Milliken: Parliament is supreme; Gagnon: No, not really

Speaker of the House Milliken ruled today that Parliament is supreme and Steve is not the President of Canada.
Milliken ruled that government was in breach of parliamentary privilege by refusing to comply with the House’s order in December to produce documents related to the transfer of Afghan detainees to risk of torture and Steve now has two weeks to figure out the details of a face-saving compromise with the opposition parties that would safeguard national security while still obeying the House's order to produce.
A victory for democracy then.

However ...

Over at the Military Police Complaints Commission today, Major Denis Gagnon testified that those very same Afghan transfer orders that Milliken has just ordered be produced are :

"all thrown together in a storage bin, a sea container" and an assessment of how long it would take to catalogue documents and identify the records requested by the commission may take years."

So. Milliken says Parliament is supreme and has the right to them but some major says sadly it just isn't going to happen.

"Earlier a senior military official testified that some Afghan detainee documents requested by the commission have been delayed to ensure no information gets out that could jeopardize the security of troops in Afghanistan."

Really. How much info from transfer orders made in say 2007 is going to jeopardize troop security today? You've been using this same excuse for years now.

"The commission was also told that Defence officials are screening out documents that military police would not have seen in the course of their duties."

... because last year Steve curtailed the authority of the MPCC to ask for docs that do not directly pertain to the military police.

"Gagnon said he makes the decision on what military police would have seen based on his personal experience in theatre and his knowledge of communications channels within the military chain of command and communications links with the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade."

So it's the Dept. of Defence that decides what is relevant then, not the MPCC.

"Commission counsel Ron Lunau asked if the commission could look at the documents that have been screened out since it should be up to the commission, not Defence officials, to determine what military police should have seen.

The answer from government counsel Alain Prefontaine and from Gagnon was a firm no."

Ok. Parliament may be supreme but Defence is supremer. Got it.
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Canadian military aware of children being ass-raped by Afghan allies since 2007

but, according to David Pugliese in NaPo this evening :

"the concern at the time was that the incident might be reported in the news media"

You're shocked I'm sure.

The incident was reported in the media. In June 2008, the Toronto Star reported that in late 2006 a Canadian soldier had heard an Afghan soldier raping a young boy and later saw the boy's "lower intestines falling out of his body." Military police reported being told by their commanders not to interfere when Afghan soldiers and police had anal sex with children.

It took till May of this year for Maj. Francis Bolduc of the Canadian Forces National Investigation Service to state in its "thorough investigation" that the allegations were "unfounded" and what's more were "never reported to Canadian military commanders".

Seems that investigation was all bullshit, according to meetings and emails flying back and forth between generals in Afghanistan and the Defence Department's civilian and military public affairs staff since 2007.

Pugliese :

"The issue is sensitive for the Canadian Forces and the federal government as the Afghanistan mission has been promoted to the public as being about protecting Afghan civilians."

Or, as Christopher Sands of the Hudson Institute put it last year :

"Canadians are rather conflicted about why they're in Afghanistan. Some people saw this as an apology for not going to Iraq [and] some people actually genuinely think that being in Afghanistan is about helping the Afghan people."

No, they don't. Not any more. They just don't have the guts to come out and say that bombing the crap out of people who never did anything to us is the price of keeping those trucks flowing back and forth across the US border.

Another investigation is being undertaken by Lt.-Gen. Andrew Leslie, "even though, according to military records, a member of his staff was informed about the sexual abuse issue back in 2007."
It will only look into the one assault reported in The Star in 2008, and "identify the actions taken by individual CF members and the chain of command in response to that incident, as well as assess whether medical care was provided to any soldier who witnessed the incident."

Words. Fail.

Alternate link as NaPo link has gone down twice now.
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