Most wanted

By Aaron Wherry - Friday, July 29, 2011 at 10:47 AM - 18 Comments

Jason Kenney talks to the Post about his most-wanted list.

Back in 2003, the Liberals considered releasing a similar wanted list but decided not to. They said they were concerned about privacy and vigilantism. Why did your government go ahead with this now?

“I read about that. If indeed they took that position I think it was bizarre and irresponsible. The notion that a foreigner who illegally enters Canada, has been found by our legal system to be involved in the worst kinds of crimes possible, such as war crimes and crimes against humanity, who is under a deportation order and a warrant — the notion that such an individual enjoys the same privacy rights as a law abiding Canadian citizen is bizarre in the extreme. And the fact that people are concerned about this just shows the kind of ideological process obsession that some people have that overrides any consideration for the public interest or the integrity of our immigration system. So when this came to light, that we were not seeking the cooperation of the public, Minister Toews and I realized that this was a mistaken approach and that we had no privacy obligation to these individuals under the principles of both consistent use of information and public interest. And under the Privacy Act, we felt there were entirely reasonable grounds to release this information.”

Chris Selley notes that the word “alleged” should be applied to these individuals. One person is threatening to sue. Another is claiming innocence.

Ratko Mladic's fan club

By Erica Alini - Thursday, November 18, 2010 at 11:40 AM - 0 Comments

Dimitar Dilkoff/AFP/Getty Images

Calling up the hotline at the Serbian Intelligence Agency with a crucial tip about war crimes suspect Ratko Mladic could earn you a $14-million cheque from the Serbian government—and a $14,000 bounty on your own head. That’s how much an ad on SerbianNationalists.com, the website of a right-leaning group, is promising as a reward for turning in anyone who informs on Mladic, the Bosnian-Serb general who stands accused of genocide before the UN international criminal court for the massacre of over 7,000 Muslims in Srebrenica during the 1992-95 Bosnian war, and for the siege of Sarajevo.

Mladic is one of the biggest stumbling blocks in the way of Serbia’s entry into the European Union. The EU recently inched closer to starting membership talks with Belgrade, but insists further progress is conditional on serious efforts to capture the fugitive. But although over 60 per cent of Serbs support joining the EU, a roughly equal percentage do not think that Mladic should be arrested and extradited, according to a recent survey.

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Who is the real Omar Khadr?

By Michael Friscolanti - Tuesday, November 9, 2010 at 10:00 AM - 71 Comments

Michelle Shephard/Toronto Star

In exchange for another eight years in prison—and the chance to be a free man in Canada long before that—Omar Khadr consented to a long list of strict conditions. He cannot sue the U.S. government for damages, regardless of how many torture sessions he may (or may not) have endured inside the barbed-wire walls of Guantánamo Bay. He will never step foot on American soil for as long as he lives. And he is not allowed to profit one penny from public speaking tours or movie deals or anything else that would involve selling his saga to the highest bidder. Any such proceeds, the agreement says, will go straight “to the Government of Canada.”

Khadr has read a lot of books during his stint behind bars (from steamy Danielle Steele novels to Nelson Mandela’s Long Walk to Freedom), and his pen pals include an English professor at an Edmonton university. But when he signed his name to that seven-page plea deal on Oct. 13, he received a first-hand lesson in the meaning of irony: the same government that spent many years and millions of dollars fighting to keep him out of Canada now owns the exclusive rights to his life story.

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"[People were] begging him while the executions were going on. It's a horrible thing to talk about."

By Michael Petrou - Thursday, March 25, 2010 at 1:58 PM - 5 Comments

My story about Bill Horace, a Toronto man who has been accused by multiple witnesses and sources of war crimes and crimes against humanity, has been posted on our website.

The People vs. Ex-Generalissimo Blair

By Mark Steyn - Thursday, February 11, 2010 at 9:00 AM - 59 Comments

It’s supposed to be Sept. 12—that’s to say, the post-9/11 era. For over seven years the entire Western world was forced to live out a kind of geopolitical Groundhog Day in which Bush, Cheney, Rummy and the rest of the gang woke up each dawn to the same eternal Tuesday morning in September, the same long shadows of the Twin Towers, the same undying certainty of another six decades of hard, cold, martial winter. It wasn’t only the ideologically opposed among the campus left and the Euro-elites: the vast mass of a once supportive citizenry got ground down, too, exhausted by the very lingo of the “war on terror” and anxious to inter it with the Bush presidency. That’s why Barack Obama was cheered from Berkeley to Berlin. He offered liberation. To invert the old line, war may be interested in him, but he wasn’t interested in war. And in those heady days of late 2008 that seemed almost plausible.
Jaw-jaw is better than war-war, as Churchill said, although he might feel differently if he had to sit through an Obama state of the union. But what about law-law? In the United States, the United Kingdom and even Canada, it’s not enough to move on to Sept. 12: the Bush era itself has to be put on trial. In London, something called “the Chilcot inquiry” has been investigating the process by which the country signed on to the Iraq invasion. For weeks, the usual bunch of shifty grandees have killed any potential awkward line of inquiry with the all-purpose brush-off, “You’ll have to ask Mr. Blair about that.” So finally they did, summoning the now reviled prime minister into the witness box to grill him on the “legality” of the Iraq invasion. Outside, protesters denounced “Bliar,” as his name is now universally spelled: “BLIAR LIED! THOUSANDS DIED!” Like a pedophile serial killer, he was smuggled into the building before dawn, lest the mob turn on him: “The People vs. Ex-Generalissimo Bliar”—or, at any rate, as near as his former comrades on the left seem likely to get to hauling him up before a war crimes tribunal in The Hague.
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Trash

By Andrew Coyne - Monday, November 30, 2009 at 5:06 PM - 180 Comments

Gotta go with the pack on this one — this is just trash:

Let me just say this: living as we do, in a time when some in the political arena do not hesitate before throwing the most serious of allegations at our men and women in uniform, based on the most flimsy of evidence, remember that Canadians from coast to coast to coast are proud of you and stand behind you, and I am proud of you, and I stand beside you.

That’s your prime minister talking, folks, accusing members of Parliament who raise legitimate questions about Canada’s policy on the transfer of prisoners in Afghanistan of smearing “our men and women in uniform.” There is no sense in which this is true. There is no interpretation you can give it that draws it near to the truth. It is not even close.

There are many points of uncertainty in the detainee issue, and some members of the opposition may have leapt to some conclusions about it. But not about the soldiers on the ground. No one that I am aware of has made any criticism of the soldiers who handed over the prisoners to the Afghan security services — only of those who issued the orders to do so.

Coupled with the continuing refusal to release the Colvin memos and other relevant documents — or rather their selective release, to some but not others — it makes it very hard to give the government the benefit of the doubt in this affair. Their story has become more believable, but their every action suggests that they themselves don’t believe it.

Liberals play the victim on Israel

By Andrew Coyne - Friday, November 27, 2009 at 10:15 AM - 93 Comments

There are many diversions in this carnival world—canasta, bubble wrap, Donald Trump’s hair—but none so entertaining as a politician trying to persuade us the emotions he puts on for a living are real. Michael Ignatieff may profess bemusement, in interviews with the foreign press, at the “theatricality” of it all, but your average pol would never concede the point. They are like those movie co-stars who must pretend to be dating in real life.

Mind you, it doesn’t take much to persuade us in the media. We are as invested as they in the pretense that, when the Member for Diddly-squat is observed to be “shaking with rage” or “visibly distraught,” he is actually experiencing something like the named emotion. Hence the readiness of so many media outlets to advertise the Liberals’ hurt feelings at those Tory pamphlets accusing them of anti-Semitism.

They don’t actually accuse them of anything of the kind, you understand. But, next to being the subject of a vicious personal attack (“you can say what you want about me, but leave my family out of it”), there is nothing a politician lives for more than to be unjustly accused of something—even if he has to levy the charge himself. The opportunities to play the victim are too tempting. Continue…

Where will he land?

By Michael Friscolanti - Thursday, November 26, 2009 at 11:00 AM - 6 Comments

The exact timeline is still sketchy, but at some point in the coming weeks, a blindfolded Omar Khadr will be escorted out of his jail cell, shackled at the wrists and ankles, and carried onto a military cargo plane. Though he won’t have the pleasure of witnessing it with his own eyes, Guantánamo Bay, Cuba—Khadr’s prison for the past seven years, beginning at the tender age of 16—will disappear into the distance within a matter of minutes.

Where he will land is still a mystery. The White House announced last week that the 23-year-old is slated to face a military commission—somewhere on U.S. soil—for his alleged war crimes, including the murder of an American soldier in Afghanistan. Yet in the very same breath, Barack Obama’s attorney general left open the possibility that Khadr, a Canadian citizen, could be transferred to his home country before a trial ever begins. Fuelling such speculation is a separate hearing in front of the Supreme Court of Canada, which must decide, once and for all, whether Stephen Harper should be forced to at least ask the Americans to repatriate Khadr. The legal arguments are complex, but at the heart of the case is a growing sense that if the Prime Minister simply asked for his release, Washington would happily oblige.

In other words, that plane leaving Gitmo could fly straight to Canada.

It’s not quite that simple, of course. The Supreme Court may not issue a ruling until the new year, and even if it does order Harper to bite his lip and lobby for Khadr, there is no guarantee the Americans will hand him over carte blanche. But for a boy (now man) who has grown up inside Gitmo’s barbed wire, the end has never felt so close. Which means the biggest question of all—the one Harper is fighting in court to avoid—must now be answered: if Omar does return to Canada, what exactly do we do with him?

“I’m not going to argue that he hasn’t served enough time, but I might argue that he’s still a threat,” says Layne Morris, a retired U.S. army sergeant who lost his right eye in the 2002 firefight that ended with Khadr’s capture. “It comes down to security. Are we confident we can let this guy go and he’s not going to try to cut people’s throats next week? That’s the overwhelming question.”

There is no easy answer. To many, Khadr is still the loyal son of a senior al-Qaeda operative, a Toronto-born teenager who lived with Osama bin Laden and allegedly tossed a grenade that killed Sgt. 1st Class Christopher Speer, a decorated Special Forces medic. To others, he is an innocent child soldier thrust into battle by his radical dad and tortured, over and over, until he confessed to a crime he didn’t commit. It’s no wonder the feds would rather let someone else (i.e., the Americans) figure out which label fits best.

If he is flown back to Canada, Khadr could—at least theoretically—face a bevy of criminal charges, including high treason (“waging war” against an army allied with Canada) and participation in a terrorist organization (al-Qaeda). But would a jury ever convict someone who was shot by U.S. troops at age 15, shipped to the world’s most notorious prison at 16, and who was clearly under the spell of his fundamentalist father? Even with a guilty verdict, it’s hard to imagine his young age would warrant a sentence other than time served.

The other option—allowing Khadr to reunite with his extremist family, where he is sure to become a folk hero for wannabe jihadists—is equally unattractive. His sister once wished she had “the guts” to be a suicide bomber, his eldest brother is an accused al-Qaeda gunrunner, and another brother is paralyzed from the waist down after being shot by Pakistani troops in the same clash that killed their father. The Cleavers they are not.

“Omar has been branded by the family,” says Dennis Edney, that family’s long-time lawyer. “When you talk about the Khadr brand, there is no distinction. But I have talked to Omar about not going back to his family, and Omar understands that and has agreed to that—and his family has agreed to that.” (Members of the family did not respond to emails from Maclean’s.)

Earlier this year, Edney released a so-called “reintegration plan” for his client that includes religious and psychological counselling, supervision by law enforcement officials, and a home-schooling program delivered by King’s University College in Edmonton. “I would take him home with me, in Alberta,” Edney says. “He’s just a kid who wants to be a doctor and who wants to just get on with his life. I’ve never met a more peaceful guy.”

It’s a difficult description to swallow; fellow Canadians have seen the infamous video of a young Omar smiling as he wires together land mines destined for the feet of coalition soldiers. Stephen Xenakis, a U.S. psychiatrist who has treated Khadr over the past year, has his own opinions about whether his patient is still a threat to society. And although he would prefer to save those opinions for a possible day in court, he does offer this much: “He is a really kind, decent, thoughtful, sensitive young man, and he cares about people. It’s really important to appreciate that he does not have any vindictiveness in his nature at all. There is not a hard edge to him at all, and there is no sense of vengeance.”

What Khadr wants, Xenakis says, is “fair justice.” Speer’s widow and two young children crave the very same thing.

'Elements of a war crime seem to be present'

By Michael Byers - Friday, November 20, 2009 at 1:41 PM - 12 Comments

Canadians should hang their heads in shame. Richard Colvin’s testimony about torture in Afghanistan is a searing indictment of government officials who either knew—or should have known—that Canada was transferring detainees to torture.

Between 2006 and 2007, Colvin, the second-highest-ranking Canadian diplomat in Kabul, sent 17 reports about torture to Ottawa. The reports, which were circulated widely within the departments of Foreign Affairs and National Defence, confirmed public warnings from international officials and journalists.

In March 2006, Louise Arbour, the then UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, reported that complaints of torture at the hands of Afghan officials were “common.”

In June 2006, the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission estimated that “about one in three prisoners handed over by Canadians are beaten or even tortured in local jails.”

In March 2007, the U.S. State Department reported that unconfirmed reports of torture were “numerous” in Afghanistan.

In April 2007, the Globe and Mail reported on “a litany of gruesome stories and a clear pattern of abuse by the Afghan authorities who work closely with Canadian troops.”

Yet the Canadian Government did next to nothing. In April 2007, Prime Minister Stephen Harper said that “Canadian military officials don’t send individuals off to be tortured.”

Colvin’s testimony directly contradicts the Prime Minister’s statement. He reports that all the transferred detainees were tortured and that this was widely know in Kandahar, including among Canadian soldiers and diplomats.

Also in April 2007, then Defence Minister Gordon O’Connor told the House of Commons that the Red Cross would inform the Canadian government if it had any concern about the treatment of detainees. O’Connor later apologized, admitting the ICRC had always maintained its policy of reporting only to the Afghanistan government.

Colvin reports that the Red Cross tried unsuccessfully for three months to convey its concerns to the Canadian military about problems in the way Canada was reporting to the Red Cross when it transferred detainees to the Afghan authorities.

Colvin’s allegations have emerged because he was called to testify before the Military Police Complaints Commission, a body—established after the Somalia Inquiry—which has been investigating detainee transfers at the request of Amnesty International and the BC Civil Liberties Association. The government sought to block Colvin’s testimony before the MPCC, citing national security. The obstruction prompted the three opposition parties to call Colvin to testify before a Parliamentary committee, where his voice could finally be heard. Now, the Canadian Government is seeking to shoot the messenger by publicly besmirching one of Canada’s finest diplomats.

Colvin currently serves as an intelligence officer at the Canadian Embassy in Washington, D.C., a post reserved for the very best in the foreign service. And he’s been put in an unenviable position, his career and reputation on the line, and has chosen to tell the truth rather than fall in contempt of Parliament. In addition to slurring Colvin, the Canadian Government is seeking to obfuscate the facts by claiming that it acted decisively to improve the detainee transfer arrangement put in place by the previous, Liberal government. Nothing could be farther from the truth: it took more than a year of complaints, news reports, litigation and political pressure before a new transfer arrangement was finally adopted in May 2007.

The actual facts are still emerging, but all the elements of a war crime seem to be present. The prohibition of torture ranks with the prohibitions of genocide and slavery as one of the most fundamental rules of international law. Torture—and complicity in torture—is a “grave breach” of the 1949 Geneva Conventions. If Canadian officials allowed detainees to be transferred to Afghan custody despite an apparent risk of torture, and chose not to take reasonable steps to protect them, they are as guilty of a war crime as the torturers themselves. They could be prosecuted in Canada under the Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes Act. Or they could be hauled before the International Criminal Court. Canada has ratified the ICC’s statute, giving it jurisdiction over Canadians who commit war crimes anywhere. However, the International Criminal Court will not intervene if Canadian officials are willing and able to investigate and prosecute. We must hope that the will to investigate and prosecute is present. For imagine the damage to Canada’s reputation and influence if a general, ambassador or cabinet minister was prosecuted for war crimes in The Hague.

As Colvin himself explained: “If we disregard our core principles and values, we also lose our moral authority abroad. If we are complicit in the torture of Afghans in Kandahar, how can we credibly promote human rights in Tehran or Beijing?”

Even more seriously, the government’s indifference to torture may have created greater risks for Canadian soldiers. Insurgents who believe they will be tortured will fight to the death rather than surrender, placing Canadian soldiers at increased danger of harm. As a result, it is possible that one or more soldiers might have been killed as a result of the Canadian Government’s actions. Again, as Colvin cogently explained: “In my judgment, some of our actions in Kandahar, including complicity in torture, turned local people against us. Instead of winning hearts and minds, we caused Kandaharis to fear the foreigners. Canada’s detainee practices alienated us from the population and strengthened the insurgency.”

It’s time for Canadians to rally behind this brave and principled diplomat. It’s time to insist that any war criminals be investigated and prosecuted, regardless of who they are.

Michael Byers holds the Canada Research Chair in Global Politics and International Law at the University of British Columbia. He has taught the laws of war at UBC, Duke University, Oxford University, the University of Cape Town and the University of Tel Aviv. Byers ran as an NDP candidate in the last federal election.