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www.oakvillebeaver.com The Oakville Beaver Weekend, Saturday November 17, 2007 - 9 Author critical of media coverage of war in Afghanistan Continued from page 8 driving the war machine, she also reserves criticism for the media, who she says all too often seem to feel it's their job to drum up support for the troops by painting a rosy picture of the war. McQuaig points to the recent CBC/Environics poll, which seemed to show that the majority of Afghan civilians support the presence of Canadian troops in Afghanistan. "The media reports around that poll were very, very poorly presented," she said. "It wasn't actually Environics that did the polling, Environics sub-contracted the polling to an Afghan company that did it. That Afghan company is a subsidiary of an American company called DC3, which does some polling work for the U.S. government. For instance, DC3 has done polling in Iraq and unlike every other poll in Iraq, DC3 consistently manages to find that the people of Iraq are very happy and optimistic about their future." Even if the poll is taken seriously, McQuaig says, the information gathered supports an end to hostilities. She pointed to an underreported section of the "In many cases these `Taliban' are just local boys who are fighting in the old Afghan tradition that's gone on for centuries of expelling foreign armies, and whether we like it or not, we are a foreign army in Afghanistan." Author Linda McQuaig poll that 74 per cent of Afghans interviewed favoured their government negotiating with the Taliban, a position deeply opposed by the Harper government. A complete inability to appreciate who Canada is fighting and killing in Afghanistan is another way in which McQuaig believes the media is failing the Canadian public. "The media positively celebrates the killing of Taliban without any understanding of what this so-called Taliban even is," said McQuaig. "In many cases these `Taliban' are just local boys who are fighting in the old Afghan tradition that's gone on for centuries of expelling foreign armies, and whether we like it or not, we are a foreign army in Afghanistan." McQuaig is disturbed by the Canadian media's apparent lack of interest in the killing of Afghan civilians, whose deaths in this conflict are literally countless. The army does not bother to count them, said McQuaig. When civilian deaths by NATO bombings are given news coverage, McQuaig said, the media is skeptical of local officials, who claim that large numbers of people were killed while often taking NATO officials at their word that the numbers were small. While the symptoms of Canada's identity crisis are quite pronounced, said McQuaig, there is still time to reverse this trend. One example McQuaig pointed to as proof that Canada is not too far gone was the response Canadians had to the Mehar Arar case in which a Canadian citizen was tortured in Syria as a terror suspect after being deported from the United States, with the complicity of the RCMP. "When that story started to break, the Martin government wanted to just push it aside. They were getting tremendous pressure from the Americans because the last thing they wanted was a spotlight shone on the war on terror. There hadn't been an investigation of what they do to terror suspects," said McQuaig. "The calls for a public inquiry came from the Canadian public, and Martin's initial response was to reject those calls. Over time the Canadian public got more and more riled up and eventually he had to call a public inquiry." The fact that Canadians can still feel sick over the degradation of their fellow human beings and are willing to speak out and do something about it gives McQuaig hope for the future. 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