Night of the Living Public Broadcaster

(The Taliban) has brutally repressed half its population. Women have been stripped of virtually all rights, denied the opportunity for schooling, the right to work or to freely move about. Women doctors, lawyers and tradespeople cannot practice their craft. The windows of their homes must be covered. They can travel outside the home only in the company of a male relative. They have effectively been blocked from receiving health care. For violating these rules, they are beaten in public by Taliban soldiers….

Here in Canada our public broadcaster is greatly concerned about this situation in Afghanistan, and continues to campaign tirelessly on behalf of the men who who wish to impose a brutal, misogynistic theocracy in Afghanistan. Friday’s lead story on The National was exemplary: “Right from the start the opposition has been claiming that government officials turned a blind eye to the torture of Afghan prisoners. But what we’re learning now is a suspicion that those hidden documents may reveal much worse that that: that the Canadians intended some prisoners to be tortured so as to gather intelligence. If true, that would be a war crime.”
As Milewski uttered the words “war crime” an Ottawa academic appeared onscreen. “This is ugly,” he said, grinning oddly as if he was about to laugh, or like he was getting away with something. “This makes Somalia look very small.”
Milewski introduced the vaunted expert – “Amir Attaran is a law professor who’s been digging deep into the Afghan file” – but he neglected to mention one niggling detail: Attaran is Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff’s friend. When Ignatieff was director of the Carr Center at Harvard where Attaran was a research fellow, Ignatieff “directly intervened in order to save Mr. Attaran’s job” after a dispute with some faculty members, and “gave him office space and mentoring support until he could find another academic home.” On another occasion, Ignatieff stood up on Attaran’s behalf to defy a lawyer’s strongly-worded piece of advice that the “secret anonymous” funding of Attaran’s research must be revealed in order to avoid a conflict of interest; Ignatieff told the lawyer that he’d already looked into it privately and found no conflict, so there was absolutely no need to reveal the source of the funding to anyone – a quintessentially Liberal response, when you think about it, and surely eye-opening to Attaran; it might even explain his oddly eager on-air grin.
A mere two weeks before his on-air accusations – which neither he nor Milewski provided a shred of evidence for – were used by the CBC as the centerpiece of an all-out anti-Conservative smear story, Attaran wrote: “Politicians, such as our Prime Minister….should be dismissed as dangerous ideologues.” In another essay, titled The Ugly Canadian, the American-born Attaran – an Ignatieff donor who recently spoke at a Liberal-organized forum on consular issues – wrote that, although he “probably…could live elsewhere,”

“….I was attracted to this very Pearsonian country in the 1990s…while I love this country, learning it through its laws has also shown me a dark side….Today’s Canada would not please Pearson, and he would find the country’s outlook on foreign people and international obligations oddly picayune and ignorant.”

Take that, you toothless conservative proles. Oh, and too bad you get to choose your representatives:

“Pearson was an Oxford-educated university professor with a hyperactive work ethic. If finding a comparable candidate requires the prime minister bypassing elected members of Parliament to appoint an outsider by way of the Senate, that is a lesser evil than entrusting a diffident poseur like Maxime Bernier with the job of picturing Canada to the world.”

It’s unprofessional and highly unethical for the CBC to not disclose Attaran’s highly-partisan pronouncements and his longstanding personal and professional relationship with Michael Ignatieff, but that’s just business as usual at the CBC’s parliamentary bureau. It can’t be stopped. Every time a spectacularly biased practitioner like Keith Boag or Susan Bonner is shipped out, he or she will be seamlessly replaced by an equally biased reporter like Terry Milewski or Leslie MacKinnon. Up and coming reporters at the CBC surely know the drill by now: treat anti-Conservative “analysis” by various academics and unidentified Liberal-supporting experts as “news”, assert to Canadians, on the taxpayers’ dime, that these negative views of the Conservatives are widely-held and growing among Canadians, and conclude reports with a warning that the “issue” raised in the report isn’t going away.
They’re right about the last one: it never really does go away, does it?