[LINK] "Flip-flop hurt military on Afghan torture file"

[rfmcdonald]

It's worth noting that this article by Don Martin was published today above the fold on the front page of the conservative National Post.

The unknown insurgent, if he’s still alive and somehow following Canadian politics, must be cracking up at the Canadian chaos he’s unleashed.

The unidentified Taliban fighter, rescued from a severe Afghan beating by Canadian troops more than two years ago, is now threatening to force a public inquiry to be held in faraway snowy Ottawa and may yet terminate a mission-leading cabinet minister.

All this because he was detained by suspicious Canadian soldiers back in mid-2006 with a scratched nose, had his picture taken to prove he didn’t have any serious injuries before being turned over to Afghan police where he was badly roughed up and promptly reclaimed by our sympathetic troops.

This one allegedly isolated situation forced Chief of Defence Staff Walter Natynczyk to mea culpa a humbling correction on Wednesday, admitting this was indeed the Exhibit A of a Canadian detainee surrendered to face Afghan-inflicted torture.

There is now clear and credible evidence that this government has lost deniability on the Afghan torture file and that diplomat Richard Colvin, whose damning testimony was so viciously ridiculed by the government and top generals, is gaining plausibility.

But nobody has taken a harder believability beating than the top military brass.

For the Chief of Defence Staff to suggest he stumbled on incendiary field notes just six hours before his defence minister was placed on the hot seat at a parliamentary committee, a report already published in the Globe and Mail, is beyond logical comprehension.

[. . .]

Mr. MacKay may have repeatedly misled the Commons by saying there were no credible cases of detainee torture, but only because the military insisted that was the case. The chain of command between the military and the minister links at the Chief of Defence Staff’s desk. If he’s in the dark, so is the government.

Yet the way the entire Conservative front bench, including a testy, albeit jetlagged Prime Minister Stephen Harper, remains angrily antagonistic and combative to questions on the file.

The Conservatives attack at every legitimate query as a slur to the uniform, when the opposition is making no such allegation.

The point is worth repeating, because the government clearly doesn’t get it. All evidence suggests Canadian soldiers showed considerable restraint when apprehending Taliban who were, after all, on a mission to kill them.

The political concern is whether anybody in the government or the military were aware of ongoing torture in Kandahar prisons while making ongoing transfers into its cells. If so, that’s called a war crime under international conventions.

The government’s ugly mood is amplified by behavior that has all the optics of obstruction, if not a cover up. They stonewalled a Military Police Complaints Commission probe of the allegations, threatened diplomat Colvin with legal consequences if he testified publicly, unleashed a character smear of his reliability when he did and reluctantly produced a blizzard of blacked-out documentation that, when the odd sentence did appear, conveniently showed no wrongdoing.