Updated on the flip.
Assuming their commanding officers can locate their maps so they can find their way back. And we'd better reconsider any plans to deploy them anywhere in future until the people who run the show have learned how to handle some rather basic tasks. Like filing.
If we're to take Major Denis Gagnon at face value, our military isn't even competent enough to handle important documents in a way that allows for their location and retrieval in anything short of "years." In other words, our military is completely incompetent and needs a thorough overhaul. From the top down. If we can't trust them with paperwork, how can we possibly trust them with loaded weapons?
I look forward to hearing about senior officers being demoted or discharged. Perhaps Major Gagnon should be among them.
H/t Alison.
Update:
By way of Scott Tribe, there's a followup story at The Chronicle Herald.
Stashed away in metal shipping containers somewhere at Kandahar Airfield are documents that could shed light on the Afghan detainee affair, an inquiry heard Tuesday.
But more than two years after public hearings were called into the prisoner controversy, the military has yet to find the paperwork and ship it back to Canada.
Would it be overly cynical of me to speculate that no effort to retrieve the documents has been made because people at the top have assumed they could stonewall the whole process and the documents would never really need to be produced? That couldn't happen, could it? And if the relevant documents have never even been located, how can so many people be so sure that they contain sensitive information that can't be released without endangering national security?
Not just Gagnon. Brigadier General Blanchette and M. Prefontaine should be facing serious sanctions for defying a civilian oversight commission. Where does Blanchette get off, doing this kind of editorializing?
That was the statement that shocked me most when someoldguy passed it on a couple of nights ago on Facebook (that's my h/t). We are in danger when serving members of the military dare to speak to civilian oversight bodies that way.
The MPCC and Milliken's ruling are not unconnected, but they depend on different legal logics. The MPCC should be able to defend itself against uppity officers and sneery government lawyers like Prefontaine. (Isn't he Mr "Good and Ready"?)
What a gong show. This is starting to make Somalia look like a well run operation.
Isn't he Mr "Good and Ready"?
One and the same.
As for Gen. Blanchette, his comment actually contradicts Gagnon by implying that the documents are at hand and "we" know that they contain sensitive information. How can "we" know that if we can't even locate the stuff in the first place?
Gagnon's comment struck me because it comes on the heels of previous revelations that our military often lost track of detainees and people didn't seem to know what their responsibilities were. As Greg suggests, the entire operation is starting to look like a gong show.
And these are the talking heads that send the young of Canada into a foreign country to kill and be killed. How much more info do we need before we say this is too much and get the hell out NOW?
More spin and game playing while innocent people are dying.
The terms "misfiled" and "can't locate" are military speak for none of your effin business