For your information, please inform to all your friends what can you suffer in the border.

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Canada’s Olympic Crackdown

Dec 1, 2009

By Amy Goodman, host of Democracy Now!

Going to Canada? You may be detained at the border and interrogated. I was, last week. I was heading from Seattle to give a talk at the Vancouver Public Library. My detention provoked outrage across Canada, making national news. It has serious implications for the freedom of the press in North America.

I drove to the border with two colleagues. We showed our passports to the Canadian guard and answered standard questions about our purpose for entering Canada. No visas are necessary for U.S. citizens to enter.

The guard promptly told us to pull over, leave the car and enter the border crossing building.

What followed was a flagrant violation of freedom of the press and freedom of speech. A guard first demanded the notes for my talk. I was shocked. I explained that I speak extemporaneously. He would not back off. He demanded notes. I went out to the car and brought in a copy of my new book, a collection of my weekly columns called “Breaking the Sound Barrier.” I handed him a copy and said I start with the last column in it.

“I begin each talk with the story of Tommy Douglas,” I explained, “the late premier of Saskatchewan, father of Canada’s universal health care system.” Considered the greatest Canadian, Douglas happens to be actor Kiefer Sutherland’s grandfather, but I didn’t get that far.

“What else?” the armed guard demanded as we stood in the Douglas border facility.

“I’ll be talking about global warming and the Copenhagen climate summit.”

“What else?”

“I’ll address the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

“What else?” The interrogator was hand-writing notes, while another guard was typing at a computer terminal.

“Well, that’s about it.”

He looked at me skeptically. “Are you going to talk about the Olympics?” he asked.

I was puzzled. “Do you mean how President Obama recently traveled to Copenhagen to lobby for the Olympic Games to be held in Chicago?”

He shot back, “You didn’t get those. I am talking about the Vancouver 2010 Olympics.” Again, stunned, I said I wasn’t planning to.

The guard looked incredulous. “Are you telling me you aren’t going to be talking about the Olympics?” I repeatedly asserted that I was not.

Clearly not believing me, the guard and others combed through our car.

When I went out to check, he was on my colleague’s computer, poring through it.

Afterward, they pulled me in a back room and took my photo, then called in the others, one by one. Then they handed us back our passports with “control documents” stapled inside. The forms said we had to leave Canada within two days and had to check in with their border agency upon leaving. We went to the car—and discovered that they had rifled through our belongings and our papers and had gone into at least two of our three laptops. We raced to the event, where people had been told about our detention. We were 90 minutes late, but the room remained packed, the crowd incensed at their government.

It was then that I started learning about what was going on. The crackdown is widespread, it turns out. David Eby, executive director of the B.C. Civil Liberties Association, told me, “We have a billion dollars being spent on security here; protesters and activists have been identified as the No. 1 security threat to the Olympic Games ... we have new city bylaws that restrict the content of people’s signs.” According to critics, the police can raid your home if you place an anti-Olympic sign in your window. There are concerns that homeless people may be swept from Vancouver, about how much public funding the Games are receiving while vital social services are financially starved. Anti-Olympic activists—and their family and friends—are being followed, detained and questioned.

Our detention and interrogation were not only a violation of freedom of the press but also a violation of the public’s right to know. Because if journalists feel there are things they can’t report on, that they’ll be detained, that they’ll be arrested or interrogated; this is a threat to the free flow of information. And that’s the public’s loss, an Olympic loss for democracy.

Denis Moynihan contributed research to this column.

Amy Goodman is the host of “Democracy Now!,” a daily international TV/radio news hour airing on more than 800 stations in North America. She is the author of “Breaking the Sound Barrier,” recently released in paperback and now a New York Times bestseller.

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Sask. couple caught in Mexican shootout

A Saskatchewan couple got caught up in a hail of bullets during a trip to Mexico
recently — but they say they'll go back. Dec, 2009

Ron and Carol Watson, who are from Avonlea, about 80 kilometres southwest of Regina, are spending the winter in Texas. They had gone across the border with Mexico for a day trip on Saturday.

They were in the neighbourhood of Nuevo Progreso, a popular tourist destination, when a firefight broke out on the main street, reportedly between the Mexican army and members of a drug cartel.

"I thought it was firecrackers," Ron Watson said. "Then people started to scatter and soldiers started coming up the street behind us. They were dressed in camouflage. Their guns were ready."

After a brief delay, everybody started running for cover, he said.

"I went through a door and into a different restaurant than where my wife was and got on the floor," he said.

Soldiers appeared 'out of nowhere' Neither Ron nor Carol Watson was injured and they emerged from the restaurant a minute or two later when the gunfire died down.

"I knew there was something going on in a store across the street and up a few doors," he said.
"They carried a man, who was shot, out of there — there were two Mexicans carrying him. And out of nowhere, some soldiers materialized, and made them put him down. And they trained their weapons on him and were asking questions. They were wanting to know whether he was a bad guy, I assume. "

The Watsons are back in Texas. Mexican officials have said little about the incident, although there have been media reports that two people were killed.

Despite their close encounter with gunfire, Ron and Carol Watson say they will go back to Mexico another time.