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.

That's How the Cookie Crumbles, Murray

...And no cookie for you

Writing on Rabble.ca, Murray Dobbin is positively apoplectic about the announcement that the government and opposition have reached an accord on how the viewing of documents pertaining to Afghan detainees will be handled.

"The agreement reached at the 11th hour on the uncensored Afghan torture documents is hardly a victory for democracy," Dobbin pouts. "It is precisely the opposite and it is the Liberals we have to thank for it. We have come to expect nothing better from the Harper Conservatives -- the most dishonest, anti-democratic and arrogant government in living memory."

The irony of Dobbin -- who continues to push his Liberal/NDP/Bloc coalition government despite Canadian rejection of it -- labelling anyone as "dishonest, anti-democratic and arrogant" needs no further comment.

After all, NDP leader Jack Layton also hailed the agreement as a triumph for democracy.

"This is a victory for parliamentary democracy," Layton announced via written statement. "The Speaker's ruling made it clear that members of Parliament have the right to review all the information about the treatment of Afghan detainees, and not just what the government thinks MPs should see."

Yet somehow, in the eyes of Murray Dobbin -- who is forever content to suck up to the NDP -- Layton escapes any blame, and all the blame should fall to the Liberals.

Apparently, the Bloc -- who Dobbin loves well enough to include as party to a coalition government despite their separatist goals -- should also escape any blame for this all-party deal.

Dobbin insists that the change in Liberal Party attitude toward the documents should be attributed to a lack of will to "face down the bully Stephen Harper".

But the fact that the Liberal Party has changed their position is more likely attributable to the prospect that MPs will now be able to actually view these documents, and that they will be able to view them for the entire timeframe of the mission.

This has evidently deflated Liberal enthusiasm for the release of the documents, and with good reason. After all, it was the Liberal Party that negotiated the orginal prisoner transfer agreement under which all the problems actually took place. They approved a weak agreement that provided them with insufficient oversight of the treatment of transferred prisoners despite receiving numerous warnings about the prevalence of torture in Afghan prisons.

It was the Conservative Party that recognized the problem, investigated, and concluded an improved PTA to help quash the problem.

While the bellicose attitude of the opposition parties offered the Conservatives little incentive to release the documents, the national security issues raised by the Conservatives seemed to have been recognized by Speaker of the House Peter Miliken when he admonished the government and opposition to decide a manner of viewing for the documents that will respect the sensitivity of them.

The alternative offered by the most fervent anti-Conservatives has been rather striking: let us have the documents now, so we can use them to smear you now.

But even as certain assclowns are rather uncomfortable with the frequent revelations that the Liberal Party has had far more to do with the torture allegations than the Conservative Party has -- John Baglow going so far as to argue that the Liberals should be let off the hook for their "good intentions" (good intentions that he seems to assume the Tories wouldn't share) -- individuals like Dobbin continue to flail, insisting that there must be something in the documents that could be used to smear the Tories, and they want it desperately.

The Liberal Party, however, having spent so much time in government, seems to know differently: that there are legitimate security concerns complicating the prompt release of the documents. Knowing that the Conservatives couldn't release them without taking measures to prevent sensitive information from being leaked -- and thus knowing the documented extent of their negligence was safe from public disclosure -- the Liberals demanded the release of the documents, knowing they could cast the Conservatives as evasive.

Now that the table has been set for the release of the documents, Liberal feet have grown colder, and the agreement the opposition parties have reached is essentially the same as the one offered: examination by an expert panel, and release based on their recommendations.

When opposition parties play these kinds of political games, it's just the way the cookie crumbles. One would have expected that Murray Dobbin would be used to that by now.

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.

Handling Dissent: Epic Fail

Canadians Against Proroguing Parliament mob dissenters

If one were to follow any number of the arguments against Stephen Harper's proroguement of Parliament, they all add up to a critique of Harper's inability to handle opposition.

So it's on that particular note that it's amusing to see how well the vaunted Canadians Against Proroguing Parliament handles opposition within its own group.

For one thing, Canadians Against Proroguing Parliament requires anyone to join the group before they're allowed to post comments on the wall, or to participate in their forum.

In other words, the Canadians Against Proroguing Parliament has been tailor-made in order to avoid having to tolerate any opposition within its own ranks.

A good case in point is that of Timothy Sorsdah, who recently posted a link to Terry Glavin's National Post Full Comment blogpost about the Liberal Party's complicity in the torture of Afghan detainees. As The Torch so recently reminded Canadians, the Liberal government of Paul Martin had received numerous warnings about the prevalence of torture in Afghan prisons while they were negotiating the prison transfer agreement they instructed General Rick Hillier to sign on Canada's behalf.

Keeping in mind that one of the opposition talking points has been that Prime Minister Stephen Harper prorogued Parliament in order to avoid questioning over this matter, one can't help but be amused as some of the response Sorsdah's reminder gets:

Peter Exel is clearly what most Canadians should recognize as a common partisan lunatic: forever looking for some way to deflect any uncomfortable revelation about his favoured political party.

Matt Boudreau's response is a little more amusing; not only was the Liberal Party in no position to shut down Parliament or the detainee abuse committee when this matter surfaced, but they've been pretending -- from the opposition benches -- that they aren't responsible for the entire mess in the first place.

Another equally-clueless individual is Peggy McLaughlan:

If McLaughlan doesn't understand what the La Presse revelations have to do with the proroguement of Parliament, she simply hasn't been paying attention to her own group's talking points.

Without the torture issue, CAPP don't have their "cover-up" issue, and would have to admit that the proroguement of Parliament is for entirely legitimate purposes: re-organizing the Senate, preparing stage two of the economic program (something that as dedicated a panic-merchant as Murray Dobbin has actually acknowledged), and taking advantage of the diplomatic opportunties posed by the Olympics.

This would defeat the entire purpose of the group. So one fully expects they'll never do that.

It's on that note that the extent to which some of them simply do not get it is utterly astounding. Consider the example of Shane Ambridge:

Ambridge seems to think he can simpy declare the Liberal complicity in torture "off topic", and end it at that.

But in order for this to work, the topic would have to actually be off topic. When one considers the extent to which the torture issue is central to the Proroguement issue, it doesn't take a political scientist to recognize the relevance of these revelations to the entire issue.

Once again, either CAPP has a legitimate cover-up issue, or they don't. And seeing as how it's the Liberal Party who are trying to cover up their complicity in torture by pinning it on the governing party, it's extremely evident that CAPP simply don't have the issue.

That they would be so resentful of Timothy Sorsdah for pointing this out to them simpy reveals the most active members of Canadians Against Proroguing Parliament for what they truly are: not democratic activists, but a core of partisan hacks and ideologues who have helped deceive thousands of other Canadians into holding a view of the current proroguement of Parliament that simply does not hold water.

It's remarkable that a group that has accused Prime Minister Stephen Harper of shutting down Parliament to avoid the Opposition has been so utterly hostile to any opposition within their own group.

Remarkable, but not terribly surprising.

Afghan Detainee Torture: The Orphan Timeline

Writing in a blog post at Macleans.ca, Aaron Wherry does his bit to respond to the recent revelation that, while negotiating a prisoner transfer agreement with the government of Afghanistan, the Liberal Party knew about the torture that was prevalent in Afghan prisons.

Wherry seems to think that he has the answer to what seems to him to be a horrible dilemma: simply ignore the revelation at hand, and shift attention back to 2007.

After an ever-so-brief mention of the La Presse revelation, Wherry directs his attention to an April 25, 2007 Globe and Mail article in which it was stated that the government had received warnings about "extrajudicial executions, disappearances, torture and detention without trial" of Afghan prisoners.

In skating over the La Presse story, Wherry demonstrates precisely where he thinks the readers' attention should be: after 2006, so long as they only pay attention to developments before April 28, 2007.

Under the stewardship of reporters like Wherry, the pre-2006 portion of the torture chronicles becomes an orphan timeline: disowned by those who are presenting this issue in the public eye. Along with that portion of the timeline, the truth is orphaned as well.

This helps Liberal MPs like John McCallum ignore their party's uncomfortable responsibility for torture and pretend that the Conservative Party didn't approach the issue properly: by investigating and fixing the problem.

But McCallum isn't the only Liberal MP enjoying this orphaning of the truth.

Speaking in a column written for Vancouver's Georgia Straight, Liberal MP Dr Hedy Fry -- who has a history of lying in the House of Commons -- has the temerity to invoke the memory of George W Bush to try to score some cheap points.

"What is it that George Bush used to say?" she asked. "'You can fool some of the people all the time, and those are the ones you want to concentrate on.' It seems to me that Stephen Harper is taking that advice. Or at least one has to wonder."

It seems that this is exactly the the strategy being used by Fry -- whose previous highlight was raising comical allegations of a Conservative Party/HBC conspiracy -- and Wherry. In Dr Fry's case, the hypocrisy of it remains as astounding as it was in McCallum's -- she served in the government that is directly responsible for the torture as Secretary of State for Women and Multiculturalism.

Wherry, Fry and McCallum seem to think they're working it to perfection.

But when truly pressed on the Liberal Party's direct complicity in the torture of detainees handed over by Canadian soldiers, they seem to recognize the key defect in their strategy -- that it will stop working when Canadians realize that the scandal is their fault in the first place.

And while Aaron Wherry, Hedy Fry and John McCallum seem to think they can distract Canadians from that fact by severing the entire pre-2006 period from the torture timeline, they'll find out in time that they can't.

It's So Hard to Get Answers From Them

Readers of the Nexus may recall a recent visit we received from liberal supporter, the chronic minor annoyance who is a core member of the Clowncar Brigade.

In response to a recent post noting that Canadians simply haven't believed Prime Minister Stephen Harper in regards to the proroguement of Parliament, liberal supporter insisted that there could be no other reasons for the proroguement but a coverup regarding the torture allegations.

As it turns out, liberal supporter's favourite political party has some covering up of its own to do.

It would be nice to get some answers out of him, but he just hasn't obliged to date.

Those who pay little attention to liberal supporter may not know this, but he actually operates a blogspot blog wherein he collects messages from people who (for reasons as much a mystery to him as to anyone else) may want to contact him.

So it seemed like a good place to ask him directly what he thought of his party's direct complicity in the torture of Afghan detainees:

Yet liberal supporter doesn't seem to be too eager to answer these questions.

One wonders why...

Oh, OK. So that's why.

So, Let's Talk About a "Cover Up"

By their own standard, Liberal Party complicit in war crimes

Recently appearing on CBC news, Liberal Finance Critic John McCallum openly accused the Conservative government of war crimes.

"I think proroguing adds to the total character picture of Mr Harper, and the fact that they may have been committing war crimes, handing over detainees knowing that they were very likely to be tortured, that is a war crime," McCallum insisted. "And the fact that they're covering it up, I think many Canadians do care about those things as well as caring about economic issues."

When asked to clarify who he was accusing of war crimes -- the Conservative government or Canadian soldiers, McCallum answered quite clearly. "It's the government."

But as it turns out, there may be even more to this story than McCallum is telling -- one that undermines his party's clear efforts to mine this issue for partisan gain.

An article appearing in the April 28, 2007 issue of La Presse (which can be translated here), it was noted that the Liberal government of Paul Martin was warned on numerous occasions spanning 2003-05 that torture commonly occurred in Afghan prisons.

Prior to 2005, Canadian forces in Afghanistan transferred their detainees to American forces operating in Afghanistan. In response to the abuses taking place at Guantanamo Bay, however, the Liberal government decided to instead transfer prisoners to Afghan authorities.

Despite these reports, then-Minister of National Defense Bill Graham negotiated a prisoner transfer agreement and instructed General Rick Hillier to sign it on Canada's behalf. This prisoner transfer agreement became a notorious point of contention in Canadian politics, as it didn't allow Canadian soldiers with sufficient levels of oversight for the treatment of any prisoners they transferred.

In other words, it's the prisoner transfer agreement that Paul Martin's Liberal government signed with Afghanistan that was responsible for these abuses in the first place -- an error the Conservative government corrected by negotiating a new prison transfer agreement.

The Liberal Party cannot claim it wasn't warned about this state of affairs in Afghan prisons. They were warned by Canadian diplomats, just as the sitting Conservative government was.

The difference, of course, being that the pre-2006 Liberal government signed a shoddy prisoner transfer agreement that put Canadian soldiers at risk of complicity in war crimes -- as so defined by John McCallum.

At this point, the fairest question may be how, precisely, so many media outlets have overlooked this particular story amidst the partisan rush to brand the sitting government as war criminals, even as the Liberal Party knew full well the hand it had played in this affair.

Finally, the Voice of Reason

Civil liberties lawyer to opposition: stop politicizing detainee abuse

For many Canadians, the ongoing controversy surrounding the treatment of Afghan detainees has been an irritating issue.

It shouldn't be said that there's no cause for any outrage. Proper-thinking Canadians of all political stripes recognize that torture is a barbarous act, and aren't prepared to tolerate it.

But by the same token, the issue -- alleging that Afghan detainees transferred to Afghan custody by Canadian soldiers were later tortured -- has, in many senses, proven to be utterly insipid.

Canada's opposition parties -- and various left-wing commentators and bloggers -- have attempted to use the issue to tar the Conservative government, and accuse them of being guilty of war crimes.

But to those Canadians who have seen this issue for what it really is, the matter at hand is utterly, crystal clear. This isn't really an issue about what Canadian soldiers have done, it's about what another country's soldiers have done.

It actually makes the drive to use the issue to portray Prime Minister Stephen Harper as George W Bush seem even more comical.

Bush was declared to be a war criminal because he had authorized the US military to use "coercive interrogation techniques" (torture) -- so, in point of fact, George W Bush is a war criminal.

But in the case of Stephen Harper, he's accused of war crimes because the soldiers of another country tortured detainees, after Canadian soldiers had transferred them under an agreement negotiated by his governmental predecessor.

In the rush to paint Stephen Harper as George W Bush, even as it pertains to torture, the best these people can do is to establish Harper as Bush-tres-lite.

But it's against the partisan abuse of the issue that Paul Champ, a lawyer for Amnesty International and the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association, has entered the fray. And he has a message for these people:

Stop politicizing the issue.

“My clients believe this is an issue that should be totally depoliticized,” Champ recently insisted, and noted that it's actually the lack of a standing military policy on detainee handling that is at the heart of this issue.

Champ notes that part of what led to this sorry state of affairs is a poor approach to the issue of detainee treatment in the first place, one that waited for proof as opposed to assessing risk.

“Basically [the politicians] are saying they want absolute proof in some way that someone has been tortured when it should be about what is the risk of torture,” Champ continued. “We think this has broader implications, not simply for the Afghan theatre but a judicial inquiry could provide guidance to the military for any future deployments that we’re engaged in.”

Champ will testify before a hastily-called meeting of Canada's special committee on the mission in Afghanistan, and plans to tell opposition MPs to stop trying to profit politically off the matter.

Paul Champ's stand on the matter is long overdue. So long as Canada's opposition parties continue to find any way to use this matter as a political club against the government, many of the answers will continue to be elusive.

Needless to say, there is no incentive for the government to help uncover facts that will unfairly be used to attack it. De-politicizing the issue will go a long way toward solving that problem.

Torture Issue Reveals Liberal Weaknesses

Hypocrisy, thy name is STILL Liberal

Watching the Liberal party, it becomes apparent that they so desperately want to be Democrats.

After sending Canadian troops to Afghanistan in the absence of any democratic decision-making process, the Liberals recently introduced a motion into the House of Commons that would force the withdrawal of Canadian troops in 2009.

The Liberals have also jumped on another issue: torture.

Allegations that Afghani prison officials have been torturing prisoners has sent the Liberals scurrying to make the most of the opportunity.

On CTV’s Mike Duffy Live, Liberal deputy leader Michael Ignatieff addressed a question regarding the Al Qaida and Taliban training manuals, which instruct captured fighters to lie about being tortured in order to manipulate courts against their captors. He responded by telling Duffy that the Liberal party believed in the principle of “innocent until proven guilty”.

Unless, of course, you’re an Afghani prison guard – or the Conservative government.

Even in the absence of credible evidence of torture, Ignatieff has insisted that the allegations of torture are well-founded. And naturally, he would. The issue of torture has proven to be a very productive political issue for the Democrats against the Republicans in the United States.

Yet, when allegations of torture were raised against the United States, Ignatieff was conditionally supportive of torture.

In “Lesser Evils”, Ignatieff wrote, “To defeat evil, we may have to traffic in evils: indefinite detention of suspects, coercive interrogations, targeted assassinations, even pre-emptive war. These are evils because each strays from national and international law and because they kill people or deprive them of freedom without due process. They can be justified only because they prevent the greater evil.”

Essentially, Ignatieff wrote that “coercive interrogations” (torture) could be justified in the face of a greater evil, so long as it were permissible under the rule of law. Not only did Ignatieff write in conditional support of torture, he also wrote in support of legalizing it!

To make matters worse for the Liberals, the current detainee transfer agreement that does not grant Canadian officials the privileges to monitor and visit prisoners in Afghanistan was actually negotiated by the Liberals.

Unfortunately for the Liberals (ironically Canada’s Republicans) they aren’t the Democrats. They aren’t even Democrat lite. Their hypocrisy only reveals deeper tendencies toward political opportunism.