General Natynczyk Disagrees with Harper

At least not for long.

The Chief of the Defence Staff, General Walter Natynczyk says he has no objection to parliamentarians seeing the secret Afghanistan torture documents.

No way, says Prime Minister Stephen Harper who steadfastly refuses to show Parliament hundreds of pages that reveal what happened to prisoners that our soldiers turned over to the Afghan secret police

Harper says they would put our soldiers’ lives in danger.

That’s not the case, says Gen. Natynczyk, who has seen those documents. There’s nothing in the documents that would incriminate our soldiers, he says.

“So you do not object to the documents being shown to Parliament?” repeated a reporter.

”Not at all! Not at all!” repeated the general.

It is unusual for a top military man to contradict his political boss. For the time being the general still has his day job. Give him about a year.

Right now Harper is fighting took and nail to keep the torture documents secret, even ignoring a parliamentary order to release them, and threatening to close down Parliament or call an election.

The Opposition parties in the Commons say the real reason Harper is keeping the documents secret is because they might show his government closed its eyes to torture.

Under the Geneva Convention, merely turning over prisoners to someone who “may” torture them is a war crime, never mind “knowing” they will be tortured.

Our soldiers coming back from Afghanistan have been spilling stories for several years now about Afghan secret police torturing our prisoners.

As well several respected Canadian diplomats have been testifying under oath for the past five months about police torture backing up the oral reports of soldiers with a huge pile of government documents.

The last thing Harper needs going into an election is to be dragged before the War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague.