There can be no other explanation for the timing of this non-story than that folks at AP are trying to sow discord between us and a critical ally in Afghanistan at a point when our President is asking for such allies to commit with us to an Afghan ‘surge’. The headline implies Pentagon distrust of Canada and the first line of the article asks how much does our government trust Canada!

Only after reading two thirds of the article do we discover this is about a story that was news in late 2006 and early 2007 based on suspicions that some Canadian coins planted on U.S. Defense contactors contained transmitters! The article also points that by January of 2007 our government denied the story’s validity. Oddly enough (or not really) this AP story from that two years ago about the supposedly bugged coins stated that the actual Pentagon report on them did not suggest that the Canadians might be behind the bugging! Further, the experts cited by the AP suggested the culprits could be the Russians or Chinese! The AP’s charge about the Pentagon and our government not trusting the Canadians is all based upon one e-mail in which a Pentagon official says that he doesn’t think the Canadians are the bad guys in the bugged coins business, but then says “who knows”! That’s it! That’s the new story! That’s our government’s thinking about an ally! Who knows!

It s not coincidental that the Associated Press assigned eleven reporters to fact check Sarah Palin’s book but has not yet noticed anything newsworthy about the Climategate e-mails! It is not accidental that they publish a story meant to stoke Canadian bad feelings toward the U.S. at exactly the time that our ally begins to discuss its own response to the Afghanistan surge.

Denis Keohane