The Black Rod

Week 13 was unlucky for Canadian forces in Afghanistan. Eight Canadian soldiers were killed in two incidents, the country's worst single week of combat deaths in 50 years. But overall, enemy forces proved ineffective whenever they abandoned terror tactics and tried to tackle Afghan and coalition forces head on. Taliban fighters continued to press British forces in Helmand province. Six weeks of Operation Achilles has failed to drive insurgents out of the Sangin valley, although they are getting the worst of every encounter. The "new military" is in love with pamphlets. Prior to each stage of the British-led Operation Achilles, NATO aircraft dropped pamphlets warning Taliban fighters of the coming of coaliton and Afghan forces to their village. Needless to say, when British arrived, the insurgents had left, except for the odd die-hard jihadists who stayed to fight and die and collect their virgins in Muslim heaven. Now, those insurgents who left are coming back to lay s...

Another week, another leak, another link between the NDP and the Crocus Fund crash-and-burn. Or, if you're Gary Doer or Greg Selinger, another knot in the noose. We learned this week that the Crocus Fund had a back-door channel to the NDP to circumvent the oversight of the Department of Industry. And, as it turns out, the Auditor-general, too. Crocus wanted special dispensation to invest reserve funds in a technically invalid area, it went to the NDP's political people in government to smooth the way. This week's leak was a fax from the Crocus Fund to Eugene Kostyra, the secretary of the shadowy Community & Economic Development Committee of Cabinet, who sent the Crocus communique to David Woodbury at the Treasury Board. Both Kostyra and Woodbury were more than civil servants. They were high-level political functionaries of the NDP appointed to government jobs. Their first allegiance was to the Party. Then to Big Labour. And then the public. The Crocus Fund, in late Janu...

Tick Tick Ti....mes Up. Don't you just love the irony. The man accused of fatally shooting Phil Haiart in 2005 went on trial Tuesday, exactly 15 days after a man was murdered in cold blood in broad daylight on Magnus Avenue. On the fifteenth day after the death of Haiart, in a street gang crossfire, the Mayor and Chief of Police held a news conference on the street at Sargent and Langside to announce an unprecedented concentration of police resources to attack street crime in the West End, where Haiart met his demise. They had obviously practiced their Alpha-male posturing. "It is time to take back our streets" blustered Sam Katz. "We have the police force, and they have the intelligence on the criminals. The police know who they are, what they do and where they operate. We don't need an ivory tower policy discussion. We need to start cracking down, and this Operation is a major step in the right direction." "Public safety is our number one concern, an...

So who knew? British forces in Afghanistan fighting their way into the Taliban controlled town of Sangin called in an airstrike by Harrier jets using rockets made here in Winnipeg by Bristol Aerospace to destroy the main building in a compound where insurgents were gathering. Finally. The clouds have parted and we can see what's going on down below on the battlefields of Afghanistan. And what we see is that the British are bitchslapping the Taliban in Mullah Dadullah's backyard. The British-led Operation Achilles achieved a major goal this week with the rout of Taliban forces from Sangin and district. This clears another swatch of Helmand province and paves the way for what may be the most important reconstruction project in Afghanistan, the Kajaki Dam which promises to bring electricity to 2 million people. The taking of Sangin caps the month-old Operation Achilles which has been under a virtual news blackout since it started March 6. The details of the assault on Sangin, cod...

Tick. Tick. Tick. It's Day Ten. And Mayor Sam Katz's credibility is draining faster than the sand in an hourglass. It's been 10 days since a man was murdered in cold blood in broad daylight while sitting in his car on Magnus Avenue. Ten days ago The Black Rod's clock of credibility began counting down the hours until the mayor announced a concerted plan to attack the crime and social disorder on Magnus Avenue. There had to be a plan, surely. The Mayor didn't hesitate when Phil Haiart, the son of a well-heeled family from south Winnipeg, was fatally wounded on Maryland Avenue when he wandered into a shootout between two street gangs. Katz cobbled together a special unit of 40 police officers to patrol the immediate area of the shooting, to target gang members and gang houses and drug dealers and street prostitution. He called a news conference 15 days after Haiarts's death to trumpet his new crime-fighting credentials. Within a couple of weeks the residents of ...

This is new. The NDP of Manitoba are running scared. On Tuesday they defiantly threw down their opening card in the next provincial election. A deuce. An "attack ad" that was so bad it deserves to be filed under J for Jump The Shark. It turns out the NDP's election plan is to attack --- Gary Filmon, a man who left politics almost SEVEN YEARS AGO. And why not? What else do they have? Their record? The Crocus Scandal The latest leaks of internal government documents prove that the Premier, the Finance Minister and, hell, the entire NDP cabinet knew, beginning in the year 2000, that unsuspecting investors were being enticed to put their pension savings in the Crocus Fund which was so broke it was being run as a Ponzi scheme, with the money from new investors going to pay off old investors. The NDP kept changing laws to disguise the precarious financial position of Crocus, which still had enough money to make a political donation to the NDP. For four years thousands more peop...

Woof. Woof. It's a sure bet that when a movie sits on the shelf for two years after its been shot it's a dog. Think Big White. Think direct-to-video. Think about 300---the 300 extras in the Winnipeg scenes of the Brad Pitt movie THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD. They thought they had a piece of the big time when they filmed their scenes way, way back in 2005, only to see the release of the movie delayed once, delayed twice, and delayed to some time in the future. Well, we've got news for you Extras. Put the champagne on ice. An apparently re-cut version or versions of the movie are being test screened across the U.S. and the reactions are spectacular. There's more buzz for "Jesse James" than all the skeeters in The Peg put together. Ain't It Cool News www.aintitcool.com/ has heard the buzz and is saying "it sounds like people are really flipping for what they're seeing. I've been hearing fantastic buzz abou...

Iran's seizure of British sailors is commanding the world's attention but the story that British soldiers are fighting Iranians in Afghanistan has gone virtually unmentioned. The information appeared in the earliest story about Operation Achilles, the British-led offensive to clear a portion of Helmand province of Taliban fighters. The operation, now in its fourth week, involves 4500 Brit troops and about 1000 Afghan soldiers. The Telegraph, March 8, 2007 Operation Achilles: Taliban launch attack in Sangin British troops fight Taliban for key town By Tom Coghlan in Kabul British soldiers fought a fierce battle with hundreds of Taliban fighters yesterday as a flashpoint town in southern Afghanistan erupted in violence. *snip* Many of those fighting the British were believed to be foreigners. "There are some very strange people," said one local by telephone. "They cannot speak Pashtu [the local language], they are speaking Dari instead. They are clean-shaven and we...