The Bridge with Peter Mansbridge - Assassinations and Atrocities - The Dark Side of War

Episode Date: September 19, 2023

Two new investigations, one by journalists and the other by the UN, tell an ugly story.  Brian Stewart joins us to carefully go through two stories we don't hear much about but are very real.  One engineered by Ukraine, the other by Russia. Plus some opening comments about the Canada/India story.

And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here. You are just moments away from the latest episode of The Bridge, The Dark Side of War. Two new investigations are giving us a real sense of that in the conflict in Ukraine. And hello there, Peter Mansbridge here in Toronto for this day and for this episode, the Tuesday episode of The Bridge. Brian Stewart will be joining us in just a couple of moments time to go through what I was teasing in a way, a little earlier, and that is a couple of new investigations into the conflict in Ukraine that give us a sense of some of the, well, the dark side of what happens in a war like this. But first, a couple of comments about yesterday, after weeks, if not months, of preparation, waiting for the House of Commons to come back, for Parliament to come back, for Parliament to come back, to see the battle between the two major contenders,

Pierre Palliev from the Conservative Party having a great summer and terrific polling results, and the Prime Minister in battle somewhat in terms of what he's gone through over a summer and difficult issues confronting the country from housing to inflation, food prices, the forest fires in many parts of Canada and the flooding in different parts of Canada. So there was much expectation watching what would happen in the House of Commons.

And as so often happens, you're kind of let down when you watch it. You know, I watched it for a while, question period, the major moment of any day. And there was Pierre Poliev. He certainly got the evidence to go with in terms of his questioning. He looked, I'll give him this, he doesn't need notes. He does not need notes. He just goes for it.

But yesterday, at least, unlike some of the other times I've watched him, he looked like he'd rehearsed every one of his questions in front of a mirror or something before giving them. Nevertheless, they were pointed questions of the prime minister. The prime minister, on the other hand, he was reading his answers, which, I don't know, seems unusual for him. I've watched him over the years, and I didn't see him referring to notes all the time, but he certainly was yesterday.

And at times had to kind of rely on some of his ministers to take the questions and to answer them in a challenging way to the leader of the opposition. But nevertheless, you know, if you were expecting, man, I'm buying a ticket to that one, I'm going to watch the fireworks, you were probably disappointed. But the issues are there, they're clearly there watch the fireworks, you were probably disappointed. But the issues are there. They're clearly there on the table, and the differences between the parties are there too.

And even through the kind of staged event, you can get a sense of where we're heading towards the debate between these two parties, and with the NDP as well, especially on their main issue for them, which is demanding a reduction in prices from the major grocery firms. But that was yesterday. We'll see how things develop through the week here in terms of what happens in question period.

Those are my initial thoughts, having watched what I watched. All right. As all of you know, almost since the beginning of the conflict in Ukraine a year ago, February, Brian Stewart has been with us to give his take on a pretty regular basis, almost weekly except for the summers, on how he sees things unfolding. Well, he's got with him this week a couple of investigative reports, one by a journalistic organization and one by the United Nations. And they are, well, to some are going to find this very disturbing, both of them. So why don't we get right at it and bring in our friend,

foreign correspondent, war correspondent, guy who spent his life covering conflicts like this, Brian Stewart. Here we go. All right, Brian, there's always a dark side to war, to any conflict, and sometimes we find out about the dark side and other times we don't but we are starting to find out thanks to the investigative work by the economist magazine

of a couple of things here but let's start off from what the ukrainians are up to in terms of targeted executions better explain that to us okay, we kind of knew from the beginning of the war that the Ukrainians would be going into partisan activities in Russia and those Ukraine territories held by Russia. But what wasn't known is that they have actually had going since 2015 when Russia first seized Crimea, a targeted major program of assassinations. That's killing of Ukrainian major collaborators with the Russians, and of Russians not only now in occupied Ukraine, but deep inside Russia itself. They have been going after those who they want to remind them, if you hurt Ukraine, you are going to be in trouble.

They have killed scores, apparently, of Russians and Ukrainian collaborators. And they have put out the word. It's a very clear word that they're getting out that, if I who betrays, shoots at Ukrainians or fires missiles on Ukrainians should understand that they are being watched and will be brought to justice. And these killings apparently have been approved right up at the top of Zelensky's office. And officials are blunt in saying that we needed the way to bring the war home to them. They want collaborators and they want Russian officers and those who fire deadly missiles into Ukraine to be looking over their shoulders, even when they go home on leave, even when they're out in a park jogging. They could be bumped off, and a few have been. They've been wiping out three major collaborator Ukrainian officers with the Russians that were blown up in succession. A Russian, this is an example of what they could do. who fired missiles into Ukraine and killed 32 Ukrainian civilians, was shot dead in a park while jogging in his hometown deep inside Russia.

So these are attacks going on. Every now and then you suddenly might hear about a mysterious explosion that occurred in Moscow or Moscow suburbs, or a factory that goes out in flames at night when there are no workers there. And the Ukrainians usually say in their broadcast, the Russians continue to smoke very badly. Dangerous smoking on Russian behalf is causing all these fires and accidents. But in actual fact, a lot of these are targeted assassinations. They're called, I hate to use the grim word but

it's called wet work by the spies who are involved in that that's the kill for revenge to intimidate and to get that message home that you cannot cause the pain you're causing to ukraine without paying a very high price you know what this sounds uh remarkably similar to, especially if you're one who has studied the 72 Olympics and the terrible situation that happened there with the killing of the Israeli athletes by Palestinian terrorists. ended that situation. The Israeli government approved targeted executions of all the different people that they could isolate who were responsible for that terrorist action. And they did. I mean, there have been books written about it. There have been movies written about it or produced about it. But this sounds in many ways very similar to what the Israelis were doing. It's very similar, and in some respects, modeled closely on it. There's an irony of history that one of the men who set up Mossad was actually born in Ukraine.

And a couple of, obviously, Ukrainian Jews who immigrated to Israel ended up working for Mossad as well. So, yes, they've certainly looked at that. And I think it's a message that really gets out to everybody watching this conflict that Ukraine will fight back with whatever means it can get at its disposal. If it has to go that kind of route and seek out Russians inside Russia to bring this message home, that's what it's going to do. It's not going to just sit back and take the blows and the endless attacks by air and rockets and missiles and the rest of it. away. And there are some concerns in the West, I should say, that it's gone from being a strategic arm of war to something that's getting much more messy. Are oddball spies doing this on their own? Is there enough oversight of this happening? So it's something that I know the Americans are watching very closely and the British as well, because they don't want to see this get out of hand.

The one thing I should say, and I think this probably would cover the Mossad as well, back in the 72 period, is that there have been strict orders from Zelensky's office that in these attacks there should be no civilian collateral damage. They don't want civilians killed who are not the actual targets. Unfortunately, one of those attacks that was aimed at a Russian nationalist a year ago inside Russia, extreme nationalist warlock, Dugin, I think his name was called, they tried to blow him up, and by mistake, they blew up another car,

which his daughter was riding. So there's always a risk of an aerial accident and innocent people getting hurt. So, you know, this is causing some unease, obviously, in the West. How far could this go? Who, you know, as you said, the killings are basically approved at the highest level, perhaps Zelensky himself, certainly in his office. But who, who carries them out? I assume these aren't just like the regular units. There must be a special unit or special units.

Yes, apparently there are three units, each very competitive, by the way, and each are carrying the boat. Some want to do more. There's, first of all, the domestic security agency, the SBU, which has a fifth counterintelligence directorate. And that's gone very early on into what are called the wet work assassinations. Then there's the military intelligence main directorate, HUR. I'm not sure how that is pronounced in Ukrainian, but it's HUR. And third is a newcomer, one of those we mentioned when we discussed early guerrilla and partisan attacks inside the occupied zone,

the SSO, which is the Ukrainian Special Operations Forces. And they've been very active inside the occupied zones and apparently are pushing now to get more leeway to be able to go into Russia itself after targets. So it's a competitive zone. It always amazes me that organizations like this can find the kind of people who want men and women who are ready to go into this kind of incredibly dangerous work and traumatic work, to say the least. But they seem to have no problem, the Ukrainians, finding lots of recruits who speak perfect Russian and can pass it.

Russian citizens working deep inside Russia. And that really must start to alarm a lot of people who are inside the bunker protection of the Kremlin and other places. That, you know, when you go for your drive and drive home to work for the night, you start having to look over your shoulder. That is part of the wear and tear of being in a war. It's part of the psychological tearing, for instance, that goes on that might help make the Russians weary of this war sooner rather than it would ordinarily. I think this is the same reason why Ukrainians are using now more and more drone attacks at unoccupied apartment buildings and warehouses and things like that.

They want to bring the war home to Russian citizens so they know they just can't get away with this and act as if life's going to go on as normal. It's part of their way to fight back. Just to, to make this point, we shouldn't be, and I know you're not, but the rest of us

shouldn't be too naive about this in the sense that, you know, most countries, including our own, have special operations units,

right? Who are, you know, who are there to do special missions. And, you know, who are there to do special missions. And, you know, usually in the case of whether it's, you know, SEAL Team 6 in the United States or JTF2 in Canada when we were in Afghanistan

and later when we were in Iraq, that those units kind of fall under the guise of kill or capture, right? Or capture or kill, I think is the way it's phrased in such a way that the primary objective is to capture these targets. If you have to, you kill them. But for the most part, they end up killing them. I mean, let's face it. So in many ways, I don't want to say they're exactly the same, but there is a certain sense of the fact that Ukraine is not the only country that does this. No, not at all. I think in major wars like this, it really becomes part of the necessary strategy. And remember, the Ukrainians are going after military individuals, either collaborator individuals or actual Russian military or extreme nationalist pro-war activists kind of thing that are part of the war effort. They're not just going out and terrorizing the sort of innocent civilians.

But yes, I think this certainly in Afghanistan, there was very much a sense that, you know, sometimes you couldn't pull off a capture, but you had a very dangerous Taliban sub leader there that was extremely dangerous, couldn't be responsible for a lot of deaths to your own personnel and to civilians as well, and took them out as part of the war.

And it's a messy kind of a war, and there are rules of some kind that sort of surround it, but it's going to be part of any kind of war like this. And one has to worry that, you know, the more that Ukraine has to pay the price of sorrow and losses, the more determined it's going to be to opt the ante for the Russians and the invaders. And where that could lead down the road is something one has to think about first you start with targeted assassinations and then you may start with uh real taking a really important infrastructure and finally you know the ukrainians know that if say their nuclear power plants are

destroyed or damaged or if tactical nuclear weapons were used i have no doubt at all that ukraine which is a highly advanced scientific technically uh developed country that has done a lot of weapons work that they have worked on weapons of mass destruction which will be somewhere there in the arsenal to bring out at a moment like, but no, they hopefully don't need to jump ahead to that kind of score. It's bad enough as it is. Okay. I want to move to the other, the other,

I said there were kind of two areas that we want to discuss. Here's the second area. And this is as a result of the UN investigation into, into war crimes. There seems to be a growing unease or concern in some Western countries about what they're finding, what that UN investigation is finding. Break that down for us. Well, there have been a number of UN reports and other investigative reports

coming out about atrocities committed inside Ukraine by the Russians. And they're all sort of coming into one major stream. And that stream says that we have now overwhelming proof that the atrocities committed by the Russians inside Ukraine is not haphazard work by certain units. It's not just a few bad officers not controlling their men. It's in fact a systemic campaign of terror launched from top officers from the top inside Russia. The torture of prisoners of war and the torture of civilians,

brutality, the beatings, every kind of, you know, horrible treatment you could think of inside prison camps and villages is not just, you know, soldiers running amok. It's part of the actual, you know, it's part of the systemic orchestrated behavior of the Russian government in this war. And what's really worrisome about that, of course, is that, you know, the Russians know what they're doing. They're trying to terrorize the Ukrainians into giving up, going for peace, is having, as we would have predicted, exactly the opposite effect. It's causing even exhausted Ukrainians to say more and more, look, we cannot possibly give up to a regime that not only carries off stuff like this, reminiscent of the Germans in Eastern Europe in the 1940s, but lies about everything as well. So you can't even get investigations going with them

because they either won't cooperate or they'll simply lie. It sort of inspires the Ukrainians to fight on longer. And, I mean, Russia has not even tried to negate these reports. It said, oh, we don't torture, but it doesn't hold itself in any of the investigations at all. It just sort of brushes them off. I mean, this is a government, after all, that not only did not bring back soldiers

who committed atrocities in Ukraine for trial and maybe imprisonment, but it sent prisoners into Ukraine. It sent people with records with the Wagner Group of rape and murder and brutality of every description into Ukraine itself, joining the looting and the raping and the rest of it. So it leads to several really worrisome thoughts for those who have been supporting Ukraine. There's no moral equivalence, really, in this war.

You cannot say that anything the Ukrainians are doing, even when they break some rules of war and commit some war crime, is anywhere even remotely comparable to the numbers, to the horrors that have been put upon the Ukrainians. I mean, even the civilian deaths in this war, do a comparison. Ukrainians have lost 9,600 civilians killed, including 1,700 children, 17,000 injured. Russian civilian deaths, 80 in comparison. I mean, they're just not in the same league.

And so there's no moral equivalence. What this means is that it makes it very hard for Ukraine to think about how it could go to a peace agreement with a country that's done this to its people, unless it gets the satisfaction of some kind of war crimes trial or reparations of this kind of thing. So it makes making peace on Zelensky's part far harder to do. The public probably would not stand for it. They'd be so enraged, but also for Western allies, for all of us, it makes it harder and harder to walk away because we really can't say, look, there's one side in this war that's committing the kind of atrocities we thought we'd never see again in Europe under any circumstances. And here they are back again.

How can we possibly turn into NATO and into the EU. So that it has that future support, confidence that it can negotiate with Russia, knowing Russia won't simply come back five years from now and do the same thing all over again. That's the only way we're going to get there. Well, you know, there's a lot of resistance to that in the West. There's a lot of people who still want to treat it as moral relativism, you know, like, well, everybody does bad things in war. I hear people say that all the time. It's really sort of odd and upsetting that they, you know, because one side, both sides do some bad things. She can't blame any side.

Well, in this case, and in many cases, there's one side that's doing horrendously bad things. And if you don't condemn them, if you don't come down heavily on them, where's the pressure for them to stop? There's no pressure. Okay. We're going to take a quick break and come back. I've got a different topic altogether still on the Ukraine situation, but different than the two we've just discussed. Back in a moment.

And welcome back. You're listening to the Tuesday episode of The Bridge right here on SiriusXM, Channel 167, Canada Talks, or on your favorite podcast platform, the guest, as always, on Tuesdays, Brian Stewart, foreign correspondent, war correspondent. Brian's seen and done it all over the years, and he's been helping guide us through the whole Ukraine story. So, Brian, for this final segment, I wanted to ask you this,

because the other day I was watching Meet the Press on Sunday morning with its exclusive interview with Donald Trump. Every network seems to be getting an exclusive interview with Donald Trump these days network seems to be getting an exclusive interview with Donald Trump these days, but this was quite something. Kristen Welker, the new host of Meet the Press, really went after him for a good half hour or so. But in one area, she was asking about Ukraine, and she was asking about this perception that he was going, he was more in the Russians' corner than he was in the Ukrainian corner,

and that if he became president again, he would magically end the war somehow in a couple of days, he said. But he made this point in terms of not sending more American aid into Ukraine. He claimed that the United States has put in more than $200 billion into Ukraine, while the European Union is basically at $25 billion. Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but those numbers are just wrong. I mean, from what I've seen over time, they're nothing like that. What say you on that point?

Well, he is absolutely wrong, and he's just making stuff up again, as we're used to him doing by now. The actual fact is, and it's very clear this week in some stats, the biggest backer of the Ukraine is no longer the U.S. It hasn't been for a little while. It's the European Union is now funding twice as much as America, twice as much. And if you throw in Britain and you throw in Norway as well,

you know, it's even more than that. What tends to happen is the Americans give their aid in one year. It's always, you know, it gets headlines and all that. But the Ukrainians or the Europeans are giving their aid longer term. And it's in many fields. It's in financial aid. It's humanitarian aid. It's humanitarian aid. It's military aid.

In many ways, they're doing much more in the long-term development aid that Ukraine desperately needs to continue this war, much more than the Americans are actually doing. This is not to in any way downplay what the Americans have done in terms of military equipment, because they are the biggest military in the history of the world. And they've got the richest military, for sure, they have more to give. But the Europeans, as long as you start, they are scrambling. And they've been actually providing far more than anyone would have predicted two years ago. Probably three times as much, four times as much. And they're carrying a lot of the bulk now of future funding for Ukraine, which is so critically important. Because the one big word you hear everywhere now about this war

is the term long. It's going to be a long war. The green building is going to take a long time. And long term aid is going to become increasingly important for the Ukrainians. You know, obviously they need urgent military equipment. They are getting it from other countries, from Germany, from France, certainly Norway and Canada. Canada is quite well up there in its funding, I think in sixth place. That has to be recognized. But that's the kind of, I think, American exceptionalism baloney. I'm sorry.

But the Americans do tend to see, with some justice, I guess, that there's only one person center stage, and it always seems to be Uncle Sam. But in actual fact, if you look at the less dramatic headlines and the money that's flowing from banks and the Kiev and elsewhere, the European Union is now enormously important in helping to hold Ukraine up. All right. We're going to leave it at that for this week. It'll be interesting to see what kind of conversations, you know, we'll find out with the statements right away from the Zelensky side and the...

I've already forgotten the name of Joe Biden suddenly, but here we go. Biden and Zelensky are meeting again this week. And we'll see initially what the statements are, and then it will usually take a couple of days, a couple of weeks, to find out what really happened in those kind of meetings. But I'm sure some of these discussions that we've been having today are going to be discussed inside those summits as well. All right, Brian, thanks very much. Biden should definitely come out and make that clear,

just how much other countries are doing. Because to leave Americans thinking they're doing everything is totally counterproductive. Right. And it becomes the campaign issue that it's already becoming, a year away from the campaign. Alright, Brian, thanks so much. We'll talk to you again in a week. Okay, thanks very much. Brian Stewart with us, as he almost always is on Tuesdays, giving us different angles, different thoughts, different takeaways on the conflict in Ukraine.

Well, I mentioned yesterday that I wanted to do some more in bits on airline issues because you know I love airline stories and I got a couple of them for you here today and they both came out of the travel department

at CNN on their website they have a segment on travel and they don't just run ads for airline fares. They also do a bit of journalism, and they've been studying for the last little while the situation for flight attendants in the United States. Now, I'm not sure, as often is the case,

of how similar this is in Canada. But, you know, it's a huge airline market in the United States. And the headline in this story is, our flight attendants are burned out and quitting. Here's why. So let's read a bit of this because it's quite interesting. You know, CNN says, working as a flight attendant might sound like a dream job, but in post-pandemic aviation landscape, defined by delays, lost luggage, staffing issues, and disruptive passengers, the dream is souring for some.

Now, do those sound like problems we see in Canada too? Oh, yeah. Delays, lost luggage, staffing issues, and disruptive passengers. And on the lost luggage front, as you know, I go back and forth to Scotland a fair amount. And friends have told me this year, more than ever, the lost luggage stuff and lost forever. I mean, I've had delayed baggage.

I've had that many times in different airlines around the world. But lost luggage, like never retrieved luggage, is a different thing. And going to Scotland, there are a lot of people who take golf clubs with them well apparently this past year has seen a lot i don't know whether it's a record number but a lot of lost golf clubs now whether that's by accident or design i don't know but nevertheless that's been the case anyway getting back to this issue on the flight attendants, 2020 saw many aviation workers furloughed while those still working risked falling ill. Then as

the pandemic waned and airplanes returned to the skies, airlines struggled to restaff quickly enough to match demand. We all saw that happening. When aviation returned, disruptive passengers seemed more prevalent than ever. No kidding. With the then obligatory wearing of face masks often the inciting factor. Since 2021, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration, that's the FAA, has reported a rapid growth in incidents where airline passengers have disrupted flights with threatening or violent behavior. As a result, flight attendants have been in many cases saying enough, I can't take this anymore. Flight attendant Rich Henderson, who's been flying for a decade, says during the pandemic the whole thing shifted, the whole environment and the energy in the environment shifted.

I always tell people that when COVID happened, all of the fun parts of being a flight attendant, all of the satisfying, exciting parts of being a flight attendant, were stripped from the job. So as a result, some of these people who have been working like 12, 15 hours a day, they just said, I'm out of here. I can't do this anymore. And the extra pay isn't extra enough.

And so I'm leaving. The problem is so omnipresent, says CNN, there's a whole conference dedicated to the issue. Dispax World, the international conference on unruly airline passenger management and restraint, is set to take place in October of this year in Prague, in the Czech Republic. The conference will gather legal experts, academics, officials, and flight attendants to discuss what they call the scourge of unruly passenger behavior. There you go. That's what it's come to. They have to have a special conference to deal, you know, you tend to think these things are one-offs.

You know, you occasionally hear about it in the news. But obviously, it's more than one-offs if they're going to have a major international conference that's focused for the most part on disruptive passengers on airlines. You got a disruptive passenger story on an airline? Drop me a note. The Mansbridge Podcast at gmail.com. The Mansbridge Podcast at gmail.com.

We'll keep it around for possible use on Thursday on your turn. Okay, here's the other airline story. And this kind of reminds me of something that happened to me. It's quite a while ago now. 40 years ago. More than 40 years ago. But it's similar. Although the outcome in this story is much better than the outcome in my story. I may have mentioned this a couple of years ago on the podcast, but I'll mention it again just in case I didn't.

I was looking after a friend's cat. At that point, I was based in Regina. I was the nationals reporter for the province of Saskatchewan. And my friend was in Winnipeg. It was 1976, I believe. And my friend was going away, had a major international trip somewhere. And so I said, I'll look after your cat. You know, we've got to make sure, but I've got to take it back to Regina.

So she bought one of the Air Canada cages, special pet cage. We put the cat in there. It was a, I still remember, it was a Russian blue cat. And so off I flew from Winnipeg to Regina, short flight, one hour, DC-9. Land in Regina, I'm waiting at the baggage carousel thing. No cat. I thought, oh, maybe they're just going to carry it out.

Then the next thing I see coming onto the carousel is a cage with the door open and no cat. So I said, you know, I got a hold of the baggage person. I said, wait a minute, I'm waiting for my cat and all I've got is an empty cage, an empty Air Canada cage. And they said, yeah, we've got a problem here. And we opened the belly of the aircraft to bring out the luggage.

The door was open on this cage and there's no cat around. I said, well, we've got to find it. And so that was the last flight of the night coming in. And for the next couple of hours, they were good enough to let me drive around with one of their people out onto the tarmac and out around the runways looking for the cat. Never found it. Never found it. I put ads in the paper.

Now, you know, this cat had been declawed, so it didn't stand a chance out in the wilds. I never did find the cat. Air Canada gave a settlement. Not a bad one, actually, about $1,000, but that didn't mean anything to my friend. It was no longer my friend after losing their cat. Anyway, so that's my story, my lost animal story. This one's different.

Delta Airlines passenger Paula Rodriguez has a six-year-old dog, Maya. She was lost in August, you know, last month, at what's considered the busiest airport in the world. That's Atlanta. Here's the story. On August 18th, Rodriguez and Maya embarked on a journey from their home in the Dominican Republic to California for a two-week vacation.

However, when they arrived in Atlanta for a layover, Rodriguez was informed by Border Patrol staff that her tourist visa did not meet the necessary requirements. They cancelled her visa and told her she would need to return home on the next flight. With the next flight to Punta Cana, this once again is coming out of the CNN travel department, by the way. With the next flight to Punta Cana scheduled for the following day, Rodriguez faced the distressing reality of spending the night alone in a detention center separated from her beloved canine companion. They called a Delta agent who took Maya from me, Rodriguez told CNN. The next day,

Rodriguez arrived at her flight's gate early, eagerly awaiting her reunion with Maya. To her dismay, Maya never arrived. Unable to remain in the U.S. for over 24 hours without a visa, Rodriguez was left with no choice but to board her flight to Punta Cana without Maya, an experience that she said triggered a panic attack during her journey home. Everyone knows what Maya means to me, Rodriguez said of her beloved pet. I don't go anywhere without her. She's so well behaved that I take her to restaurants, literally everywhere. She's my partner in everything. Two days after Maya went missing, a Delta rep contacted Rodriguez to share unfortunate news. He said that she was being transported to the plane on the runway. This is the dog. And staff had opened her kennel, sound familiar? And she'd escaped into the middle of the runway.

Despite Rodriguez's relentless calls to Delta for updates, weeks went by without receiving any new information. A Delta spokesperson previously told CNN in a statement, Delta teams have been working to locate and reunite this pet with the customer, and we remain in touch with the customer to provide updates. Delta people feel deeply concerned for the customer and the dog, and we're committed to ongoing search efforts. With the cancellation of her tourist visa, Rodriguez sent her mother to Atlanta to join the search efforts in the vast 4,000 acres of the Atlanta airport. Well, guess what?

That's right. You guessed it. They found the dog. You know, her worst fears faded just on Saturday when Atlanta airport officials announced Maya's discovery three weeks after she was lost. CNN tried to contact Delta Airlines to hear what they're going to do about all that. They didn't get a reply. Anyway, that's a lot better outcome than mine,

although I still like to believe that somewhere, somehow, out in the wheat fields of Saskatchewan, there's a 50-year-old cat, Russian Blue, still making its way through the fields. And if you believe that, I've got a bridge I want to sell you. Got time for one more? This this has nothing to do with aviation this is a short one do you know

which museum anywhere in the world has more YouTube video views than any other. Okay? Any other, anywhere in the world. More than the Museum of Modern Art,

which has 519,000. More than the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, both these in New York, 380,000. Or the Louvre in Paris, which has had 106,000 YouTube views. No, it's none of those. You'll never guess. You'll never guess unless you read the New York Times the other day. It's the Tank Museum.

That's right, Tank, T-A-N-K, Tank, Army Tank. The Tank Museum in Bovington, England. Doesn't usually rank among the world's great museums. Located next to a military base in serene countryside. The collection of around 300 armored vehicles attracts only a few hundred thousand visitors a year, mainly families and on rained-out beach vacations. Yet there's one place where it not only ranks among the world's largest museums,

but surpasses them all. And that's on YouTube. It's had over 100 million YouTube views. So I'm going to have to go. I'm not a big Tank fan, although I loved the Brad Pitt movie, Fury. But I'm just going to have to go and look up the Tank Museum in Bovington, England and find out what all the fuss is about.

There you go. Tomorrow, Wednesday, Smoke, Mirrors, and the Truth, Bruce Anderson will be by. I'll be in Quebec City tomorrow. I've got a speech in Quebec City and I and got an event later in the week in Ottawa, so a bit of bouncing around this week. But tomorrow, SMT, as we say, will come to you from Quebec City. I'm Peter Mansbridge.

Thanks so much for listening today. Talk to you again in 24 hours.