felt were getting out of hand, and were most certainly inconvenient. Particularly since he had assured interlocutors on U.S. networks that his people loved him and would never revolt.

Since then the enmity between the two leaders has deepened, with Prime Minister Erdogan voicing his disdain for the violence that had overtaken Syria, and President al-Assad threatening his neighbour if he continued to shelter and support the Syrian Opposition. When the two-week-old protests began in Turkey against the government's decision to raze a park in Istanbul and build a replica of an Ottoman-era barracks, alongside a mosque and a shopping centre, President al-Assad chided President Erdogan for his uncompromising stance, delighted he could return the compliment.

There was, in fact, little difference in the reaction of the two when civil unrest rose in their respective countries; Prime Minister Erdogan characterized his critics as criminals, where al-Assad had characterized the Syrian protesters as terrorists.


A protester throws a petrol bomb towards riot policemen during clashes in Taksim Square in Istanbul, Turkey, Tuesday, June 11, 2013. Kostas Tsironis  / AP Photo

There is an eerie similarity to the two uprisings; both began as peaceful demonstrations, with protesters simply asking for reconsideration of prevailing situations felt to be inimical to their well-being. In both instances the official responses were harsh and violent, leading to the protests themselves becoming more demanding. The government of Prime Minister Erdogan has responded with tear gas, water bombers, rubber bullets, endearing themselves to the public to a huge degree.


A police vehicle fires a water cannon to extinguish a fire of another vehicle after protesters threw a petrol bomb during a police operation to evacuate Taksim Square in Istanbul Tuesday, June 11, 2013. Thanassis Stavrakis / AP Photo

Four people have died, and thousands have been wounded. The Gezi Park redevelopment scheme protests are testing Erdogan's authoritarianism. His kind of democracy of which he is so proud, is one where protests are not permitted. The outraged reaction to his insistence that construction will proceed as scheduled, to transform the rare green space in the city centre to a commercial establishment has served to grow the original peaceful protest into a heavily supported mass call for the Prime Minister to retract his decision.

Protesters in their thousands camp out at the park and at Taksim Square, determined not to leave until their protests have been heard, digested and acted upon. The countervailing action remains rounds of tear gas, running battles with protesters who hurl fireworks, bottles, rocks and firebombs. When police do manage to clear the square it is quickly re-occupied. The protest has no intention of dissolving itself. The "marginal groups" in fact represent a wide spectrum of Turkish society, including many of its lawyers.

The protest has spread and has support in over 70 Turkish cities. Prime Minister Erdogan rails against the misfits who are contesting his rule, blaming them for spoiling the vision the world has of Turkey as a serene, well-managed, economically-fit democracy. But of course it is not the protesters who have besmirched Turkey's reputation on the international scene, but rather the decisions that the Prime Minister has made, in violently confronting the protesters who are, after all, only demonstrating their democratic rights of assembly and speech and protest.

Condemnation has been directed against this once-respected leader of a now-disrupted country, from its one-time allies; the United States, Canada, the European Union and elsewhere. The situation has got out of hand, and is deteriorating rapidly. Prime Minister Erdogan's true character is not one that many other democratic leaders admire. Where formerly they closed their eyes to the government's arrest of journalists, they have opened their eyes to the indelible vision of a country whose democratic underpinning has gone amok.


Police launch tear gas during an operation to evacuate the Taksim Square in Istanbul Tuesday, June 11, 2013. Thanassis Stavrakis / AP Photo

Under an Islamist government that has incrementally overturned all the social, political and religious conventions that the country has lived with since Kemal Ataturk separated Mosque and State.

Questionable Job Performance Evaluation

"Here we must ask, who handled this important abduction poorly? ... Does it come from the unilateral behaviour along the lines of our brother Abu Abbas, which produced a blatant inadequacy: Trading the weightiest case (Canadian diplomats!!) for the most meagre price (700,000 euros)!!
"Rather than walking alongside us in the plan we outlined, he managed the case as he liked."
North African Branch, al-Qaeda

"Your letter ... contained some amount of backbiting, name-calling and sneering," they write. "We refrained from wading into this battle in the past out of a hope that the crooked could be straightened by the easiest and softest means. ... But the wound continued to bleed, and in fact increasingly bled, until your last letter arrived, ending any hope of stanching the wound and healing it." 

My, such a querulous, dissatisfied, slandering note of grievance. What might have occasioned such bitterness? That the ransom of a United Nations Niger-employed diplomat of Canadian provenance was insufficient unto the purpose of releasing him back to his country of origin? Tut-tut, shouldn't have made the deal. Shouldn't have entrusted the making of the deal to their own version of a black sheep, someone who wasn't a team player, chafed at taking orders he had no wish to comply with.

So Robert Fowler and his colleague Louis Guay were freed from captivity, from the misery of their forced incarceration by a band of desert jihadists who pay for their operations, their costly purchases of arms, by such abductions and consequent ransoms. Abductions which the world deplores, and most particularly those countries whose nationals have been targeted, and for whom to gain release they pay through the nose.

Insisting vehemently all the while that they paid nothing; it was simply an act of altruism that somehow struck the abductors, feeling badly that they had discommoded those whose lives they made miserable, and simply released them out of the goodness of their shrivelled, black little hearts. Heaven knows, in all likelihood Canadians might have seen a better use of $1-million than to waste it on rescuing Robert Fowler from his misery.

Robert Fowler has often demonstrated his gratitude to the country and to the Conservative government, in power at the time and whose decision it must have been to bring him on home, by sharp criticism and ongoing blame for anything and everything that he doesn't, in his great, good wisdom, agree with. That, of course, is a story other than the one that has led al-Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb to have their 14-member Shura Council moan about being short-changed.

The voluminous letter setting out the Shura Council's disgust with the actions of Moktar Belmoktar, a petty-criminal-minded jihadist they were evidently incapable of controlling to their satisfaction, affirms that ransom payments derived from governments seeking to free their captured citizens are indeed used for the purchase of arms, enabling them to carry out attacks against the very governments that have awarded them the cash to begin with.

It's even likely that some of the arms dealers they do business with are ensconced in those very same European countries.

Life is complicated.

The leaders, in the letter, vent their outrage against Belmoktar who decided in high dudgeon to have no further truck with the group, in any event. And he set out to form his own terrorist group. With some spectacular results, since his was the jihadist group  - including two Canadian Muslims - that planned the largest hostage-taking yet, at the BP-operated In Amenas gas field in Algeria.
aired Al-Qaeda’s dirty linen in public, in online jihadist forums.

A still image broadcast by Algeria's Ennahar TV on January 19, 2013 shows hostages surrendering to Islamist gunmen who overtook a gas facility in Tiguentourine near In Amenas in the south of the country. (AFP Photo / Ennahar TV)

And just to prove that this was no one-off where he got lucky, planned and carried out simultaneous bombings in Niger last week, at a military base, and at a French uranium mine. Could be that al-Qaeda could use Belmoktar's expertise, after all. They might consider begging him to reconsider and return to the fold and use his bold sense of attack-and-atrocities to their further advantage.