Richard Colvin speaks

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, November 18, 2009 at 3:51 PM - 64 Comments

At this moment, Richard Colvin is delivering crushing testimony to the special committee on the Canadian mission in Afghanistan. Here is the first dispatch from Canadian Press.

A federal official says all of the prisoners Canada handed to Afghanistan’s notorious intelligence service in 2006-07 were tortured — and many of them were likely innocent … In a blistering indictment of Ottawa’s handling of prisoners, Colvin 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.”

Reports from Canadian Press, the Star, Canwest, Reuters, the Sun, CTV and CBC.

An extract from Colvin’s opening statement here.

Hope for Zimbabwe’s hellish jails

By Patricia Treble - Thursday, June 18, 2009 at 1:20 PM - 2 Comments

Conditions within Zimbabwe’s prisons are so horrific that the International Committee of the Red Cross has stepped in. The Swiss-based organization announced last Friday that it is distributing food to 6,300 inmates and has set up therapeutic feeding programs for the severely malnourished. The help can’t come fast enough. On March 31, an undercover South African documentary titled Hell Hole showed emaciated detainees in rags. And the prison system is so overcrowded that the diseased and starving are forced to share cells with healthy prisoners. So many were dying that the bodies were crammed into makeshift mortuaries.

Lucky prisoners get one meal a day and salty water. Roy Bennett, a leading opposition politician who is now deputy minister of agriculture in the coalition government, was noticeably thinner after being freed on bail in March after a few weeks behind bars. He called his detention, on banditry and terrorism charges many believe were politically motivated, a “harrowing experience” that “I don’t wish on my worst enemy.” While he was in jail it took authorities up to two days to remove five bodies. A Zimbabwean newspaper reported that more than 50 per cent of the inmates in one prison died in 2008.

Continue…

'We hope that you will find the report useful'

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, April 7, 2009 at 1:15 PM - 5 Comments

Mark Danner has filed a second piece for the New York Review of Books on the torture that took place under the Bush administration. The Review has also posted the Red Cross report that documented the abuse. Danner’s first piece, published a few weeks ago, is here.

For the sake of comparison, here is the affidavit of Omar Khadr filed with the Canadian Supreme Court as to his treatment while in American custody.

While the matter of his child soldier status has made for an interesting debate, it is probably tangential to the central question of his detainment: regardless of guilt or innocence, has his treatment violated the moral, ethical and legal standards of our society?

Choose your own foreign policy

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, January 8, 2009 at 1:41 PM - 9 Comments

Jim Travers theorizes on the rise of Peter Kent.

Gaza, a crisis with troubling similarities to the 2006 Israeli adventure in south Lebanon that exposed Harper’s foreign policy inexperience, is being presented subtly to Quebec by Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon and aggressively in the rest of Canada by his junior minister and rookie MP Peter Kent… having been burned once by the Middle East, Harper is now letting ministers aim one message at Palestinian sympathetic Quebec and another at more pro-Israel audiences elsewhere.

(Is this really possible? Are left-wing Quebecers unable or unwilling to read what’s being written elsewhere? Doesn’t the Internet render this sort of stuff rather moot?)

Meanwhile, Kent’s previously stated claim to clarity on the issue of humanitarian disasters in the region would seem to put him somewhat out of step with both the United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross.