The Commons: Starring Vic Toews as Kurt Russell

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, February 8, 2012 at 6:54 PM - 0 Comments

The Scene. After offering a general appeal for clarity from the government—”What is happening on your side?” she begged—Nycole Turmel narrowed her complaint to a specific article of speech. In this case, a conjunction.

“Yesterday, the Minister of Public Safety said ‘information obtained by torture is always discounted. However…’ What does he mean by ‘however?’ she asked. “There is no ‘however.’ There is no ‘but.’ Torture is either condoned or it is not. Which is it? No ‘however.’ No ‘if.’ No ‘but.’ ”

Rising as today’s stand-in prime minister, Peter MacKay offered a perfectly straightforward response that entirely avoided the question. “But! But!” the New Democrat side mocked. “But! But!”

Ms. Turmel tried again, this time en français. Mr. MacKay did likewise. “Mais!” the New Democrats chirped. “Mais!”

Switching to English and stepping forward, the Defence Minister attempted to put this all in perspective. Or possibly to read aloud from a script he’d recently submitted to television producers. Continue…

‘On the same moral ground as regimes like Syria’

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, February 7, 2012 at 9:29 PM - 0 Comments

Paul Dewar blasts Vic Toews’ directive.

“I’m appalled at the moral bankruptcy of the Harper government. Torture has no place in a civilized world. We cannot condone torture and then talk to other nations about human rights,” said Dewar … “When Mr. Harper and his government condone torture, they are putting Canada on the same moral ground as regimes like Syria that practice torture. Our country should be a beacon for human rights not an enabler of human rights abuses” stated Dewar.

The Commons: The government’s tortured answers on torture

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, February 7, 2012 at 6:30 PM - 0 Comments

The Scene. In an obvious attempt to find common ground with his Conservative counterparts, Jack Harris appealed to the ideals of the free market.

“As long as there is a market for information derived from torture,” he posited, “torture will exist.”

Mr. Harris’ concern this day was the government’s quiet decision to allow for the use of information potentially obtained through torture. This after publicly renouncing the suggestion that it was operating under any such policy.

“Why,” the NDP critic wondered, “is the government getting Canada into the torture business?” Continue…

Exceptional circumstances

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, February 7, 2012 at 11:09 AM - 0 Comments

As I reported in September, the Harper government quietly directed CSIS in December 2010 that it could make use of information obtained through torture—this after publicly renouncing a CSIS lawyer’s public testimony that such information might be used. Jim Bronskill has now obtained the full text of the ministerial directive issued by Vic Toews.

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.” In such rare circumstances, it may not always be possible to determine how a foreign agency obtained the information, and that ignoring such information solely because of its source would represent “an unacceptable risk to public safety.” ”Therefore, in situations where a serious risk to public safety exists, and where lives may be at stake, I expect and thus direct CSIS to make the protection of life and property its overriding priority, and share the necessary information — properly described and qualified — with appropriate authorities.”

The directive says the final decision to investigate and analyze information that may have been obtained by methods condemned by the Canadian government falls to the CSIS director or his deputy director for operations — a decision to be made “in accordance with Canada’s legal obligations.” Finally, it says the minister is to be notified “as appropriate” of a decision to use such information.

Absurdity, there and here

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, January 12, 2012 at 10:54 AM - 0 Comments

The Harper government is disappointed with Hamid Karzai’s demand that all American-held detainees be turned over to Afghan authorities.

“Canada demarched the Afghan government on this issue,” a spokesman for Foreign Minister John Baird told Postmedia News. ”Our diplomats have expressed in the strongest terms Canada’s disappointment with the government of Afghanistan’s handling of this matter,” Joseph Lavoie said. “We also underscored that transitioning full security responsibility to Afghan control is an important process that must be carefully managed, with effective co-ordination among (International Security Assistance Force) partners.”

Meanwhile, the squabble over images of detainee hairdos could result in a Charter challenge.

Absurdity, here and there

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, January 9, 2012 at 9:05 AM - 0 Comments

The latest squabble over Afghan detainees, national security and access to information involves hairdos.

Meanwhile, Hamid Karzai is alleging abuse and demanding that all detainees under NATO control be handed over.

American officials, caught off guard by the president’s order, scrambled to figure out the source of the allegations. Now they have at least part of an answer: the Afghan commission that documented the abuses appears to have focused mainly on the side of the prison run by Afghan authorities, not the American-run part, according to interviews with American and Afghan officials.

Mr. Karzai was, in essence, demanding that the Americans cede control of a prison to Afghan authorities to stop abuses being committed by Afghan authorities.

Detainees taken by Canadian Forces are presently being transferred to the Americans.

Goodbye to the NDS?

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, December 15, 2011 at 10:18 AM - 0 Comments

An interesting exchange—and perhaps even a straight answer—from Question Period yesterday.

Hélène Laverdière. Mr. Speaker, I have a simple question for the Minister of Foreign Affairs. Can the minister confirm that none of the Afghan detainees transferred by Canada are still in the hands of the national directorate of security—the NDS—an organization known for abusing detainees?

Peter MacKay. Mr. Speaker, I can confirm that is the case.

And so we come full circle

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, December 9, 2011 at 9:28 PM - 0 Comments

John Baird informed the House this morning that detainees in Afghanistan will now be transferred to American forces.

Mr. Speaker, with the combat mission in Afghanistan now complete, I am pleased to inform the House that our government has signed an arrangement with the Obama administration to facilitate the transfer of detainees captured by Canadian Forces in Afghanistan to U.S. custody at the detention facility in Parwan. The U.S. operates this facility with full agreement of the Afghan government and detainees can be prosecuted under Afghan law. Canadian officials will continue to be present on the ground to monitor all Canadian transferred detainees until they are sentenced or released.

It was concerns about how the United States treated detainees—and the example of Abu Ghraib—that led to the decision to transfer detainees to Afghan custody in the first place.

Security and torture

By Aaron Wherry - Saturday, December 3, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 0 Comments

The Montreal Gazette obtains a CSIS memo that raises more questions about CSIS and the use of information obtained through torture.

In the letter, Judd urges the minister to fight an amendment to C-3 proposed by Liberal MP Ujjal Dosanjh that would prohibit CSIS and the courts from using any information obtained from torture or “derivative information” — information initially obtained from torture but subsequently corroborated through legal means.

“This amendment, if interpreted to mean that ‘derivative information’ is inadmissible, could render unsustainable the current security certificate proceedings,” Judd writes. “Even if interpreted more narrowly to exclude only information obtained from sources and foreign agencies who, on the low threshold of “reasonable grounds” may have obtained information by way of torture, the amendment would still significantly hinder the Service’s collection and analysis functions.”

As I noted in September, a ministerial direction issued by Public Safety Minister Vic Toews in 2010 seems to allow for the use of information obtained through torture—a possibility the government dismissed after it was raised by a CSIS lawyer in 2009.

Bush, Castro and human rights

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, October 13, 2011 at 12:32 PM - 38 Comments

A few weeks after NDP MP Don Davies suggested Dick Cheney should be barred from entering Canada, Amnesty International says Canadian authorities should arrest George W. Bush when he visits next week. It’s not clear that we have the power to do so. Jason Kenney is unimpressed.

“Amnesty International cherrypicks cases to publicize based on ideology. This kind of stunt helps explain why so many respected human rights advocates have abandoned Amnesty International,” Immigration Minister Jason Kenney said.

Kenney noted in an email that in the past, Amnesty had not asked for Canada to bar former Cuban leader Fidel Castro, even though the rights organization itself said he had presided over “arbitrary arrests, detention, and criminal prosecution.”

Castro’s last visit to Canada would seem to have been for Pierre Trudeau’s funeral in October 2000.

Human Rights Watch also wants Canada to take action. Noting Amnesty’s call, Andrew Sullivan lays down a straightforward standard: “Either the Geneva Conventions are the law or they are not.”

Compelling evidence

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, October 11, 2011 at 8:45 AM - 3 Comments

The United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan has released a report into the treatment of detainees by Afghan authorities.

UNAMA’s detention observation found compelling evidence that 125 detainees (46 percent) of the 273 detainees interviewed who had been in NDS detention experienced interrogation techniques at the hands of NDS officials that constituted torture, and that torture is practiced systematically in a number of NDS detention facilities throughout Afghanistan … More than one third of the 117 conflict-related detainees UNAMA interviewed who had been in ANP detention experienced treatment that amounted to torture or to other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment…

UNAMA’s detention observation included interviews with 89 detainees who reported the involvement of international military forces either alone or together with Afghan forces in their capture and transfer to NDS or ANP custody. UNAMA found compelling evidence that 19 of these 89 detainees were tortured in NDS custody and three in ANP custody.

The full report is here. As the Globe notes, one detainee, interviewed in March, claims a separate process for those transferred by Canadian forces. Continue…

Meanwhile, at the Federal Court

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, September 30, 2011 at 12:27 PM - 5 Comments

A government appeal to limit the scope of an investigation by the Military Police Complaints Commission has been rejected.

A Federal Court has dismissed an application that would, among other things, strike the testimony of diplomat-whistleblower Richard Colvin and block thousands of pages of documents from being used by the Military Police Complaints Commission…

Justice Department lawyers argued the commission had no authority to call witnesses who were not members of the military, such as Colvin, who said he repeatedly warned both Foreign Affairs and the Defence Department about possible prison abuse … The government also claimed that the watchdog, created in the aftermath of the Somalia scandal to monitor the conduct of military police, exceeded its mandate by issuing summonses for documents.

CSIS and torture

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, September 28, 2011 at 12:00 PM - 10 Comments

Two and a half years ago, Geoffrey O’Brian, a CSIS lawyer told the public safety committee that the agency would use information that may have been obtained through torture if faced with potentially grave circumstances.

Frankly, I’m tempted to say that there are four words that can provide a simple answer, and those four words are either “yes, but” or “no, but”, and the “yes, but” is, do we use information that comes from torture? And the answer is that we only do so if lives are at stake.

Peter Van Loan, public safety minister at the time, rebutted that a day later, saying such information is “discounted” and that Mr. O’Brian had engaged in “some kind of hypothetical discussion.” Jim Judd, CSIS director at the time, said Mr. O’Brian might have been “confused” and Mr. O’Brian subsequently retracted his remarks.

But a year ago, the Canadian Press obtained briefing notes for CSIS director Richard Fadden. And those notes outlined a position similar to that expressed by Mr. O’Brian.

CSIS will share information received from an international partner with the police and other authorities “even in the rare and extreme circumstance that we have some doubt as to the manner in which the foreign agency acquired it,” say the notes prepared for use by CSIS director Dick Fadden. The notes say that although such information would never be admissible in court to prosecute someone posing an imminent threat, “the government must nevertheless make use of the information to attempt to disrupt that threat before it materializes.”

This brings us now to the Security Intelligence Review Committee report released this month on CSIS and the handling of Afghan detainees. Contained within that report are references to a deputy director operations directive issued in 2008 and a ministerial direction issued in December 2010. At the bottom of page 14, SIRC states as follows. Continue…

‘It’s irresponsible the way they throw these words around’

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, September 27, 2011 at 8:45 AM - 7 Comments

Dick Cheney does not appreciate the tone adopted by the likes of Don Davies.

“Now we have a lot of people running around using language like ‘torture.’ I heard one of your members of Parliament saying we used it on hundreds of people at Guantanamo. Not true,” said Mr. Cheney, who became a lightning rod for critics of the Bush administration, particularly over the war on Iraq, during his eight years as vice-president.

“We did not use torture. … We did what we absolutely needed to do. We had an obligation to gather intelligence to ensure that we didn’t get struck again, and I think it worked,” he said, noting that Mr. Mohammed, in particular, produced a “gold mine” of information “after he’d been through the process.”

The utility of waterboarding Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is a matter of some debate. So far as the hunt for Osama bin Laden, for instance, John McCain has said that torturing Mr. Mohammed actually produced false and misleading information.

‘Having engaged in acts of torture’

By Aaron Wherry - Saturday, September 24, 2011 at 12:09 AM - 39 Comments

NDP immigration critic Don Davies has written to Immigration Minister Jason Kenney asking that Mr. Kenney deny Mr. Cheney entry to the country (the former vice president is scheduled to visit Vancouver on Monday as part of his book tour).

Minister, may I remind you of your own government’s initiatives this summer in which you called on the public to assist your government in removing from Canada those individuals who had engaged in serious criminality, war crimes or crimes against humanity. May I also remind you of your own government’s actions in denying entry to British MP George Galloway. At that time you stated that: ”It’s not about words. It’s about deeds.”

… Minister, the essence of just application of the law is that it is applied evenly and consistently. I would therefore respectfully request that you deny entry to Mr. Cheney on grounds of inadmissibility under IRPA for having engaged in acts of torture. In the event that you do not do so, I would respectfully request that a report be prepared setting out the relevant facts, and that you refer same to the Immigration Division for an admissibility hearing with a view to issuing a removal order against Mr. Cheney, all pursuant to section 44 of IRPA.

CSIS and the NDS

By Aaron Wherry - Thursday, September 15, 2011 at 4:38 PM - 7 Comments

The Security Intelligence Review Committee has released its review of how CSIS handled Afghan detainees and its relationship with Afghanistan’s National Directorate of Security.

The Service’s relationship with the NDS consisted of [REDCATED] exchanges of information, [REDACTED].

Notwithstanding this productive working relationship, CSIS’s assessment of the NDS was both cautious and measured. [REDACTED] CSIS continued to stress that most allegations of human rights abuses were unconfirmed, [REDACTED].

In the course of this review, SIRC found no indication that in the period during which they conducted detainee interviews, CSIS officers posted to Afghanistan ever had firsthand knowledge of abuse, mistreatment or torture of detainees by Afghan authorities.

Maher Arar’s mind cannot forget

By Jonathon Gatehouse - Thursday, September 8, 2011 at 9:00 AM - 8 Comments

Blair Gable/Maclean's

It doesn’t take much to carry Maher Arar back to the place he least wants to be. The sight of a mustachioed policeman, any sort of filthy smell, or even the sound of a crying baby has the power to transport him to that tomb-like prison cell. Nine years on, his body has recovered from the beatings the Syrian Mukhabarat inflicted with their fists and thick strips of cable, but the psychological scars of his rendition, imprisonment and torture persist. It is worse when he travels. “When I take the plane, I’m always tense and nervous,” he says. “It just triggers a fear in me that I might be kidnapped again.”

Sept. 26, 2002, was the day U.S. authorities detained him at New York’s J.F.K. airport, as he was heading home to Ottawa from an extended family stay in Tunisia. Oct. 8 was the night he was hustled on to a CIA-leased private jet and flown to Jordan, then driven—shackled and blindfolded—to the border of his native Syria. It was early April 2003, when he next felt daylight, allowed to roam a prison courtyard for a few minutes. Freedom—and a flight back to Canada, his wife and two young children—finally came that Oct. 5.

There’s no doubt, however, of when everything really did change for the 41-year-old telecommunications engineer. On the morning of the Sept. 11 attacks, Arar was in San Diego, Calif., on business for a Boston-based client. The sun wasn’t even up when the phone in his hotel room rang. It was his friend and colleague David Hilf telling him about terrorists hitting the World Trade Center. At first, Arar thought it was a prank—he and Hilf, who is Jewish, spent a lot of their time on the road joking about their odd-couple alliance. When he was finally convinced to turn on the TV, Arar was devastated by what he saw. One of his first thoughts was of the inevitable anti-Muslim backlash. He called his wife, Monia, then pregnant with their second child, in Ottawa and warned her not to leave the house. “She’s visible. She wears a head scarf,” he says. “There might have been some crazy people trying to get revenge.”

Continue…

Reading the documents: Adventures in redaction

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, July 6, 2011 at 3:37 PM - 4 Comments

The Afghan detainee documents tabled last month can be viewed in their entirety here. Herein, a look at some of the noteworthy files and disclosures contained therein.

POA 0007 is an overview of the situation in Afghanistan circa 2005. It is most notable for what was previously redacted and now disclosed: references to torture, abuse and various problems with the Afghan justice system.

POA 0014, similarly, is an overview of the situation in Afghanistan circa 2006. Where redactions in the “summary” section of POA 0007 have been removed, they remain in POA 0014. But what’s behind one of these redactions seems to have been revealed four years ago by the Globe. And connecting those dots, it would seem that what has been unredacted by the panel of arbiters in POA 0007 remains redacted in POA 0014.

POA 0010 is an enlightening read: eight pages blacked out in their entirety.

See previously: Reading the documents, DFAIT 10, What the detainees said and Notification, policy and concerns.

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.

This is the week that was

By Aaron Wherry - Sunday, June 26, 2011 at 4:18 PM - 0 Comments

The Conservatives were bashful. And mysterious. And succinct.

The House talked and talked and talked and talked and talked about sending Canada Post employees back to work. And then it stopped.

The government tabled the Afghan detainee documents. Which you can read more about here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here. Continue…

Reading the documents: What the detainees said

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, June 24, 2011 at 4:54 PM - 0 Comments

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

With the exception of the aforementioned DFAIT10, the files between DFAIT2 and DFAIT34 cover updates on the transfer of detainees between June 2007 and November 2009.

The memos marked DFAIT3, DFAIT4, DFAIT5, DFAIT7, DFAIT9, DFAIT11, DFAIT16, DFAIT19, DFAIT30 and DFAIT33 include allegations of mistreatment.

Revealing inconsistency

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, June 24, 2011 at 10:37 AM - 0 Comments

Terry Milewski notes two redaction curiosities in the latest raft of documents.

Still, the “international relations” exception seems to be extremely flexible. Ditto, “national security.” In fact, the definition of what’s important to censor and what isn’t seems to be both flexible and constantly shifting. In another baffling example, there’s a document which says a prisoner was deprived of sleep for [X] days. We must not know how many days! And, yet, we do! In another version of the same document, we can see that it was … four days. Somehow, the national security of both Canada and Afghanistan seems unaffected by this revelation.

As I detailed last year, there exists a field report that has been released in two different versions: one in which the word “assault” has been redacted, one in which the word has been disclosed. The document has actually been released on three separate occasions: first with the word redacted, then with the word unredacted and then again with the word redacted.

The work wasn’t done

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, June 24, 2011 at 8:39 AM - 0 Comments

While the Prime Minister’s Office apparently declines to say whether the opposition leaders were asked if they wished to proceed with the detainee document review, it is clear the panel of judges was not done reviewing some of the material—including documents identified by the government as being subject to cabinet confidence.

Parliament’s dissolution meant that the judges no longer had any committee of MPs to turn to for input. Post-election, the judges were looking to discuss their findings with a renewed committee of MPs, but no such committee was formed. “We were advised by the government that it is unlikely that the [committee] will be renewed,” the judges wrote in their June 15 letter.

So they handed over what they had done and left some work dangling – including documents over which the government had claimed absolute secrecy. “We did not undertake a review of the government’s claims of cabinet confidence since we received confirmation of these claims only before Parliament was dissolved,” the judges wrote. “Nor did we complete our review of all of the government’s claims of solicitor-client privilege.”

Greg Weston reviews how we got here.

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…