The Sixth Estate

First of all, let me say that this is absolutely, unforgiveably, completely beyond the pale in a democracy. Sun News is to be heartily congratulated for coming forward with it. On the other hand, even in being honest they manage to be far, far too charitable to the Harper Conservatives.

The news, in case you haven’t seen it yet, is that Harper’s campaign team attempted to plant a story in the papers about how Michael Ignatieff was covertly working on the front lines in the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. The centrepiece of the story was a picture supposedly of Ignatieff, in military kit, posing with some soldiers in front of a helicopter. But the picture isn’t real. Or rather, it is real, but it’s not Ignatieff. It’s someone who looked vaguely like Ignatieff, so they decided to pass it off to the press as part of this fabricated story. It didn’t work. Sun News went public with the fraud. But there are at least four huge problems so far, and frankly any one of them is frightening.

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