Prime Minister Stephen Harper remains unmoved and his spokesman, Kory Teneycke, has accused the Liberals of “revisionism and hypocrisy” for only now adopting the cause.
“This is the process the Liberals chose, and we're sticking with it,” Mr. Teneycke said in an interview Sunday.
In short, Harper is going to stick to his stance on Omar Khadr because he thinks he can pin it on the Liberals politically.
How mature of him. He's willing to throw a Canadian citizen away for points. I have news for you Mr. Harper, politics isn't a videogame. You don't come out on top for having a 'high score'...and I don't think you get any bonus points for being a cold-hearted, unfeeling clod either.
But his new spokesbot can't stop, and comes out in a full out lie:
"This information was in their hands when they made these decisions," he said.
... and then there's the other side of the story.
But today, Liberal Dan McTeague – a parliamentary secretary who had been given a special responsibility for Canadians detained abroad – says he regrets telling Canadians that Mr. Khadr was being treated humanely.
“I said it many times, ‘We've been given assurances by Americans.'… I said it in [media] scrum after [media] scrum, I had to take them at their word,” Mr. McTeague said in a recent interview with The Globe and Mail. But now he says he was not in the loop on a sleep-deprivation program, that, according to a newly released Canadian briefing note, U.S. military officials had used against Mr. Khadr in 2004.
“That information was not made available to me at the time,” Mr. McTeague said. “Obviously I wouldn't have made that statement had I known that.”
Off the top of my head, either Spokesbot Teneycke is utterly clueless about what happened, or he's busy trying to apply as much spin as he can get.
Let's be clear about something here - I wasn't exactly impressed with how the Liberal governments dealt with the Khadr file either. However, we get to work with the facts we have today, and we must assess today's government on the basis of what we know today about that file. Leaving Mr. Khadr to fend for himself in a pseudo-legal "trial" that may or may not be fair is becoming less and less tenable as each day goes by and each new revelation escapes from the guarded worlds of Guantanamo Bay and CSIS.
The Harper government stands on its own actions - or lack of them.
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