Eerily familiar

As much as the Cons try to criticize any attempt to link them to the Bush administration, they sure seem to be going out of their way to build parallels. Take Gordon O'Connor's excuse as to how he thinks he can regain the trust of Canadians after his previous position on Afghan detainees was proven to have no basis in reality:

He will meet with the head of the Kandahar office of Afghanistan's human rights commission to make sure the group honours an agreement to monitor the condition of the detainees on behalf of Canada.

"I want to look the man in the eyes and I want to confirm that they are going to do what they say they're going to do," Mr. O'Connor said. "I just want assurance from him that he will monitor and he will inform us of any abuses."

No word yet on whether O'Connor thinks he'll be able to get a sense of anybody's soul. But it won't be the least bit surprising if that becomes part of the post-visit spin.

O'Connor may think that his verdict on the visit (complete with predetermined judgment) should be enough to paper over his own fabrications. But there's no reason for Canadians to agree - whether it comes to O'Connor's future portrayal the terms of the new agreement, or to his ability to evaluate the honesty of somebody else promising to fulfill that agreement. And with Canadians discovering the fact-free underpinnings of their reactionary government far faster than the U.S. managed to, it may not be long before the parallels between the Bush and Harper regimes include a massive political rejection of both.

Update: This is remarkably irresponsible even for the Cons, as it turns out that O'Connor didn't even bother checking to see whether the human rights official in question was actually around to meet with him:

Defence Minister Gordon O'Connor's attempts to meet with the head of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission failed Monday when he discovered the organization's director wasn't in Kandahar.

Mr. O'Connor said after arriving Sunday night that he wanted to meet AIHRC head Abdul Qadar Noorzai to look him in the eye and confirm that his group, the newly appointed monitors of Canada's detainee agreement, are “going to do what they say they're going to do.”

But the meeting was cancelled late Monday afternoon when it emerged that Mr. Noorzai was in neighbouring Helmand province.

It's not known why Mr. Noorzai was in Helmand or whether the meeting will be rescheduled.

One presumes that in the interest of fairness, we'll see multiple weeks of Bourque headlines on O'Connor's waste of federal funds.

Mind you, O'Connor does have one more distinctly Republican option if he's determined to deliver an authoritative opinion. That is, if he can track down enough footage of Noorzai to perform a soul diagnosis.

Update II: The latest spin from O'Connor is that an exchange of letters and a meeting from last year (before Canada actually signed any agreement with the human rights commission) offer all the assurance Canada could possibly need:

(I)n a news release, O'Connor pointed to a recent exchange of letters between Canada and the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission.

The defence minister said the AIHRC has agreed to undertake "to provide immediate notice to Joint Task Force Afghanistan or the Canadian Embassy, should it learn that a detainee transferred by the Canadian Forces to Afghan authorities has been mistreated."

O'Connor added that in June 2006 the Commission met with officials from Foreign Affairs and National Defence in Ottawa to discuss human rights conditions in Afghanistan as well as detention conditions.

Let's leave aside the implausibility of a meeting last year having any relevance to a deal signed just last month. Does this mean that O'Connor's trip to Afghanistan was solely for the purpose of looking into Mr. Noorzai's eyes for reasons unrelated to the agreement?