So many smoking guns

...you'd think there'd just been a Mafia firefight.

Other bloggers have already pounced gleefully upon the clutch of heavily-redacted documents released yesterday. My favourite comment is this one: "It's all here in black and."

NDP foreign affairs critic Paul Dewar: "It's like reading tea leaves." I'd prefer another metaphor: squid-ink. An Exxon Valdez tankerful of squid-ink.

Then there are the fresh revelations from the International Red Cross, a growing list of detainees, new evidence of Colvin-muzzling...

And this amazing spectacle continues to unfold. Meanwhile, a parliamentary committee is still denied access to documents that a parade of rebuttal witnesses have had in their hands. There is something almost surreal about the way the government is carrying on.

So many leaks and breaches are occurring at the moment that at least one document has appeared in both a redacted and unredacted form, gleefully brandished by Paul Dewar. Guess which version doesn't have the word "torture" in it?

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.

[H/t Impolitical, Far and Wide]

UPDATE: And still more recently-fired weapons.

Lt.-Col. Tom Putt: "I mean, we were basically capturing a local yokel. Detaining the local yokels and handing them off."