Tagged: torture
MacKay stoops lower
A Contrarian reader writes:
If only it were true that they were back peddling. In tonight’s news, MacKay is heard sinking to new depths of loathsomeness by accusing Colvin of impugning the integrity of Canadian troops. He obviously hoping Canadians will turn against Colvin if he can be made to look as if he’s attacking the military. How much more cowardly and disgusting can you get than using the military as a red herring to draw attention away from your own behaviour. I’m beginning to feel slimy just being in the same country with this guy.
Contrarian is out of the country, where my ability to follow the torture scandal over the last few days has been fragmentary. If my correspondent’s account of MacKay’s performance today is halfway accurate, it deserves the appellation loathsome. I hope others will call him on it.
As a placemarker, I want to flag another point for later elaboration: As first noted by Kady O’Malley in our raucus panel on CBC’s Power and Politics Friday, many in the mainstream media have done an exceptionally good job covering this story. The bits and pieces I’ve seen yesterday and today (in part thanks to tweets and e-mails from WLR at National Newswatch) has featured a steady stream of new revelations from Canadian Press, the Star, the Globe and Mail, CBC, and others—none of it flattering to the Harper Government’s crude spinslingers. Confirmation yet again that there is no substitute for good old-fashioned reporting.
How Colvin got to Kandahar
Contrarian is relieved to report that whoever kidnapped Stephen Maher and published Saturday’s bizarre column under his byline has released him. His column this morning offers a useful reminder of the circumstances under which Richard Colvin went to Kandahar in the first place.
In January 2005, Canadian diplomat Glyn Berry, the political director of the provincial reconstruction team in Kandahar, was killed in a suicide bombing that wounded three Canadian soldiers.
After Mr. Berry’s death, while the Foreign Affairs Department was struggling to find diplomats to serve in the dangerous and challenging country, Richard Colvin volunteered to go to Kandahar to do Mr. Berry’s job for several months in 2006.
This is the man Peter MacKay portrays as a patsy for Canada’s enemies. Some patsy.
The whole column is worth a read.
In 2007, Harper’s office micromanaged torture spin
Today’s must-read: A former NATO official tells the Toronto Star how Prime Minister Harper’s office micromanaged the story of Canada’s complicity in Afghan torture when it first erupted in 2007.
The former official, speaking on condition his name not be used, told the Toronto Star that Harper’s office in Ottawa “scripted and fed” the precise wording NATO officials in Kabul used to repudiate allegations of abuse “at a time when it was privately and generally acknowledged in our office that the chances of good treatment at the hands of Afghan security forces were almost zero.”
“It was highly unusual. I was told this was the titanic issue for Prime Minister Harper and that every single statement that went out needed to be cleared by him personally,” said the former official, who is not Canadian.
“The lines were, ‘We have no evidence’ of coercive treatment being used against detainees handed over to the Afghans. There were very clear instructions for a blanket denial. The pressure to hold to that line was channelled via Canadian military and diplomatic personnel in Kabul. But it was made clear to us that this was coming from the Prime Minister’s Office, which was running the public affairs aspect of Canadian engagement in Afghanistan with a 6,000-mile screwdriver.”
The former NATO official had this to say about how detainees were treated:
Everyone knew that if a detainee got handed to the NDS (the National Directorate of Security, Afghanistan’s intelligence service), they were not going to be in any way looked after the way they should have been.
The NDS operated under almost impenetrable secrecy. The closest relationship the NDS had with any foreign forces was with the Americans. But that ran completely outside of ISAF channels because of the exclusively American parallel operation in Afghanistan.
The one thing Conseravtive spinmeisters failed to do
In his Saturday column, Jeffrey Simpson pointed out something others have overlooked: For all the fire and brimstone Conservative spinmeisters hurled at Richard Colvin, they didn’t actually contradict a single word of his testimony.
Significantly, for those who paid careful attention to substance rather than bombast, in all the sound and fury from the government and former military personnel, no one actually contradicted a single thing in Mr. Colvin’s testimony…
The attack script written this week for Conservative MPs by the Prime Minister’s Office and party research office impugn Mr. Colvin for a) wanting to assist the Taliban, b) undermining the morale of the Armed Forces, and c) making recruitment difficult.
These are the classic responses of politicians whose government, and the military it supposedly directed, are engaged now in a massive campaign against someone who reported what he saw, tried to alert his superiors to danger, but found that plausible deniability and professions of ignorance were the preferred elements of the endless spin campaign that characterizes everything this government does.
The whole piece is worth reading.
Contrarian spent most of Saturday and Sunday on airplanes, with limited Internet access. I will catch up with reader feedback on the Harper Government and the torture story in the next few days.
A spotlight finds the invisible man
Sonia Verma profiles diplomat Richard Colvin in the Globe:
“Richard is a beta, not an alpha. He doesn’t seek out the spotlight. He’s never the guy you would notice in the room,” said one long-time associate, who requested anonymity to speak frankly… Asked what stood out about him, one former colleague replied: “His meticulous note-taking abilities.”
Are the Harper forces backpedaling on torture?
The Star’s Tonda McCharles reports that the Conservatives are changing tack in the torture scandal.
“It is our understanding that other current and former DFAIT employees will be testifying before the Parliamentary Committee. Their testimony will provide important context and information about this issue.”
…The comments came hours after Defence Minister Peter MacKay insisted in Halifax Friday that the government’s attacks on Colvin’s credibility weren’t “personal.”
The federal government changed tack late Friday in response to allegations made by Richard Colvin, shifting to a wait-and-see approach and downplaying efforts to discredit the foreign service officer who says he warned Canada was violating its international obligations to avoid handing Afghan detainees over to certain torture.
Jamie Christoff, a spokesperson for the Department of Foreign Affairs, released a statement cautioning that the full story has not yet been heard, despite Colvin’s bombshell testimony to a parliamentary committee, and the government would willingly participate in the parliamentary inquiry.
“It is important to let the Parliamentary Committee process unfold and to consider and weigh the testimony of subsequent witnesses before drawing any conclusions about how events in Afghanistan may have unfolded in 2006 and 2007,” Christoff said.
If it is the start of a big backdown, not everyone is on message:
Yet again Friday, Transport Minister John Baird said Colvin’s allegations “are nothing short of hearsay, sometimes second- or even third-hand information, or worse yet, information that came directly from the Taliban.”
Tom Flannigan is baffled too
Former top Steven Harper strategist Tom Flannigan tells Jane Taber of the Globe and Mail he’s unimpressed with Conservative character assassination of career diplomat and whistle-blower Richard Colvin. He thinks it’s happening…
“…only because Mr. Harper, “the grand strategist,” has been away travelling in Asia and not focusing on the issue. Meanwhile, his ministers are freelancing as they try to deal with the fall-out on the Afghan mission…
Conservative ministers are being too aggressive, said Mr. Flanagan, a political science professor at the University of Calgary.
“When the top guy is the grand strategist and he’s not there, it really is difficult for people who are not the top guy to take command,” he said. “I have seen this happen before. … It is a factor when something big happens when the Prime Minister is gone.
“Going immediately to attack credibility strikes me as perhaps swinging bit a too hard.” What happens, he wonders, if more witnesses come forward corroborating Mr. Colvin’s testimony and character? It could be dangerous for the ministers.
Even Coyne is baffled at Conservative smear tactics
Writing in Maclean’s, Andrew Coyne expresses “some bafflement” at the Conservatives’ reaction to Richard Colvin’s testimony.
Don’t worry, Coyne hasn’t gone socialist. He’s sure Canada is no longer turning over detainees without adequate safeguards. He thinks the Harperites fixed the problem, and ought to take credit for it. He doesn’t think we are at the point of needing a public inquiry—yet. He thinks Colvin’s testimony is “less than bullet-proof.”
But it’s another thing altogether to imply that Colvin is some sort of whack job or stooge of the Taliban. As others have pointed out, his sterling career track — he’s now a senior intelligence officer at the Canadian embassy in Washington — hardly bespeaks eccentricity or incompetence. And if, as the government maintains, there was no reason to believe what he was saying was true — on a balance of probabilities, at least — then why did the government eventually change its practice? If no one in government even knew there was a problem, how could anyone have given the orders to fix it?
Whatever the truth or falsehood of Colvin’s reports, it is scarcely credible that they would not have been passed up to the highest levels: not just in the bureaucracy, but the cabinet as well. If the Minister of National Defence at the time, Gordon O’Connor, did not know, he surely should have; if bureaucrats insulated him from that knowledge, to preserve “plausible deniability,” that is a mark against him as much as them, for not establishing as an inviolable rule that he should be kept abreast of all such sensitive matters.
But the more likely proposition is that he did know. And if he knew, it is equally likely that the Prime Minister would have been told. Again, I don’t find that damning in itself: once told, they acted, even if it now appears rather too slowly. What’s indefensible is for ministers to have lied about what they knew, especially to Parliament — or, if they did not know, for officers and bureaucrats to have deliberately kept them in the dark. The more the government attempts to shoot the messenger, the more one suspects one of these will prove to be true.
If they knew, and lied about it, maybe that explains the baffling attacks on Colvin.
Hébert: only minority government let Colvin testify
Chantal Hébert makes a good point. Canadians only got to hear Richard Colvin’s testimony because we have a minority Parliament. The Conservatives had previously used a national security clause in the Canada Evidence Act to prevent Colvin from testifying to a Military Police Complaints Tribunal hearing. But not having a Parliamentary majority, they were powerless to prevent him from testifying to the Special Committee on the Canadian Mission in Afghanistan.
Hébert is skeptical of claims the government was out of the loop:
[T]the government could not have been in the dark about the potential prevalence of torture unless the country’s top civil servants conspired to keep their political masters out of the loop, and that is highly unlikely.”
As of 2006, Colvin – who was serving in a senior official position in Afghanistan – was sending scores of reports warning of systematic detainee abuse. At first they seemed to fall on deaf ears. In time, he was asked to deliver them only verbally…
According to Colvin, the clampdown order came from the very top, from officials who reported directly to Prime Minister Stephen Harper or his ministers, often on a daily basis.
In 2006 and 2007, the Afghan file was not only Canada’s most important military engagement in decades; it was also the Prime Minister’s self-chosen defining foreign policy file…
At the time the Conservatives took power, the public service was still reeling from the fallout of the Gomery inquiry into the sponsorship scandal. By and large, federal mandarins were determined to take all available steps to avoid getting tangled up in a partisan chain of command again.
It would have been an astounding decision on the part of the senior civil service to keep its Conservative masters out of any critical loop on the Afghan file.
In the House Thursday, Defence Minister Peter MacKay did not say the government had not been apprised of Colvin’s reports. Instead, he dismissed them as lacking in hard evidence and implied that they were based on Taliban propaganda.
CBC’s Kady O live blogs the Colvin reaction
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Kady O’Malley live blogs the NDP response to the Colvin torture testimony and the Conservative’s bucket defence. [Note to CBC: Horrible interface.] Moneyquote:
[NDP MP Paul] Dewar… is clearly genuinely angry, and getting more so as he describes the attempts to challenge Colvin, and previously, members of his party — and Harris quotes Former Colleague Wells’ explanation of the Bucket Defence,* which he seems to agree is operational here…
[CTV's] Roger Smith wonders whether really, this isn’t Afghanistan’s problem — the torture, that is — and not really about Canada. Even if we did set up a better monitoring system, and were able to determine whether Canadian-transferred detainees were tortured, they’d still have been tortured. That’s a bit existential, no? Not that I’m complaining, mind you. Anyway, Dewar agrees that the wider question of Afghanistan is a valid one, but Canada’s credibility is at stake. Harris notes that Colvin’s testimony also offered a disturbing assessment of those initially detained — farmers, tailors, other locals — which makes it even more important to make sure that they weren’t being handed over to face all but certain torture. If Canadians are taking people randomly from a field, and sending them off to be tortured, how does that affect our standing with the Afghan people?
*As mentioned earlier , Freud had an even better explanation of the Bucket Defence.
