New Survey: Who is Your Favourite Cartoon Character, John Baird or Dimitri Soudas?

Just when you thought Dimitri Soudas couldn't say anything more stupid, he outdoes himself. With John Baird shoving a pair of socks in Bev Oda's mouth to avoid accountability and transparency, Dimitri Soudas referred to Bob Rae's comments about Harper's backroom boys being Jihadists, as an insult to victims of terrorism.

Go right for the jugular.

This from a man who called environmental activists "terrorists", and created a "crisis" in Vancouver over peaceful protests against closing down the safe injection site. He only got involved because the wonderful Libby Davies stood with her constituents.

But Bob Rae has a very valid point and one we should be paying attention to. Those young boys in the backroom do control everything, while the people elected to represent us have lost their voice. Their only function is to read lines and take part in ridiculous little skits.

And Rae was not the first to sound the alarm.

In May of 2006, Bruce Champion-Smith wrote a piece for the Toronto Star: How Harper controls the spin

"What we're seeing here is a degree of control within the government, within the caucus ... that we haven't seen for a very long time .... That control extends to every corner of government.

Even the military

At a recent news conference, senior military officers were under government orders to answer reporters' questions only on the condition that they were not identified."I have to live within that limitation," Lt.-Gen. Walter Natynczyk, vice-chief of defence staff, told reporters.

And from our former ambassador to Afghanistan

Arif Lalani, Canada's ambassador in Afghanistan, is not allowed to speak with reporters without having each individual request approved by Ottawa, sources say. The Canadian International Development Agency has no one in Kandahar authorized to speak with reporters, even though development is ostensibly the focus of the extended mission.

And this tight messaging control caused a delay in the reporting of detainees. According to Brian Stewart of CBC:

All three of the independent military commands at that point (in 2007) — the Canadian, Dutch and British — knew that under international law they were responsible for the well being of all Afghans they picked up, even after they were handed over to Afghan prisons and interrogation centres. The Dutch were concerned enough to report immediately any handover to the local Red Cross
officials. Britain acted within 24 hours.

But Canada? hen Canadian soldiers brought in the usually hooded and tightly bound detainee, our military police on the spot would first inform the colonels and generals in the Kandahar mission control centre. But instead of alerting the Red Cross right away, like the Dutch and British, these commanders, following orders, sent the information to CEFCOM, the Canadian Expeditionary Force Command in Ottawa. his information would then be passed over to Defence Headquarters and to Foreign Affairs.

By the time the information was vetted, no one knew where the detainees had gone.

And in 2007 evidence revealed that Stephen Harper's office was already engaged in a cover up.

WASHINGTON–Prime Minister Stephen Harper's office used a "6,000-mile screwdriver" to oversee the denial of reports of Afghan detainee abuse when the scandal first erupted in 2007, according to a former senior NATO public affairs official who was then based in Kabul. The former official, speaking on condition his name not be used, told the Toronto Star that Harper's office in Ottawa "scripted and fed" the precise wording NATO officials in Kabul used to repudiate allegations of abuse "at a time when it was privately and generally acknowledged in our office that the chances of good treatment at the hands of Afghan security forces were almost zero."

"It was highly unusual. I was told this was the titanic issue for Prime Minister Harper and that every single statement that went out needed to be cleared by him personally," said the former official, who is not Canadian.

"The lines were, 'We have no evidence' of coercive treatment being used against detainees handed over to the Afghans. There were very clear instructions for a blanket denial. The pressure to hold to that line was channelled via Canadian military and diplomatic personnel in Kabul. But it was made clear to us that this was coming from the Prime Minister's Office, which was running the public affairs aspect of Canadian engagement in Afghanistan with a 6,000-mile screwdriver."

And even more alarming, according to Rick Hillier, Stephen Harper's backroom boys want to now run our wars from behind the safety of their junk food laden desks. (Hillier slams 'field marshal wannabes' in revised edition of his memoir, By: Murray Brewster, The Canadian Press, October 11, 2010)

Canada's former top soldier is warning that "field marshal wannabes" are angling to take a bigger role in directing the day-to-day operations of military forces in the field. Retired general Rick Hillier says a policy paper is circulating around senior levels of the Harper government that suggests the Clerk of the Privy Council and the deputy minister of defence take a greater role to "guide" the military.The former chief of defence staff writes, in a new postscript for the softcover edition of his memoirs, that there is a growing movement within the federal government to establish a system of micro-management that could extend from the highest reaches of Ottawa all the way down to individual combat units.

...The notion that the military needs greater guidance on how to conduct operations irked Hillier. "What crap!" Hillier writes in the new edition of A Soldier First, an advance copy of which was obtained by The Canadian Press.

So when Bob Rae uses strong language to sound the alarm on Harper's Jihadists, we need to pay attention. This is a very serious issue. These young men are not elected and therefore don't have to be accountable to anyone except our dictator.