Taliban Larry

NaPo : Vindication for Taliban Jack (h/t : Boris)

"So now it’s time to talk to the Taliban.

Canada’s Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon told reporters on Tuesday that the Taliban has an important role to play in laying the foundations of a new Afghanistan. “We encourage a reconciliation process that is inclusive of all Afghans, no matter their ethnicity,” he said.

Now cup your hand to your ear and listen for the caterwauling of the uber patriots here on the home front decrying the minister’s capitulation to the enemy. Hmm. Oddly quiet. Could this minster really represent the government that so cravenly branded NDP leader Jack Layton “Taliban Jack” four years ago for suggesting exactly the same thing?

“Is it next going to be tea with Osama Bin Laden?” asked Peter MacKay.

A Globe and Mail columnist [Christie Blatchford] indignantly wrote “Would he pull out the chairs for their representatives? Would he pour tea for those who have killed 23 Canadian soldiers this year?

So almost four years after Layton suggested talking with the Taliban the minister acknowledges this is now official policy. For a guy who was labeled a soldier-hater and a Taliban-lover Jack Layton is remarkably gracious about the turnaround. I asked him recently if he was planning to ask for an apology and he demurred. “As long as the right thing gets done I don’t really care”.

Cannon has actually been making quiet noises about Taliban "reconciliation and re-integration" since January : Canada considering Karzai plan to offer cash to Taliban: Cannon

From John Manley's 2008 Independent Panel on Canada's Future Role in Afghanistan :

"When asked whether President Karzai should enter into negotiations with the Taliban and allow them to participate in the political process, some 60% of Afghans currently believe a negotiated settlement should be pursued."

About the same margin of Canadians, including Conservatives, also favoured negotiation back in May 2007 : CTV : Canadians support talks with Taliban: poll

"Canadians still think it's a good idea to negotiate with Afghanistan's Taliban insurgents as a way to end the violence there, a poll finds.
In The Strategic Counsel poll conducted for CTV and The Globe and Mail, there was almost two-to-one support for the notion:
Net good idea : 63 per cent
Net bad idea : 32 per cent
Donolo said 57 per cent of Conservative Party members supported the idea of negotiations."

Airshow Pete, "Goldie" Hawn, and World Stage Steve will eventually have to find a whole new place to play dress-up.
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Security theatre of the absurd

Given that the Cons blocked the Military Police Complaints Commission from receiving documents on the Afghan detainees :

"Canada's former top military police officer, retired navy captain Steve Moore, advised he had documents that he wanted to turn over to the inquiry, however Mr. Moore and his lawyer had to sign a pledge preventing them from passing the documents to the inquiry."

and redacted the docs they did allow :

"This is what the Bravo Company, 2nd Battalion Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry Battle Group sergeant wrote in June 2006 about the Afghan detainee who was beaten up:

"We then photographed the individual prior to handing him over, to ensure that if the ANP did assault him, as has happened in the past, we would have a visual record of his condition."

but this is what the government sent to the Military Police Complaints Commission:

"We then photographed the individual prior to handing him over (redacted)."

and also sandbagged the Parliamentary Afghan committee by threatening and muzzling witnesses:

"The federal government is blocking diplomat Richard Colvin from giving documents to a special House of Commons committee investigating Afghan torture.
Justice Department lawyers have told Colvin - through the Foreign Affairs department - that they do not accept the view that testimony before Parliament is exempt from national security provisions of the Canada Evidence Act.
Violating Section 38 of the Canada Evidence Act can be punishable by five years in prison."

before finally shutting parliament down altogether to shut everyone up about it ....

who could possibly pretend to believe they will now freely hand over those very same docs to retired Justice Iacobucci?

Answer : The Libs.
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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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Hansard Quotes of the Day

Among the many fakeries and falsehoods foisted on the House yesterday by the Cons in their bid to maintain the most secretive and unaccountable government evah, usual frontrunners Laurie Goldie Hawn and Cheryl Gallant got beat out by Gary Goodyear, Minister of Creationism, Science, and Technology.
Here he is explaining why the motion to release documents the government had already supplied to Christie Blatchford and friendly Afghan committee witnesses but not to the Afghan committee members or Richard Colvin, who wrote some of them, would be a very. very. bad. thing.

"Madam Speaker, perhaps I will just make a comment. The fact is that we are debating a motion here that is asking the government to release information that could in fact entail something as simple as a soldier's name, middle name, address and perhaps phone number. It is information that the Taliban are hoping they can get their hands on, not just to attack that soldier but also potentially to put the family of the soldier at risk."

And that, boys and girls, is why the dates and the word torture must be blacked out on Richard Colvin's three year old reports.

Second prize goes to Goldie, who characterized a Canadian soldier's reports of extrajudicial killings and torture as :

"one Taliban got hit with a shoe"

and for the following rhetorical flight of irrelevancy :

"When it comes to the big ticket items of national unity and doing the right thing on the international stage, Liberals and Conservatives have always spoken with the same voice. That is the voice of freedom, it is the voice of courage, it is the voice of doing the right thing for Canadian men and women here and abroad, people like the people of Holland in 1944-45..."

Gallant takes third place for her accusation on two separate occasions that personal info about soldiers would be twittered straight from the Afghan committee to the Taliban, a point seconded by Jim Abbott who is himself on the committee.

Honourable mention - Lawrence Cannon, Minister of Abandoning Canadians Overseas, for : "We are at war."

Steve and Airshow MacKay had no new material - just the same accusations that not supporting the Cons' contempt for parliament is the same thing as attacking the troops.
High point : a brilliant speech by Paul Dewar.

The motion to release to the Afghan committee documents related to the care and detention of Afghan prisoners passed by 145 to 143. Steve has no intention of honouring that vote.
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Who here believes in parliamentary democracy?

Come on - hands up.
Yes, quite a few of us actually.
Yet judging from the vote in the House today on a motion demanding the release of uncensored government documents to the Special Committee on Afghanistan charged with oversight of the 'mission', almost half of our elected MPs do not. The motion passed by a mere 2 votes - 145 to 143. I find that quite astonishing.

The docs, already made available to journos and committee witnesses sympathetic to the Cons but not released to the committee, would not be disclosed to you, me, and the national press. The docs could remain in camera. Yet even that amount of parliamentary oversight is too much for the almost half of the people we elected to represent us who apparently do not much care for the concept of parliamentary privilege.

So I have to ask - what do they think they doing there?
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I reckon we've had just about enough of this bullshit

Shorter Harper : If you point the war crimes finger at me, I'll deflect it at the troops.

Faced with mounting condemnation for government ass-covering over Richard Colvin's testimony about Afghan detainees, Harper resorts to an oblique slight-of-tongue blackmail :

"There were allegations of Canadian troops involved in torture. We’ve been very clear that's not the case."

So who is pointing fingers at the troops?

No one. No. One. But. Steve.

Least of all Richard Colvin, as he made abundantly clear right away at the beginning of his Nov. 18th testimony before the Committee on the Canadian Mission in Afghanistan :

"I was very proud to have served in Afghanistan alongside the courageous and professional men and women of the Canadian Forces, including Canada's military police. The focus of our attention, in my view, should not be on those who obeyed their chain of command, which soldiers are obliged to do. Instead, any responsibility for Canada's practices toward detainees lies, in my view, with the senior military officers, senior civilian officials, and the lawyers who developed the legal framework, designed the policies and practices, and then ordered that they be implemented."

Well that seems clear enough.

Evidently not clear enough though for warporner Christie Blatchford :

In condemning with the same brush highly professional Canadian soldiers, and to complain that they were complicit in breaches of the law of armed conflict and knowingly buried his reports, it is Mr. Colvin who has some explaining left to do.

but certainly clear enough for anyone not looking to turn Colvin's words upside down and pretend that any criticism of the HarperCons and their public service camp followers equals a danger to the troops and military police, as Harper does here today:

"... in a time when some in the political arena do not hesitate before throwing the most serious of allegations at our men and women in uniform, based on the most flimsy of evidence, remember that Canadians from coast to coast to coast are proud of you and stand behind you, and I am proud of you, and I stand beside you."

Steve bravely champions the troops by hiding behind them and pointing a finger at them.

Are people gonna fall for this bs?

Impolitical handily deconstructs Harper's nonsense

while Contrarian takes down Blatchford.
And yes, why was Christie Blatchford leaked information deemed too sensitive for the Parliamentary Committee on the Canadian Mission in Afghanistan?

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How's that CBC poll on Colvin's credibility doing?

Hmmm ... 94% to 6% in favour of Colvin's testimony on an unfreepable one-vote-per-IP poll.

Ok, just checking.

I was wondering how that parade of generals appearing before the Afghan parliamentary committee was going over.

Everyone impressed the generals had access to Richard Colvin's reports but the committee members doing the investigation are denied the same access?

Hell, it's just one more Con puppet-head show now.

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Watch Peter MacKay's one minute smirking response about it here :

Minister MacKay on how the generals got the documents. (h/t Scott)

and then sign this letter demanding a public inquiry.

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Inside the Committee on Afghanistan

Doris vs Dewar ... via Thwap's Schoolyard :

Mr. Paul Dewar (Ottawa Centre, NDP) : Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you, Minister.

I want to start off with your comments about communication and getting the message out. I want to be precise. In looking over the shop that you chair, the Afghanistan task force, something came up that caused me considerable concern. When I asked officials responsible for training military and police whether they were able to read the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission's report, a wonderful project that we helped fund, they told me they couldn't read it because it was in Dari. I was happy to provide a translation for them.

I looked into this, and I asked an order paper question about translation and the capacity of the task force. You talked about getting the message out, and that's fair enough. What came back was rather stunning to me. Not one person in the PCO, the Afghanistan task force, knew Dari or Pashto. In this country, I'd think we'd be able to find someone—I have. Those six communication assistants in that shop are doing something. From 2006 to 2009, the government spent a total of $4,512 on translation into Dari or Pashto, whereas in this same time period they spent $9.2 million on communications about the war.

I point that out to you because I think there are a lot of deficits. It's about priorities. I don't think we should be spending $9.2 million on getting the message out about the war. We should spend more on translation services. We have a critical role. If we can't even find people to translate the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission's report about torture by the people we're training, we have a problem, Minister.

I will leave that with you as a concern, because you asked for advice. It's not acceptable, from my point of view, and I'd like to know the response. I think it's an area where we have failed.

There's been a lot of attention paid to the transfer of prisoners. I'm going to make a motion to have this committee talk to people about this and bring people before the committee. Are the transfer agreements that the government brought in and we signed onto being followed by Afghan government officials? Are we certain that they're following the procedure we put in place?

(1625)
Hon. Stockwell Day: It's my understanding that they are. I'll get back to you on how we came to that understanding and what gives us that sense of confidence. Then you can judge whether it's a good checking process we have.

On the issue of translation, there actually is a Dari speaker on our task force. This may not have been true when you asked for that information, but there is somebody there now who speaks Dari. Is one person enough? I don't know.

You've raised some good issues on translation. I'll get some information back to this committee, because I know we receive it from other sources. We get the reports of those human rights—

Mr. Paul Dewar: But you understand the disproportionate nature of the numbers.

Hon. Stockwell Day: With respect to communication itself, I'll come back to you with the costs. The cost of printing and distributing these reports—that's got to be fairly significant. There are quite a number of other communication methods that are used. More communication was one of the key recommendations of the independent panel that looked at Afghanistan. In fact, it is the reason we're here today: communication, communication, communication. It was very strong. So I'll get back to you on that.
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Un-fucking-believable.
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