"Forces' terror manual lists natives with Hezbollah"

That is today's most prominent front page headline at the Globe and Mail. The editorial staff are stepping up their relentless campaign to vilify the Canadian Forces.

Radical natives are listed in the Canadian army's counterinsurgency manual as a potential military opponent, lumping aboriginals in with the Tamil Tigers, Hezbollah and the Islamic Jihad.

The military is putting the finishing touches on the manual, but a draft version of the document obtained by The Globe and Mail outlines a host of measures the military might use to fight insurgents at home and abroad. The measures include ambushes, deception and killing.

The draft manual was produced in September, 2005, and recently released through an access-to-information request. A final edited version of the army manual is expected to be complete within months, but a cover letter states that the draft version was immediately circulated in 2005 to army units for military training.

Its inclusion of "radical Native American Organizations" as a potential target of military action surfaces at a time of heightened tensions between aboriginals and the federal government.

"The rise of radical Native American organizations, such as the Mohawk Warrior Society, can be viewed as insurgencies with specific and limited aims," the manual states. "Although they do not seek complete control of the federal government, they do seek particular political concessions in their relationship with national governments and control (either overt or covert) of political affairs at a local/reserve ('First Nation') level, through the threat of, or use of, violence," the manual states...

Stewart Phillip, the Grand Chief of the Union of British Columbia Indian Chiefs who recently predicted "a summer of aboriginal protest" in response to the perceived lack of action on native poverty in the federal budget, said he is "absolutely outraged" by the manual.

"It's a complete attack on our political rights," he said...

The most recent protest by natives led to arrests and charges yesterday for three men connected to the blockade of Quebec's Highway 117 on March 12 and 13.

The highway is the Abitibi region's main link to the south, and the blockade caused major concern for the residents of Val-d'Or and Rouyn-Noranda.

Among those arrested was Guillaume Carle, the controversial leader of the recently formed Confederation of Aboriginal People of Canada. Mr. Carle led the protest of about 50 people, many of whom were carrying rifles [emphasis added].

The headline is purposely misleading. It's a (draft) counterinsurgency manual, not a counterterrorism manual. It does not "list natives with Hezbollah"--nor, contrary to the first paragraph, is there any "lumping" with the Tamil Tigers or the (Palestinian?) Islamic Jihad. The draft makes very clear the limited nature of native aims and that any possible violence is almost certain to be much different in scale and nature from those of the terrorist groups the Globe highlights. The mere fact that all are mentioned in the same manual is no reason for saying it equates them, which is what the Globe, shamefully, has done.

The story also does not mention a rather important fact; the CF are only used in "Aid to the Civil Power" under the National Defence Act (as in the case of the natives at Oka in 1990), at the request of the civilian authorities. Should the CF not develop doctrine for that contingency?

What malicious, gutter, yellow "journalism". Hurl.

Topic thread at Army.ca on this is here.

Update: I omitted to mention this classic Globe front pager:

'The Canadians try to kill everybody'

The Canadian Forces certainly are a scary bunch, in immediate need of being reined in before they go totally berserk. That's what the Globe's Editor-in-Chief would seem to wish us to think.

Upperdate: The Globe reports the facts--but at the bottom of p.4, and the headline calls the counterinsurgency manual a "terror report". Good grief.

References to radical natives in the Canadian army's counterinsurgency manual will not appear in the final version of the document, Defence Minister Gordon O'Connor has announced...