Low in facts

The Globe and Mail reports on yet another complete fabrication from a Con cabinet minister, as the Red Cross has flatly denied Gordon O'Connor's claim that it has any involvement in Canada's detainee transfer agreement with Afghanistan:

The International Committee of the Red Cross confirmed Wednesday that it has no role in monitoring the Canada-Afghanistan detainee-transfer agreement, in direct contradiction to assurances Defence Minister Gordon O'Connor has made to the House of Commons.

The Red Cross also said that it would never divulge to Ottawa any abuses it might identify in Afghan prisons.

“We were informed of the agreement, but we are not a party to it and we are not monitoring the implementation of it,” Simon Schorno, a spokesman for the ICRC, said in an interview.

In his most explicit statement to the House of Commons on May 31, Mr. O'Connor said: “The Red Cross or the Red Crescent is responsible to supervise their treatment once the prisoners are in the hands of the Afghan authorities. If there is something wrong with their treatment, the Red Cross or Red Crescent would inform us and we would take action.”...

That claim has been persistently and vigorously disputed by opposition political and human-rights groups, which contend the ICRC never divulges its findings either publicly or to third parties and that the minister is misrepresenting its role.

“The minister is wrong,” NDP defence critic Dawn Black said.

“Either he is woefully ill informed or he is misleading the House. He needs to clear this up,” she said this week in a interview from her riding in British Columbia.

Even the Foreign Affairs Department has now formally contradicted the minister's statement.

“The ICRC is not required to notify Canada,” Foreign Affairs spokeswoman Ambra Dickie confirmed in an e-mail, delivering a formal response that had been approved by senior officials to a written question from The Globe and Mail. The question was: “Is the ICRC required to notify Canada of any suspected violations of the Geneva Convention against detainees transferred into Afghan custody by Canada?”

While it's a plus to see O'Connor's invention exposed, I'll disagree with Black's view here just as I did with the Libs' strategy earlier, as there's no reason to think that offering the Cons a chance to explain their lies will result in anything positive. At best, O'Connor will have nothing useful to say; at worst, he'll simply conjure up some other excuse which may not be debunked until after the next election, allowing him to give a wrongful impression that he's actually made up for his previous fabrications.

Instead, it's long past time to conclude that the Cons simply don't have anywhere near enough credibility to be worth listening to, and to highlight the basis for that conclusion to the wider public. And with any luck, the end result in the near future will be a change to a government which isn't thoroughly detached from reality.

Update: Not surprisingly, O'Connor's response goes directly into the "nothing useful to say" category:

Defence Minister Gordon O'Connor, in an about-face from earlier comments, acknowledged Thursday that the International Committee of the Red Cross does not inform Canada of the treatment of detainees captured by Canadian troops and transferred to Afghan authorities.

In a terse statement released to The Globe and Mail Thursday evening, Mr. O'Connor said: "It was my understanding that the ICRC could share information concerning detainee treatment with Canada.

"I have recently learned that they would, in fact, provide this information to the detaining nation, in this case Afghanistan."

Among the Cons, this apparently counts as contrition and explanation. But it shouldn't be hard to see that O'Connor's wrong "understanding" was precisely the one that Dawn Black and others attempted to correct.