Canada on torture : We're buying if you're selling

Canada's collateral fallout from Tuesday's Senate Intelligence Committee summary on the torture of prisoners at CIA “black site” prisons around the world.

"A spokesman for Public Safety Minister Steven Blaney’s office said Wednesday that Canada does not engage in, or condone, torture by national security agencies but ...  Canada will act on “a tip from any source” if Canadians’ lives are in danger."

This is our usual "we're buying if you're selling" approach to torture.

Feb. 2012 : "The latest directive says in "exceptional circumstances" where there is a threat to human life or public safety, urgency may require CSIS to "share the most complete information available at the time with relevant authorities, including information based on intelligence provided by foreign agencies that may have been derived from the use of torture or mistreatment."

April 2010 :  Day One of Omar Khadr's trial at Guantanamo. Confessions elicited via sleep deprivation, denial of pain medication, stress positions, being forced to urinate on himself and being used as a human mop, being terrorized by barking dogs, and being threatened with rape and torture. Khadr's defence team was only allowed to interview three of Khadr's 30 interrogators at Bagram and Gitmo, two of whom admit the 15 year old Khadr was threatened with rape.

FBI agent Robert Fuller

"... elicited from Khadr the identification of another Canadian, Maher Arar, who Khadr during interviews by Fuller claimed was training with al Qaeda operatives at a training camp at a time that, it later turned out, Arar was actually at home in Canada.

"In contrast to testimony he gave Monday, [FBI]special agent Robert Fuller told Khadr's war-crimes hearing that the young Canadian was not immediately able to name Arar, but did say he looked familiar." 

Shortly after Fuller reported the identification of Arar to the government, Arar was apprehended at JFK airport and rendered to Syria for interrogation there.

FBI agent Fuller also got Khadr to confess to throwing a grenade at US forces."

December 2009 : Harper shuts down parliament for two months in what turned out to be a successful strategy to muzzle parliamentarians regarding Richard Colvin's testimony about the torture of random Afghan farmers and taxi drivers under Canadian watch. 

Harper hired Bruce Carson to "stickhandle" the Afghan file "on a daily basis, involving senior officials from departments such as foreign affairs, defence, RCMP, justice and corrections". In 2007 a requisition for special boots to allow Correctional Services Canada inspection teams to wade through blood and shit in Afghan prisons was made public.

I think it's fair to say any report similar to the US Senate summary made partially public on Tuesday would never see the light of day in Canada.

April 2009 : "More than 16 months after Canada's security agencies cleared Abousfian Abdelrazik, government lawyers are now pressing him to admit to being a senior al-Qaeda operative, echoing American accusations extracted from Abu Zubaydah, water boarded more than 80 times under the Bush administration."

As noted by POGGE at the time : 

"While the rest of the world is coming to terms with the fact that the Bush administration was actually using torture to elicit false confessions in an effort to justify their invasion of Iraq, the Hapless Government™ is trying to use statements from a man who was waterboarded 83 times to prove that Abdelrazik is a terrorist."

March 2009 : The same day that CSIS lawyer Geoffrey O’Brian told the public safety committee there is no absolute ban on using intelligence that may have been obtained from countries with questionable human rights records on torture, RCMP spokesman Gilles Michaud tells the same committee :

"I want to be clear here - there is no absolute ban on the use of any information by the RCMP."

November 2006 : CSIS director Jim Judd said it had done nothing wrong by accepting as genuine the confession of Maher Arar, who was secretly and illegally bundled off by extraordinary rendition to a prison in Syria where he was held and tortured for a year.

"It does not necessarily follow that because a country has a poor human rights record that any information received from it was the product of torture," Judd told Parliament's public safety committee.

G&M : "In an Oct. 16, 2003 e-mail marked “secret,” officials of the intelligence unit of Foreign Affairs note that CSIS agents will pass on details of their then just-completed interrogation of Omar Khadr in Guantanamo and planned to “send two officers to Sudan next week to interview Abdelrazik.” 

Dec. 9, 2014 CBC : "This is a report of the United States Senate," Harper told the House of Commons on Tuesday. "It has nothing to do whatsoever with the government of Canada."
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Update : Tom Tomorrow
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The rules for censoring the Afghan detainee docs

On Wednesday, Airshow and Baird announced their success in killing off any further investigation into the abuse of  those Afghans it pleased them to refer to as "Taliban detainees" - the farmers and taxi drivers  handed off to the CIA-funded NDS on political orders from the Canadian government.

The release of a small percentage of heavily redacted docs reviewed by the three judges of the Panel of Arbiters completely vindicated the Canadian Forces, they read nervously from their notes. As if anyone other than them had insinuated allegations about "the troops" into what was their responsibility to comply with international law on the treatment of prisoners of a country we invaded.

Reading the panel's many restrictions on unredacting the documents, you might wonder how Speaker Milliken's order to release the docs to Parliament 18 months ago got watered down to whatever survived the following censorship :

REPORT BY THE PANEL OF ARBITERS ON ITS WORK AND METHODOLOGY FOR DETERMINING WHAT REDACTED INFORMATION CAN BE DISCLOSED , excerpted

The Panel of Arbiters can determine, at the request of the government, that certain information should not be disclosed due to the solicitor-client privilege.

The Panel of Arbiters, after consultation with the Clerk of the Privy Council, can also determine, at the request of the government, that information constituting Cabinet confidences should not be disclosed.

Also not to be released :

... information relating to the characteristics, capabilities, performance, potential deployment, functions or role of any defence establishment, military force or unit; and information obtained or prepared for the purpose of intelligence relating to the defence of Canada or an allied state.

 ... communications and documents obtained in confidence from third parties, generally allied states, should not be disclosed without the prior consent of the providing third party.

... information not widely known or accessible, where the authenticity of the information is neither confirmed nor denied, and where the information was inadvertently disclosed.

Government officials expressed serious concern about the disclosure of intergovernmental communications. They told us that all diplomatic communication is undertaken with the expectation of confidentiality and that disclosure of confidential communications would cause serious harm, regardless of the substance of the communication, and whether the “speaker” is Canada or a foreign government.

Certain documents referred by the Committee contain Canadian criticism of, or candid negative commentary about, Afghan institutions or officials. Some documents also contain Canadian reporting about criticism by one Afghan institution or official of another.

If the assessment appears to be merely speculation by a non-senior Canadian official, we generally either leave it redacted or summarize it at a very high level, making it clear in doing so that the assessment is the view of the individual, and not the government of Canada.
We exercise our judgment in each case to decide whether the information at issue is truly critical, and therefore would be harmful if released.

Generally speaking, we do not disclose any information or communications flowing from Canada to the ICRC [Red Cross]. We do not disclose any information, even in summary form, about or from the ICRC that is directly attributed to the ICRC or that it can be inferred comes from the ICRC.

...where information is not attributed to the ICRC, that the ICRC is the source of this information. Where that is the case, we leave the information redacted.

... information from third parties, such as foreign governments or intergovernmental organizations like NATO or NATO’s International Security Assistance Force. ... our approach is to not disclose or summarize third party information.

... the names of Afghan officials, including senior Afghan officials. Our approach is not to disclose these names except where the information, including the name, has already been widely disclosed.

... our approach is not to disclose or summarize information about Special Forces activities

...the use of gunshot residue (“GSR”) testing in Afghanistan ...disclose information indocuments relating to the use of the test and results obtained ... leave redacted other information to avoid compromising national defence.

... solicitor-client privilege is close to absolute ... extends to communications between government officials and government lawyers just as it does to any other lawyer-client communications. Unless it is waived by the client, solicitor-client privilege generally lasts forever.

Cabinet confidentiality may extend beyond Cabinet documents per se ; it may, for example, apply to communications between or involving Ministers.

So what was left to disclose on Wednesday after all the above censorship?
Just enough to shut it down.  Apparently.
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Bruce Carson : "stickhandling" the Afghan file

Five times convicted fraudster Bruce Carson - currently under RCMP investigation for influence peddling and illegal lobbying of Indian Affairs to obtain a water filtration contract that would have netted his 22-year old fiancee 20% of sales - was granted a secret security clearance in 2006 by some "low level staffer", just so he could be Harper's "main player "and "point man" on the top secret and sensitive Afghanistan file.

"... starting in 2007, Carson was a regular participant in daily telephone briefings on Afghanistan involving senior officials from departments such as foreign affairs, defence, RCMP, justice and corrections. “It was evident to all the departments that he was the main player, Harper’s point man on the file,” said one source familiar with the briefings. “He was given the most sensitive file to work on."

So while Stockwell Day was braying in the House in 2007 that even to question the treatment of detainees was tantamount to treason, a convicted felon was briefing his Correction Services Canada inspections team in Afghanistan "on a daily basis" and possibly figuring out what to do about Corrections Canada requests for boots suitable for "walking through blood and fecal matter on patrol or in the prison".

While Harper has a national security adviser, it was left to Carson, chief policy analyst, to stickhandle the Afghan file on a daily basis. His focus was usually on how the mission was being communicated here in Canada rather than on developments in the field, the source said."

Ah yes, putting the happy face on war crimes :

Canadian diplomats in Afghanistan were ordered in 2007 to hold back information in their reports to Ottawa about the handling of the prisoners, say defence and foreign affairs sources. The instruction — issued soon after allegations of torture by Afghan authorities began appearing in public — was aimed at defusing the explosive human-rights controversy, said sources who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

The controversy was seen as “detracting from the narrative” the Harper government was trying to weave around the mission, said one official. “It was meant to put on a happy face,” he added.

The instruction was passed over the telephone by senior officials in the Privy Council Office."

Impolitical says : "Incompetent leadership that left the highest, most sensitive affairs of Canada in Bruce Carson's hands without the proper security clearance"

but I think Harper knew exactly why he wanted the felon they called 'The Mechanic'.

By the way, how is the more recent stickhandling of the Afghan detainee documents progressing, 16 months after they were demanded by Parliament?

March 3, 2011 : Secret Afghan documents could be ready in two weeks, say Liberals a month ago.

The Cons have been stonewalling on handing over the Afghan detainee documents to our duly elected members of Parliament, while some unelected convicted felon buddy of Harper's was the Afghan file "point man" doing the "stickhandling" during the time in question. Unbelievable.

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Where in the world is Frank Iacobucci?

Kady has been trying to get some answers on how Justice Frank Iacobucci's inquiry into the Afghan detainee documents is coming along, given that Speaker of the House Peter Milliken ruled on Tuesday that Frank's mandate is outside of parliamentary oversight and he reports only to the Minister of Justice.

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Well, at least we know where he is.

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Milliken: Parliament is supreme; Gagnon: No, not really

Speaker of the House Milliken ruled today that Parliament is supreme and Steve is not the President of Canada.
Milliken ruled that government was in breach of parliamentary privilege by refusing to comply with the House’s order in December to produce documents related to the transfer of Afghan detainees to risk of torture and Steve now has two weeks to figure out the details of a face-saving compromise with the opposition parties that would safeguard national security while still obeying the House's order to produce.
A victory for democracy then.

However ...

Over at the Military Police Complaints Commission today, Major Denis Gagnon testified that those very same Afghan transfer orders that Milliken has just ordered be produced are :

"all thrown together in a storage bin, a sea container" and an assessment of how long it would take to catalogue documents and identify the records requested by the commission may take years."

So. Milliken says Parliament is supreme and has the right to them but some major says sadly it just isn't going to happen.

"Earlier a senior military official testified that some Afghan detainee documents requested by the commission have been delayed to ensure no information gets out that could jeopardize the security of troops in Afghanistan."

Really. How much info from transfer orders made in say 2007 is going to jeopardize troop security today? You've been using this same excuse for years now.

"The commission was also told that Defence officials are screening out documents that military police would not have seen in the course of their duties."

... because last year Steve curtailed the authority of the MPCC to ask for docs that do not directly pertain to the military police.

"Gagnon said he makes the decision on what military police would have seen based on his personal experience in theatre and his knowledge of communications channels within the military chain of command and communications links with the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade."

So it's the Dept. of Defence that decides what is relevant then, not the MPCC.

"Commission counsel Ron Lunau asked if the commission could look at the documents that have been screened out since it should be up to the commission, not Defence officials, to determine what military police should have seen.

The answer from government counsel Alain Prefontaine and from Gagnon was a firm no."

Ok. Parliament may be supreme but Defence is supremer. Got it.
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Over at the Afghan Committee, things are very "robust"

In fact Wednesday's testimony by three former Canadian ambassadors to Afghanistan on the Afghan detainee transfer-and-abuse system marks perhaps the single most frequent use of the word "robust" - eleven times in two hours by my count - evah.

Globe and Mail :

"The court Tuesday heard of documentation, drawn from military files, relating to six known cases in which Afghan captives handed to the Afghan National Directorate of Security (NDS) prisons, including one in Canada’s military jurisdiction in Kandahar, are said to have been tortured using electric shocks, beatings with wires, whips and metal rods, sleep deprivation and cuts, between early 2007 and late 2008."

Oh sorry, that was in Britain on Tuesday.

In Canada on Wednesday, our ambassador to Afghanistan in 2008, Ron Hoffmann, told the Afghan committee :

"There were no allegations of abuse in 2008"

while Dept of Foreign Affairs' David Sproule, ambassador from Oct 2005 to April 2007, said although "they were under no illusions about the treatment of detainees" :

"We never transferred detainees from Canadian forces if there was any risk of torture . We exceeded our international obligations. ... There was not a single incidence of detainee abuse during my tenure."

Not a single incidence from Oct 2005 to April 2007?
And Arif Lalani, ambassador from April 2007 to Aug 2008?

Paul Dewar, NDP :

"With regards to the NDS, Mr Lalani, one of the questions we had as to the new agreement, is that it's become evident to me through evidence that has been given and what I've heard today - when an allegation was made, that the responsible entity at the NDS facility to look into that allegation and investigate it was the NDS. Is that your understanding as well?

Lalani :

"Point #1, I think we had a number of allegations that were made as a result of our monitoring.

Point #2, the agreement that we signed had clearly in it that the Afghans would exercise their obligations and their sovereignty by investigating allegations, and so that was done.

Point #3 as has been made very clear in all of the reporting that you may have seen and that others have seen, we also inform the ICRC who undertook whatever action they wanted to take and I want to be very careful about saying more about their work.

Dewar :

"Will you then confirm then that when an allegation was made, from a detainee or from another source about torture, that it was the NDS who investigated that?"

Lalani : "I think from my other ..."

Dewar :

"Sorry to interrupt but I know the ICRC was involved and I understand their mandate, but according to the agreement - I mean Ms Buck made this statement in Federal Court as well - was it the NDS that was responsible for following it up?"

Lalani :

"From my recollection of the cases that involved the NDS, they most likely made the investigation."

Dewar :

"And do you understand why I would have concerns - and many others - that in the case of Mr Colvin's claim that there was torture going on and that there was concerns that had to be removed from the report and wasn't giving the full picture, and the fact of the matter is what we've heard is - and I think you halted transfers of detainees because you had concerns about the NDS - that it really isn't a strong enough agreement to have the NDS investigate itself."

The NDS investigating itself might go some distance in explaining why, according to Hoffmann earlier, there were no further allegations of abuse in 2008, supposing that is indeed the case.

Meanwhile, over in unredacted Britain, internal memos from named British officers outline the continuing impossibility of monitoring detainees disappeared by the NDS, along with all the gruesome unredacted details of their torture.

Fed up with two year's of government obstruction in delivering of our detainee documents, the Military Police Complaints Commission has summoned the military and foreign affairs officials responsible for the documents to testify next Tuesday.

Whatever is in those documents, Steve seems desperate to hide them at any cost but he can't rely on the self-inflicted Jaffer/Guergis misdirection scandal continuing to distract the public once the unredacted details of Britain's apparently identical detainee problems start heavy rotation in the national media.
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Colvin, Kafka, and Catch-22

Over at the Military Police Complaints Commission, Department of Justice lawyer Alain Préfontaine is trying to prove that diplomat Richard Colvin's emails flagging abuse of Afghan prisoners were so vaguely worded that the government could not possibly be held responsible for failing to understand what he was talking about.

Colvin and MPCC chair Glenn Stannard have the blacked out versions to work from. Colvin is not allowed to divulge what he remembers is under all that black ink.

If we could just all see the unredacted versions, says Colvin, they would reveal the crucial information.

Well I have seen the unredacted versions, says Préfontaine, representing the government that blacked out the emails, and I can tell you there's nothing of importance there.

Then why can't we see them? asks MPCC chair Stannard, who apparently doesn't have the clearance to see the very emails he's holding hearings about.

"Because," Préfontaine answered, "disclosure would be injurious to either national defence, international relations or national security."

I do hope you're keeping up here. Colvin's emails are apparently so sensitive they must be blacked out while simultaneously being so unimportant there's no need to see them.
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Inside the new recalibrated Afghan committee

Back in 2007 the Cons claimed that all the Geneva Conventions do not apply in Afghanistan because we are not officially at war with Afghanistan. Yesterday in the Afghan parliamentary committee, Con MP Jim Abbott attempted to resuscitate that position.
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Appearing as a witness before the committee, Paul Champ, human rights lawyer for Amnesty International and the BC Civil Liberties Association, advised that the UK suspended detainee transfers in June 2009.
If the Brits still think the risk of torture is too great, he asked, why does Canada think it's safe, particularly in light of the 2009 report from the US State Dept dated March 11 2010 regarding continuing reports of detainees being beaten, subjected to elecric shocks etc?
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Hawn asked whether it is appropriate to impose Canadian standards on Afganistan.

Champ : "Prisoners in Canadian corrections facilities are not subjected to electric shocks or beaten with electrical cables or hung up for days."

Dosanjh : "Are you suggesting that we as Canadians, the Canadian government in particular, with the evidence before us, are in breach of our obligations vis a vis the Geneva conventions?"

Champ : "Yes and also the convention against torture and human rights [I didn't catch it]."

Dosanjh ; "Is it your view that the government of Canada today if taken to court would be likely to be found in breach of international obligations?

Champ : "I do ... Prohibition against torture is a non derogable duty."

Abbott : "Dosanjh's question is irresponsible. Would you agree with me that the Geneva convention does not apply in Afghanistan because it is not a state-to-state conflict, and would you further agree you were worried that we could be or soldiers could be subject to laws under the Geneva convention. And considering that it doesn't apply, would you agree, why would you answer that irresponsible question with an irresponsible answer?

Champ : "I would disagree with you that the Geneva convention does not apply to the armed conflict in Afghanistan."

Abbott : "Who was the other state?"

Champ : "You are quite right there's some dispute whether its an international armed conflict or not but regardless Common Article 3 - which is the duty not to subject individuals to inhumane or cruel treatment - that applies both in internal civil armed conflicts or international armed conflicts so that applies regardless and I think almost any lawyer would agree with me on that."

Abbott : "Are you chery-picking the Geneva convention?"

Champ : No I don't think so.
Common Article 3 applies in all conventions 1,2, 3 &4 . It's the prohibition against cruel and inhumane treatment and I think any lawyer would agree with me that it applies in this conflict."

There was more showboating from Abbott about docs leaked in the US "sending Osama bin Laden back to his caves" and "damage to soldiers from the complete public release of all docs" - which the unflappable Champ responded to by explaining that what is needed is a functioning system for dealing with all this and no one has suggested full scale public release of the docs and for instance he for one does not expect to see them.

Hawn opined that Champ is an employee of 2 orgs that are fighting our government so it's all just a partisan political witch hunt and we should move on to other matters.

Bachand reminded Hawn that the Cons boycotted the committee before xmas and then prorogued for a month so it's pretty rich they now just want to move on, at which they all went "in camera" for a fight.

I do not see how we can "move on" as long as we have a government that does not believe in prohibitions against torture.

UPDATE : Dave explains yet again why the Cons fiddling around with definitions of torture endangers the very troops they purport to champion as they hide behind them.

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Laurie Hawn's "gold standard"

On CBC radio's The House this morning, Laurie Hawn, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of National Defence and the lead government MP on the Special Committee on the Canadian Mission in Afghanistan, said that his government had fixed the faulty Afghan detainee agreement they had inherited from the Liberals and then made the following statement about the current treatment of Afghan detainees :

"Our detainee arrangement is the new gold standard. Taliban prisoners are treated like gold."

Well so much for the U.S. State Department's 2009 report on Afghan human rights then :

"Human rights organizations report local authorities tortured and abused detainees. Torture and abuse methods included ... beating by stick, scorching bar or iron bar, flogging by cable, battering by rod, electric shock, deprivation of sleep, water and food, abusive language, sexual humiliation and rape."

This is Laurie Hawn's "gold standard".

We should just "move on" he said, backed up by a sound clip from Afghan occupation promoter Terry Glavin, who deemed the parliamentary Afghan committee's attempt to get documents necessary for their work "a kangaroo court".

Hawn also repeated his favorite little chestnut about "some Taliban being hit with a shoe".
Does ex-Canadian Air Force Lieutenant-Colonel Laurie Hawn not realize what a real disservice this statement is to the Canadian troops who have not only documented abuses but refused to hand over prisoners that they were convinced were just going to be killed?

This is why we can't "move on". Despite reports like the 2009 US State Dept report, the Cons are still in denial and refuse to release even independent human rights reports to the parliamentary committee charged with oversight of our "mission" in Afganistan.
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h/t Croghan at Bread and Roses for The House link.
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Security theatre of the absurd

Given that the Cons blocked the Military Police Complaints Commission from receiving documents on the Afghan detainees :

"Canada's former top military police officer, retired navy captain Steve Moore, advised he had documents that he wanted to turn over to the inquiry, however Mr. Moore and his lawyer had to sign a pledge preventing them from passing the documents to the inquiry."

and redacted the docs they did allow :

"This is what the Bravo Company, 2nd Battalion Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry Battle Group sergeant wrote in June 2006 about the Afghan detainee who was beaten up:

"We then photographed the individual prior to handing him over, to ensure that if the ANP did assault him, as has happened in the past, we would have a visual record of his condition."

but this is what the government sent to the Military Police Complaints Commission:

"We then photographed the individual prior to handing him over (redacted)."

and also sandbagged the Parliamentary Afghan committee by threatening and muzzling witnesses:

"The federal government is blocking diplomat Richard Colvin from giving documents to a special House of Commons committee investigating Afghan torture.
Justice Department lawyers have told Colvin - through the Foreign Affairs department - that they do not accept the view that testimony before Parliament is exempt from national security provisions of the Canada Evidence Act.
Violating Section 38 of the Canada Evidence Act can be punishable by five years in prison."

before finally shutting parliament down altogether to shut everyone up about it ....

who could possibly pretend to believe they will now freely hand over those very same docs to retired Justice Iacobucci?

Answer : The Libs.
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Iacobucci Sandbagging redux

On Friday Justice Minister Rob Nicholson announced the government was appointing Frank Iacobucci, a former Supreme Court judge with no legal hold over them, to determine what documents pertaining to the Afghan detainee issue could be released without compromising national security, national defence, and/or international relations. The scope and terms of Iacobucci's appointment are not known and he will report directly to Nicholson.

A number of bloggers have already weighed in on Iacobucci's suitability to the task. Steve at Far and Wide in particular points to Iacobucci having already previously agreed to omit information - at the Minister's request - from the public version of his October 2008 inquiry into the illegal renditioning of three Canadian citizens, Abdullah Almalki, Ahmad el-Maati, and Muayyed Nurredin to Syria and Egypt where they were tortured before being deemed innocent.

In light of Prof. Amir Attaran's explosive allegations on CBC that Afghan detainees were handed over to Afghan authorities with the precise purpose of having them tortured, and tonight's news that CSIS was involved in the interrogation of Afghan detainees, it's worth looking at what was omitted from Iacobucci's 2008 report.

What was included in the initial report was bad enough ;
In September 2001, the RCMP described Mr. El Maati to Syria and Egypt as an Al Qaeda associate and an "imminent threat to public security"
CSIS decribed him as "involved in the Islamic Extremist movement" and "an associate of an Osama Bin Laden"
They then shared his travel plans with the CIA who passed them on.
Mr. El Maati was detained in Syria for two months and Egypt for two years, where he was tortured with electric shock to his hands, back and genitals, and sleep deprivation while being subjected to excruciatingly painful stress torture for days on end.
In 2003, CSIS sent Egypt a “statement of concern” about Mr. El Maati should he be released from custody.

Iacobucci said he could not stress sufficiently that these three must "be presumed innocent of any wrongdoing."

The omitted part that Steve alludes to was released just two weeks ago as a supplement :
In June 2002, CSIS agents advised Egyptian authorities that El Maati was involved in a plan "to commit a terrorist act in Canada". They did not say, and maintain they could not have known, that this "confession" was derived from his torture in Syria.
In December 2002, CSIS went to Egypt with a list of questions "to which it wished to obtain answers."

While we the public were prevented from seeing this latest information till two weeks ago, Justice Iacobucci knew it all along and sought to have it made public. And yet in his summation to his 2008 report he still concluded :

"The inquiry did find that the three men were tortured in foreign prisons and that the mistreatment may have "resulted indirectly from several actions of Canadian officials."

but that :

"I found no evidence that any of these of these officials were seeking to do anything other than carry out conscientiously the duties and responsibilities of the institutions of which they were part."

And that, as I said at the time, is the most damning part of all.

I offer this blogpost just to run to ground the discussion on Iacobuccu's suitability as a beard for the Cons. In truth, I'm with Pogge and Eugene Forsey here - Nicholson can talk to anyone he likes - it doesn't matter. Parliament has demanded the documents. The Cons are currently in contempt of Parliament. Ultimately they must be forced to give the documents up. It's the law here.
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Democracy and Parliament not sidestepped, only suspended

We would like to thank Con MP Brent Rathgeber for that lovely explanation of Steve's dismissal of parliament - first ignoring its will and then proroguing it - and move on to how the media props up that contempt by ignoring it.

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With a little help from his friends ...

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As pointed out by POGGE here and here, CBC and CTV/CanWest both blew their year-end interviews with Steve.

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Mansbridge took a stab at getting some explanation from Steve on why he prorogued parliament but then allows Steve to blow him off with bafflegab about how Canadians don't care about it anyway. The question Mansbridge should have asked is why Steve is ignoring a parliamentary motion to hand over unredacted documents on the Afghan detainees and did he shut down parliament to avoid doing so?

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At least Mansbridge gave it a shot. In their year end interview, the CTV/CanWest tagteam of John Ivison and David Akin don't even mention proroguing or detainees, never mind ignoring the will of parliament. They just skip the whole friggin thing. In fact their interview, which ran in the National Post, opens with this :

IVISON: "Prime Minister, it seems there is not going to be much for us to write about, unless there are Senate appointments in our near future."

Yup, year end review, not much goin' on here right now. What ever will we write about?

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In his blog entry : Interviewing Harper: What to ask? Why not ask about prorogation? David Akin explains that Mansbidge already covered that issue - no, David, clearly he did not - and that they did not have much time to ask questions that could be rewritten up by their affiliate papers :

"[T]he goal for Canwest, at least, is to leave the interview with a story that the local editors of the Vancouver Sun, Montreal Gazette, Ottawa Citizen and other Canwest papers would find interesting enough that they would make (valuable) space for in their papers."

Yet within that admittedly short 13 minutes there was apparently ample time for questions like this :

AKIN: Do (you) see yourself in a decade -- you may not be prime minister -- do you see a career for yourself after this? I don't sense you're the board of directors type but I don't know, maybe you are -- an academic? What do you want to do? Where are you in a decade?"

Steve in a decade? Who gives a rat's ass? We want to know where our parliament is right now.

Akin responds in comments at Pogge's.

Happily the conservative US UK mag The Economist, in two separate articles, goes straight to the heart of what the Canadian media to a truly frightening degree ignores :

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Harper goes prorogue

Parliamentary scrutiny may be tedious, but democracies cannot afford to dispense with it

Never mind what his spin doctors say: Mr Harper’s move looks like naked self-interest.
His officials faced grilling by parliamentary committees over whether they misled the House of Commons in denying knowledge that detainees handed over to the local authorities by Canadian troops in Afghanistan were being tortured.

A legislature matters more than the luge
Mr Harper is a competent tactician with a ruthless streak. He bars most ministers from talking to the media; he has axed some independent watchdogs; he has binned campaign promises to make government more open and accountable. Now he is subjecting Parliament to prime-ministerial whim. He may be right that most Canadians care more about the luge than the legislature, but that is surely true only while their decent system of government is in good hands. They may soon conclude that it isn’t.

Canada without Parliament - Halted in mid-debate

Stephen Harper is counting on Canadians’ complacency as he rewrites the rules of his country’s politics to weaken legislative scrutiny.

The danger in allowing the prime minister to end discussion any time he chooses is that it makes Parliament accountable to him rather than the other way around.
It is now up to [the opposition] to show that Canada cannot afford a part-time Parliament that sits only at the prime minister’s pleasure.

One would hope it would also be a matter of some concern to the Fourth Estate.

CANADIANS AGAINST PROROGUING PARLIAMENT - 92,000 120,000 140,000 and counting ...
On Facebook .

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Richard Colvin's devastating letter of rebuttal

On Airshow MacKay's attempt to discredit Colvin by accusing him of not having brought up detainee abuse the one time MacKay met with Colvin in Afghanistan :
He, Colvin, had only been on the job for 10 days and had not met with any detainees yet.
And even if he had, protocol was to report to DFAIT, not the minister.

On Christie Blatchford's Con-fed column that Colvin had only been outside the wire once :
Colvin : 'Outside the wire' in Kandahar at least 11 times, in Kabul over 500 times.

On the claim his reports in 2006 did not use the word 'torture' :
Colvin : Six reports, one including the phrase " rife with torture"

On the government claim it heard no allegations of "torture" prior to April 2007:
Colvin : "... in early March 2007, I informed an interagency meeting of some 12 to 15 officials in Ottawa that, 'The NDS tortures people, that's what they do, and if we don't want our detainees tortured, we shouldn't give them to the NDS.' ... The response from the Canadian Expeditionary Force Command (CEFCOM) note-taker was to stop writing and put down her pen."

On the claim that it was only insurgents and Taliban who were detained:
Colvin : "... it was the NDS that told us that many or most of our detainees were unconnected to the insurgency. This assessment was reported to Ottawa. The NDS also told us that, because the intelligence value of Canadian-transferred detainees was so low, it did not want them."

On the government claim that it took action as soon as it was informed of abuse :
They were informed repeatedly of the risk of torture, the deficiencies of Canada's monitoring system, and delays in reports to the ICRC in 2006 in reports from the Provincial Reconstruction Team, the US State Department, and the US Secretary General. They finally sent someone in October 2007 who immediately confirmed torture.
The government also twice intervened to keep a torturer named by the PRT in place.

On Interdepartmental Coordinator for Afghanistan David Mulroney's statement that the only reason reports were edited was to remove 'opinion' or 'non‐fact based' information.

Colvin : Embassy staffers were told that they should not report information, however accurate, that conflicted with the government's public messaging. Ambassador Lalani instructed that we not report that the security situation was deteriorating.

In September 2007, an embassy staffer, in response to a written request from DFAIT's Afghanistan Taskforce to contribute to a security assessment by one of our NATO allies, sent a report that security in Kandahar had got worse and was likely to further deteriorate. Mr. Mulroney severely rebuked the officer in writing.

On Assistant Deputy Minister Colleen Swords' testimony that she told Colvin to phone first, write later :
Colvin : "Her message to me was that I should use the phone instead of writing..."

On the claim from Goldie, Gallant, MacKay, Abbott that "Afghan detainees are trained to claim torture."
Colvin : They are not Al Qaeda; they are peasants. We arrest them and turn them over to torturers. Why would they make any claims of torture, false or otherwise, to us? They don't trust us. Besides, reports of torture based on physical exams, not testimony.

And so on and so on. Absolutely devastating.

When Colvin originally testified at the Afghan Committee, he was just doing his job - appearing as summoned. As he stated today - he is not a whistleblower.
Today's letter, on what he politely termed the "inaccuracies" of the government's witnesses and MPs and camp followers, is even more damaging than his original testimony.

Government response?
Fucking idiot Goldie Hawn : "Now is not the time to accuse our troops of war crimes."
Peter MacKay's spokesweasel, Dan Dugas : "We reject all assertions that Canadian troops have committed war crimes."

Which is interesting in light of Colvin's letter. Note that he does not even obliquely lay blame on the military brass, never mind the troops.
Nope, it's all on MacKay, DFAIT and the Privy Council Office.
And this is why Harper has refused to release the docs to Peter Tinsley's Military Police Complaints Committee and the Afghan Committee, has fired Peter Tinsley, has intimidated witnesses from appearing before the Afghan committee, has refused to allow the Afghan Committee to continue their investigation, and has refused to call a public inquiry as voted on by the House.

All because one civil servant insisted on doing his job.
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Con MPs boycott Afghan Committee today

Con Committee chair Rick Casson confirmed today's meeting with the opposition MPs but did not bother to tell them that neither he nor any of the other Con MPs would be showing up.
As the committee requires a quorum of seven to convene and only the six MPs from the opposition parties showed up, the committee could not go ahead as planned.

That the Cons are dipping into their dirty tricks manual on how to disrupt committees again does not surprise, but the Cons primary argument against having the public inquiry into the whole detainees mess - passed as a motion in the House and then ignored -has been that it is already being dealt with in this committee.

The Cowardly Cons on the Afghan Special Committee :
Rick Casson , Chair : CassoR@parl.gc.ca ,
Jim Abbott : AbbotJ@parl.gc.ca ,
Goldie Hawn : HawnL@parl.gc.ca ,
Greg Kerr : Kerr.G@parl.gc.ca ,
Deepak Obhrai : ObhraD@parl.gc.ca ,
Dave MacKenzie : MackeD@parl.gc.ca .

Send them a feather.

Possibly none of them wanted to deal with reports from today that British Colonel Dudley Giles, a senior military police officer with NATO's International Security Assistance Force, complained to the Canadian embassy in Kabul in August 2006 that

"Canada was stonewalling on providing basic information on the Afghans it was capturing."

or that

"a memo from Canadian NATO staffer Anne Burgess alerted the government on Sept. 11 2006 to the fact that the ICRC had singled out Canada's practice of handing over prisoners to the Afghans on the battlefield."

And if there's anyone left, aside from the Cowardly Cons, who still doesn't think it much matters what is done in our name a long way from home, either Dave or Boris will explain it to you.
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Hansard Quotes of the Day

Among the many fakeries and falsehoods foisted on the House yesterday by the Cons in their bid to maintain the most secretive and unaccountable government evah, usual frontrunners Laurie Goldie Hawn and Cheryl Gallant got beat out by Gary Goodyear, Minister of Creationism, Science, and Technology.
Here he is explaining why the motion to release documents the government had already supplied to Christie Blatchford and friendly Afghan committee witnesses but not to the Afghan committee members or Richard Colvin, who wrote some of them, would be a very. very. bad. thing.

"Madam Speaker, perhaps I will just make a comment. The fact is that we are debating a motion here that is asking the government to release information that could in fact entail something as simple as a soldier's name, middle name, address and perhaps phone number. It is information that the Taliban are hoping they can get their hands on, not just to attack that soldier but also potentially to put the family of the soldier at risk."

And that, boys and girls, is why the dates and the word torture must be blacked out on Richard Colvin's three year old reports.

Second prize goes to Goldie, who characterized a Canadian soldier's reports of extrajudicial killings and torture as :

"one Taliban got hit with a shoe"

and for the following rhetorical flight of irrelevancy :

"When it comes to the big ticket items of national unity and doing the right thing on the international stage, Liberals and Conservatives have always spoken with the same voice. That is the voice of freedom, it is the voice of courage, it is the voice of doing the right thing for Canadian men and women here and abroad, people like the people of Holland in 1944-45..."

Gallant takes third place for her accusation on two separate occasions that personal info about soldiers would be twittered straight from the Afghan committee to the Taliban, a point seconded by Jim Abbott who is himself on the committee.

Honourable mention - Lawrence Cannon, Minister of Abandoning Canadians Overseas, for : "We are at war."

Steve and Airshow MacKay had no new material - just the same accusations that not supporting the Cons' contempt for parliament is the same thing as attacking the troops.
High point : a brilliant speech by Paul Dewar.

The motion to release to the Afghan committee documents related to the care and detention of Afghan prisoners passed by 145 to 143. Steve has no intention of honouring that vote.
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Ok, John, seeing as you put it that way...

Rising to a question in the House yesterday as to why the Cons refused to act on first-hand accounts of detainee abuse in Afghan jails from troops, John Baird responded by asking why the leader of the opposition does not trust the word of "General Walter Natynczyk, a decorated war hero, someone who has served our country in uniform for decades"?

OK, John, seeing as you put it that way, we'll go with the general's account then.

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Peter MacKay vs the evidence

Paul Koring :

"In one well-documented case in the summer of 2006, Canadian soldiers captured and handed over a detainee who was so severely beaten by Afghan police that the Canadians intervened and took the detainee back. Canadian medics then treated the man's injuries. The incident is documented in the field notes of Canadian troops, recounted in a sworn affidavit by a senior officer and confirmed in cross-examination by a general."

Peter MacKay :
"There has never been a single, solitary, proven allegation of abuse of a detainee, a Taliban prisoner, transferred by Canadian Forces.” Dec. 2 in the House of Commons

“Mr. Speaker, there has not been a single, solitary, proven allegation of a prisoner being abused that was transferred from the Canadian Forces.” Nov. 23 in the House of Commons

“We do want to hear from individuals who can bring forward credible, proven allegations, not just recitations of what was heard, what was passed on, what was read in reports, or what was disclosed by Taliban prisoners themselves. That is what the evidence is so far. We have not seen a single scintilla of proof.” Nov. 23 in the House of Commons

“There has never been a single proven allegation of abuse involving a prisoner transferred by the Canadian Forces, not one.” Nov. 23 in the House of Commons

What next, Pete? You were sadly misinformed by your generals? Your base doesn't give a shit about the Geneva conventions? What? I'm guessing Pete will go with blaming the generals.
MacKay's spokesweasel Dan Dugas lays the groundwork :

The minister's spokesman said Sunday that Mr. MacKay was standing by his repeated denials.
“He has said what he has said based on the advice of generals and senior officials in the department."

... all of which would carry slightly more weight had we not already heard from foreign affairs and defence officials via Murray Brewster that they had been instructed by "senior officials in the Privy Council Office (and reinforced in follow-up conferences between Ottawa and Kabul, as well Ottawa and Kandahar) to "hold back information in their reports to Ottawa about the handling of the prisoners" that didn't promote "a happy face".
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Airshow MacKay's 'catch and release yokel program'

Then, Nov 23 :

"Concerns about the treatment of Afghan prisoners prompted Canadian soldiers to halt the transfer of detainees three times over the course of the last year, says Defence Minister Peter MacKay.
MacKay said the suspensions followed the refusal by Afghan authorities to abide by an agreement that guaranteed access to prisons where the detainees were being held.
"Most recently the reason that the transfers stopped was that the Afghan officials were not living up to ... expectations," MacKay said."

Sounds like Airshow MacKay is staking out the high moral ground here, until Today :

"Afghanistan's intelligence service refused to accept Canadian-captured prisoners over the summer because the military was providing "insufficient evidence" of wrongdoing, The Canadian Press has learned.

And so with little or no evidence to hold suspects, the spy agency has been releasing them - to the dismay of the Canadian military."

CBC :

"Canada's top two commanders in Afghanistan in spring 2006 told investigators the government pressured them to transfer detainees to Afghan authorities faster than they felt was appropriate, CBC News has learned.

[Brig.-Gen. David] Fraser and [Lt.-Col. Tom] Putt said the military's interest in detainees ended as soon as the prisoners were transferred. The military didn't monitor their condition — that was not its jurisdiction, Fraser said.
And the government's position was that monitoring detainees was an Afghan problem.

Putt's testimony also suggests Canadian troops frequently weren't capturing high-value Taliban targets — an assertion [Richard] Colvin first raised two weeks ago

"I mean, we were basically capturing a local yokel, " Putt said. "Detaining the local yokels and handing them off."

What a surprise : Gen. Stanley McChrystal, commander of all alliance forces in Afghanistan, says Violence in Afghanistan has increased 300% since 2007. even as President Obama was making his major surge speech:

"And we must make it clear to every man, woman and child around the world who lives under the dark cloud of tyranny that America will speak out on behalf of their human rights and tend for the light of freedom and justice and opportunity and respect for the dignity of all peoples. That is who we are; that is the source, the moral source of America's author."

"And just as America can't afford to abandon this war, surely it can't afford to abandon the Afghan people, who without the American military would be left to the savage whims of their hated enemy, the Afghan people. Indeed, it remains America's solemn duty as the leader of the free world to bring freedom and security to the Afghan people by hunting down and eliminating the Afghan people. Nor can America forget its own national security, and the dire threat posed by the Afghan people to our war against the Afghan people."

Correction : The second paragraph above was mistakenly attibuted to President Obama earlier today. It has since come to our attention it was actually written by Fafblog.
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We can't stop here! This is bat country!

Today in the House, Paul Dewar moved for an independent "Public Inquiry into the transfer of detainees in Canadian custody to Afghan authorities from 2001 to 2009."
It passed 146 to 129, not that this means we'll actually get one.

Here, via Hansard, Con MP Cheryl Gallant presents the Cons' closing argument for why we should not pursue an independent inquiry, unsullied by partisan political gamesmanship :

"Mr. Speaker, on the weekend I had an opportunity to speak to a soldier from Canadian Forces Base Petawawa who had served several rotations in Afghanistan.

He urged me not to go forth with an inquiry on this issue. He said that every time the Afghan deployment is debated in Parliament, it puts the lives of our soldiers in theatre at greater risk. He recounted that when the motion to withdraw from Afghanistan or to end the combat mission in 2011 was before Parliament, they were in a operation where they heard the insurgents on the radio saying to each other that they should kill as many Canadian soldiers as possible because we were debating this in the House of Commons and that when Canadians saw the caskets of soldiers coming off the plane it increased public pressure. They wanted the MPs to vote to get out of Afghanistan as quickly as possible.

I asked him if they listened to Al Jazeera while they were fighting at the front, so to speak, and he said, “No, ma'am. We heard this chatter on our coms”.

So they had heard Taliban talking to one another, urging each other to kill as many Canadian soldiers as possible. He credits the leader of the NDP directly for the death of his best friend as a consequence of that."

Mrs. Gallant's musings can frequently be heard from her perch on the Parliamentary Committee of National Defence.
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h/t Scott
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I reckon we've had just about enough of this bullshit

Shorter Harper : If you point the war crimes finger at me, I'll deflect it at the troops.

Faced with mounting condemnation for government ass-covering over Richard Colvin's testimony about Afghan detainees, Harper resorts to an oblique slight-of-tongue blackmail :

"There were allegations of Canadian troops involved in torture. We’ve been very clear that's not the case."

So who is pointing fingers at the troops?

No one. No. One. But. Steve.

Least of all Richard Colvin, as he made abundantly clear right away at the beginning of his Nov. 18th testimony before the Committee on the Canadian Mission in Afghanistan :

"I was very proud to have served in Afghanistan alongside the courageous and professional men and women of the Canadian Forces, including Canada's military police. The focus of our attention, in my view, should not be on those who obeyed their chain of command, which soldiers are obliged to do. Instead, any responsibility for Canada's practices toward detainees lies, in my view, with the senior military officers, senior civilian officials, and the lawyers who developed the legal framework, designed the policies and practices, and then ordered that they be implemented."

Well that seems clear enough.

Evidently not clear enough though for warporner Christie Blatchford :

In condemning with the same brush highly professional Canadian soldiers, and to complain that they were complicit in breaches of the law of armed conflict and knowingly buried his reports, it is Mr. Colvin who has some explaining left to do.

but certainly clear enough for anyone not looking to turn Colvin's words upside down and pretend that any criticism of the HarperCons and their public service camp followers equals a danger to the troops and military police, as Harper does here today:

"... in a time when some in the political arena do not hesitate before throwing the most serious of allegations at our men and women in uniform, based on the most flimsy of evidence, remember that Canadians from coast to coast to coast are proud of you and stand behind you, and I am proud of you, and I stand beside you."

Steve bravely champions the troops by hiding behind them and pointing a finger at them.

Are people gonna fall for this bs?

Impolitical handily deconstructs Harper's nonsense

while Contrarian takes down Blatchford.
And yes, why was Christie Blatchford leaked information deemed too sensitive for the Parliamentary Committee on the Canadian Mission in Afghanistan?

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