Outspoken

Amnesty International along with retired diplomat Gar Pardy and others testifying at an informal hearing of the committee investigating allegations of senior government and military cover-up of Afghan prisoner torture makes some fairly dubious claims. But Liberal Members of Parliament are having a grand old time, extracting information that they feel vitalizes their all-too-obvious politicizing of an issue that the current Conservative-led government is aware of, and attempting to handle properly.

They've handily forgotten, or chosen to overlook their own leader's equivocating on the matter of when and where and on which occasions some elements of torture are morally permissible. Validation of an ambiguous morality? But that, of course, is not germane to the study at hand. Nor is the fact that it was originally a Liberal-led government that took Canadian forces into Afghanistan and it was as well known then as it is now that the country's tribal mentality saw little amiss in physical violence directed against inmates of prisons.

They also overlook, because it suits their purposes, that the current government has taken steps to ameliorate the situation, by training prison guards, by funding the construction of new prisons, by removing prisoners from situations where it is thought they would be abused. They choose to overlook that when in a foreign country, while one does not always feel justified in "when in Afghanistan do as Afghans do", it is difficult during the stress of war to impose Western constraints on Eastern mindsets.

However, retired general Rick Hillier was definitely diplomatically incorrect when he famously stated in a public forum, his distinct opinion of the Taliban as "detestable murderers and scumbags". One cannot take issue too fervently, however, with his characterization other than that it was impolitic. The executive branch of government or the military generally exercises a greater degree of diplomacy. It wouldn't do, after all, to encourage that kind of thought in the head of a disgruntled grunt.

And the term 'scumbags' is surely a trifle undue in description of the Taliban. This is a sobriquet given to low-level societal misfits whose predations on society strike the meter as nuisances. The Taliban are, rather, the scum of the Earth, in their deadly predations on the defenceless schoolgirls willing to court danger to empower themselves through learning; on widows whose only source of income they constrained to ensure their prohibition on women appearing in public was maintained.

The Taliban don't prey in the lightest way on the population; they flay those who celebrate life, enslave young women to old men's desires, slaughter opponents and schoolteachers, line their pockets while pauperizing the helpless population unable to defy the whims and demands of fanatics. The Taliban who pay for farmers to grow poppies for opium production, and who set IEDs to destroy the lives of foreign soldiers are decidedly not scumbags though they are detestable murderers.

And while they are detestable murderers, representatives of NATO may not engage in meting out to those taken prisoners, their hatred and their spite in the form of physical punishment. Not even after themselves being targets of those murderers. Nor enable their Afghan counterparts to do likewise, even if to do so is a heritage-function of their prison system. Nor has the Canadian military done so. Nor has the Government of Canada been complicit in enabling prisoner abuse and torture.

And General Hillier is spot on in observing that "...even in a perfectly functioning society like our great country, if you walk into Millhaven penitentiary and you ask half the inmates there whether anybody's abused them, they'll probably all say yes, because that is the nature of the beast. So there is always a risk that something can occur, and you are comfortable that there is a follow up process that would recognize that. That was the key."

Unfortunately, the opposition in Parliament is utterly disinterested in turning the key to unlock the real truth; they're too busy inventing their own.