Pettigrew does not intend to be consistent. If the Canadian government seriously opposed the torture of Canadian citizens, it would pull out all the stops to have Washington return teenager Omar Khadr from the Guantánamo Bay prison camp, where he is being held outside of international law and where, according to his lawyers, he has been physically abused.
If the Canadian government seriously opposed torture, it would not allow its soldiers in Afghanistan to hand over captured prisoners to U.S. forces operating outside the Geneva Conventions who, according to numerous accounts by human rights agencies, routinely abuse their charges.
Nor would it exchange information on Canadians with regimes that deliberately engage in physical abuse as an accepted form of interrogation — like Egypt, Syria and the United States.
But Ottawa is not serious. Hypocrisy has long been a staple of Canadian foreign policy. But the government's level of hypocrisy in this affair is breathtaking.
If you have a moment in the midst of Gomeryfest, give it a read.
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