Posted on 12/05/2006 8:42:05 PM PST by canuck_conservative
OTTAWA — When the prime minister unleashes his lap dogs to join a parliamentary pack attack, someone is about to die.
Conservative MPs treated RCMP Commissioner Giuliano Zaccardelli with kid gloves during his first appearance before a parliamentary committee two months ago to explain his involvement in the Maher Arar affair.
They dropped the gloves and savaged him during his second appearance on Tuesday, when he admitted to misleading MPs due to a severely flawed memory.
It was an all-party Zach attack and when Stephen Harper stood in the Commons a few hours later, urging patience for ‘due process’ before anyone gets fired, well, all that’s left to discuss are the terms of severance.
The behaviour of the RCMP Commissioner during the Arar inquiry’s aftermath certainly ranks as a head-shaking Keystone Cop moment. Consider the bizarre sequence of events.
After the RCMP fired off incomplete and false information to American authorities about Arar as a security risk, which led to the Canadian’s deportation to a year of torture in Syria, an inquiry was launched and the presiding judge cleared Zaccardelli of any knowledge about the bad data.
So far, so good — at least for Zaccardelli.
But then, he testifies live on national television in September, that the inquiry was wrong and that he knew the information was erroneous and briefed various ministers on it.
Back at RCMP headquarters, with the mentioned ministers in full denial, his brass quickly took Zaccardelli aside to suggest he was out of his mind, that he had no advance knowledge of information inaccuracies, and that he hadn’t told anybody anything.
Zaccardelli became terribly, terribly concerned and wanted to recant. He was so worried, he waited six weeks before contacting the committee to book mea culpa time and then waiting another month to offer himself up as a pinata for a miffed MP bashabout.
Before he did that, he decided to get those MPs angrier by confessing all at a business luncheon, where the audience didn’t know whether to clap or boo after the country’s RCMP boss admitted he was dyslexic with dates.
On Tuesday, 69 days after he first mislead MPs, Zaccardelli returned to the committee. "I clearly made a transfer of the knowledge I had acquired in 2006 to what I knew in 2002, which is incorrect."
How come I never get cops like that when busted for speeding? Imagine how easy it would be to get off if the cop could only narrow his memory to a four-year period?
(I’ll have to check, but it sure sounds as if Zaccardelli might have mentored the RCMP officers who found two bodies in an Edmonton paper recycling plant in 1994 and decided they’d been accidentally electrocuted. Two days later, the trail and bodies gone cold, the coroner discovered two bullets in their brains. I digress.)
Zaccardelli’s gone one botch too far to survive, particularly given the jaundiced look the auditor general gave his department last week at the plodding pace of investigations into RCMP pension fund administration irregularities.
His behaviour suggests only two explanations. Either Zaccardelli was wilfully blind to a critical part of a flawed RCMP investigation for four years. Or, he was pathetically confused during his first committee appearance when his first, second, third and fourth answers turned out to be an imprecision, a misimpression, a misunderstanding or a mistake. A third option? He could’ve been lying, although I can’t figure out why he’d want to implicate himself after being cleared by a judge.
Still, all of the above speaks to his competence. And all of the above are grounds for his dismissal.
If Zaccardelli isn’t gone by the weekend, the Harper government must stand accused of cashing in his marker for revealing a Liberal cabinet minister was under investigation on an income trust leak at the most volatile moment of the last election campaign.
After all, a prime minister who takes just 24 hours to declare Quebec, oops, the Quebecois a nation within Canada ,should be able to act inside of a week to restore confidence in police authority.
Perhaps Zaccardelli himself delivered the most appropriate reason for why he should be fired. "I can’t have any diminution of the trust Canadians have in their national police force," he insisted.
His lingering presence in the top cop spot undermines that trust.
Police officers must be meticulous in their memories and truthful in their testimony. If Zaccardelli can’t get the facts straight in a case where his own life or death are on the line, it’s time law enforcement’s top dog was put down.
© National Post
Pinggggg
A previous article on the topic:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/1515808/posts
Wonder why reporters keep leaving out bits of info like this?
“There was no response from any of these editors or journalists and then came the publication of the Toope Fact Finding Report in the Arar case. In the case of this Arar Commission report where Maher Arar and several other persons who claim having been tortured in Syria were interviewed, the CBC, CP and other Canadian media paid no attention to the nature of the report as only taking a stance on the probability of some truth to these claims. It also stated that one organization and a witness had clearly embellished and exaggerated their accounts. In addition, it stated that none of those interviewed had been under oath and that Arar and several others had communicated with each other prior to the interviews. These are important facts!” Njalsson explains. ------- "CBC and Canadian Press Flunked Out in Coverage of Several Terrorist Cases,"
I-NewsWire.Com , 2005-11-04
Please send me a FReepmail to get on or off this Canada ping list.
What information is left out of that?
Everything in brackets.
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