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I’ve been keeping an eye on what has been happening recently with the Canadian Armed Forces and their handling of the detainee situation. The prognosis has been rather bleak. We are most likely responsible for people being abused and tortured while under our aegis. The Harper government has been doing backflips as of late to keep a lid on the story. Intransigentia has forwarded this article to my attention.
“The Harper government has effectively suspended parliamentary hearings on allegations that Afghan detainees were transferred to torture – boycotting attempts by opposition MPs to continue a Commons probe of the matter.”
Why are the Conservatives engaged in what seems to be a full on exercise in damage control if in fact, there is no substance to the allegations raised by Richard Colvin?
The Conservatives are blocking parliamentary inquiries saying insipid tidbits like this:
“It’s not the time to be having meetings that are implying, intentioned or not, that Canadians are somehow guilty of war crimes,” Laurie Hawn, the parliamentary secretary for the Defence Minister, said on CTV’s Power Play after the aborted meeting.
Well Mr.Hawn when exactly is the time to investigate possible war crimes perpetrated by our forces? The optics do not improve by stalling and delaying the House of Commons about the issue.
What is happening is that the Conservatives know they have a situation that will bring down their government. Delaying parliament is only the first step in the three ring circus that is forming around this issue. I guarantee this is only going to get worse.
What is not surprising is that Harper’s Government continues to stonewall the inquiry into the allegations that Canadian troops knowingly handed over captured Afghan prisoners. The playbooks seems to somewhat disorganized as Gen. Walter Natynczyk found out he needed to change his story to harmonize with what the current acceptable truth needs to be.
“The individual who was beaten by the Afghan police was, in fact, in Canadian custody,” Natynczyk told reporters in Ottawa on Wednesday.
Natynczyk had told a parliamentary committee that Canadian troops questioned the man, picked up during operations in Zangabad. But Natynczyk said it was the Afghans who took him into custody.”
Okay..but then….
“On Wednesday, the defence staff chief said he has received new information and learned that Canadians had taken the suspect into custody before handing him over to the Afghans.”
Whoops! Well, apparently we did actually have him in Canadian custody. The general was very apologetic. Also, the prisoner in question was also rescued by Canadian soldiers after they saw the prisoner being beaten by Afghan authorities.
This is just one case though. The amount of smoke and mirrors being produced in Ottawa as of late lead me to question our policy and presence in Afghanistan.
According to Richard Colvin, since 2006 (and probably earlier) the Canadian Armed Forces have had a hand in facilitating the torture of afghan prisoners. Richard Colvin said:
“According to our information, the likelihood is that all the Afghans we handed over were tortured. For interrogators in Kandahar, it was a standard operating procedure,” Colvin said.
He said the most common forms of torture were beatings, whipping with power cables, the use of electricity, knives, open flames and rape.”
Let me state this right now. Torture does not work. For an in depth analysis of exactly how bad torture is for nation states see Alflred McCoy’s book: A Question of Torture.
So torture is neither viable nor productive in terms of gathering information. Unless of course you are the church and are just trying to save the poor heretic’s souls.
It was only a matter of time as the slaughter and abuse of civilians goes hand in hand with imperial misadventures. We avoided the Iraq fiasco, but now are fully mired in Afghanistan. Colvin expresses his regrets about our foreign policy:
“As I learned more about our detainee practices, I came to a conclusion they were contrary to Canada’s values, contrary to Canada’s interests, contrary to Canada’s official policies and also contrary to international law. That is, they were un-Canadian, counterproductive and probably illegal.”
I agree with Mr. Colvin. But did our government? Of course not, the denials and spin began almost immediately.
“Defence Minister Peter MacKay also questioned the credibility of the allegations earlier this week. Hillier and Conservative officials denied Colvin’s assertion that he reported prisoner abuses as early as 2006.”
To expect a different response from any political party would be silly. That is the sad fact of the realpolitik of our times, we sanction horrible practices, and then when public scrutiny arrives, the government does its utmost to deny, deflect and discredit the bearer of the news of its malfeasance. Witness our feckless Conservatives in action:
“Last week, Colvin was accused by Conservative MPs of being a Taliban “dupe” for believing and broadcasting claims of prisoner abuse — and testifying he’d relayed those concerns to an unreceptive government.”
Mr. Colvin’s assertions were corroborated by a Afghani MP Malalai Joya she said:
“What he has been saying is what I’ve heard from my people,” she said.
Many of the victims are women and children detainees who have been raped, she said. “It’s not new for our people.”
Whoops! A outside confirmation of what is happening in Afghanistan? The Conservatives could not possibly be lying could they?
“The Conservative government was aware of concerns about the state of prisons in Afghanistan in early 2006, prompting it to negotiate a new prisoner transfer agreement, Defence Minister Peter MacKay said Friday.”
Wow, getting caught in a lie misunderstanding (again) sucks does it not Mr.MacKay? The caliber of the verbal casuistry being spewn forth by the Conservative government leaves me gobsmacked.. The party of ‘law and order’ and ‘family values’ and morality in general. I remember with the Conservatives were rallying against the Liberals during the Adscam – debacle, oh how shrill they were. Good thing the Conservatives are above such antics now that they are in power.
It looks like we are at least partially responsible for people being tortured. A government that was actually dedicated upholding human rights and ‘canadian values’ would at least admit to their part in this ugly little affair.
The British PM Gordon Brown wants Hamid Karzai to clean up corruption. Brown said:
“I am not prepared to put the lives of British men and women in harm’s way for a government that does not stand up against corruption,” Brown said in speech at the Royal College of Defence Studies in London.”
This should be referenced in light of the recent attack in Helmand province in which an Afghan police officer shot and killed 5 British soldiers and escaped into the countryside.
“The soldiers concerned were mentoring Afghan national police. They were working inside and living inside an Afghan national police checkpoint, just outside Nad-e-Ali district centre,” Lt.-Col. David Wakefield, spokesman for the British forces, told Sky News. “It is our initial understanding that an individual Afghan policeman possibly acting in conjunction with one other started firing inside the checkpoint before fleeing from the scene.”
Occupying a country certainly is more difficult if when they keep turning on you and killing your soldiers. We are not going to see another British Colonial India in Afghanistan. The governments of the West are deluding themselves if they think they can install some local panjandrum and then rule quietly behind the scenes. It just will not happen, ask the Russians how much fun ‘ruling’ Afghanistan is. Perhaps the British have more insight? Doubtful.
But back to cleaning up corruption; or more specifically how to do so when it is your presence that is causing the massive corruption in the first place?
We should not be kidding ourselves. The West’s military presence in Afghanistan is creating more problems than it is solving and should be withdrawn immediately. If the Taliban, which we created and armed so well in the 1980’s, presents itself to be a problem then we should negotiate with them to broker an agreement without having to slaughter innocents in the process.
There is no way for the West to “win” in Afghanistan, we should begin reparations and move on as soon as possible.
It has been strangely quiet in the news about Iraq. It takes a significant event, as CBC reports, to make headlines about the shattered country.
“At least 136 people died Sunday after two car bombs detonated in Baghdad. With casualty figures still rising, officials said that nearly 600 people had been injured and taken to six area hospitals.
So many people were wounded that even civilian cars were pressed into service to take the casualties to area hospitals, said a Baghdad hospital official who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity.
The two vehicles were packed with explosives and detonated less than a minute apart in the centre of the Iraqi capital, officials said.”
Are we purging our collective memories of Iraq and the atrocities we have committed there? Do we think that not bringing Bush and Cheney in for war crimes will not incense the rest of the world?
Iraq is still being torn asunder. The coverage has moved on to Afghanistan and so has our consciousness. Our actions leave us accountable for so much destruction and chaos. We owe the people of Iraq and Afghanistan more than just bullets and bomb craters.
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