The beatings will continue until morale improves

Dawg sums up the Harper government's tortuous torture story with this "unfortunate analogy":>

An unfortunate analogy occurs to me. The Harper government is behaving very much like a stubborn prisoner reluctant to confess. Electric cables and beatings are obviously not ours to deploy, even if by now we were to have the unpleasant urge to use such devices. Nevertheless, we--blogospherians, frustrated parliamentary committee members, bloodhound journos, various fed-up officials, human rights activists, maybe even The Hague--have ways of making you talk.
It's just a matter of time. And there's no point screaming--because we don't give a damn about your pain.

Drip, drip, drip... the revelations keep coming day by day.
Here's the latest one in which we hear the most convoluted scenario I have ever read, all about how our military says they don't want to be policemen but they have been arresting people without evidence that justifies the arrest and then the Afghan authorities are releasing those people without, apparently, torturing them for confessions, so our soldiers are supposed to be all discouraged and disheartened.
More discouraging, I would think, is how nobody seems to be able to say why these people were being arrested in the first place, if they weren't committing a crime.
But at least Obama, for all the criticism of his speech, has finally laid out a rationale for why the Afghanistan war is continuing -- its not about nation building

he made explicitly clear that we are in Afghanistan to serve our own interests (as he perceives them), not to build a better nation for Afghans. Nation-building, he said, goes "beyond ... what we need to achieve to secure our interests" and "go beyond our responsibility."

They're not making the world safe for democracy; they're making it safe for the United States.
So now, finally, Canada can decide whether that is a goal we can share.