Canadians vs Schrieber & Mulroney or War on Iran: Things are Not what they Seem

by Hal. C. Sisson, QC

	Brian Mulroney, Former Prime Minister of Canada.

For your information I’d like to ask you a question? Are things more like they used to be then than they are now? Or is it just that things are more like they are now than they ever were before. For example:

The scene is a French railway car. Seated in one of the train’s compartments are four people: a young girl, an old lady, Karlheinz Schrieber and Brian Mulroney. The train enters a tunnel, a loud kiss is heard, then a resounding slap. When the train emerges into the light again all is silent, only Karlheinz has a black eye.

The old lady thinks, “How virtuous of her, what a good example she sets for other girls.”

The young girl thinks, “That’s funny, why on earth should that German fellow Karlheinz kiss the old lady instead of me?” v Karlhienz thinks, “That Canadian Mulroney is no fool. He steals a kiss and I get hit.”

Brian Mulroney thinks, “ I’m a clever fellow, I kiss the back of my hand, hit Karlheinz and no one suspects me!”

During sworn testimony in a 1996 defamation suit against Ottawa, as to whether he knew Karlheinz Schrieber, Brian Mulroney more or less said, ‘Karlheinz? Karlheinz who?’ According to Brian at the time, Karl apparently was only a casual acquaintance with whom Brian had partaken of coffee, on maybe two occasions. Did he not know that Schrieber was the guy who secured his leadership at the Progressive Conservative Convention, who paid to fly Mulroney delgates in from Quebec to help Brian stab Joe Clarke in the back.. Brian also forgot to mention under oath that he and Schrieber had met in three different hotel rooms and upon each occasion Brian had been the recipient of $100,000.00 in cash; and that later he had flown to Paris for one afternoon to have a $2000 lunch with Karl in a rented hotel suite, in an effort to persuade his friend to forget that those transactions had ever taken place. Brian’s reasoning is that they never asked me about something they never knew about so I didn’t bother to mention it.

Now, is failing to tell the truth under oath perjury? Put another way, does a bear defecate in the woods? The layman would think the same answer applies to both questions, but the Canadian Department of Justice must think that things are never what they seem to be, and so far they have taken the attitude that there must be some other logical explanation. The story presented by Mulroney that he made a simple error in judgement in accepting those three cash payments from Schrieber in three different hotel rooms in three different locations, does not merely strain credibility, it is simply not credible. He had to have done something to earn that kind of money, there has to be a credible quid pro quo involved somewhere in transactions of that nature. Brian failed to prove he did anything for Karlheinz after he got the money so it is simple logic that he must have done something before.

An illustrative story comes to mind, a story of things that only seem to be:

This little kid’s mother had baked his father’s favourite pie, strawbapple, and she was going to serve this delicious dessert for his supper. She said to her six year old son as she placed the pie on the kitchen counter to cool, “I’ve got to go out for a few minutes, Ralphie, now don’t you dare touch that pie.” No sooner had she left the house than Ralphie, of course, was into the pie, devouring a huge slice. He hears his mother returning. What to do? He has to think fast. Grabbing the house cat he rubbed its face in the pie and left the cat on the counter.

The mother was furious with the cat and told the father all about it when he showed up at supper time. The father, in a rage, grabbed the cat and a shotgun and went out into the yard. A shotgun blast was heard -- Bang!

Little Ralphie said, “Poor kitty, another victim of circumstantial evidence!”

The law abounds in such examples. “Your Honour,” said the lawyer, “I submit that my client did not break into the house at all. He found the dining room window open, inserted his right arm, and removed a few trifling articles. Now my client’s arm is not himself, and I fail to se how you can punish him for an offence committed by only one of his limbs.”

“Your argument,” answered the judge, “is very well put. Following it logically I sentence the prisoner’s arm to one year’s imprisonment. He can accompany it or not, just as he chooses.”

Whereupon the accused calmly removed his artificial arm and walked out of the courtroom.

Will Byron do likewise? The German government wants Canada to deport Karlheinz Schrieber. Many Canadians think Mulroney should go with him. Only time and politics will tell, and Jonah is proof that you can’t keep a good man down….

But je digress. I started out to deal with serious political matters but seem to have gotten sidetracked into more humourous aspects of the same theme. A joke is a brief single incident stripped of all non-essential details. It begins with a situation, has no middle, and ends with a surprising or unexpected outcome. A joke is not what it starts out to seem. The opening is generally descriptive, the ending spoken. The humour lies in the relation of the two parts, the situation preparing the listener to expect something and the punchline reversing what is anticipated. If either part is too brief, the effect is spoiled by ambiguity. If either is too rambling or extended, the surprise element is weakened.

I took a stroll through the Ross Bay cemetery in Victoria recently. Came across a man crying his eyes out beside a grave while repeatedly mumbling, “Oh why did he have to die? Why did he have to die?” The headstone indicated a male deceased. I couldn’t help commiserate and remarked, “You must have lost a very dear friend indeed.”

“No,” the man tearfully replied, “I didn’t know him at all.”

“Then why this great display of grief?” I couldn’t help but ask.

“He was my wife’s first husband,” he replied.

Another instance of things not being what they seem on the surface.

This article should really take a more serious turn and relate more important examples of non sempa ca sunt quae videntur -- things are not always what they seem.

For instance, was the American destroyer Maddox attacked twice by three North Vietnamese torpedo boats in the1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident as related by President Lyndon Johnson in order to start the Vietnam war? Or should we have known he was lying because his lips were moving? Turns out after nine years of devastating war that the latter was the case and over fifty thousand Yanks died as a result, let alone the million or so Vietnamese. We have already seen that scenario repeated regarding wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, with talk of Iran being next in line for a shellacking and destabilization. The excuse of the-idiots-chief is always that ‘since 9/11’ America has to take these pre-emptive strike military actions - ‘we’ve got 4000 nuclear weapons and you might get one, so we have no alternative but to wipe out your terrorist country. Even the controlled demolition of 9/11 on the World Trade Center looks like an excuse for the Forever "War on Terror".

You have all heard of the Omaha-based U.S. Strategic Command (StratCom). Is StratCom what it seems? Is it merely a military command headquarters that is in charge of our protection - or is it the most dangerous place on the face of the earth?

Tim Rinne of Nebraskans for Peace thinks the latter to be the case - ‘Tapped in the aftermath of 9/11 to wage the Bush/Cheney Administration’s “War on Terror”, StratCom today has a mission array that stretches from directing a dreaded air-and-sea-based attack on Iran to the outright domination of space by the Pentagon. Stratcom is still performing its historic role as the command center of the U.S.’s nuclear arsenal. But under the White House’s new “Doctrine of Preemption”, the Omaha headquarters is now authorized to offensively attack any place on the planet within one hour -- with either conventional or nuclear weapons -- if a threat to America’s national interests is simply suspected.’

I guess what I’m trying to say is that maybe most things are never what they used to seem to be.

About the writer:

Hal Sisson, Q.C., R.C.A.F. armourer in World War II, is a reformed lawyer who practiced law in Peace River, Alberta for thirty-five years and has been resident in Victoria, B.C. since 1985. Author of ten published books including the best selling Coots, Codgers and Curmudgeons (with his partner Justice Dwayne Rowe); and his latest Modus Operandi 9/11 that exposes the White House lies about 9/11, the machinations of the New World Order and the "War on Terror", and does so featuring salty humour in the form of a novel. International croquet and marble player and collector, his major hobby was stand-up comedy and writing and performing in Western Canada's longest running (25 years) burlesque revue, Sorry 'Bout That. LINK.

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