PMO May Come to Regret Afghan Document Dump
The latest tactic by the Harper PMO in the effort to stifle the Opposition’s efforts to get to the bottom of the Afghan detainee issue may have backfired. The so-called Document Dump strategy basically involves releasing an overwhelming number of documents in response to demands for a selected few; the idea being that the Opposition would be swamped with irrelevant information. The government surprised everyone on Thursday morning when it released two thousand six hundred pages of redacted documents the government presented two boxes containing a single copy of what it said were previously unreleased documents pertaining to the handling of Afghan detainees. It now appears they likely didn’t read them all before releasing them.
It’s only been a day and already two reports by the CBC raise concerns. The first, that a Canadian soldier had raised concerns that Afghan soldier routinely executed detainees. The second, that a soldier assigned to question an Afghan prisoner later expressed concern Afghan forces had abused the detainee before the questioning took place. Did Harper, Soudas and crew fail to consider that the press would be all over these documents? Is it possible that they haven’t bothered to dig into this themselves to see if indeed there is something to the Opposition’s allegations? Surely if you’re going to dump documents you’d take the time to read them all and ensure that they don’t contain anything that would raise more issues.