Friday, April 30, 2010

Murray Dobbin on the "National Security" Lie

From rabble.ca:

almost no one has commented on the totally absurd nature of the Harper government's basis for stonewalling. Indeed everyone seems to casually accept the framing of the issue that the government has relied on for months.

That framing suggests that documents relating to the detaining of suspected insurgents and their transfer to the Afghan secret police are somehow critical to national security. If any of these redacted parts of the documents were revealed to the public we are asked to believe that Canadian soldiers' lives would suddenly be in greater danger than they already are in this outrageous war and occupation.

...

There is nothing in these documents that talks about military strategy and tactics or military intelligence gathering. There is nothing that could give the Taliban an advantage in killing Canadian soldiers. There is nothing that reveals our long term policy. These documents were assembled on the basis of their specific relevance to the issue of the torturing of Canada's Afghan prisoners.

...

If the opposition parties had in the first place refused to accept the opportunistic and phony framing of the documents issue they would not now be bending themselves out of shape trying to compromise on something that should not be compromised: total, unrestricted parliamentary access to the documents that will tell us once and for all the critical question at the core of this issue:

Are Canadian senior officials, up to and including ministers of the crown, guilty of war crimes?

(Emphasis added.)

Dobbin is exactly right. This screeching about "national security" and the safety of "the troops" is the most blatant form of bullshit. Scum-bags like Ezra Levant and stephen harper would sacrifice their precious "troops" in a second if it was necessary to save their own vast expanses of skin.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Exactly. Not just that, but Milliken's performance was not even necessary in the First Place!!

WTH are our representatives in the House even thinking? It's infuriating!

thwap said...

Well, I think that protocol required referring it to the Speaker, and the Speaker had to grant some consideration for a government's right to do its job. And it seems to me that Milliken's ruling tried to maintain some dignity for our political system with his wording.

Also, he can't order Parliament to do anything, he can only say that the government members have to work with the rest of the House.

But it's everyone else who is maintaining this "polite" fiction that harper isn't just obstructing investigation into his war crimes, on the part of the media, mainstream commentators, the opposition parties, that's ridiculous.