The Liberal Excuse For Enabling Torture

It was the CBC who broke the story of the diplomat who told the Liberals that torture was likely in Afghanistan before the Liberals agreed to start handing over POWs to Afghan officials, and now it is the CBC running Liberal damage control the next day. The new headline "Liberals feared Abu Graib-type detainee scandal: source" where an anonymous source reported that the Grits were so freaked out about Gitmo and Abu Graib that they were justified to speed up the switch to transferring prisoners to a place where their own diplomats repeatedly warned them of "horrific" torture.

In Abu Graib, they might put a bag on your head and make you stand on a stool while a goofball guard poses for a photo op; in Afghan prisons they allegedly do far worse and cause severe permanent physical damage. Or worse than mutilation, they could have been sent to a tropical cell at Gitmo, complete with soccer fields and prayer rugs where they risk being kept awake at night with loud music and tricked with fake newspaper headlines. Granted, 60% of Gitmo's POWs were released via military tribunals in the last couple of years of George Bush's reign, but you don't often see that in the headlines (especially at the CBC).

So the new Liberal defense, "we were so scared of a Yankee guard taking a picture with a hooded prisoner that we instead willfully turned them over to facilities where our own diplomats reported horrific abuse." Very responsible guys. Even if you agree that there was a probability of humiliation in American custody, that is still no excuse for not putting any monitoring mechanisms into your new transfer deal with a country that your own people are telling you torture far worse than what you are seeing on CNN. I'm sure every detainee would prefer to have their fingernails ripped out instead of having water poured down their nose. Once upon a time I was on the YMCA junior swim team and my grandparents owned and operated a tourist camp on a lake. I have experienced water up the nose on dozens of occasions. It is uncomfortable and it burns, but it is completely tolerable and goes away fast. Rip out my fingernails, and that burns forever.

Nevertheless, it is disappointing that the day after getting excited that the CBC broke a story that painted a negative pox on the Liberal Party, they come out with a juvenile defense for what was reported the day before. The day of the controversy, it was a named diplomat; the day after it was a source that refused to be identified.