So maybe it was Canadian soldiers abusing prisoners

Yesterday's post was in response to a short television news segment about Canadians' responsibilities for their prisoners' well-being. I misunderstood the discussion. I thought they were referring to the people we turned our prisoners over to (Afghan government and US military). It turns out that it is that, and our own soldiers' treatment of prisoners as well.I tend to ignore television news and I've stopped buying newspapers, and I follow stories online, so I'm not always up on the latest breaking stuff.

Toronto Star

OTTAWA–Two separate probes are underway into a complaint that up to three prisoners suffered injuries while in the custody of Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan, the Toronto Star has learned.

...

Questions are being asked about how as many as three unidentified men suffered injuries to
their upper body while being detained by Canadian soldiers in the Kandahar region last April.
And investigators want to know why the military police officers who eventually took charge of the detainees didn't do their own probe of the injuries.

The Star appears to be curiously vague about the nature of the abuse, ... referring to "upper body injuries," that could mean some bruises on their chests from bumping into something.

The CBC has more (including the name of the guy on CHTV yesterday):

The allegations come from a law professor at the University of Ottawa, Amir
Attaran, based on government documents he obtained under the Access to
Information Act.

...

The documents show three men were brought to military police by a single interrogator in one day with injuries to their faces, heads and upper bodies, he told the CBC on Tuesday.

He said the men had swollen eyes, cuts on their eyebrows, gashes to their forehead and slashes on their cheeks.

I have to say that if this is what that CH anchorwoman was talking about when she sneeringly asked how realistic it is to imagine that all prisoners will be treated properly, then I have to say that I'm appalled.

It's one thing to think that Canadian troops might not have to be responsible for how prisoners are treated by the Afghan government, but it's quite another thing to thing to simply believe that our soldiers should be excused from respecting human rights themselves.

I think I'll check the submerged third of humanity and see how they're taking this (if they're even acknowledging it) ...

Oh yeah, ... as suspected:

"I honestly do not know what the problem is. Ok, a few prisoners are slapped around. If it is that much of a hassle, simply take no prisoners, shoot every SOB."

"I'm with GaryinWpg, just shoot them dead as you find them since the liberal MSM moonbats are too cowardly to embed themselves with the troops they can only speculate."

"Prof. Amir Attaran, I thinks 6 weeks basic at Petawawa and a trip to Afstan is in order, and not as a concientious objector. Maybe you will get more of an appreciation of things local, from a combat soldier's and the local Afghani's perspective when you are on the receiving end of all those poor "insurgents" that you weep for. "

"In the past, Amir Attaran would have been arrested as an enemy spy. His purpose is not so-called 'human rights abuses'. That is his clever cover. He is using our laws and values against us, in order to support the jihad."

"(The enemy infiltrator known as) Attaran's last effort was to have the Geneva enemy combatant rules applied to jihad prisoners. The problem is jihadi Islamofascists, especially the Taliban, are not recognized soldiers of any country's military. So, in its present form, the Geneva rules do not apply. But, obviously, he's still trying to cripple our military effort any way he can."

"What the MSM should be concentrating on is questioning the motives of the oppostion and this
professor in bringing this crap forward. Additionally, this all happened under the LIBS did it not? Where were they. How does this reflect on the current government? "

There's lots more of course. Remember, this is the political base of politicians like Stephen Harper, Stockwell Day, and Mike Harris. These aren't just harmless, pathetic morons. Shit-heads like this have made Stockwell Day our Minister of Public Safety.

If you're a supporter of the war in Afghanistan, and you have faith in the principles of our soldiers, then your proper response to this story should be along the lines of: "These are still just allegations, and while I'm sure they're not true, it's a serious matter. I hope they're not true, but I realize that it's an important story."

You don't immediately begin to whine about how the media is out to destroy the troops' morale and that who cares if we beat the shit out of people?

These idiots will never realize that if - if - Western democracies behave better in wartime, it isn't because of callous, indifferent, pro-war, pro-torture vermin like them, it's because bleeding-heart pinko fags care to make sure that we do.

The right-wing needs to learn to understand, and then embrace the "Canadian values" that they 're so mindlessly, and incomprehensibly, so proud of.

Otherwise, after we've cut ourselves so much "slack" we might produce monsters like this:

Dilawar was sent to Bagram and soon labeled "noncompliant." One of the guards, Specialist Corey Jones, said the prisoner spat in his face and started kicking him. Jones responded, he said, with a couple of knee strikes to the leg of the shackled man."He screamed out, 'Allah! Allah! Allah!' and my first reaction was that he was crying out to his god," Jones said to investigators. "Everybody heard him cry out and thought it was funny. It became a kind of running joke, and people kept showing up to give this detainee a common peroneal strike just to hear him scream out 'Allah,"' he said. "It went on over a 24-hour period, and I would think that it was over 100 strikes."

...

The findings of Dilawar's autopsy were succinct. He had had some coronary artery disease, the medical examiner reported, but what killed him was the same sort of "blunt force trauma to the lower extremities" that had led to Habibullah's death.One of the coroners later translated the assessment at a pre-trial hearing for Brand, saying the tissue in the young man's legs "had
basically been pulpified.""I've seen similar injuries in an individual run over by a bus," the coroner, Lieutenant Colonel Elizabeth Rouse, added.

Remember, Dilawar was an innocent man, a taxi-driver who had the misfortune of driving by the scene of an insurgent bombing of a US military post.

Let's review the moral universe of the right-wing. From links in earlier posts you can find out that some of the Taliban fighters in the area where Operation Medusa was carried out were merely farmers who were trying to resist an admittedly corrupt and brutal Karzai police force. Okay? They're poor farmers trying not to be robbed and beaten, and the Taliban is the group that is organizing resistance and so they joined it.

The right-wing Liberal-Conservative Party of Canada, and the bottom-third of the Canadian population have seen fit to put Canadian soldiers into Afghanistan to crush this resistance.

If we are to capture any of these poor farmers as Taliban fighters, the right-wing thinks it's fine if our troops relieve their stress by beating the living crap out of them. I imagine that if one of our troops goes "too far" and kills anyone, ... maybe even takes some trophy photos, ... this same human garbage will whine about the media making a big deal about "a few bad apples."