A Bit More Detail

• blogTO notes that the Union-Pearson Express train line is going to be quite expensive, perhaps unworkably so.


• Centauri Dreams looks at the imminent flyby by Pluto of the New Horizons probe.


• Will Baird of The Dragon's Tales reacts with upset to the confirmation that the CIA engaged in torture.


• Geocurrents' Martin Lewis looks at the controversies surrounding performances of an Indonesian popular music genre, dangdut, which features sexualized female performers.


• Marginal Revolution talks about which economies around the world are the most undervalued. (Sri Lanka comes up.)


• The Planetary Society Blog's Emily Lakdawalla talks about China's plans for space, including a Mars mission.


• Spacing Toronto talks about the day in 1950 when the sun above Toronto turned blue.


• Bruce Sterling shares a Washington Post article noting how forests have regrown across Europe in the past century.


• Torontoist notes that the city of Toronto has sought to secure heritage status for El Mocambo.


• Towleroad observes that the Irish Catholic Church has severed its links to a Northern Irish adoption agency for being GLBT-inclusive.


• Window on Eurasia notes a Russian expert who says that Ukrainian decentralization will be impossible at present and suggests that a new Munich arrangement over Ukraine is unlikely owing to Western distrust.

By tradition, in Canada, when a Speaker is elected and first takes his throne, the prime minister and the opposition leader drag him to the throne while he pretends to struggle, a reminder that kings used to behead Speakers.

On Tuesday, Speaker Peter Milliken, like Lenthall before him, asserted the power of Parliament in the face of the power of the Crown, embodied by Prime Minister Stephen Harper.

Milliken ruled that the House, having voted, has the right to demand that MPs be allowed to look at secret documents relating to the treatment of Afghan detainees, although Harper and his ministers have refused to show them.

It is an assertion of the ancient privileges of Parliament, won at the cost of many heads.

"In a system of responsible government, the fundamental right of the House of Commons to hold the government to account for its actions is an indisputable privilege, and in fact an obligation," Milliken said.

"Embedded in our Constitution, parliamentary law and even our standing orders, it is the source of our parliamentary system from which other processes and principles necessarily flow."

The particulars of this showdown do not matter as much as the principle that was reasserted against the efforts of the Crown.

Opposition MPs had asked the government to compromise, to establish a security system so they could look at the information.

The government refused, citing national security, and hired retired Supreme Court judge Frank Iacobucci to decide which documents to release.

Milliken said, though, that this reasonable-sounding measure is flawed, because Iacobucci’s master would be the government, not Parliament.

• blogTO's Robin Sharp reports on the latest fears that the Annex, arguably the signature neighbourhood of Jane Jacobs' urbanism philosophy, is on the verge of changing hugely.


• James Bow thanks the opposition parties in the Canadian parliament for passing a resolution forcing the Conservative government to release documentation relevant to the torture of Canadian detainees.


• Daniel Drezner lets us know that North Korea's revaluation of its currency is producing measurable levels of popular unrest and fears this may help hardliners be all the more in control and remain aggressive internationally.


• English Eclectic's Paul Halsall thanks American conservative preacher Rick Warren for condemning Uganda's anti-gay law.


• At Gideon Rachman's blog, the Financial Times' Victor Mallet documents the latest tiresomeness of the Anglo-Spanish confrontations re: Gibraltar.


• Global Sociology notes that poor countries are great places to dump toxic waste.


• Douglas Muir at Halfway Down the Danube explores the machinations behind Congo's bizarre seafront and Angola's enclave of Cabinda.


• Marginal Revolution points out that, contrary to libertarian fantasies, the Confederate States of America was actually quite a strong state.


• Normblog's Norman Geras points out that using Saudi Arabia's low level of religious tolerance as a standard anywhere in the world is a Bad Thing.


• Noel Maurer follows up on Douglas Muir's post on Congo's weird maritime border by examining how that border created the oil-rich Angolan enclave of Cabinda, and documents Venezuela's now-finished oil-driven economic boom.


• Strange Maps documents another case of long-standing cultural differences driving politics, here dialectal differences mapping onto support for conservative and liberal parties in Denmark.


• At Understanding Society, Daniel Little examines how recent community surveys in southeastern Michigan document the recession's severe effects, and examines Arthur Koestler's fictional take on Bukharin.


• At the Volokh Conspiracy, Eugene Volokh reveals that even states which explicitly don't recognize same-sex marriage recognize the parenting rights of same-sex couples, split or otherwise, as per long-standing practice.

All detainees transferred by Canadians to Afghan prisons were likely tortured by Afghan officials and many of the prisoners were innocent, says a former senior diplomat with Canada's mission in Afghanistan.

Appearing before a House of Commons committee Wednesday, Richard Colvin blasted the detainees policies of Canada and compared them with the policies of the British and the Netherlands.

The detainees were captured by Canadian soldiers then handed over to the Afghan intelligence service, called the NDS.

Colvin said Canada was taking six times as many detainees as British troops and 20 times as many as the Dutch.

He said unlike the British and Dutch, Canada did not monitor their conditions; took days, weeks or months to notify the Red Cross; kept poor records; and to prevent scrutiny, the Canadian Forces leadership concealed this behind "walls of secrecy."

[. . .]

According to our information, the likelihood is that all the Afghans we handed over were tortured. For interrogators in Kandahar, it was a standard operating procedure," Colvin said.

He said the most common forms of torture were beatings, whipping with power cables, the use of electricity, knives, open flames and rape.

[. . .]

Colvin told the committee that the detainees were not "high-value targets" such as IED bomb makers, al-Qaeda terrorists or Taliban commanders.

"According to a very authoritative source, many of the Afghans we detained had no connection to insurgency whatsoever," he said. "From an intelligence point of view, they had little or no value."

Colvin said some may have been foot soldiers or day fighters but many were just local people at the wrong place at the wrong time.

"In other words, we detained and handed over for severe torture a lot of innocent people."

[. . .]

Colvin said when a new ambassador arrived in May, the paper trail on detainees was reduced and reports on detainees were at times "censored" with crucial information removed.

He said all of these steps were "extremely irregular."

At the time, the government denied there were any credible allegations of torture.

But Tories questioned the validity of Colvin's sources, saying the information he received concerning the allegations were from second-hand and third-hand reports.

Colvin's testimony "seemed dramatic, but under questioning it was revealed to be filmsy, inconsistent, unreliable," Laurie Hawn, parliamentary secretary to Defence Minister Peter MacKay told CBC News. "[He] did not come across as credible."

While he didn't doubt Colvin's sincerity, "every time something has happened in that mission, we have taken action," Hawn said. "And that's evidenced by the improvements in the prison, the training we've done, money we've invested, the visits we've had organized with the various authorities there."

• Acts of Minor Treason's Andrew Barton blogs about the need to remember history so as to war against the dying of the light.


• Alpha Sources' Claus Vistesen is wondering what the investment patterns of Japanese housewives indicate about the structure of the Japanese economy and the prospects for world economic recovery.


• blogTO reports that fiddleheads are now available to eat in Toronto. real fiddleheads, not the ones that I mistakenly identified on Prince Edward Island as a youth.


• Antonia Zerbisias at Broadsides points out that Mother's Day was proposed by a woman, Julia Ward Howe, who sought to make the holiday into a memorial by mothers to their sons killed in the Civil War and other conflicts. And yes, she also wrote the Battle Hymn of the Republic.)


• Far Outliers' Joel quotes Niall Ferguson on the origins of the Second World War, to the effect that Hitler's foreign policy was actually a radical reorientation of Germany's traditional foreign policy.


• t h e FORVM's M Aurelius makes the point, on Margaret Thatcher's 30th anniversary, that she would come across as a "Euro wimp," a member of the Democratic Party, even, to many Republicans today. (She believed in science! She allowed abortion rights! She didn't bomb targets on the Argentine mainland!)


• Lawyers, Guns and Money's Charli Carpenter makes the point that the question of whether or not torture is effective is beside the point.


• Marginal Revolution explores the reasons why Canada's financial sector didn't have a meltdown on the American model. Among other things, people can't walk away from their mortgages.


• pauldrye at Passing Strangeness examines the horse flu epidemic of the 1870s, with its implications for the economy, politics and war, and the emergent fields of microbiology and epidemiology.


• Noel Maurer takes on the concept of a resource curse.


• Space and Culture has a picture of oil sands scrapers on the move in northern Alberta.


• Spacing Toronto's posts a video depicting the Lower Donlands, now a relatively industrial and unattractive area, post-clean up and restoration, while Thomas Wicks blogs about the Iroquoian longhouse in Toronto.


• Torontoist's Kevin Plummer commemorates the 1934 visit of Canadian communist leader Tim Buck to Toronto.


• The Volokh Conspiracy's Ilya Sumin wonders when the United Federation of Planets became socialist. Yes, I know.


• Window on Eurasia suggests that interethnic marriages in the North Caucasus are becoming increasingly rare and wonders about this statistic's import on interethnic relations.