Thursday, November 26, 2009

CBC and expert hacks...

Thanks a bunch CBC. Your 6am news (which I normally don't mind waking up to, by the way) featured an interview with Mercedes Stephenson* about the prisoner issue in Afghanistan. In her unassailable University of Calgary/Pentagon/MIT/DND/Fraser Institute wisdom, Ms. Stephenson proceeded to inform bleary waking listeners such as myself that (paraphrased and summaried from my memory):
'it's an incredible stretch to think brave Canadian soldiers could face war crimes trials, let alone commit them and besides, the Taleban don't wear uniforms so they're not covered under the Geneva conventions [implicitly: who gives a damn what happens to them anyway, if torture really happened, so what].'
Waking up to this kind of drivel shits me to tears, especially when it amounts to a more credentialed variation the "support the war or fuck you" mantra repeated ad nauseum by the wingnuts and the consequent complete dismissal of contrary information. Especially when billed as a University of Calgary 'expert'. Sure this is part of the public discourse, and valid inasmuch as it articulates the rightwing braintrust's position on the prisoners, but not first thing in the morning, please.


*Ms. Stephenson seems to be early flyer of a hawkling, so maybe her apparent dismissal of the seriousness of the prisoner torture issue is a consequence of her naivety and early seduction by defence and security types on both sides of the 49th. So perhaps there's still hope for this one. If I were her, I'd probably think about not doing any more CBC interviews until I was certain I wasn't about to put my foot in my mouth.

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