I ran across an article in The Ottawa Citizen (by way of MetaFilter) that lays down some serious smack against the US State Department, which recently released its annual report, “Patterns of Global Terrorism 2002“. A small remark in the report’s Western Hemisphere Overview brings up some concerns about Canadian policy being an impediment to terrorism investigation:
Some US law-enforcement officers have expressed concern that Canadian privacy laws, as well as funding levels for law enforcement, inhibit a fuller and more timely exchange of information and response to requests for assistance. Also, Canadian laws and regulations intended to protect Canadian citizens and landed immigrants from Government intrusion sometimes limit the depth of investigations.
Because of the bad light in which Jim Bronskill’s article paints the report, I was originally going to rant about the Bush administration and its pattern of poor diplomacy and the executive branch’s increasing desire to ignore Constitutional guarantees of civil liberties in its zeal to crack down on terrorists. While I still strongly believe both of these to be true, I’d rather rant about Bronskill’s explosion of a minor comment into some kind of mortal insult against Canada. I went to the State Department’s Web site and looked up the report for myself.
Re-read that one small excerpt from the report. Does that single paragraph, which is the only part of the report that criticizes Canada in any way, seem to warrant an article titled “U.S. says Canada cares too much about liberties”? The report says “some US law-enforcement officers” have concerns about Canada’s laws being an impediment to investigation of potential terrorists. This hardly sounds like the opinion of the whole executive branch, much less the entire nation.
Not only is this is one tiny paragraph a minor statement of concern, it’s not even a very large statement in the context of the report. The section on Canada in the Western Hemisphere Overview devotes more than nine times more text to praising Canadian cooperation with US anti-terrorism efforts than it does to this one small paragraph.
Bronskill has excerpted only the miniscule parts of the report that paint an ugly picture of State Department policy. To his partial credit, he does briefly mention toward the end of his article that the report includes “effusive praise for the federal government’s overall efforts to work with the U.S. in the fight against extremism”. Given the ratio of praise to criticism in the report, Bronskill’s focus on the negative is a pathetic attempt to twist the report into something far more sinister than it actually is.
I’ll be the first to argue that the United States government has been paranoid in the extreme since 9-11, and I fear the loss of liberties that kind of paranoia inspires. But we’ve got enough real civil liberties problems to worry about (Mike Hawash being foremost in my mind) without seeing bogeymen in relatively innocuous comments from the State Department.
