Terry Glavin Discusses Afghanistan with Rex Murphy

Here's a quick-loading mp3 of Rex Murphy interviewing Terry Glavin (who was in Afghanistan at the time) on the matter of the detainee "scandal".

"It's a disgrace, if you ask me, it's a complete disgrace that we're running around playing this sort of 'gotcha' journalism in Ottawa while we've got all of these soldiers engaged in this epochal struggle here, and treating - by the way - Taliban prisoners with kid gloves."


"Well, this is the funny thing - and we've all struggled with this here - I've talked to a number of journalists about this who are with me, and the journalists that are here, and we're all scratching are heads and wondering what is the story here, exactly? You tell me. What's news? How is it possible that any editor in his right mind could think that Peter MacKay conceding that we've known that some of these drooling brigands that are apprehended by the Afghan national army get their ears boxed a little bit from time to time? That's the way it was, that isn't the way it works now, by the way, not since 2007. The process is meticulous, it is squeaky-clean, it is public, it involves corrections Canada, the international Red Cross, the military police, the Afghan security and intelligence group, NATO - all of these detainees, and there's hardly any, by the way, we rarely turn anyone over to the Afghans any more. By the way, if an insurgent who kills a Canadian soldier gets apprehended on the battlefield, and puts his eye out or something like that, he goes into the same triage system as Canadian soldiers do, and if he's hurt a little bit more than a Canadian soldier is, he gets priority.

"All of this is old news. I'm sorry, (but) I mean, I spent fifteen years working for the dailies, and I've done a lot of sort of book writing and magazine writing ever since, and I'm not one of these embittered and cynical old journalists, but this is a bunch of reporters embedded at the Darcy McGhee pub in Ottawa trying to make a nuisance of themselves."

I highly recommend listening to the whole thing.

Posted by: EBD at December 30, 2009 10:48 PM