Rights and Democracy: The Fraud and Deception Reaches New Heights.

Something stinks here, and it stinks to high heaven. Yesterday, it was right there in plain sight for certain of the stenographers in the Ottawa press gallery to see. Maybe they didn't notice it. Maybe they chose not to, lest they be exposed for being the willing dupes of a strategic "leak" of a confidential report that was intended to distract the public from the real story that they haven't had the wherewithal or the inclination to inquire into.

In any case, what happened yesterday is now fully exposed to have been a shell game, a classic bait and switch job. Today, Gérard Latulippe, the president of the absurdly beleagured federal "GONGO" known as Rights and Democracy, announced that he smells a rat. He also points out what everyone should have noticed right away: "With regard to the Deloitte Report in particular, I wish to say that Deloitte was never given a mandate to identify fraud or embezzlement within Rights & Democracy."

As I pointed out yesterday: "One of the first things you will read in the Deloitte audit is this: "Our work did not have the objective of detecting errors or fraud that might exist. . . All the facts related in this report are only based on the documents provided to us. . . We did not analyze the effectiveness and the achievement of the objectives of Rights and Democracy's projects."

Here's how the shell game worked.

Rights and Democracy submitted two confidential reports to the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development. One was undertaken by the auditing firm Deloitte. The other was undertaken by the security firm Groupe Sirco, which, among other things, was tasked with inquiring into a mysterious break-in at the R&D offices in Montreal and a theft of computers that appears to have occurred, by remarkable coincidence, while everyone was away at the funeral of R&D president Remy Beauregard.

The Groupe Sirco report remains conveniently hidden from public view. The Deloitte report was leaked to the Globe and Mail yesterday along with the sleight-of-hand "R&D Vindicated" storyline. Remember: Deloitte was never given a mandate to identify fraud or embezzlement and did not have the objective of detecting errors or fraud.

Nevertheless, the "news" that was served up to accompany the leaked Deloitte report comes under such headlines as "Rights Group Audit Clears Late President," as if it were only the character of the late Remy Beauregard that was at stake, and "No Wrongdoing Found In Rights and Democracy Audit", as if Deloitte's mandate was to uncover any wrongdoing in the first place.

How too convenient for those parties (among them most noticeably the NDP Standing Committee member Paul Dewar) who have staked their own reputations on sullying the reputations of certain Rights and Democracy board members. My favorite act of feigned moral outrage uttered against the Rights and Democracy board yesterday came from Paul Dewar himself: “They had a zealous agenda of their own and what they managed to do was to take an organization that had a solid reputation internationally and tarnished that reputation.”

What an utter farce this has become. Rights and Democracy is "an organization that had a solid reputation internationally"? That line might play with suckers and propagandists, but for years, Rights and Democracy has been a laughing stock among international government agencies and NGOs with with similar mandates. Every federal intervention or board overhaul at R&D has been an effort to staunch the bleeding of its reputation.

Most recently, Rights and Democracy bosses Marie-France Cloutier and Razmik Panossian, whose defenestration by the new board we have been instructed to so loudly protest, ran a bully regime that former employees described as “nonrespect of staff, misallocation of resources, micro-management, arbitrary imposition of weakly developed policies designed with no consultation from staff, and even the appearance of systemic sexism.”

We've all been advised to faint over the current board's hiring of the private security firm Groupe Sirco with a mandate to inquire into some of the murkier aspects of the former R&D regime. But you'll be accused of a "smear job" against the late Beauregard for merely noticing that for some undisclosed reason, during their tenure, Cloutier and Panossian retained the services of Donald McCleery, the infiltration-and-surveillance specialist perhaps best known for burning a barn in Quebec back in the 1970s while he was with the RCMP’s notorious and shadowy “G” Section. And we're not supposed to even complain that we are not allowed to see the Groupe Sirco report? Give me a break.

Something very weird is going on here. It may very well turn out that nothing especially revealing shows up in the Groupe Sirco report - nothing would surprise me about this story by now. But why isn't anyone shouting for its release? It was funded with public money. Whoever leaked the Deloitte report - and there were only a handful of people who had a copy - would have also had a copy of the Group Sirco report. Why did they leak one report, but not the other?

Why was the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs abruptly cancelled yesterday, just as Latulippe and R&D board chairman Aurel Braun were about to testify?

"We deplore the unauthorized disclosure of the Deloitte report after it was submitted to the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs," Latulippe says. "When I sent the Sirco and Deloitte reports to Ottawa in compliance with the order issued by the Committee, I was aware of the risks of unauthorized disclosure. I could not have imagined, however, that a report submitted to a Standing Committee of the House of Commons, under subpoena, would find its way into the hands of the media."

Far more strange is that it was only the Deloitte audit that "found its way into the hands of the media."

Something stinks here.