Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Canadian Political Free-for-All -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ichy Smith who wrote (10692)	10/4/2006 10:42:22 PM
From: DeplorableIrredeemableRedneck	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 37540

Over $100,000,000.00 spent on the investigation and court costs and thiss arsehole claims RACISM because they were not offered "grief counselling". That card has been played Ad nauseam. YAWN Question of racism raised at Air India inquiry 04/10/2006 3:09:25 PM The head of the Air India Inquiry is raising the question of whether racism may have played a role in public and government reaction to the 1985 bombing that took 329 lives. news.sympatico.msn.ctv.ca CTV.ca News Staff Former Supreme Court justice John Major, head of the Air India Inquiry, listens to testimony at the inquiry in Ottawa, Wednesday, Oct.4, 2006.(CP / Fred Chartrand) "That is the fact that, if it had been an Air Canada plane and Anglo Saxons, things would have been different," said former Supreme Court judge John Major on Wednesday. Major made his comments during an exchange with Bob Rae, whose recommendations and meetings with family members of Air India victims led to the full-scale inquiry. Major said it's "hard not to share' an impression held by some of the victims' families, who accused the federal government on Monday of ignoring them for more than 20 years. 'Why was there no grief counselling offered to the families for Canada's largest mass murder?" Deepak Khandelwal, who was a teenager when he lost both his sisters, said at the inquiry. 'I unfortunately deeply believe that racism was a significant driver in how the families have been treated in the past 21 years," Khandelwal added. Rae said he found no evidence of racism among government officials, police and intelligence officers during his investigation. But he said he did notice certain "culturally driven" issues. For example, he said it often took weeks to translate wiretap surveillance tapes of the bombing suspects from Punjabi into English. Rae, a former Ontario premier and now a Liberal leadership candidate, said there simply weren't enough people capable of doing the job. He compared the situation to when U.S. authorities didn't have enough Arabic-speakers to handle surveillance prior to the 9/11 attacks. "That's not racism," said Rae. "But it certainly leads to ineffective surveillance. It means that you can't really understand what's going on on a snap basis." Only one man has ever been convicted for the Air India attack and crash that killed 329 people, and which has long been blamed on a small group of Sikh separatists in B.C. Another suspect was shot dead in India in 1992, while two more were acquitted last year in a trial in Vancouver. The inquiry holds no power to revisit past court cases or to hold anyone criminally responsible. Instead, it is concentrating on broader issues of anti-terrorist policy still relevant in the post-9/11 world. Rae recommended last year that the government hold a "focused, policy-based inquiry," and said in his report that Canadians deserve to know more about how authorities assessed the terror threat and handled their investigation of the crime. As first witness to testify Wednesday, Rae said the bomb should never have slipped past airport security. "And secondly, the bag should never have gone through a screening system without being detected in Toronto. . . . It's one of those tragic situations where everything that could have gone wrong did go wrong and the consequences were simply disastrous for the people who were on board that flight.' Rae found a number of major gaps within the system that lead to the tragedy -- most notably the lack of communication between CSIS and the RCMP. Rae stressed that changes must happen today in order to prevent more loss of life. With files from The Canadian Press