MacKay, flypaper, and...The Battle of the Bulge?

Peter MacKay was in Washington yesterday to observe the annual Canadian Defence Minister's homage to Bush's flypaper strategy :
"If the job is not done in Afghanistan, if countries like Canada leave, the Taliban can follow them,'' MacKay told Canadian reporters here.

The tradition began in October 2004 when President Bush, aka Crusader Bunnypants, addressed reporters in Greeley, Colorado:
"We have defeated the Taleban..."
Wait, that's not it...just a sec...scrolling down...ah, here we go :

"We are fighting these terrorists with our military in Afghanistan and Iraq and beyond so we do not have to face them in the streets of our own cities." (Applause.)

Canada failed to observe the flypaper strategy ceremony in 2005 for some reason, but here's Defence Minister Gordon O'Connor in April 2006 :

"Fighting terrorists in Afghanistan is better than waiting until they show up in Vancouver, Montreal or Ottawa, Defence Minister Gordon O'Connor told the Commons on Monday."

MacKay slipped in a small coda of his own yesterday when he added a reference to the US Battle of the Bulge, saying he wanted to "look into the whites of the eyes'' of other NATO countries to determine whether those nations truly appreciate the need to step up in Afghanistan and the impact on their countries if they don't :

"North America is not immune. Continental Europe is not immune. Nobody is immune.''

Canadian reporters were puzzled but they wrote it all down anyway.

And did I call this one back in July? Why yes, yes I did.

Resign now : Hillier and O'Connor

G&M : From Canadian custody into cruel hands
"Afghans detained by Canadian soldiers and sent to Kandahar's notorious jails say they were beaten, whipped, starved, frozen, choked and subjected to electric shocks during interrogation.
In 30 face-to-face interviews with men recently captured in Kandahar province, a Globe and Mail investigation has uncovered a litany of gruesome stories and a clear pattern of abuse by the Afghan authorities who work closely with Canadian troops, despite Canada's assurances that the rights of detainees are protected."

G&M : Calls for Defence Minister ouster over Afghani detainees
"Canada's opposition parties were demanding changes to the Afghanistan detainee transfer agreement and calling for the Defence Minister's resignation following accounts of gruesome torture of prisoners in Kandahar.
NDP Leader Jack Layton said the transfer of prisoners to Afghan authorities should stop immediately, a public inquiry be launched and Mr. O'Connor be sacked. He was backed up by all opposition parties."

UBC Int. Law Prof. Michael Byers : “If this report is accurate, Canadians have engaged in war crimes, not only individually but also as a matter of policy.”

OK, we've been playing at being the "good Germans" for well over a year now, in the face of all and any evidence from groups like the Afghan International Human Rights Commission, to whom we have entrusted the safety of detainees captured by our troops, and the Revolutionary Afghan Womens Association.
Is there any meaningful difference between U.S. and Canadian foreign policy as regards the rights of brown peoples?
Anybody feel up to doing a little "standing on guard for thee" today?

Make your voice heard - CBC, the Globe and Mail, your MP, your favourite Afghan war apologist.
Just do it right now. Because this absolutely will not stop until we make it stop.

Then go read Dana.
.

Clusterfuck O'Connor

You missed your court date?

And you'd like a three month extension to find those missing detainees and your case?

Globe&Mail :

"After missing a court deadline, Canada's Department of National Defence has decided it now wants to defend itself against accusations that its Afghan detainee policy violates international law and the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

Under a controversial policy, Canada hands battlefield detainees to Afghan police and army forces without any follow-up.
"Retrieving and reviewing all relevant documents, including those generated in Afghanistan, is an enormous task,” the letter says."

Yeah, about "retrieving" those "relevant documents" :

"Two assistant deputy ministers told MPs in December that Canada had been notifying the Afghan International Human Rights Commission of the names of transferred detainees for months. But in a March 15 letter revising their statement, they wrote that Canadian Forces didn't pass along any of the names of transferred detainees.
"No notifications, in fact, took place," until last month, the two assistant deputy ministers wrote."

That'd be our old friend Vincent Rigby, dropping O'Connor in it again.

So does anyone have any kind of list?
After all the AIHRC has only eight guys monitoring the whole of southern Afghanistan. And they're doing it without any help from us :

"Mr. O'Connor said last week that the Defence Department would not provide any
money to AIHRC.
"I think it would be improper to give them any money because it would appear that this is not an unbiased organization."

So we're the only country not providing any lists of detainees nor any funding to keep track of them.

"However Gen. Hillier has insisted that the highest priority is placed on safeguarding captives."

Clusterfuck, with bullshit.

G&M Dog ate my homework link via Cracked Crystal Ball

.

O'Connor's "Bumps along the road and little glitches"

Just a couple of guys who were the victims of bad intelligence.

On the heels of Defence Minister Gordon O'Connor's apology for misleading the House with assurances that the Red Cross would report any mistreatment of Afghan prisoners to Canadian authorities, the Globe and Mail reports today that O'Connor was the victim of bad intelligence from his policy advisors.

"The group, led by assistant deputy minister for policy Vincent Rigby, first advised Mr. O'Connor last May that "if pressed" in the Commons with questions about detainee follow-up, he should respond by saying: "If the ICRC advised us of some problems with transferred detainees, we would discuss the issue with the government of Afghanistan." "

This has certainly been Mr Rigby's own preferred response when pressed :


Rigby, addressing the Standing Committee on National Defence on Dec 11, 2006:

"With respect to the International Committee of the Red Cross, again, they have an international mandate to follow up in this regard with detainees who are transferred to Afghan authorities. Our relationship with the ICRC has been excellent. They have all the information we've provided to them, and certainly they've had access and have been following up with detainees we've transferred to Afghan authorities."

and

"We're very comfortable with the role of the International Committee of the Red Cross, with the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, and with our access to prisons as required. We've had absolutely no information passed to us directly by the ICRC or the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission or Afghan authorities themselves as to mistreatment of detainees passed on to Afghan authorities by Canadian Forces."





There's lots more quotes like this from Rigby but you get the gist : he never actually states that we're depending on the ICRC to report back to us about the prisoners we hand over; he just mentions them in the same sentence every time it comes up.

The previous May, O'Connor was deferring all such questions regarding prisoners to Rigby.

From the Standing Committee on National Defence, May 30, 2006 :


"NDP Ms Dawn Black: I've had a lot of interest and questions about the detainee transfer agreement with Afghanistan. Has NATO concluded a detainee transfer agreement with Afghanistan, and when will that agreement be made public? I would assume that it will be, if indeed there is an agreement with NATO, and that it would govern Canadian transfers once NATO assumes control through ISAF in the south.

Hon. Gordon O'Connor: I don't know that, ma'am. I'm going to have to ask Mr. Rigby.
Is there such a thing as a NATO agreement for detainees?

Mr. Vincent Rigby (Acting Assistant Deputy Minister (Policy), Department of National Defence): We're certainly working on that right now, Ms. Black, in a NATO context. Certainly Canada is very involved in Brussels in helping draft that document, but it's not finished yet. I'm not aware of exactly how.... One of the issues is how it will relate to the Canadian detainee arrangement and the other detainee arrangements that NATO allies have right now, so it's still a work in progress; we still have a little ways to go.

NDP MP Ms Dawn Black: Essentially, are Canadian soldiers instructed to give minimal protections because this is not an international conflict, or do we give the full prisoner-of-war protections, such as preventing prisoners from being humiliated or being put as public curiosities and photographed?

Hon. Gordon O'Connor: My understanding is the latter--that we maintain the highest standards.
I'll ask Mr. Rigby to confirm that."





Yeah, ok, that's enough of that. You get the idea. O'Connor doesn't appear to know anything about prisoners and repeatedly cues Rigby up to "imply".

And it was all going just swimmingly until O'Connor stood in Parliament - without Rigby - and made that one small causative embellishment on Rigby's usual series of passive-voice obfuscations :

"The Red Cross or the Red Crescent is responsible to supervise their treatment once the prisoners are in the hands of the Afghan authorities. If there is something wrong with their treatment, the Red Cross or Red Crescent would inform us and we would take action."



and another time :

"The process is that if Canadian soldiers capture insurgents or terrorists they hand them over to the Afghan authorities and then the International Red Cross or Red Crescent supervise the detainees. If there is any problem, the Red Cross or Red Crescent would inform us and then we would become involved."

At which point the ICRC was forced to say that no, they wouldn't, because it was not in their mandate to report back to third parties.

The US State Dept, Louise Arbor at the UN, Amir Attaran, Michael Byers, and the Afghan International Human Rights Committee have all described torture of detainees in Afghanistan as "routine".
But O'Connor's getting his advice from a guy who once described Canada's decision to stay out of Iraq and the US Ballistic Missile Defense Program as "bumps along the road and little glitches".

That was Vincent Rigby in his powerpoint presentation to the Heritage Foundation in Washington.
You can watch it here.

UPDATE : Well now look - you guys have pissed Dave off with your Bushwhackery.
That link to Rigby's Dec 2006 appearance before the National Defence Standing Committee keeps going down so here it is in a cached pdf And I forgot to thank Audacious Ontology for the G&M link.