I must confess that it was amusing to watch Evan Soloman throw some left handed jabs at former Liberal Defense Minister Bill Graham over his 2005 prisoner transfer agreement which may or may not have violated the Geneva conventions. I did not watch Graham's testimony before committee, but he was specifically asked by Soloman why there was not a monitoring mechanism in the agreement to ensure that prisoners would not be tortured. Graham says that it was impossible, there was absolutely no way that we would ever have that capacity, thus it was not included. Case closed. Now we know why we were not monitoring. It was not possible.
Then E-Solo steers Graham towards the NDS who ended being the ones who took custody of transferred detainees, and that the NDS was widely speculated at the time to be engaging in torture. Graham's response was that he had no idea who the NDS were and that they never came up in conversation; ergo "how can I be expected to know about something that we didn't talk about?" Ladies and gentlemen, your 2005 Minister of Defense. He was a co-architect of the prisoner transfer agreement, which ignored monitoring prisoners turned over to an already allegedly brutal police force; because monitoring was impossible and Bill Graham was not yet aware that the NDS existed.
So it looks like E-Solo does us a favour here?
ReplyDeleteThis issue had always looked like the Liberals know where the bodies are buried and they thought they could use it to tar the government with not cleaning up Liberal incompetence.
Maybe the buried bodies has been the reason behind Ralph Goodale's apparent reasonableness.
It seems that the PM would not play it this way if he thought he had a bad poker hand.
The Speaker's ruling aside, this has all been just noise as the cat plays with the mouse.
Take Iggy's appointment to the Privy Council.
The PM says to Iggy, here's your key to the Council and now I'm going to show you what we know about how your party handled these things before the PM was elected.
I predict this will all fizzle out as Iggy realizes he's holding a losing hand.
He's already been shown to be someone who can't keep a secret with the G-G thing.
And maybe E-Solo's bias has been noticed by his bosses.
Maybe somebody is starting to tell him temper his bias with a newfound balance.
Highlites from Grahams testimony,
ReplyDeletecommon sense and perspective:
'Graham said even in hindsight Canada can’t be held responsible for prisoners being tortured once they were handed over to Afghan authorities.
“You can’t be responsible for what you don’t know about...''
'.. organizations were concerned about the conditions of the Afghan jails, but “it’s not the same as torture..''
'.. he didn’t accept allegations that Canadians were “knowingly or implicitly involved” in a way that they would make them liable for possible war crimes.'
http://toyoufromfailinghands.blogspot.com/2010/05/so-whats-big-partisan-deal-about-afghan.html