MILNEWS.ca News Highlights – 17 May 11

• “The military is still investigating the cause of a helicopter crash in southern Afghanistan early Monday morning. “The accident occurred when the aircraft was trying to land and is not due to enemy action,” Capt. Mark Peebles told QMI Agency. Reports suggest bad flying conditions may have contributed to the crash. Four Canadian soldiers were injured when the Chinook Ch-47 helicopter made a hard landing in a riverbed and then rolled a little after midnight local time. Their injuries are not considered life-threatening. The crash happened during a nighttime operation in the Panjwaii district in southern Afghanistan ….”  More from CTV.ca here and the National Post here.
• “Chaos and confusion erupted amid the wreckage of a Canadian Forces helicopter in the moments after it crash-landed in southern Afghanistan early Monday morning, injuring four soldiers, a reporter on the chopper recounted. “It happened very, very, very quickly,” said Colin Perkel, a Canadian Press journalist covering Canada’s military deployment to Afghanistan. “There was almost no time to even think, ‘Oh my God, what is going on?’ “The whole scene was completely chaotic. All the folk on the left side of the chopper had basically just come flying through the air with their rifles and their backpacks and kits and radios and everything else, had just come flying through and landed on the people who were on my side. And things were very, very confused.” One soldier suffered serious injuries when the Chinook helicopter crashed in a remote part of Panjwaii district ….”
• Taliban Propaganda Watch:  Taliban claims responsibility for shooting down Canadian-flown chopper, alleging all aboard killed or wounded.
• Libya Mission (1):  “Mulling an extended mandate for Canadian Forces in the Libyan war zone will be a top priority issue for the new crop of MPs. Parliament is set to begin June 2 — just two weeks before the current mission is scheduled to end on June 16. NDP MP and foreign affairs critic Paul Dewar said the Official Opposition is not opposed to a possible extension beyond the three-month mandate, but he wants a more defined role and greater emphasis on diplomatic and humanitarian objectives. “I’m not suggesting that we’d say no, but it would have to be something we would look at and want it to be a role for Canada to play,” he told iPolitics. “We’re all concerned about mission creep.” ….”
• Libya Mission (2):  Dummies + Explosives + Inflatable boats = Libyan IEDs  “NATO said its warships found explosives and mannequins on a small boat off the Libyan port of Misrata on Monday, in what they believe was a plan by Muammar Gaddafi’s forces to lure ships and destroy them. A NATO statement said the boat was abandoned when NATO forces approached to check two rigid-hull inflatable boats (RHIB) heading toward the rebel-held port. The other craft escaped at high speed. “An explosive ordnance disposal team from an allied warship was deployed to inspect the abandoned RHIB and discovered a large quantity of explosives (approximately one tonne) and two human mannequins,” the statement said. “It looks like they were there to look like people and draw ships in and the explosives could be detonated,” a NATO official said. A NATO ship destroyed the boat with gunfire, and the explosion could be seen 12 nautical miles away, the official said ….”
• CFB Kingston commander off to Africa.  “Rick Fawcett is trading Kingston for Kinshasa. The commander of CFB Kingston is set to leave next month for the Democratic Republic of the Congo, to take a posting with a United Nations peacekeeping force. Fawcett, 50, has been commander of CFB Kingston for two years and said that time has been a learning experience. “It’s been fast,” he said Monday morning. “It’s certainly not what I expected. I thought I knew what I was getting myself into.” ….”
• F-35 Tug o’ War:  “American defense commentators don’t have a monopoly on arguing over the future of the F-35 Lightning II — it’s just as divisive, if not more so, among our friends to the north in Canada. In fact, if anything, the F-35 is a bigger deal for Canadians, garnering a level of national discussion that defense issues almost never get in the States ….”
• “The United States is finally scrapping a controversial rule that prompted many Canadian defence contractors to keep employees born in China and two dozen other high-risk countries away from U.S. weapons work. The so-called International Trade in Arms Regulations, or ITARs, created a minefield of human rights violations and costly red tape for Canadian and other foreign companies ….”
• What’s Canada Buying?  Wanted:  150,000 rounds blank .303 ammunition (via Milnet.ca).
• “The terrorism trial of a Pakistani-Canadian is underway in Chicago amid widespread speculation it could tie Pakistan’s shadowy intelligence agency to the 2008 Mumbai massacre. The case against Tahawwur Hussain Rana, a 50-year-old Chicago businessman who maintained a family home in Kanata, has the potential to shatter any remaining trust between the United States and Pakistan, as U.S. officials demand to know whether elements of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) spy agency harboured Osama bin Laden for nearly a decade. “This is going to be yet another brick in this very large wall of suspicion that we have about Pakistan,” Khalil Marrar, a political-science professor at Chicago’s DePaul University, told Agence France-Presse ….”  A bit more here.
• “A P.E.I. man who was a spy in World War Two has died at the age of 91. Clifton Stewart was recruited by the British for his radio operating skills. He was one of several hundred allied troops trained at a special covert facility in southern Ontario called Camp X. Stewart talked to CBC News about some of that training for a documentary in 2009. “It took quite a bit of training not to jump at a gunshot. We were lined up in groups and the instructor would take a Colt 45, which is a big bullet, and shoot a live round between the rows, as those would go by two people’s ears,” said Stewart. “It kept a lot of us alive. As they told us, they might not be shooting at you. As it turned out, in my case, it was always true. They weren’t shooting at me, they were shooting at somebody else.” ….”  More here.