Natyncyzk corrects himself

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, December 9, 2009 at 12:05 PM - 49 Comments

In a press conference just now, the Chief of Defence Staff has said he learned this morning that the detainee tortured by Afghan officials in the summer of 2006 was originally in the custody of Canadian Forces.

Reports from Canadian Press, Canwest, CBC, the Globe and Mail, CTV, the Star, the Sun and Bloomberg.

Background here , here and here.

The fully updated Colvin Encyclopedia is here.

Questioned v. Detained

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, December 8, 2009 at 2:00 PM - 13 Comments

The Chief of Defence Staff attempts to split the difference.

The affidavit of Col. Steve Noonan is here. The relevant portion would seem to be paragraph 56. There was one incident in which the CF took custody of detainee who had been turned over to the local ANP by the CF. In this case, the CF learned that the detainee had been beaten by the local ANP. When they learned of this, they approached the local ANP and requested that the detainee be given to them. The ANP complied and the CF subsequently transferred the detainee to the Provincial ANP.

The field notes of a soldier reporting the incident, as discovered by the Globe, apparently read as follows. Local ANP elements were in possession of a PUC detained by CDA troops and subsequently transferred to ANP custody.

The incident is also referenced during the cross-examination of General Joseph Deschamps during Federal Court proceedings.

The Colvin encyclopedia

By Aaron Wherry - Sunday, December 6, 2009 at 1:31 PM - 25 Comments

A collection of documents, testimony and news reports related to Richard Colvin and Canada’s handling of Afghan detainees. The Colvin encyclopedia is updated as events warrant.

Continue…

About those times the transfers were halted

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, November 23, 2009 at 5:52 PM - 2 Comments

The government has released a statement to explain General Walter Natynczyk’s disclosure that transfers have been stopped more than once.

Since the May 2007 Supplementary Transfer Arrangement was implemented, Canada has temporarily paused transferring detainees once in November 2007 and on three occasions in 2009.  The first two pauses in 2009 were related to allegations about treatment, the last pause was related to access to facilities.  All three pauses were for brief periods of time.  The first allegations in 2009 were investigated by Afghan officials and appropriate corrective actions were taken.  In the latter case, Afghan officials moved quickly to restore unrestricted access to facilities.  When Canadian officials were satisfied that the original concerns were appropriately addressed, the transfer process resumed.

'We did indeed stop the transfer more than one time'

By Aaron Wherry - Sunday, November 22, 2009 at 3:28 PM - 12 Comments

General Walter Natynczyk reveals the transfer of detainees has been stopped more than once. Until now it has only been disclosed that transfers stopped briefly in the fall of 2007.

Canadian officials have halted the transfer of prisoners to Afghanistan’s intelligence service “more than one time,” because of the possibility of torture, Canada’s chief of defence staff said Sunday.

Gen. Walter Natynczyk, speaking at the end of the three-day Halifax International Security Forum, declined to offer details, saying additional information is expected as more witnesses speak before a special House of Commons committee.

“We indeed did stop the transfer more than one time,” he said. “At the same time, I don’t want to throw out more information. There’s a process that’s undergoing and I know that the witnesses will be called forward for that process and give their testimony.”

The end is the beginning is the end

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, November 16, 2009 at 1:30 AM - 8 Comments

Defence Minister Peter MacKay comments from Kandahar.

MacKay said Natynczyk’s interpretation of Parliament’s instructions to withdraw from Kandahar was “reflective of what everyone from the prime minister on down views as those instructions.”

But MacKay was unclear on what direction the mission would take after 2011 and whether it would involve regions of the country outside of Kandahar. ”The military mission is changing,” he said. “It is obviously transitioning at 2011 to emphasis on reconstruction, development, things that we are doing now but we’ll be able to do more. And clearly, there is discussion as to how this is going to take place. We’re tasked with that now.”

The previously stated positions of Gen. Natynczyk and the Prime Minister’s Office are here. Full audio of the Defence Minister’s comments are here. And a rather interesting interview with Hamid Karzai is here.

MPs and Mental Health Awards

By Mitchel Raphael - Saturday, October 24, 2009 at 11:29 AM - 7 Comments

The seventh annual Champions of Mental Health Awards were held at the Fairmont Château Laurier ballroom. Margaret Trudeau, seen below with son Justin, got an award for being open about suffering from bipolar disorder.

Also on the awards list were Defense Minister Peter MacKay (left) and General Walter Natynczyk, Canada’s Chief of Defense Staff, for their work launching the “Be the Difference” mental health campaign in the Canadian Forces.

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Don't look away (II)

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, October 20, 2009 at 1:17 AM - 15 Comments

Global National reports that Rick Hillier was aware of Richard Colvin’s reports on the treatment of detainees in Afghan prisons.

According to insiders, it turns out Ottawa was indeed aware of reports from a senior Canadian diplomat, which repeatedly warned that Afghan detainees turned over to local authorities risked being tortured. Global National has learned from senior sources within the federal government and the Canadian military, that diplomat Richard Colvin’s warnings reached Retired Gen. Rick Hillier, chief of defence staff at the time…

Canada’s current top soldier says he’s working to get to the bottom of what happened to Colvin’s reports. Gen. Walter Natynczyk, chief of defence staff, said Friday he did not yet know where the diplomat’s reports landed back in Ottawa, who read them, and what was done with the information.

How to beat an insurgency by killing fewer people (II)

By Michael Petrou - Sunday, April 19, 2009 at 11:57 PM - 5 Comments

My colleague Andrew Potter blogged a few weeks ago about Thomas Ricks’ new book, The Gamble: General David Petraeus and the American Military Adventure in Iraq, 2006-2008. The book tells the story behind America’s strategic shift in Iraq – from one where the primary goal is defeating the enemy, to the current strategy which holds that the primary objective is winning over the population.

The man most responsible for this shift is David Petraeus, who commanded the 101^st Airborne Division during the invasion of Iraq and later led its occupation of the northern Iraqi city of Mosul. Here he sought to engage and protect the local population, rather than seeking out and destroying every last insurgent. The city was a rare success during the early days of America’s occupation of Iraq, but was swallowed up by the insurgency when Petraeus and the 101^st left. Petraeus now heads U.S. Central Command and directs U.S. strategy in Afghanistan, where the United States is shifting its focus, and where Canadian soldiers have been fighting the Taliban for the last seven years.

Last June, Petraeus sent his commanders in Iraq a memo in which he outlines the tactics and philosophies he expects them to employ in a hearts-and-minds counter-insurgency campaign. This memo is included in the appendix of The Gamble, and I’ve recorded much of it below.

General Walter Natynczyk, Canada’s chief of the defence staff, shares Petraeus’s belief that beating an insurgency requires winning over the local population. He said as much in a recent speech. Still, I’d like to know how many of the tactics and strategies discussed by Petraeus are employed by Canadians in Afghanistan. Does the Canadian military have patrol bases and outposts in Kandahar city? How much time (especially overnight) do Canadian troops spend there versus back at the main base? Are Canadian soldiers living among the Afghans, or as, Petraeus would describe it, are they commuting to work? How many patrols are conducted on foot, versus from inside vehicles? How much, if any, of Kandahar city and province do the Canadian soldiers or their Afghan allies decisively control? Are they holding territory, or does their authority vanish when their patrol rolls away? Is the Canadian military working to peel away “reconcilable” insurgents from “irreconcilables”? In other words, are Canadian soldiers talking to the Taliban? How smooth are transitions from an outgoing group of soldiers to those who are just arriving? Are relationships that are built between locals and one deployment of Canadian troops carried over to the new arrivals?

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Navy Appreciation Day

By Mitchel Raphael - Saturday, March 7, 2009 at 6:42 PM - 20 Comments

MPs hit a special reception with navy officers for Navy Appreciation Day. Newfoundland Liberal MP Siobhan Cody (centre).

(Left to right) Tory Senator Hugh Segal, Jay Paxton, the press secretary to Defence Minister Peter Mackay, and Immigration Minister Jason Kenney.

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How to beat an insurgency by killing fewer people

By Michael Petrou - Monday, March 2, 2009 at 2:18 PM - 0 Comments

I wrote this article about tackling the Afghan insurgency for our website.

How to beat an insurgency by killing fewer people

By Michael Petrou - Monday, March 2, 2009 at 1:36 PM - 1 Comment

The insurgency Canada and allied nations face in Afghanistan is a political problem and a battle in which the military should play a supporting role, according to General Walter Natynczyk, Canada’s Chief of the Defence Staff.

Speaking in Ottawa at the annual general meeting of the Conference of Defence Associations Institute (CDAI) on Friday, Natynczyk described a counter-insurgency doctrine that reflects the thinking outlined in a manual that the Department of National Defence distributed earlier last week. It stresses that simply killing insurgents in Afghanistan will not result in their defeat.

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Remember her?

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, November 19, 2008 at 11:58 PM - 0 Comments

That Mellissa Fung story went away rather fast, no?

A few op-eds this weekend (here, here, here and here). Canadian Press tracked down comment from James Loney, the Canadian once kidnapped in Iraq. And the chief of defence staff has publicly endorsed media blackouts in these circumstances.

But have we seen satisfactory answers to any of these questions? Is it too late to have an adult conversation about all of this? Have we all moved on? Or, in this new era of harmony, is this one of those things we’re not supposed to talk about? Anybody want to wager on the government being asked about this in Question Period on Thursday?

Megapundit: Tell another one, Uncle Gerry!

By selley - Monday, September 22, 2008 at 3:20 PM - 14 Comments

WEEKEND ROUNDUP

Must-reads: Christie Blatchford on Gerry Ritz; Doug Saunders on the Eurabia hypothesis; David Olive on uniting the left; John Ivison in northern Ontario; Rosie DiManno and Peter Worthington on Afghanistan; Scott Taylor on Canada and the Caucasus; Konrad Yakabuski on Justin Trudeau; L. Ian MacDonald on what Jean Charest’s up to.

On the issues
Behold: all the things we’re not talking about!

The Toronto Sun‘s Peter Worthington is not impressed by the “tomb of silence” in which the Harperites have sealed all matters military: notably, committing to withdraw from Afghanistan in July 2011 and replacing the outspoken Rick Hillier with Walter Natynczyk, who seems more shy about vocally “standing up for soldiers and reviving our combat character”—both of which, in Worthington’s view, seem to make the Prime Minister “nervous.” The army needs at least “an additional brigade,” he argues, and ideally to double in size, but recent events lead him to fear that “lethargy is again taking over before the military rebuilding job is done.”

“The yearning for peace in Afghanistan hasn’t dwindled,” the Toronto Star‘s Rosie DiManno assures us, but “there is growing disenchantment with NATO, which clearly can’t contend with a resurgent Taliban.” American troops redeployed from Iraq might be able to do the job, she argues, but “the whole point of NATO taking over responsibility of Afghanistan—besides justifying its existence post Cold War—was to put a multinational face, earnest and humanitarian, on the mission.” Due to many factors including the component nations’ inability or unwillingness to commit enough troops to combat duty, DiManno seems more or less ready to call that mission a failure.

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Megapundit: From the depths of Barack Obama's cosmopolitan soul

By selley - Monday, July 28, 2008 at 2:03 PM - 0 Comments

WEEKEND ROUNDUP

Must-reads: Scott Taylor on Walter Natynczyk; Dan Gardner and Rex Murphy on Barack Obama.

Same old Ottawa
Stand by for overhyped by-elections, laboured comparisons and impenetrable prose. Jeffrey Simpson’s in a good mood, at least.

Lorne Gunter, writing in the Edmonton Journal, says Stephen Harper has nothing to lose in the Sept. 8 by-elections and Stéphane Dion has everything, first and foremost his job. “Should the NDP win Westmount, as it did the previously safe Liberal seat of Outremont last fall, Dion will have trouble keeping his job,” he opines, but he goes way out on a limb and says he “suspect[s]” Westmount will stay red. He also suggests the Tories play off the “timidity” of Ontario voters in Guelph by paining the Green Shift as a “radical threat to the status quo.”

“By-elections are often overanalyzed, overblown, overrated. In the grand scheme, they shouldn’t toll heavily,” says The Globe and Mail’s Lawrence Martin. “But they do.” The Canadian Alliance’s “humiliation” in Perth-Middlesex in 2003 convinced Harper to pursue a merger with the Progressive Conservatives; Deb Grey’s victory in Beaver River in 1989 constituted Reform’s “breakthrough”; and last year’s NDP win in Outremont buried Stéphane Dion in an “avalanche of derision.” This is all true. But those outcomes strike us less as evidence that by-elections matter than evidence of just how overanalyzed, overblown and overrated they really are.

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Megapundit: Rosie DiManno vs. the U.S. Army

By selley - Monday, June 9, 2008 at 1:58 PM - 0 Comments

WEEKEND ROUNDUP

Must-reads: Rosie DiManno on female police in Afghanistan, and on American troops’ enemy-making skills; Scott Taylor on Kandahar prison; Daphne Bramham on the children of the FLDS: Lawrence Martin on Liberal incivility; Thomas Walkom on Roy Romanow; Dan Gardner on pesticides and science; Greg Weston on the lost promise of openness and accountability.

Ils accusent
It’s official: the pundits have absolutely nothing good to say about federal politics. And away we go…

If anyone’s going to investigate the unlikely prospect that Maxime Bernier’s left-behind documents represented a security breach, Lysiane Gagnon suggests it be the foreign affairs department, and if necessary CSIS and the RCMP. Committee hearings would be “a joke,” she writes in The Globe and Mail—a “partisan circus,” just like they’ve been at the Schreibergelder hearings. If MPs are really this desperate for something to occupy their well-paid time, she suggests they discuss military equipment, Omar Khadr and the private members bills “that many fear might eventually lead to the criminalization of abortion.”

The Toronto Star‘s Chantal Hébert says Stephen Harper’s “crafting [of] a bipartisan consensus on the future of the Canadian mission in Kandahar” was a rare snapshot of successful “Conservative statesmanship”—a triumph of “finesse” over his manifest preference for “brute strength.” This recollection seems a tad airbrushed to us, but she’s quite right that the government’s been pretty much crap since then, if not before. The positive contributions of Jim Prentice and David Emerson in cabinet are routinely undone by Peter Van Loan’s “overly partisan tone,” she argues, and it’s needlessly damaging the government’s reputation.

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BTC: This space for sale

By Aaron Wherry - Sunday, June 8, 2008 at 10:28 PM - 0 Comments

Is there anyone left who would dispute that in the matter of Harper v. the Parliamentary Press Gallery, the Prime Minister has thoroughly trounced the fourth estate? For all the bluster and angst, for all the projections of inevitable karmic comeuppance at the hands of aggrieved and all-powerful scribes, can the Conservatives not now claim complete and total victory in the battle to control who and how this government is defined?

For sure, these past two weeks have included some of the Harper administration’s least flattering moments. Never minding even the dramatic unravelling of Maxime Bernier’s political career, this government has struggled mightily to maintain its equilibrium. With the Prime Minister in Europe, desperate for good news, the PMO wrongly (or at least prematurely) announced the Italians willing to do more in Afghanistan. With the Bernier affair still making news upon Stephen Harper’s return, James Moore was then dispatched, bizarrely, to reintroduce the infamous Cadman tape—an attempt to discredit the opposition that was counter-productive at worst, silly at best.

Now, with revelations of Julie Couillard’s personal life still emerging every couple of days, a confidence vote to come Monday and law enforcement authorities due to testify publicly about what they knew and when about Bernier’s companion, the Harper government should be staggering toward the summer recess.

And yet. If this administration has lost control of itself, it has not lost control of the message. Continue…