Government Rejects La Presse Report As Taliban Propaganda
Recently, three Pakistanis that had allegedly been recruited to fight in Afghanistan were paraded in front of television cameras by Afghan authorities. They relayed stories about how they were fed false information regarding their recruitment; that nothing they were told turned out to be true when they arrived in Afghanistan to fight, and that they just wanted to go home. There were no questions allowed them by the media, no Afghan official appeared on tape, and yet we are supposed to take their admissions as fact. And yet, when Montreal’s La Presse ran a story yesterday about accounts from captured detainees and the Afghan Human Rights Commission that the Afghan secret services continue to torture prisoners, even those handed over to authorities by Canadian forces, it was immediately dismissed by the government as Taliban propaganda.
We’ve seen this before, of course. When the Globe & Mail first reported that it was taking place it caused quite a stir, one that was addressed by the government in some ways and downplayed by them in others. Unfortunately, it seems that now that they feel they’ve addressed them problem, the chance that it could still exist isn’t something they’re willing to admit, let alone even discuss. And that’s a rather dangerous precedent to set.
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October 30th, 2007 at 1:31 pm
It’s odd how ever since I read the Shock Doctrine, I’m finding it applicable every single day to some news report or other.
Personally, I’d be stunned to discover that these prisoners *weren’t* being tortured, but regardless of my personal suspicions, saying “We do expect these kinds of allegations from the Taliban. It is their standard operating procedure to engage in these kinds of accusations” makes you sound like a blithering idiot.
WTF?!
October 30th, 2007 at 1:49 pm
PS. On a (mostly) unrelated subject, did we all notice the new post on http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com/ a few days ago? Every time I see a new post from her, I start out with a sigh of relief that she’s still alive, but get progressively closer to tears as I read the post. This latest one was no exception.
October 30th, 2007 at 2:17 pm
“The Conservative government in Ottawa responded to similar reports last spring by saying it had a new a deal to monitor detainees.”
I’d sure like to know what agency Canada is using to monitor the Afghan prison system. If we’re depending on the local agency in Afghanistan then we’re going to get the same lack of access as it’s funded by the Karzai government which isn’t about to reveal incriminating evidence about it’s own activites.
As far as I’m concerned nothing has changed, there was a story in the Globe & Mail in September about how 50 captives Canada has turned over recently to Afghan authorities have gone missing. In that kind of environment it usually means dead, not misplaced.
November 1st, 2007 at 5:45 pm
When will it be enough? By that, I mean bad enough for someone to actually step in and DO something? What is going to take? Are they gonna wait until more innocent people (reporters, the citizens of that country, etc.), or worse yet Canadian and American soldiers being treated in the same manner to ACT?!?
When did we forget that we are all human beings?