The North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) and the Russian Federation Air Force conducted a cooperative air defense exercise from August 8-11 that focused on combating terrorism.

OVER ALASKA - A pair of F-22 fighters escort Fencing 1220, a Gulfstream 4 simulating a hijacked airliner, over Alaska as part of Exercise VIGILANT EAGLE Aug. 8. VIGILANT EAGLE is a cooperative exercise involving the North American Aerospace Defense Command and the Russian Air Force. The exercise scenario creates a situation that requires both the Russian Air Force and NORAD to launch or divert fighter aircraft to investigate and follow a "hijacked" airliner. The exercise focuses on shadowing and the cooperative hand-off of the monitored aircraft between fighters of the participating nations. (U.S. Army photo by Maj. Mike Humphreys)

Vigilant Eagle was hailed as a milestone exercise between the Cold War era rivals. It included Russian, U.S., along with Canadian Air Force personnel operating from command centers inside Russia and the United States directing fighter jets, as well as civilian air traffic controllers. It took several years to stage the drill which centered around, “an international air terrorism scenario exercised over the Pacific Ocean consisting of forces from the U.S. and Russia responding to the simulated hijacking of a B-757 en route to the Far East.” The joint exercise was, “designed to establish clear communication processes that would allow the two forces to work together during a real crisis.” Russian Air Force Col. Alexander Vasilyev emphasized the importance of cooperation in combating the dangers of air terrorism. He stated, “Terrorism is something that affects all our countries. So it is very important that we work together to develop procedures and bring the relationship between our countries closer together to unite our countries in the fight against terrorism.”

In April, it was announced that, “NATO and Russia have begun a testing phase of a joint system for air traffic coordination. This will be the first NATO-Russia system of this kind to be fielded. The system focuses primarily on the fight against terrorism and will provide a shared radar picture of air traffic and early notification of suspicious air activities.” The report entitled the Moscow Metro Bombings and Terrorism in Russia also addresses the possibility of developing further practical NATO-Russia cooperation in regards to terrorism. President Barack Obama has called for Russia and the U.S. to further deepen collaboration on security and anti-terrorism matters. In May, the Associated Press reported that, “Obama told a Russian television station that no single country can defeat terrorists who have attacked targets throughout the world. He said he looks forward to ‘increasing cooperation between the United States and Russia’ on fighting terrorism.” Despite any past or present tension between the two countries, the seemingly endless shadowy war on terrorism has provided a common enemy and demonstrated how the global conflict can at times make strange bedfellows.

The recent NORAD-Russian air drill was preceded by an incident where Canadian fighter jets repelled two long-range Russian bombers off the coast of Labrador near the Arctic. Russia contends the flight was simply a training mission and deny trying to enter Canadian airspace. They maintain that the Canadian military was aware of the exercise contrary to Defence minister Peter MacKay who insists that they were not notified. NORAD fighters have intercepted between 12 and 18 bombers annually since 2007. In advance of President Obama’s visit to Canada back in February of 2009, Canadian fighter jets were scrambled to head off Russian bombers approaching its airspace. Prime Minster Stephen Harper promised that Canada would defend its airspace and sovereignty by responding every time the Russians make any kind of intrusion into its Arctic territory. At times, Canada and Russia have both been guilty of a war of words in regards to Arctic sovereignty. The latest so-called Russian bomber incursion appears to be nothing more than an attempt by the Conservative government to capitalize on the event to further its political interests.

The Harper government is using the most recent confrontation between Canadian and Russian military planes to justify its plans to buy 65 new jet fighters and draw attention to its stance on Arctic sovereignty. In July, the Canadian government announced plans to acquire the Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II which will replace its fleet of CF-18 Hornets. The first F-35’s are expected to be delivered by 2016. Including maintenance of the fighter jets, the total price tag is expected to cost Canadian taxpayers over $16 billion. The government insists they are getting the best aircraft for the best value. Some have questioned the purchase considering Canada is running its largest deficit in history. The Liberal party has been critical of the deal and its lack of transparency. Not to mention that one of Canada’s biggest military acquisitions was done without a single competing bid. The Conservatives argue that they exercised options and that the F-35 was the only next-generation fighter plane that meets the operational requirements of the Canadian Forces. They continue to defend their decision making a case that the new jets are part of its obligation to its allies and will protect Canada’s sovereignty well into the future.

Controversy has surrounded Canadian Defence Department computers being used to alter online Wikipedia entries. This includes the removal of some information which was critical of the Harper government’s decision to spend billions on the new F-35 stealth jet. The New Democrats are demanding answers. NDP MP Claude Gravelle stated, “At worst this type of manipulative behaviour is indicative of the government’s culture of information control.” He went on to say, “Even if this apparent misuse of resources is the work of a lone DND staffer ‘freelancing,’ it raises questions about oversight in that department.” Defence Department computers were also used to insert insults on Wikipedia aimed at the Liberals who have questioned the jet aircraft purchase. Gravelle also added, “Some of the comments posted regarding Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff and the media were particularly worrisome. We do not expect to see this type of big brother behaviour in Canada. Unfortunately Canadians are starting to see a pattern in the desire to control the message.” This illustrates how web based institutions such as Wikipedia can act as gatekeepers and be used to spread propaganda in an effort to guide public perception.

It is expected that the Commons Standing Committee on Defence will hold hearings near the end of August on the Conservative’s proposed purchase of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. The Liberals remain critical of the plan and have said that if they form the next government, they would put the contract on hold until further review. In the end, they would approve it. The truth is that on most major issues there is hardly a difference between the Liberals and Conservatives and they differ on rhetoric alone. Even the Globe and Mail had a recent headline Tories and Grits are as one on defence policy. Both parties have advanced North American integration through NAFTA, the Security and Prosperity Partnership and other initiatives. They have also supported Canada’s mission in Afghanistan which is slated to end in 2011, but could be extended. In the coming years, Canada could be asked to play a bigger role in the war on terrorism, including participation in future American and NATO military operations. Many would like to see a return to its more traditional role as a peacekeeping nation, one which has garnered praise from the rest of the world.

Whether or not the majority of Canadians support the government’s decision to purchase the new F-35 jets, it does represent a continued commitment to NATO and NORAD. It is also closely tied to deeper U.S.-Canada military integration and a North American security perimeter.
By Dana Gabriel  – Be Your Own Leader
Dana Gabriel is an activist and independent researcher. He writes about trade, globalization, sovereignty, as well as other issues. Contact: beyourownleader@hotmail.com. Visit his blog site at beyourownleader.blogspot.com

TORONTO — A government changes a law to allow police to arrest people without probable cause. It does so without any legislative debate. Then it keeps the change a virtual secret, until someone is arrested under those new powers.

Dave Vasey stands outside the Eastern Ave. detention centre after being arrested and placed in a metal cage under the new G20 law giving police greater powers. (June 24, 2010)

The Soviet Union circa 1950? Nope. Try Canada, June 2010.

Civil liberties advocates and political activists are up in arms after it emerged Friday that police in Toronto have been given special powers to arrest anyone near the site of the G20 summit if they fail to identify themselves.

What’s more, the government of the province of Ontario, which green-lit the new powers, didn’t tell anyone about it until after someone was arrested under the new powers.

Thirty-one-year-old Dave Vasey was arrested near the G20 perimeter security fence in downtown Toronto Thursday afternoon after refusing to identify himself to a police officer.

“The officer told me, ‘I am going to have to place you under arrest if you don’t show your identification,’ and I replied ‘I’m not comfortable with that,’” Vasey said, as quoted at the Toronto Star.

With Vasey’s arrest, it emerged that Ontario secretly changed its Public Works Protection Act to allow police officers unprecedented powers of arrest. That law allowed police to arrest people if they fail to identify themselves to a police officer when inside a government building or near a “public works” project. It has now been expanded to include the area around the G20 summit, meaning a significant portion of downtown Toronto.

The Toronto Star reports:

The regulation kicked in Monday and will expire June 28, the day after the summit ends. While the new regulation appeared without notice on the province’s e-Laws online database last week, it won’t be officially published in The Ontario Gazette until July 3 — one week after the regulation expires.

According to the new regulation, “guards” appointed under the act can arrest anyone who, in specific areas, comes within five metres of the security zone.

Within those areas, police can demand identification from anyone coming within five metres of the fence perimeter and search them. If they refuse, they face arrest. Anyone convicted under the regulation could also face up to two months in jail or a $500 maximum fine.

Toronto Chief of Police Bill Blair, who reportedly requested the arrest powers, denied Friday that it had been done in secret.

“We haven’t changed the rules,” he said, as quoted at the National Post. “We have put up a fence. We have told people very very clearly that we will not be allowing the public access into that area. … Our authority comes primarily comes from common law, but also by the regulation that has been passed by the province of Ontario.”

But the assertion that the change wasn’t secret was immediately challenged by reporters covering the G20 summit.

“Funny,” writes Adam Radwanski at the Globe and Mail, “I asked two different spokespeople for the integrated G20 police unit — at least one of whom was from the Toronto force — about the legal justification for the measures being taken around the perimeter. Neither breathed a word about anything about the Public Works Protection Act, let alone any recent cabinet decisions that affected it.”

“It’s just unbelievable you would have this kind of abuse of power where the cabinet can create this offense without having it debated in the legislature,” Vasey’s lawyer, Howard Morton, told the Star.

Activist groups say that keeping the new police powers a secret means they have been giving G20 protesters inaccurate advice about how to deal with police confrontations. Vasey himself refused to show identification to police because he was following the advice laid out by the Toronto Community Mobilization Network, which is organizing some G20 protest activities.

“This act values public property over the freedom of people and prevents community members from walking freely through the streets without questioning from authorities,” the group said on its Web site Friday. “We will not be made examples of, but rather, we will publicly denounce oppressive activities of the state and highlight the solidarity in our communities.”

Vasey is scheduled to appear in court on July 28.

Canadian fighter jets have escorted a Cathay Pacific airliner to land at Vancouver airport after receiving an alert of a bomb threat, officials said.

The Vancouver-bound flight, which originated from Hong Kong, landed safely and was towed to a secure part of the airport.

Canadian police told the BBC the plane had been screened and no explosives were found.

The police spokeswoman said the bomb threat had been received by telephone.

The passengers, all unharmed, were taken off the plane, while police investigated the alert.

The two CF-18 jets were scrambled after the threat was received.

The jets, acting under the orders of the North American Aerospace Defence Command (Norad), took off from a base at Comox, on nearby Vancouver Island and returned after flight CX 839 had landed.

“As a precaution, Norad fighters escorted the aircraft until it landed safely in Vancouver,” said Maj Holly Apostoliuk.

One of the disembarked passengers told Canada’s CTV News that he had not noticed the jet escort.

Another man said: “They told us there was some sort of terrorist problem and the baggage would be held up.”

[BBC]

The federal Justice Department is considering a new law to randomly force drivers to take roadside breath tests, regardless of whether police suspect they have been drinking, Canwest News Service has learned.

Random breath testing, if adopted, would replace Canada’s 40-year-old legislation on impaired driving, which dictates that police can only administer breathalyzer tests if they have a reasonable suspicion of drunk driving.

Justice Minister Rob Nicholson publicly raised the prospect of random testing recently at the annual gathering of Mothers Against Drunk Driving.

“He has his justice officials putting together the legal parameters,” said MADD chief executive officer Andrew Murie.

Nicholson, when asked by Canwest News Service whether he is considering a new law on random testing, said: “We are looking at all options in that regard.”

But he would not elaborate, saying that he currently has a packed slate of anti-crime legislation that is winding its way through Parliament.

“I try not to ever announce anything or get ahead of myself,” he said.

The House of Commons justice committee recommended in June that Canada follow in the footsteps of several other countries that have adopted random breath testing. Nicholson must publicly respond to the all-party report by Oct. 19.

Justice Department officials have been seriously considering the pros and cons of revamping the Criminal Code.

The debate centres around whether random testing, while it has proven internationally to be the most effective deterrent that exists to curtail drunk driving, would be a justifiable violation of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantee against unreasonable search and seizure.

MADD says that action is needed because progress in nabbing drunk drivers has stalled in the past decade, largely because the remaining culprits are a hardcore group that was never persuaded to drive sober.

Also, research shows that even when impaired drivers are stopped at sobriety checkpoints, most go undetected so they are never tested, MADD says.

Police are even more likely to miss experienced drinkers, because they exhibit fewer signs of intoxication.

The Traffic Injury Research Foundation reports that in 2006, 907 Canadians were killed in traffic accidents involving a driver who had earlier been drinking.

The justice committee, in its recent report, concluded the “current methods of enforcing the law lead police officers to apprehend only a small percentage of impaired drivers, even at roadside traffic stops.”

The report noted an Australian study showed a 36% decrease in the number of people killed in drunk-driving accidents after several states adopted random testing. An Irish study reported a 23 per cent drop in traffic deaths after Ireland passed a similar law in 2006.

The committee report says that random testing could be legally challenged as an unreasonable search and seizure, but that the courts could uphold the law under a charter section that preserves otherwise unconstitutional legislation if it is shown to be a “reasonable and demonstrably justified” infringement.

The report points out that the Supreme Court of Canada has already said that “there is no question that reducing the carnage caused by impaired driving continues to be a compelling and worthwhile government objective.”

MADD, in a background paper, said that most European countries and Australian states, as well as New Zealand, have adopted such laws, beginning with the Scandinavian countries more than 30 years ago.

“While random breath testing will be challenged under the charter, this should not deter Parliament from introducing a measure that has dramatically reduced alcohol-related crash deaths around the world and can do the same in Canada,” says the paper.

About 50 feet before a car from Canada reaches the border inspection booth, the screenings begin.

A camera snaps your license plate.

An electronic card reader mounted on a yellow post scans your car for the presence of any radio-frequency ID cards inside. If there is an enhanced driver’s license embedded with biometric information, its unique PIN number is read without you offering it.

The Customs and Border Protection computer connects with your province’s database and in less than a second – .56 to be exact – your personal information is uploaded to a screen in the booth. A second camera snaps the driver’s face.

Welcome to the United States of America.

If Canadians were under the impression that the Canada-loving U.S. President Barack Obama would heed pleas to loosen border controls to ease trade and traffic, there should no longer be any confusion. He has not.

Beginning June 1, you’d better have that passport ready. Or if you have an enhanced driver’s licence from British Columbia, Manitoba or Quebec, make sure it’s in your wallet, ready to show. (Ontario is now processing applications for the cards.)

Some Canadian MPs, border state lawmakers and Detroit-Windsor area businesses expect the worst when the new controls kick in.

“Either it’s going to cause a massive backup, or it’s going to cause a dramatic decrease in travellers across the border, or it’s going to cause both,” says Melissa Roy of the Detroit Regional Chamber, the largest chamber of commerce organization in the U.S. “It’s an absolute nightmare.”

Obama’s top officials – Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton – signed off long ago on the June 1 deadline for the infamous Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative. That’s the George W. Bush-era policy that Congress pushed through under the 9/11 intelligence reform bill, which requires every person entering the United States by air, sea or land to carry a passport or U.S. government-approved secure identity document.

Napolitano says Canadians had better get used to it. “The future is that there will be a real border,” she told a trade group last month.

This is what that border already looks like:

A post-mounted scanner screens your vehicle for radioactive material that could be used to build a “dirty bomb” – a probe so sensitive it will detect if you’ve recently had a medical test that used isotopes.

As you pull up to the booth, a computer monitor may be filling with information about you, even before the guard asks, “Where are you coming from? What’s your citizenship? Where are you headed? Why?”

If a border lookout, arrest warrant or criminal record pops up on the guard’s screen, or if something doesn’t quite add up – maybe you’re sweating bullets on a cold day – expect to get hauled over for a secondary inspection.

The port of entry at the Ambassador Bridge in Detroit – the busiest commercial land crossing in North America, through which a quarter of all Canada-U.S. trade passes – has strict controls, as does the Detroit-Windsor tunnel.

Border agents, packing pepper spray, collapsible batons and 9-mm automatic pistols, are the first point of contact for people and cargo alike. Sometimes their supervisors order vehicle sweeps at random. Then for 30 minutes, agents will pop every trunk, just for a look-see.

Down below the 80-year-old bridge, dozens of long-haul transport trailers are queued up to go through the same checks, and possibly pass through a giant gamma-ray screening facility that peers inside suspicious 18-wheelers.

Between the legal crossing points, all along the Canada-U.S. border, there’s a new reality.

While the U.S. is not constructing an 1,100-kilometre fence between itself and Canada, as it is doing along its southern border with Mexico, the makings of a virtual fence are in place along what was once known as the world’s longest undefended border.

High in the sky over North Dakota, an unmanned Predator drone is on patrol, equipped with an infrared security camera that looks forward 16 miles.

The drone is not authorized to fly in Canadian airspace, but it can peer across into Manitoba. Another one is to be stationed near Detroit next year to scan the Michigan-Ontario boundary.

More daytime and nighttime infrared camera, radar surveillance towers and remote motion sensors are being erected across the northern U.S. border with Canada.

And there are more boots on the ground than ever. Before 9/11, the U.S. had 340 Border Patrol agents along its Canadian border. By next year, there will be more than 2,000.

The Detroit–Port Huron–Sault Ste. Marie regional border patrol operation boasts a fleet of prop planes, small helicopters, a bigger Black Hawk helicopter, speedboats, Coast Guard vessels, even a small Cessna Citation jet.

In Windsor, it makes MPs like the NDP’s Brian Masse nervous about “the militarization of the border.”

He points to the helicopters and drones, and Canada’s willingness to accept U.S. Coast Guard training exercises on the Great Lakes, where boats are equipped with machine guns that fire more than 600 bullets a minute.

It’s all “really changed the nature of the border itself,” Masse says.

Edward Alden, a Canadian journalist and senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, wrote The Closing of the American Border, which documented the toll of overzealous border policies on the U.S. economy.

He argues “the biggest mistake of the post-9/11 period” was the decision to blur the lines between the fight against terrorism and the fight against illegal immigration.

Alden does not see any evidence of change under Obama. Democrats don’t want to be seen as soft on homeland security, and have been “hawkish since Day One.” But they also are under pressure by a strong Hispanic voting bloc to treat the southern and northern border with what Napolitano calls “parity.”

Chief Ron Smith, public affairs liaison for Customs and Border Protection in Detroit, concedes that when it comes to the northern border, “A lot of people overstate the security threat. If somebody’s trying to sneak into the United States along the northern border, it doesn’t mean they are a terrorist. We get people trying to sneak across the northern border for the same reasons people try to sneak across the southern border.”