Complicit in torture

The Conservative government has refused opposition calls for a public inquiry into Canadian diplomat Richard Colvin's allegations that Canadian soldiers handed over Afghan captives to resident torture chambers. The government's official line and/or talking point is that it is all based on lies from the Taliban.

Colvin sent seventeen secret messages to senior buereaucrats and army officers in Ottawa, Kabul and Kandahar throughout April 2006 to October 2007. He implied warnings regarding a renegade operative working at the Canadian embassy in Washington was responsible for Canada's "probably illegal" and unwarranted prisoner policy.

Colvin named six officials who knew about his accounts or were told about them. Lt.-Gen. Michel Gauthier, then the head of the Canadian Expeditionary Forces Command, and Gen. Rick Hillier, then the chief of defence staff, knew about Colvin's charges and at the time were two of Canada's top army officers. Colleen Swords, then the assistant deputy minister of foreign affairs, Margaret Bloodworth, then national security adviser to Harper, David Mulroney, then the head of Afghanistan Task Force, now ambassador to China, and Arif Lalani, Canada's ambassador to Afghanistan from April 2007 to September 2008, were also included by Colvin.

According to Colvin, Canadian officials were aware that "standard operating procedure" for Afghan officials included mistreating prisoners, regardless of their accused offence or intelligence value. They included Bloodworth and Mulroney. Colvin said in 2007 he was informed to start sharing his accounts of abuse in spoken word or on the phone telephone, as opposed to written reports so the media and others wouldn't learn more.

Colvin's associates said he is not sure what affect his testimony might have, however he concludes that he was speaking for several government associates who are discontent with the Afghan mission's administration. A colleague said Colvin believes that Canada response to Afghan dilemma was handled "with secrecy and dishonesty, and really messed up the mission. People were getting killed, Canadians and Afghans, and he just found that unacceptable."

The House of Commons committee's probe in which Colvin testified o Wednesday is beginning and dozens of witnesses have yet to give evidence. Maj. Cindy Tessier, a spokesperson for chief of defence staff Gen. Walter Natynczyk, said senior officers appearing next week will provide context and information regarding how prisoners were handled:

It is important to let the parliamentary process unfold and to consider and weigh the testimony of subsequent witnesses before drawing any conclusions about how events in Afghanistan may have unfolded in 2006 and 2007.

The Globe and Mail's Graeme Smith confirmed that Canadian forces turned over Afghan detainees to Afghanistan's secret police.

Defence Minister Peter MacKay was the foreign minister in Harper's Conservative government at the time and rejects Colvin's account, saying that they are baseless. Mackay attempted to ridicule him, but admitted in the House of Commons that an assessment to invest $132 million in mid-2007 to improve prison conditions in Kandahar was concluded partially on the Colvin's testimony. Mackay also varified several parts of Colvin's charges, including that Canada took more Taliban detainees than than the British and Dutch. He said Colvin's charges were only deemed sincere at the time, a year following his first report, because they were supported by "a number of sources".

The opposition pounced on this, stressing that Harper and senior ministers must have known about Colvin's information, and if so Canada would be complicit in toture and implicated in war crimes. Liberal Foreign Affairs Critic Bob Rae:

The fact of the matter is that if there was ever at any time a view that there was a serious risk of people being mistreated those prisoners should never have been transferred and such transfer is a breach of international law.

Liberal Defence Critic Ujjal Dosanjh:

Torture is a war crime. The fact is that this government has engaged in a massive cover-up, (to the) highest officials, the Prime Minister's own deputy minister, the Prime Minister's own national security adviser knew of the allegations of torture, knew of the cover up. One draws one's own conclusions.

In the House of Commons, Bloc Québécois Leader Gilles Duceppe asked about Colvin being told to stop making his claims in writing was proof "the Prime Minister wanted to hide the whole affair because these were war crimes."

Wesley Wark, an intelligence expert at the University of Toronto's Munk Centre for International Studies, said in a pathetic attempt to defend the Harper government that while it may shock Canadians, they might have been trying to rein in a "renegade":

If the feeling was that Colvin was becoming...a pain in the ass in Afghanistan, reporting unsubstantiated stories that people back in Ottawa with other sources of information knew to be either incomplete or not true... there might have been good reason to do that.

Weak.

Lawyers for human rights groups that have failed to defy Canadian detainee policies for two years said that government lawyers appear to have failed to follow the judge's orders to turn in documents that would have included Colvin's warnings to senior officials, and they are looking at whether to reopen those cases. They are also considering launching complaints against Canada before international tribunals which investigate violations of the Geneva Convention, including the United Nations Committee Against Torture, the UN Human Rights Committee and the UN Rapporteur on Torture.