Don Martin:OTTAWA -- Befuddled by a straight shooter who was hogging the spotlight, Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s staff finally tried to gag and hide Rick Hillier from public view.
It didn’t work, of course.
Retired chief of defence staff Hillier’s soon-to-be-released autobiography A Soldier First, published by HarperCollins, fell into my hands recently and, as expected, he pulls no punches in needling those huddled inside the parliamentary bubble.
He spits out the sock they tried to stuff into his mouth, rages against an unwieldy federal bureaucracy, reveals private showdowns with former defence minister Gordon O’Connor and twice dismisses Liberal MP Denis Coderre’s politics as “dumber than dirt.” Ouch.
But while he will undoubtedly flesh out his recollections during the book promotion tour to come, Gen. Hillier’s observations about the Afghanistan detainees caught my attention because he insists the government was kept in the loop about prisoner torture allegations.
The question of when and what senior ministers knew about the treatment of captured Taliban in Kandahar is another one of those explosive issues where a proven coverup would be worse than the actual crime.
A parade of defence ministers initially denied all knowledge of the allegations in the House of Commons, despite a steady stream of torture reports hitting the bureaucracy from Richard Colvin, the senior diplomat on the ground.
A Military Police Complaints Commission is probing the allegations, but it has been starved of requested documentation by a stonewalling Defence Minister Peter MacKay.
Read more: http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2009/10/19/don-martin-hillier-defied-pmo-bureaucrats-biography-recalls.aspx#ixzz0UiZOOqP6
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