Con MPs boycott Afghan Committee today

Con Committee chair Rick Casson confirmed today's meeting with the opposition MPs but did not bother to tell them that neither he nor any of the other Con MPs would be showing up.
As the committee requires a quorum of seven to convene and only the six MPs from the opposition parties showed up, the committee could not go ahead as planned.

That the Cons are dipping into their dirty tricks manual on how to disrupt committees again does not surprise, but the Cons primary argument against having the public inquiry into the whole detainees mess - passed as a motion in the House and then ignored -has been that it is already being dealt with in this committee.

The Cowardly Cons on the Afghan Special Committee :
Rick Casson , Chair : CassoR@parl.gc.ca ,
Jim Abbott : AbbotJ@parl.gc.ca ,
Goldie Hawn : HawnL@parl.gc.ca ,
Greg Kerr : Kerr.G@parl.gc.ca ,
Deepak Obhrai : ObhraD@parl.gc.ca ,
Dave MacKenzie : MackeD@parl.gc.ca .

Send them a feather.

Possibly none of them wanted to deal with reports from today that British Colonel Dudley Giles, a senior military police officer with NATO's International Security Assistance Force, complained to the Canadian embassy in Kabul in August 2006 that

"Canada was stonewalling on providing basic information on the Afghans it was capturing."

or that

"a memo from Canadian NATO staffer Anne Burgess alerted the government on Sept. 11 2006 to the fact that the ICRC had singled out Canada's practice of handing over prisoners to the Afghans on the battlefield."

And if there's anyone left, aside from the Cowardly Cons, who still doesn't think it much matters what is done in our name a long way from home, either Dave or Boris will explain it to you.
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