Power Trip

In “Canada Needs a Foreign Spy Agency,” Wesley Wark cautions us that when we imagine foreign intelligence agents, we shouldn’t picture Jason Bourne or James Bond. I concur, but we need not look so far from home for inspiration for what Wark has in mind. Some of the cruelest, most scientifically useless forms of abuse perpetrated under MKUltra occurred on Canadian soil. At McGill University, agents drugged civilians with hallucinogenic and narcotic drugs in the pursuit of novel forms of torture and interrogation. Maybe, instead, we should take as our example the Central Intelligence Agency agents (both named and anonymous) who abetted in the murder of Patrice Lumumba, former prime minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, in 1961. Or the Canadian assets who have played roles in right-wing coups in countries like Guatemala, Bolivia, and Iran. Wark seems content to perpetuate the fantasy that spycraft is, as Rudyard Kipling’s spy novel Kim once put it, a “great game.” If it is a game, it is only because it’s played with other people’s lives and other nations’ democratically elected governments. Perhaps we’ll need a Canadian Henry Kissinger next.

Tom Thor Buchanan Toronto, ON

A Legacy of Shame

In her piece on Guantanamo Bay, “Where Cruelty Is the Point” (July/August), Michelle Shephard captures the feel of the naval base. I, too, travelled back and forth between Joint Base Andrews and Guantanamo, as lead defence counsel for Mohammed Nazir Bin Lep, one of the Southeast Asian detainees in the military commissions. It was a four-year legal odyssey for me and our defence team. Nazir was tortured for three years and then warehoused without trial for two decades. It was his torture, and that of all the other detainees in the charged cases, that was correctly named by John Baker, former chief defence counsel in the commissions, as Guantanamo’s “original sin.” There is no getting around that brute fact, as hard as the United States government has tried, and still tries, to evade and excuse it. While I am deeply proud of the work our team did, as we stood against this human rights obscenity, when I think of that period, the dominant emotion I feel is sadness. It’s sad to know that state-sponsored torture is forever part of our national legacy. As Shephard observed, terms like “enhanced interrogation techniques” and “reservations” are not just “dizzying” but outright misleading. Such cynical wordplay has done the heavy lifting for authoritarian regimes throughout human history. Part of the point of propaganda is to make it seem like everything is normal. In the military commissions, nothing is normal but abnormality itself. We desperately need a truth and reconciliation commission on torture. And that’s sad too: knowing we may never find the courage to honestly face what we have done, or to demand accountability for it.

Brian Bouffard Fort Worth, TX

Beyond the Grave

From the age of eighteen to twenty-four, I worked in cemeteries restoring historic gravestones. I’m pretty sure it will go down as the best job I ever had. Ellen Himelfarb’s “The Dearly Departed Are Getting Creative with Death” highlights the growing scarcity of available plots in old urban cemeteries, in part due to expanding cities and the paucity of land. The reason I loved working in those cemeteries so much is because of how beautiful they are. Most are lined with trees older than the inhabitants of the soil. They are dotted with headstones and flat markers made of materials from all over the world (and the odd early twentieth-century zinc marker). These are public spaces. Quiet, well shaded, good benches, old stones. They’re mature parks. It would be a shame to let the city sprawl swallow these spaces that haven’t changed much since their advent. Build more cities, build more cemeteries.

Kipp Macdonald Hamilton, ON

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