Lies the Harper Haters Tell, Part 3

As the Shit Harper Did website continues to spew innuendo, half-truth and outright lies at the Canadian people, the Nexus is continuing its fact-checking mission into the claims made on the site.

The site previously lied in suggesting Harper was involved in police abuses during the 2010 G20 Summit, and ignoring net funding increases to science in Canada.

Today, we explore a far more insidious lie from the website:

The site reiterates claims that Harper and the Conservative Party were complicit in the torture of detainees in Afghanistan, and repreats the sensational claims of former Diplomat Richard Colvin.

Unsurprisingly, the site omits a few facts. Such as the fact that it was a Liberal government, under the leadership of Paul Martin, that actually signed a Prisoner Transfer Agreement that provided insufficient oversight of the treatment of prisoners after they were transferred from Canadian to Afghan custody.

Moreover, they had even been warned about the prevalence of torture in Afghan prisons by former diplomat Eileen Olexiuk. They ignored her.

This is very different from how Prime Minister Stephen Harper handled reports of torture. When revelations that Afghan prisoners transferred by Canadian soldiers were being tortured reached Harper, his government immediately re-negotiated the PTA.

But don't expect to hear that from the people behind Shit Harper Did. They're too busy lying to the Canadian public.

How the "Progressive" Left Handles Dissent

Readers of the Nexus must certainly recall a post from yesterday taking Chickenwanker CK to task for her approach to the recent Eileen Olexiuk revelations -- very directly suggesting that the CBC ought to have suppressed the story.

CK gamely attempted to rebut with this little nugget of brilliance:

"Perhaps it's also time for you to be truthful, like your other neo-con friends. Just admit that Muslims don't count and that the torture must go on...we all know that's what you're thinking."

Leave it up to one of the Chickenwankers to retaliate with one of the most inflammatory -- and baseless -- accusations imaginable.

For her follow-up act, CK managed to muster this:

Which is kind of hilarious when one thinks about it. After all, in contrast to her own site, the comment policy at the Nexus is remarkably open -- only one intellectually-useless tool has ever been banned at the Nexus, and that was merely because he never has anything to contribute.

As opposed to the Chickenwanker way, which is to ban anyone who dares stand up to you and win.

Whereas when one's dealing with the Chickenwankers, they'll do you one better when banning you from their comment sections doesn't silence dissent sufficiently -- they'll deny you the "privilege" of reading at all!

Which leads one to beg the obvious question:

What's the problem with that, again?

Torture Derangement Syndrome

Please, please, pleeeeeeeease pay no attention to Liberal Party complicity in torture

When dealing with The Chickenwankers, that collection of "Progressive" bloggers who lacks the courage to decide for themselves who may or may not comment on their blogs, one can expect one thing above all others:

The intellectual dishonesty and cowardice of The Chickenwankers truly knows no bounds.

A typical case in point is Sister Sage's Musings proprietor CK. In a recent post there, she decides that the CBC is afflicted with "Liberal derangement syndrome" for reporting on the most recent development in the allegations regarding the torture of Afghan detainees:

"It never seems to stop. This time, it appears that the CBC is now afflicted with LDS. It is now helping the Harpercons do that whole 'blame the Libruls' thang back in order to deflect and distract. Yikes!"

Apparently, in the mind of CK, the role of the CBC isn't to report the news -- not by a long shot. Rather, CK seems to think that the role of the CBC is to suppress any story that doesn't directly benefit her ideological agenda.

And it would now seem that the CBC is off the reservation.

For those not in the know, it turns out that Liberal party received even more warnings about the potential torture of Afghan detainees than a recently re-revealed story in La Presse indicated.

Recently, Eileen Olexiuk, who was the second-in-command of the Canadian embassy in Kabul, recently reported that she warned the Paul Martin government on many occasions that torture was common in Afghan prisons.

Her warnings went unheeded.

"I don't think anybody really cared, quite frankly," she said.

The Martin government had apparently considered establishing a Canadian detention centre in Afghanistan, or handing detainees over to US Forces to be held in their facilities. Both options were rejected out of fear of a Guantanamo Bay-esque scandal.

Instead, the Liberals ignored the warnings regarding torture, and negotiated a prisoner transfer agreement with the government of Afghanistan that did not allow Canadian forces sufficient monitoring powers over detainees transferred -- an oversight that the Stephen Harper government has since corrected.

An apologist for anything left-wing no less esteemed than fellow Chickenwanker John Baglow insists that if the Liberal Party is guilty of anything, it's of signing a flawed PTA.

Baglow previously insisted that the obvious Liberal complicity in torture be discounted out of "Canadian fairness". "Canadian fairness" apparently doesn't apply to the governments that actually fix the problems left behind by their predecessors.

CK goes on to insist that the Liberal Party isn't very troubled by the notion that their complicitly would -- or, rather, already has -- come to light. Admittedly, Ujjal Dosanjh certainly doesn't seem worried.

"We want to be transparent, and learn what mistakes were made, and who knew what and what was hidden from the public, either by the Liberal government or the current Conservative government," Dosanjh insisted.

Of course, Dosanjh has every reason to be confident. His party has been doing everything it can to make an issue out of the highly-questionable Richard Colvin allegations for months, all while the media declined to report on the pre-2006 timeline.

All but overheard in Liberal Party circles was "seriously, do you believe this? Do you fucking believe this? It's a matter of public record that our government negotiated and signed the PTA under which the torture took place, and the media isn't saying 'boo'. We get to tar the Conservatives for our supreme fuck up! Do you believe this? It's too good to be true!"

If CK and John Baglow are guilty of anything, it's of two things.

The first is trying to sell something that was too good to be true. They both knew, just like any Canadians who have paid even passing attention to this story, that the Liberal Party made the torture of detainees transferred by Canadian forces possible in the first place.

The second, clearly, is an act of historical revisionism. They are just as guilty as anyone else for the phenomenon of the orphan timeline, a bizarre rhetorical approach to the matter that has attempted to omit the entire pre-2006 timeline and the entire post-2007 timeline from the public discourse.

Having invested so much time and energy in peddling a derangement syndrome to anyone foolish enough to listen to them, they simply cannot bring themselves to admit that if the Conservative government is guilty of anything it's of not taking torture allegations seriously enough. The Liberal Party is clearly guilty of the same.

Considering the well-known Al Qaida/Taliban tendency to falsely claim torture, it would be hard to blame either.

The difference between the two, of course, is that the Conservative Party didn't sign a fatally flawed Prisoner Transfer Agreement despite having been warned.

The Liberals did.

CK and John Baglow may consider themselves free to desperately try and spin that.