At least they don't shoot our generals

The pathetic and abysmal handling of the Afghan detainee issue by the government may well offset in public opinion any increased support for our mission resulting from the Manley panel report. And our scandal-obsessed media only make things worse. The Globe and Mail's Christie Blatchford (our Annie Oakley of journalism) hits the target as usual:

Oh, please: The Stephen Harper government didn't know that the Canadian military had stopped handing over Afghan detainees last fall, after Canadian monitors found what they called a credible allegation of torture?

This claim, made Thursday night by the Prime Minister's communications director, Sandra Buckler, was being hastily retracted by Ms. Buckler less than 24 hours later.

"I should not have said what I said to you," she told The Globe and Mail's Campbell Clark yesterday. "I misspoke, and I wanted to make sure you were aware of that." Then she refused to say whether she "misspoke" because she said something she shouldn't have or because she said something that was wrong, and declined further comment. And she - madness! -- is the PM's communications director.

Knock me down with a feather: Ms. Buckler misspeaks, slurs the Canadian Forces and gives credence to all those who were already, as Mike Duffy noted Thursday on CTV NewsNet, pointing the finger of blame at Chief of the Defence Staff Rick Hillier and what? She gets to say, albeit in a magnificently unhelpful way, "Oops"?

Off with her head.

[...]

Yet what is far more interesting than the duplicitous double-speak coming from this government is what it reveals both about its control-freak mentality (that if its first instinct is to say nothing, its second is to blame someone outside the circle of wagons, often the military) and the troubling, giddy eagerness with which the claim was sucked into the 24-7 media machine and spun out virtually unaltered for hours at a stretch.

[...]

...with Gen. Hillier in the air Thursday when this story broke - he was en route to resume the rare holiday he had already interrupted to return to Ottawa to discuss the Manley report, apparently with the PM and cabinet - there was in his absence no one willing or able to risk disputing Ms. Buckler's now-discredited allegation that the Canadian Forces had kept the government in the dark.

A second factor, I think, is that every story now, whether it is about Paris Hilton or the mission to Afghanistan, is subjected to the same unquestioning hyperbole. We in the press seem to suffer somewhat from a version of what in badly behaved children is called oppositional defiance disorder; we mistrust our own institutions such that we are fully prepared to accept, at least for story purposes, that the Canadian military would try to keep the government, which soldiers know better than anyone else is properly its master, out of the loop...

Damian Brooks has an excellent post of his own at The Torch on the government's failure to communicate. There's a nice post on the whole "detainee" question at Barrel Strength. I am in complete accord with this comment at Milnet.ca; please read the whole thing:

...I am not blind to the fact that Prime Minister Harper and his close, personal staff are anti-military and, at the very best, weak sisters when it comes to the Afghanistan mission...

A much stronger presentation of thoughts similar to mine here.

Mark C.

Posted by markc at January 27, 2008 08:47 PM