Thursday, December 16, 2010

A Witch-Hunt Exposed

Hundreds of thousands of dollars spent, privacy rights trampled, harassment by private investigators and a good man driven to his grave.  Now clearly shown to have been nothing but a vindictive witch-hunt, a clearly political attack by a government with an 'Israel right or wrong' obsession on an arms length agency.
A closed-door parliamentary hearing has been cancelled before MPs got a chance to hear senior board members of Rights and Democracy explain why they spent $400,000 trying to discredit the now-deceased former head of the federally funded agency. Gérard Latulippe, president of Rights and Democracy, laughs as prepares to start his testimony before the Commons foreign affairs committee on April 15. (Fred Chartrand/Canadian Press)After months of ignoring promises to release the findings of a commissioned audit, the Montreal-based organization that promotes human rights has finally handed over the report to the Commons foreign affairs committee.
The agency's new president, Gérard Latulippe, and its chair, Aurel Braun, were to appear before MPs on the committee in an in camera session later Thursday. But the hearing was cancelled because the House of Commons is adjourning for its holiday break at 3 p.m. ET.
A spokesman for Latulippe said the president would not comment on the contents of the report or any in-camera discussions with MPs "as it would be inappropriate to do so."
But the spokesman said Latulippe would recommend to the committee that a redacted version of the report be made public "in the days following the hearing." MPs on the committee are sworn to secrecy about the report's contents, but NDP MP Paul Dewar, who has examined the findings, said there's "nothing there."
"In fact, they went on a witch hunt," Dewar told reporters. "They found nothing."
Nobody in the blogosphere has followed this whole sorry story more closely than Dawg's Blog.  I strongly recommend checking out his posts on the subject.

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