Reading the documents: Notification, policy and concerns

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, June 27, 2011 at 4:32 PM - 5 Comments

The documents tabled last week can be viewed in their entirety here. Herein, a series of posts on some of the noteworthy files and disclosures contained therein.

Documents marked DFAIT36 through DFAIT116 cover the notification of the Red Cross (and later the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission) in regards to those detained and/or transferred by the Canadian Forces between June 2006 and May 2007.

DFAIT36 outlines concerns expressed by the International Committee of the Red Cross in June 2006 about delays in notification. DFAIT75 covers concerns expressed in December 2006. DFAIT145 covers concerns raised in May 2007.

In DFAIT126, dated September 2006, Richard Colvin suggests Canada should be doing its own monitoring of detainees in Afghan custody.

DFAIT141 covers a wide discussion of detainee policy, while DFAIT147 and DFAIT149, both from May 2007, are drafts of new policies.

DFAIT151 covers a number of issues and proposals raised in the wake of the Globe and Mail’s April 2007 reporting.

The Commons: Two words to say so much

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, June 23, 2011 at 6:48 PM - 0 Comments

The Scene. John Baird seemed to stumble before catching himself.

“Mr. Speaker, our government is, and has always been,” he said this afternoon in response to a question from the NDP side, “committed to handling Afghan… Taliban prisoners in accordance with our international obligations.”

Taliban prisoners is indeed the preferred honorific. And four years after the treatment of those transferred to Afghan authorities by the Canadian Forces became a matter of public concern—four years after allegations that Canadian-transferred detainees had been punched, choked, whipped and electrocuted by Afghan officials—much of the government’s response to so many questions of human rights, war, torture and parliamentary privilege would seem to involve this two-word phrase.

Continue…

Reading the documents

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, June 22, 2011 at 11:24 PM - 0 Comments

The documents tabled today can be viewed in their entirety here. Some of these memos appear to have been made public previously, but starting here, a series of posts on some of the noteworthy files and disclosures contained therein.

Files POA 0424 through POA 0437—see the second batch of files—appear to contain memos drafted by Richard Colvin between June 2, 2006 and April 20, 2007. These are memos would have been filed before the Globe and Mail’s first major story on the handling of detainees was published on April 23, 2007.

The panel of arbiters has unredacted references to Governor Asadullah Khalid in POA 0433 and POA 0434. (References to Governor Khalid are also revealed in POA 0148, dated April 28, 2007.)

In POA 0437, a reference to “suspicions of maltreatment by the NDS” has been disclosed.

POA 0439 through POA 0464 contain memos that followed the Globe’s report. References to Governor Khalid have been unredacted in POA 0454 and POA 0455.

POA 0465 is Mr. Colvin’s final report on the conclusion of his 18 months in Afghanistan.

Amrullah Saleh and the Afghan detainee controversy

By Michael Petrou - Monday, June 20, 2011 at 11:43 AM - 7 Comments

Amrullah Saleh was head of Afghanistan’s secret police, the NDS, during the time that Canadian diplomat Richard Colvin alleges detainees transferred to the NDS by Canadian Forces were tortured.

As near as I can tell, Saleh has not spoken to media about these allegations (though he has addressed them in letters and reports — including to the former Afghan ambassador to Canada — that have been made public).

I met with Saleh in Kabul. The bulk of our interview concerned his involvement in the political movement opposed to a peace deal with the Taliban. We did, however, briefly touch on the detainee issue. Here, for the record, is what he said:  Continue…

The paper trail

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, October 6, 2010 at 4:04 PM - 0 Comments

While the Military Police Complaints Commission continues to go over what was known, what was believed and what could be proven about the treatment of detainees in Afghanistan, the NDP has released a memo drafted by Richard Colvin in June 2007—apparently obtained through an access to information request—that details three allegations of abuse.

The visit reported in the memo came six weeks after the Globe’s pivotal reporting of detainee abuse. Transfers were halted in November 2007 after an embassy official heard an allegation of mistreatment from a detainee and was directed to the electrical cable allegedly used.

Twelve of a kind?

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, August 18, 2010 at 12:05 PM - 0 Comments

To the cases of Linda Keen, Arthur Carty, Bernard Shapiro, Kevin Page, Peter Tinsley, Richard Colvin, Marc Mayrand, Paul Kennedy, Robert Marleau, Munir Sheikh and Pat Stogran, you can perhaps add the curious case of Chief Supt. Marty Cheliak.

The head of the Canadian Firearms Program, who is a strong supporter of the long-gun registry, is quietly being bounced out of the position, CBC News has learned…

CBC’s Brian Stewart reported that Cheliak was set to unveil a major report before the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police at their annual general meeting in Edmonton and get a president’s award for his work on the long-gun registry. But Stewart said Cheliak was told by the RCMP he’s not going to be sent there.

'It was my No. 1 priority, but my bosses had other priorities, too'

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, June 18, 2010 at 4:28 PM - 4 Comments

As the Military Police Complaints Commission hearings continue, perhaps as many questions are raised as are answered.

Former diplomat Nicholas Gosselin visited Afghan detention facilities at least 38 times, but conducted only a handful of interviews with prisoners in the months after a bombshell allegation that a Canadian-captured detainee had been beaten with electrical cables. The revelation stunned both the inquiry chair and the human-rights group that prompted the continuing torture inquiry.

Gosselin told a Military Police Complaints Commission inquiry Tuesday that there often wasn’t time to get in to a question-and-answer session with inmates of either the Afghan intelligence jail, or the notorious Sarpoza prison.

“It wasn’t that there wasn’t a will,” said Gosselin, whose job at the Kandahar provincial reconstruction base included monitoring prisoners. “It was my No. 1 priority, but my bosses had other priorities, too.”

How to answer a question

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, June 16, 2010 at 5:17 PM - 50 Comments

From Question Period this afternoon, the definitive moment of this particular moment in our collective history.

Hon. Jack Layton (Toronto—Danforth, NDP): Mr. Speaker, the faulty deal that the Prime Minister signed with the coalition of the unwilling shows why only a judicial inquiry is ever going to get to the bottom of the Afghan torture scandal. The government tried to silence diplomat Richard Colvin, who was trying to blow the whistle on torture. DND officials were sending memos begging to silence him. Why did the government reassign people who were trying to raise the issue of torture? Why did it want to stop Richard Colvin from exposing the truth and reporting on what he saw?

Right Hon. Stephen Harper (Prime Minister, CPC): Mr. Speaker, three political parties worked to get a responsible resolution of this question. Unfortunately, the NDP did not, but why would we be surprised? The deputy leader of the NDP knew full well what she was saying. She made statements that could have been made by Hamas, Hezbollah or anybody else with no repercussions from that party whatsoever. I hope the leader of the NDP will come clean and actually face up to his responsibilities on that question. While I am on my feet, I also hope that he will help us pass a reform of the pardon system, which Canadians have been waiting weeks for.

The brink

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, June 14, 2010 at 11:55 AM - 41 Comments

The latest, and perhaps last, meeting of all parties to negotiate a release of Afghan detainee documents will be this afternoon at 4:15pm. The Bloc and NDP indicated last week that this would likely be their last day before returning to the House. Over the weekend, while trying to sound as unthreatening as possible, Michael Ignatieff put an onus on today’s meeting.

And now, adding to the drama, new documents emerge indicating Canadian military officials were displeased with Richard Colvin’s reporting.

While we wait

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, April 30, 2010 at 2:23 PM - 1 Comment

A former diplomat told the Afghanistan committee this week that the first officials heard of specific allegations of torture was when the Globe and Mail reported as much in April 2007.

A military official told the Military Police Complaints Commission that documents related to the handling of detainees are being stored in a shipping container in Afghanistan and may take years to locate.

And, amid new testimony gathered by the Canadian Press, the Canadian Forces is investigating whether soldiers killed an unarmed teenager—an incident raised two weeks ago during testimony at the Afghanistan committee.

The eternal search for logic and consistency

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, April 16, 2010 at 2:16 PM - 34 Comments

From QP this morning, Wayne Easter attempts to put two and two together. Or connect the dots. Or whatever the appropriate phrase is here.

Mr. Speaker, Richard Colvin is a diplomat with 20 years of distinguished service to Canada. He remains a high-level employee of the government in perhaps our most important foreign mission, the embassy in Washington. When Mr. Colvin and others raised serious allegations, the government said he was not credible. However, when the Prime Minister got second-hand information from Mr. Gillani, known as Big Daddy G, the government fired the Status of Women minister, booted her from caucus and called in the police. Why the hypocritical double standard?

The Commons: Too little, too late

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, April 15, 2010 at 5:39 PM - 67 Comments

The Scene. Bob Rae stood with nothing to say about Helena Guergis. Alas, the good news ended there.

Each day, he said, there were new allegations, new information about this country’s handling of detainees in Afghanistan. None of this is being resolved. So why not a public inquiry to sort it all out?

Here came the Defence Minister, quite ready for this. “Mr. Speaker, the key word in the honourable member’s question was ‘allegations,’” Peter MacKay said. “In fact what we knew yesterday was the witness before the committee made allegations, and when specifically asked about these allegations he said he had no specific evidence to support the claims. In fact it was the honourable member who posed questions to him that elicited that response. When specifically asked if he was even in the area when these alleged incidents occurred, he said ‘no.’”

This is, you might note, just about the same tack the government employed five months ago after Richard Colvin’s initial testimony. And that was, you might’ve noticed, not particularly successful in bringing this matter to a conclusion.

Mr. Rae tried again. “Mr. Speaker, it is not going to do,” he offered, somewhat exasperatedly, “to not recognize the seriousness of the allegations which were made by the individual yesterday.” Continue…

'Just a real silly question then: any reason why we don’t have it?'

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, April 14, 2010 at 12:36 PM - 98 Comments

The Globe’s Steve Chase nicely captures an absurdist moment at the MPCC hearings yesterday.

The full transcript of Richard Colvin’s testimony yesterday can be downloaded here.

The Commons: In other news

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, April 13, 2010 at 6:52 PM - 46 Comments

The Scene. When all of this is past, and Helena Guergis has either been redeemed or forgotten or both, various members of this government might send her a polite note of thanks. Peter MacKay in particular.

If not for Ms. Guergis’s unfortunate spring, it might very well be much worse for the government side. If not for the opposition’s eagerness to chase the mystery of Ms. Guergis’s misdeeds—rightly or wrongly, justifiably or not—the questions would be far more profound and far less easily dismissed. As it is, every question asked about who may or may not have alleged what she may or may not have done and why we may or may not ever know about any of it, is a question that does not involve the phrases “torture” and “Asadullah Khalid” and “Afghanistan.”

Indeed, every question about the affairs of the former minister of state for the status of women is one less opportunity for Peter MacKay to stand up and say something silly. And for this we are all surely the poorer. Continue…

Colvin redux

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, April 13, 2010 at 12:32 PM - 16 Comments

Richard Colvin is in Ottawa today to testify at hearings of the Military Police Complaints Commission. The morning was mostly a repeat, with some added detail and commentary, of his testimony at the special committee last year. Early reviews are in from the Globe, Canadian Press, CBC, Canwest, Star and Sun.

The Colvin encyclopedia is fully up to date with the latest relevant links and background.

Meanwhile, Derek Lee and Jack Harris responded yesterday to the government’s response to the opposition’s question of privilege on the House order to produce documents. Tom Lukiwski and Jim Abbott then commented for the government. The Speaker thanked all for their submissions and said he would now be considering the matter with a judgment to be delivered in due course.

The text of the discussion if available here.

'Yeah, those allegations, they occurred, and we're doing the best we can to not have them happen in our custody'

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, April 8, 2010 at 5:45 PM - 20 Comments

Reports from today’s Military Police Complaints Commission from the Globe, Canadian Press and Sun.

Richard Colvin is now scheduled to testify before the MPCC on Tuesday.

Secrecy and inconsistency

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, April 5, 2010 at 3:49 PM - 29 Comments

The Hill Times finds a relevant e-mail in last week’s pile of detainee documents.

Canadian Forces headquarters ordered Canadian Military Police in Kandahar to withhold information about detainees from the allied International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan, an email among the 2,600 documents the government tabled in Parliament says…

According to [redacted] the situation has not/not improved,” the email says. “The Canadian [Military Police] Provost Marshal in Kandahar has told ISAF that he would be pleased to provide the information but that he has received explicit instructions from NDHQ not/not to do so. [Redacted] said this is very frustrating as ISAF has responsibilities on detainees that it is obliged to discharge.”

The email is equally important on another ground because the Military Police complaint it contains about orders to stay quiet over detainee information was redacted from another version of the same email that the government released last November. That was when the special Commons Committee on Afghanistan began hearing Colvin and other witnesses about Canadian actions during the war and allegations of torture.

The Commons: A little light reading

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, March 25, 2010 at 6:53 PM - 21 Comments

The Scene. Bob Rae sat with a great pile of paper on the desk in front of him. And after Michael Ignatieff and Lawrence Cannon had dealt with the question of what the government might say if the Americans were to ask about the possibility of Canadian troops staying a bit longer in Afghanistan, Ujjal Dosanjh stood to question the Conservative side about this pile of paper.

“Mr. Speaker, the government appointed Mr. Iacobucci at the last minute on a Friday morning, then took two weeks to release his terms of reference, and this morning, dumped some torture documents in the House without Mr. Iacobucci reviewing them,” Mr. Dosanjh reviewed.

Then the question. Or, more specifically, four questions, the last of which was actually two queries put together. “What was the government’s objective in hiring him? Was it just a stalling tactic? Why is Mr. Iacobucci being circumvented? Does he have a real job or is this just more cover for this government?”

The Justice Minister stood and shrugged and mumbled. “Mr. Speaker, quite the opposite,” Rob Nicholson said, though in response to which of the above questions it was unclear. “Mr. Justice Iacobucci is going to undertake an independent, comprehensive review of all the documents. The government has said that officials will make all relevant documents available, and the tabling today is part of that process.” Continue…

Why is Iacobucci playing along?

By Andrew Coyne - Thursday, March 18, 2010 at 11:51 AM - 167 Comments

Photograph by Adrian Wyld/ CP

As the Watergate scandal deepened, the U.S. Senate struck a committee to investigate. Headed by Sen. Sam Ervin, it had broad powers to subpoena documents and compel evidence, together with a staff of investigators and legal counsel.

On July 13, 1973, Alexander Butterfield, Richard Nixon’s deputy assistant, told committee staff that discussions in the Oval Office were routinely tape-recorded. Before long, judge John J. Sirica had launched proceedings to force the president to hand over the tapes. Nixon refused, citing executive privilege, but in the end complied with a Supreme Court ruling ordering their release, with consequences that are well known.

But suppose the U.S. Congress functioned like Canada’s Parliament, and Nixon had the powers, not of a president, but of a prime minister of Canada. The committee, uncertain of its jurisdiction and with little in the way of staff or resources, would very likely never have learned of the tapes’ existence. Had it persisted with its inquiries, Nixon could have shut down the committee, and the Congress with it. And, rather than defend his case in court, Nixon could have hired a former Supreme Court judge to “advise” him on whether to release the tapes. And that would more or less be that.

Continue…

The Commons: Wait and see

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, March 15, 2010 at 5:23 PM - 73 Comments

The Scene. Bob Rae stood, with a number of papers in his right hand, and attempted to square what the Prime Minister seemed to say last week about the mandate of Justice Frank Iacobucci with what the government actually announced about Mr. Iacobucci’s mandate this weekend. Suffice it to say, Mr. Rae found the latter quite lacking.

John Baird was sent up to read from the script. “Mr. Speaker, here is what the Prime Minister did say in this place last week. He said that he had requested Justice Frank Iacobucci to undertake an independent, comprehensive and proper review of all the redacted documents related to Taliban prisoners. Justice Iacobucci will look at all the relevant documents going back not just to this government but even to the previous government,” Mr. Baird reported. “He will report on the proposed redactions, how they genuinely relate to information that would be injurious to Canada’s national security, national defence or international interests. We should have confidence in a man of this gentleman’s esteem.”

For all intents and purposes, this line of inquiry was thus concluded. Still, the opposition kept on. Continue…

What might have been (II)

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, March 12, 2010 at 2:08 PM - 10 Comments

The Globe looks at the concerns within NATO in late 2006.

A memo obtained by The Globe and Mail shows that in 2006 the federal government was briefed on a lobbying campaign by NATO allies aimed at getting the Kabul government to create stronger safeguards for detainees after prisoner abuses elsewhere. “London, The Hague and Canberra [Australia] are deeply concerned about the absence of solid legal protections for detainees, which – in the age of Gitmo and Abu Ghraib – imperils domestic support for the Afghanistan mission,” said the memo of Dec. 4, 2006, written by diplomat Richard Colvin.

The memo was written after consultation with Catherine Bloodworth, a Foreign Affairs colleague, as well as the military attaché in Canada’s Kabul embassy. It was approved by David Sproule – then Canada’s ambassador to Afghanistan – and was e-mailed to dozens of officials at Foreign Affairs, the Privy Council Office and National Defence.

Contingency and hindsight

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, March 9, 2010 at 12:02 AM - 30 Comments

CBC obtains the contingency plan the government prepared to deal with public accusations of torture in Afghanistan.

Meanwhile, the board of inquiry charged with investigated the events of June 14, 2006 has completed its work and its report is now being reviewed ahead of a public release.

'Anything less will fail to provide Parliament and Canadians with the answers they are entitled to'

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, March 8, 2010 at 10:32 AM - 192 Comments

Michael Ignatieff sends an open letter to the Prime Minister.

Dear Prime Minister:

Your government’s decision to appoint Justice Iacobucci is an overdue admission that action must be taken to get to the bottom of the Afghan detainee scandal.

Justice Iacobucci’s reputation is beyond reproach and his record of public service speaks for itself. The problem lies not with Justice Iacobucci but with the job you have given him to carry out. We do not know what his mandate or deadline will be, and we do not know whether or how he will report to Parliament and the Canadian people.

Further, Justice Iacobucci will not be empowered to do his job adequately, unless the government gives him the mandate to hold a full public inquiry.

Continue…

Your morning briefing

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, March 8, 2010 at 8:00 AM - 24 Comments

Given this weekend’s news and allegation, one imagines this week, like those weeks before Christmas, could be dominated by the matter of Richard Colvin and this country’s handling of detainees in Afghanistan.

For those in need of reminding, the Colvin encyclopedia is now fully revised and updated.