Edney, Dennis - short clip - CanadianSupremeCourtsBraveDecision
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Transcript
Transcripts may contain inaccuracies.
- | What I did was I, | 0:00 |
quite naively thought, | 0:05 | |
I'd just communicate with my government | 0:06 | |
and see how they can help me. | 0:09 | |
So I started this pen-pal relationship | 0:13 | |
with the Canadian government. | 0:15 | |
And after a while, | 0:18 | |
my writing hand became quite sore | 0:19 | |
because the number of letters that I wrote | 0:23 | |
and the very few responses I received, | 0:26 | |
this was the liberal government at the time, | 0:30 | |
became frustrating. | 0:33 | |
Like all governments, | 0:35 | |
and the liberal government had come into power | 0:37 | |
saying that we're going to be transparent and open | 0:42 | |
with its citizens. | 0:45 | |
And so relying upon that, | 0:47 | |
I thought they would be transparent and open. | 0:48 | |
but every time under the Freedom of Information Act | 0:51 | |
that I wrote a letter, | 0:54 | |
it was denied. | 0:55 | |
And when I pushed it further, | 0:57 | |
I was challenged by claims of privilege | 0:59 | |
without any sort of expansion | 1:04 | |
on what particular privilege you're claiming. | 1:06 | |
I recall thinking, | 1:10 | |
what do I do? | 1:14 | |
Cause I don't recall ever making | 1:16 | |
a Freedom of Information application | 1:18 | |
up until I became involved with Omar Katter. | 1:19 | |
And so like an ordinary citizen, | 1:23 | |
what I could do is | 1:24 | |
believe that my government was making a decision | 1:25 | |
in the best interest of the Canadian people, | 1:28 | |
by telling me I just can't get that information, | 1:31 | |
cause they know better. | 1:34 | |
Or I could look at an amount of refusals | 1:36 | |
with very little information about why I'm being refused. | 1:40 | |
I look at the quality of the questions I was asking, | 1:44 | |
which wasn't asking for national security disclosure. | 1:48 | |
So I then chose to spend my own money | 1:52 | |
to challenge that. | 1:55 | |
And so I challenged for information about Omar Katter | 1:57 | |
in the hands of the Americans | 2:03 | |
and that challenge took five years. | 2:05 | |
It went up to the Supreme Court of Canada. | 2:09 | |
The Supreme Court of Canada said | 2:12 | |
that all Canada had been doing the last month, | 2:14 | |
the last five years and refusing to provide disclosure | 2:17 | |
was to cover up this egregious misconduct in Guantanamo Bay. | 2:20 | |
The Supreme Court found that the United States | 2:26 | |
had breached the Geneva Conventions. | 2:30 | |
The convention on the international torture | 2:34 | |
and that Canada have been complicit in that torture. | 2:38 | |
A brave decision by the Supreme Court. | 2:42 | |
The only advanced court | 2:44 | |
that challenged the U.S. administration | 2:47 | |
on Guantanamo Bay. | 2:51 |
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