Posted on 10/07/2007 1:40:58 PM PDT by lowbridge
Remember all those dirty hippies who threatened to move to Canada if Bush was re-elected? Guess what, Canada doesn't want them either....
Peace activists Medea Benjamin and Ann Wright have been arrested in the U.S. while protesting the Iraq war, but they never dreamed that would prevent them from entering Canada.
The arrests landed Benjamin's and Wright's names in an FBI-run database, the National Crime Information Center, which Canada also relies on to screen visitors. When the two women visited the country in August, they were told they would have to apply for "criminal rehabilitation" and pay $200 if they wanted to visit again. Neither did.
On Wednesday, Benjamin, co-founder of the anti-war group Code Pink, and Wright, a retired Army colonel, walked into Canada at Niagara Falls to test whether they really would be denied entry because of their anti-war-related arrests.
They were.
Now, Benjamin and Wright are asking why the names of people arrested during peaceful protests would be included in an FBI-maintained database meant to track fugitives, potential terrorists, missing persons and violent felons.
Good on you, Canada.
A ping t’ ye.
My guess is that Canada prefers people that bathe occasionally.
Stupid cows - if you get arrested for *anything*, including littering or disturbing the peace, you go in the NCIC.
ROTFLMAO! This made my day.
We can clap now and be all excited, but in next 4 years when hillb wins, we can all be arrested as well and put on the no fly register.
Hint, speaking out against illegal immigration may put you in the clink.
With Hillary Clinton as President we will get more Ann Wrights in the military.
******
ANN WRIGHT: Well, they said, yes, in order to ever be eligible to go to Canada, we would have to fill out a criminal rehabilitation packet, eighteen pages worth of all of your history. We also can’t have an arrest within five years of submitting that package. So, for Medea and myself and many other peace activists who consider civil disobedience as a part of a technique to bring light to what’s going on, particularly on ending this war in Iraq, we can never be criminally rehabilitated, nor do we want to be, from standing up for truth and justice and stopping an illegal war on Iraq.
AMY GOODMAN: So, Ann, you were turned back at the border. You go back to Washington, D.C. You meet with Canadian officials at the embassy. What did they tell you?
ANN WRIGHT: Well, they told us that any time that the FBI puts people on this NCIC list, they just accept it at face value, that they don’t really investigate things. And we kept saying, “Well, you ought to, because a lot of these things appear to be going onto this list because of political intimidation,” because, indeed, the list itself for the database says that people like foreign fugitives, people on the ten most-wanted list or 100 most-wanted list, people that are part of violent gangs and terrorist organizations, are supposed to go on that NCIC list. It didn’t seem like that we were a part of — we haven’t done anything to be on the list.
And since this thing is just now — we are the first ones that we know of that have been formally stopped from going into Canada. In fact, it happened to me in August, when I went up to Canada to participate in the Security and Prosperity Partnership. I had to buy my way in, $200 for a three-day temporary resident permit. “If I’m so dangerous, why would they even give me that permit?” I asked the immigration officer in the Canadian embassy.
ANN WRIGHT: Well, they don’t consider my background at all, that I have had extensive experience, that the reason that I feel it is very important for me to be protesting is that I do bring both the military and a diplomatic background to my concerns about what’s going on in Iraq and potentially in Iran and certainly in Afghanistan, where I did serve in December of 2001. They don’t — although I would say that the immigration officer at the Canadian embassy found it very interesting that I had had all of this experience, but as he said, “It really doesn’t matter to us what your background is. As long as you arrive on that database, we really don’t question it.”
But what we’re asking the — we’re asking Canadian members of parliament to question whether or not their government should be — pardon me — just following wholesale anything the US government tells them to do. In fact, we have a letter from Olivia Chow, one of the members of Congress, that says in Canada, peaceful activity — “peaceful protest is not criminal activity, despite how some US agencies may regard it. In the future, I trust that people like Ms. Wright and Ms. Benjamin will be welcomed into Canada based on appropriate standards decided by the Canadian government and not by any other foreign body.”
And I think the Canadians are absolutely right. I think the Bush administration is really pushing down the throats of a lot of countries methods to control dissent here in the United States of America, and those countries ought to say to the Bush administration, “Stop this. We can determine who ought to be coming into our country and who should not, and not based on what you think they are doing in your country.”
AMY GOODMAN: Dana Perino, White House press secretary, being grilled by the press. Retired Army Colonel Ann Wright, you have protested torture; your response?
ANN WRIGHT: Well, I think Dana Perino needs to have a little counseling on how you answer these questions. What she has done is created a lot more people who hate America. I mean, this whole issue that we are still debating or that the administration is still doing secret memos that show that we indeed are torturing people, I mean, that’s creating more people that hate America. The attacks that possibly could come on America would happen exactly because of what the Bush administration is doing.
Torture techniques don’t get you any more information; it just gets you bad information. I’m very concerned that the CIA still has this authority to do those types of techniques that are truly torture. Our military has been told not to do them, but many times the military and CIA are together in same areas, and our military will start seeing that they’ll start doing the same old thing they were doing in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. So Dana Perino has — continues to muddy the waters about torture. We should be saying we don’t torture, and we should not be torturing. It is just creating more enemies for the United States, that we don’t need to be doing this sort of thing.
AMY GOODMAN: Finally, Ann Wright, this weekend is the anniversary of the US bombing of Afghanistan. You went to Afghanistan voluntarily to reopen the mission, as you were working for the State Department. What are your thoughts today?
ANN WRIGHT: Well, here it is almost six years later, and I would say that we — probably a better response would have not been the military response. A beefed up, strong, very strong international law response probably would have had more results on going after al-Qaeda than what six years of, in many ways, a limited military response has done. I think the Bush administration has been — what has happened in Afghanistan has really sunk the country into a big morass that’s getting deeper and deeper now. The potential for real help to the people of Afghanistan — I think the window of opportunity is closing tragically very fast.
Canada’s laws are a tad different than ours. Most folks don’t know that if you have a misdemeanor DUI on your record in the States, Canada can and will keep you out. Up there, it’s a felony.
Well, I don’t think Wright has enough sentences beginning with “Well”. Doesn’t show a lot of intellect. But we know that from her actions and statements.
Very True...
Try living here in Alaska and get through Canada to go down to the lower 48 if you have any type of conviction...Pure hell..
I think you answered your own question, gals.
Now that's nice. So, they mooch off the U.S. yet again.
Maybe I'm just jaded, but it seems to me that Canada's little act here is mostly just their usual anti-American gig.
Anyone can get into Canada by simply speaking the magic words, "I'm a refugee". It's a well known thing. It's the reason Toronto is the new "multicultural" center of the planet. We don't really believe that there are databases in Gaza that let you know that Mohammed Al-Jihad has a few minor shopping center blasts in his past, do we?
No. We don't. The only people with that kind of record keeping on them are the people in Communist countries, and of course, here in good ol' America, Land of The Free.
Where anyone's credit history, identity, car registration, mortgage remaining, first grade spelling bee results, and marital indiscretion history is readily available...online.
To anyone who pays $15 bucks.
So I'm sure lotsa people here see this as funny, but....methinks its just the Canadians having a little fun at the expense of the Americans as usual. They love to screw with us, as I have unfortunately learned having lived with them (one was an illegal alien in the U.S.! She hated America and Americans, and that was decades ago), worked with them, and had the misfortune to visit there thinking it was a hospitable place.
It's not. They hate us.
Umm, excuse me, but I have to take their side here. An arrest is nothing more than an allegation. If there is no conviction, it means nothing other than a cop decided to detain you.
Or do you believe that the police should be judge and jury?
Many people here on this forum have been hassled and even arrested demonstrating against gun laws, illegal immigration, tax laws, you name it. In many cases just because the police are in government employee unions and they themselves are Leftists, acting on orders of their union.
Why should there be a "record" of their arrest? If they were arrested but not charged, why were they arrested? So that the police union could smear them? Intimidate them?
What goes around comes around. Like the other poster said, wait till the Witch is in power, and get back to us on your rights under her.
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