Canada ignored torture warnings: Diplomat
Canada: Torture State. Like the ring of that? If not, Canada, then we have to push against this and take responsibility for the ongoing injustices being committed in Afghanistan, before we can reclaim our good name.
Flashback: Military lawyer stonewalls on Afghan torture claims | Ottawa was warned Afghan detainees might be tortured | Military commission suspends torture hearings, gags witness | Torture probe delayed; Tories deny gagging witness | Federal court limits Afghan detainee torture probe | Watchdog rejects government bid to delay Afghan detainee inquiry | Ottawa moves to block Afghanistan detainee torture hearings again | Bid to Block Afghan Detainee Inquiry Slammed | What Ottawa doesn’t want you to know: Government was told detainees faced ‘extrajudicial executions, disappearances, torture and detention without trial’
Allan Woods, Toronto Star
Novermber 18, 2009
OTTAWA – A former senior Canadian diplomat in Afghanistan has levelled bombshell allegations suggesting the military knowingly handed detainees to Afghan authorities who allowed them to be tortured.
Richard Colvin, now an intelligence officer at the Canadian embassy in Washington, said Canada took six times as many detainees as coalition partners from Britain and the Netherlands, had no way to track their whereabouts, and ignored warnings they were being tortured with electrical cables, extreme temperatures, knives and sexual abuse.
Colvin made the allegations while testifying today before a special House of Commons committee on Afghanistan.
Warnings first delivered in spring 2006 were ignored by senior Canadian Forces and government officials for a year until newspaper reports brought the allegations of mistreatment to light. After that, Colvin said, diplomats were instructed not to keep written records of any talk of torture by their higher-ups in Ottawa.
Colvin said the Canadian military’s handling of detainees betrayed the country’s core values, undermined counterinsurgency efforts in Kandahar, and was “probably illegal” under international law, which prohibits complicity in torture.
The Canadian Forces also erected a wall of secrecy around the practice of handing over detainees that was out of sync with Canada’s NATO partners, refusing to share with both the Canadian public as well as NATO itself how many detainees the military had captured. The purported reason was that such information could put troops at risk, but he said that was a weak reason.
Colvin also said the rank-and-file soldiers were clearly troubled by the practice, which involved handing over relatively low-value detainees to certain torture by the Afghan secret police, but deferred to their superiors.
“Instead of winning hearts and minds,” he said, “we caused Kandaharis to fear foreigners.”
Other government agencies, like Foreign Affairs, were powerless to intervene because they were relatively disorganized and understaffed compared to the Canadian Forces. There was also a wide-ranging deference to then Chief of Defence Staff Gen. Rick Hillier, who brushed off allegations the military was complicit in torture as “bullsh–.”
Colvin also told the committee that the government has tried to block him from testifying before a Military Police Complaints Commission hearing on detainee treatment by denying him legal representation and stopping him from accessing some of the reports he wrote while stationed in Afghanistan for 17 months in 2006 and 2007.
Colvin said he remains concerned because Canada continues to hand over its prisoners to the National Directorate of Security, Afghanistan’s notorious intelligence service.
He also said the Red Cross tried for three months in 2006 to warn the Canadian army in Kandahar about what was happening to prisoners, but no one would “even take their phone calls.”
Conservative MPs on the committee were indignant and said Colvin’s testimony amounted to hearsay. They insisted he had provide no “first-hand” proof of torture, despite having seen bruises and other marks of abuse on the prisoners he interviewed.
“It’s all second hand,” said Tory MP Laurie Hawn, a former military officer. “I really have to question whether this is credible.”
Fellow Conservative MP Cheryl Gallant dismissed all of the testimony as something that wouldn’t be admissible in court and tried to paint Colvin as a Taliban dupe.
“They know how to take and plant false stories, how to push stories out,” she said reading from previous testimony given by a military officer to the Commons defence committee.
“It’s called information operations.”
Hawn, who is the parliamentary secretary to the defence minister, questioned why Colvin never raised his concerns directly with cabinet ministers when they visited Afghanistan.
“It would be a bit inappropriate, I think, to ruin a minister’s visit by coming and saying, ‘Hey did you know people are getting tortured with electricity?”‘ Colvin answered.
But Hawn said it’s exactly the kind of information ministers would want to know.
Liberal defence critic Ujjal Dosanjh described the Conservative response as “despicable” and an attempt to shirk their responsibility.
“There is something called ministerial accountability. You can’t be ignorant. You can’t be dumb. You can’t shut your ears, your ears and your mouth to say ‘No, I didn’t know.”‘ Dosanjh said.
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