Source: Global Research and Corbett Report
James Corbett
TRANSCRIPT AND SOURCES:
James Corbett
TRANSCRIPT AND SOURCES:
Documents released under the Access to Information Act in Canada
earlier this month reveal what Canadian activists have long known: that a
massive RCMP-led intelligence dragnet worked for 18 months to infiltrate, surveil, and ultimately arrest activists across the country for their participation in Vancouver Olympic and Toronto G20 activism.
The operation involved the formation of a Joint Intelligence Group that the RCMP itself said in an internal document
was “likely the largest [such group] ever assembled in Canada.” And
after 18 months of operation, this dragnet–part of the one billion
dollars that the Canadian taxpayer was forced to pay out for security
operations around the G8 and G20 meetings in Toronto last year–resulted
in the arrest of just 17 people, with six of the accused pleading guilty
to charges of counseling mischief. 11 of the 17 have had their charges dropped altogether.
The documents reveal the organizational structure and the inner
workings of the intelligence task force, which employed over 500
federal, provincial and municipal police and began working as far back
as mid-2009, before the conference was even scheduled. An early threat assessment document
identifies the types of people police believed would be involved in
protesting the G20 summit, the annual meeting of political leaders from
the world’s top economies:
“The 2010 G8 Summit in Huntsville, as with most venues of this type,
will likely be subject to actions taken by criminal extremists motivated
by a variety of radical ideologies,” the report reads.
“These ideologies may include variants of anarchism,
anarcho-syndicalism, nihilism, socialism, and/or communism.[…]The
important commonality is that these ideologies[…]place these individuals
and/or organizations at odds with the status quo and the current
distribution of power in society.”
The report goes on to conclude that “criminal activity” is often
embraced by such groups, and that they pose “serious public safety
challenges.”
Other documents outline
the different types of undercover agents, event monitors and
surveillance teams deployed by the group, the covert operations
undertaken by these agents, and the organizational structure of the different groups involved.
Officers involved in the trial of the 17 people who were the ultimate
target of this vast intelligence operation testified that they had not
only infiltrated the group, but took part in and even encouraged acts of vandalism amongst the groups they had infiltrated.
These reports lends further credence to the idea that the iconic
burning of the police car, the most infamous scene from the Toronto
G20, was not an inexplicable failure of the $1 billion security
operation, but in fact itself a carefully choreographed event that
provided police forces with carte blanche to crack down on all protests
the next day:
The almost farcical nature of the case and what it has revealed about
the behind-the-scenes security precautions for the Toronto G20 belie
the very real abuses of civil rights that took place in the name of that
security, including numerous documented violations by police officials of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms:
Earlier this week I had the chance to talk to Dan Dicks, an independent journalist who documented many of these abuses in his film, Into The Fire, about what these recent documents reveal about the police state in Canada.
Indeed, the G20 violations were just the latest in an ongoing series
of scandals that have long tarnished the reputation of the RCMP and of
Canadian policing in general.
In 1977, the Trudeau government assembled a royal commission of inquiry
to investigate numerous cases of illegal conduct committed by the RCMP
in the 1970s. The commission, which released its final report in 1981,
concluded that the RCMP had repeatedly and flagrantly violated the law
in its pursuit of domestic intelligence missions, including breaking
into, stealing documents from and opening the mail of political parties,
burning down a barn in Quebec, forging documents and conducting illegal
surveillance.
As a result of the commission, the national security function was
removed from the mandate of the RCMP and assigned to a new civilian spy
agency, CSIS, which was formed in 1984 and immediately hit by scandal
when it failed to prevent the bombing of Air India Flight 182 despite
having a mole inside the group that committed the bombing. CSIS was later reprimanded for having destroyed its own wiretap evidence in the case.
In 2007, undercover Quebec provincial police infiltrated the peaceful
protests at the Montebello SPP Summit. The masked undercover officers
were spotted with rocks in their hand approaching the police line, but
when called out by one of the protesters, were then “arrested” by the
police and taken away. Within days, the government was forced to admit that the men had indeed been undercover police officers.
As more revelations continue to emerge from the scandalous security
operations at the Toronto G20, activists who have long warned of an
encroaching police state only continue to be proven correct. And as
political protest becomes more commonplace in the light of the
persistent crisis of the current global financial order, political
pundits of all stripes are bracing for more such abuses and violations
of the basic rights of Canadians.
Now as these documents shed even more light on a long history of
illegal conduct by Canadian police services, many Canadians are asking
whether the country has in fact become a police state.
