Friday, June 15, 2007

The Failings of MicroManagement, Part XVII - Afghanistan

I've commented on just how badly Harper's micromanagement style is going to get things wrong.

Sure enough, we see that when the PMO wasn't getting the reports on Afghan detainees. WTF? Why in heck should it require the PMO to figure out that abusing prisoners, or handing them over to abusers is bad karma?

Where was the Minister of Foreign Affairs? Or the Minister of Defense? These are the two ministers whose direct responsibility the Afghan mission falls under in one form or another. Feigning ignorance doesn't cut it.

Mr. MacKay said that until recently, he knew nothing of the reports either.

"The human rights reports are not normally copied to the Minister of Foreign Affairs, nor is the Minister briefed on their content," Mr. MacKay wrote in response to NDP defence critic Dawn Black. In a separate response, National Defence Minister Gordon O'Connor wrote that he and his predecessors had also not been made aware of the human rights reports.


MacKay and O'Connor may well not have been made aware of those human rights reports. In which case, not only should they resign, but half of their political staff should be fired immediately for gross incompetence. You're conducting activity in a war theatre, and neither of these men is paying attention to the human rights files? Okay, boys, it's time to put away the guns - because clearly you haven't got a goddamned clue what you are doing! Ignorance of such an important issue in today's world is inexcusable.

I think we can guess where they were. Mackay was busy licking Condi's boots to a fine polish (you get to imagine how Condi was dressed), and O'Connor was busy fulfilling his unfinished contracts as "lobbyist" for various military hardware vendors.

As for the PM? Well, obviously he had bigger things to do - like piss off China for example.

In the Commons yesterday, Government House Leader Peter Van Loan said that "everybody knows that the Department of Foreign Affairs reports annually on human rights."

In fact, the Foreign Affairs Department initially denied the existence of the Afghan human-rights report, saying in response to an access-to-information request earlier this year that "no such report on human rights performance in other countries exists." Only after complaints to the Information Commissioner was a heavily edited version of the report released in April.


Like the business with Celil rotting in a Chinese prison, or Omar Khadr being paraded like a sacrificial sheep through the kangaroo courts in Guano Bay, the HarperCons keep showing that they have no idea about dealing with human rights of any sort, nor do they give a damn - whether or not you are a Canadian citizen.

Worse, they are outright willing to lie, and cover up what they are (or are not) doing in the name of Canada. It's time for this bunch of incompetent, lying bastards to leave office. They are clearly neither ready for, nor able to govern a nation...much less Canada.

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