By its persistent sabotaging of the Somalia inquiry, up to and including its clumsy attempts to discredit the report and its authors, the present government of Canada has, in effect, collaborated in a military coup upon itself.

That is the real issue, here: not the killing of two young Somalis at the hands of Canadian soldiers, nor the many failures of leadership that made such savagery almost inevitable. What is at stake is no less than democratic rule, and whether the military is answerable to the institutions of civil authority. Let it be said that the government of Canada has come down hard on the side of the military.

The Defence minister, Art Eggleton, if not quite so categorical in denying a coverup, was more vehement in protesting the military's mistreatment at the hands of the commission of inquiry. In his strangely heated response to the report, the minister seemed particularly at pains to make two points. One, the title of the report -- Dishonoured Legacy -- was offensive. And two, the incidents with which the inquiry was primarily concerned happened more than "four years ago." Apparently, that's the statute of limitations on war crimes.

As for the rest, well, what are the integrity and expertise of the three commissioners, or the two years of work that went into their 2,000-page report, compared to Eggleton's three weeks on the job as Defence minister and the two days he had to read the report? What, indeed, are the report's detailed accusations of official complicity in misleading the public about events in Somalia and obstructing all subsequent attempts to uncover the truth beside the Prime Minister's one-sentence denial? "There is no cover- up." No cover-up? Which one does he mean to deny? There were the initial field reports that characterized both the killings under scrutiny -- the March 4, 1993 shooting of an unarmed Somali suspected of theft, and the March 16 beating and torture of a captured Somali teenager -- as routine or even praiseworthy. There was the inexplicable six-week delay in sending military police to investigate the first death, after army surgeon Maj. Barry Armstrong, who examined the body, began to voice his suspicions. The investigation itself was, according to testimony before the inquiry, further impeded by interference from above.

But these pale in comparison to the obstacles encountered by the Letourneau inquiry, installed by the incoming Liberal government after all previous inquiries had failed to get to the bottom of the Somalia mess. The liaison group set up within the military command, allegedly to help the inquiry gather evidence, instead seemed devoted to inhibiting it by any means at hand. Documents requested by the commission were repeatedly delayed, altered or even destroyed. Others came to light only because of third-party inquiries.

When the commission, exasperated, called senior officers to testify about the document-tampering, they stalled, blamed subordinates, and -- according to the commission -- flat-out lied. Having detained the commission many months in pursuit of the missing documents, Defence officials then prevailed upon the government to put an end to the inquiry, on the premise that it was "taking too long." The previous minister having cut short the inquiry's labours, his successor now has the gall to attack its report as incomplete.

Where did the military learn such tricks? Perhaps from its political masters.

The report speaks of an absence of an "accountability ethic" within the chain of command. It might equally be called a culture of honour. The culture of honour has long since disappeared in political circles, vanished with such fusty traditions as ministerial responsibility. Faced with a crisis within their departments, the instinct of a modern minister is not to resign, still less to root out the problem, but to stonewall, to tack this way and that, go into damage control -- anything but admit fault or accept responsibility. The bureaucrats beneath him take the appropriate cue. The watchword within the department becomes "deniability." Just such an ethic appears to have infected Defence HQ, where departmental bureaucrats and senior military officers mingle and mix. So the word went out in March of 1993 that nothing was to emerge from the Somalia mission that might embarrass the Minister. So, the killings having occurred, the forces went into damage control. So the cover-up proceeded, and fed upon itself, until at last it was confirmed in the Prime Minister's own words: "There is no cover-up."