My Riding Endorsed Torture-Man

I'm somewhere between amazed and bitter. I don't think Lewis Carroll invented a word for that as he did with chortle and gimble. Let's just say that I'm hardly mimsy.

Did the people in Carleton-Mississippi Mills realize what they were doing?

Here we have a former military officer, Gordon O'Connor, a Brigadier-General no less, who was made Minister of Defence. He told our soldiers and officers to turn their prisoners over to the Afghan authorities.

He lied to us when he told us that the Red Cross would keep tabs on them when he had to know, as an experienced military officer, that the Red Cross has never done any such thing.

He lied when he pretended he didn't know that the Afghan authorities were torturing prisoners to death. Even the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission admitted it.

He made us complicit, as the voters in this democracy of Canada, in a war crime. Certainly he committed the foul, but we committed him and so are responsible for his actions.

But until tonight, we could pretend that he did it against our will. Until tonight, we could argue that we didn't know what he was when we first elected him. We only picked him because he was Conservative in a strong Conservative riding.

But we know now. We know that he aided and abetted torture. We know that he turned a blind eye and tried to cover it up.

And then we elected him again anyway.

What does that say about us? What does it mean the next time a Canadian soldier is taken prisoner? Where now is our moral high ground when we speak of Maher Arar, Omar Khadr and William Sampson? Will they say, "You did it to ours. Why can't we do it to yours?"? What argument will we use then?

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