19 Nov Torture by proxy

Unlike Britain and the Netherlands, Canada did not directly monitor how Afghan security forces treated detainees we turned over to them. We relied on the International Red Cross and the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission (AIHRC) to do that.

But as Richard Colvin testified, AIHRC was not allowed into the prisons at Kandahar, and Canada’s military brass devised a baffling six-step process for notifying the Red Cross in Kandahar when it turned over a prisoner (Military police to Canadian command at Kandahar Airport to CEFCOM in Ottawa to Canadian Embassy in Geneva to Red Cross International Headquarters to Red Cross unit in Kandahar).

Colvin testified that this process took days or weeks, and in at least one case, up to two months. By contrast, when Dutch forces turned over a prisoner, they notified the Red Cross in Kandahar immediately.

Why would Canadian officials put such an inefficient notification process in place? Occam’s Razor requires us to consider the possibility that they did not want the Red Cross to know, that they wanted to give the Afghans’ well-known torture program a head start.

As Colvin testified, “[S]eizing people and rendering them for torture is a very serious violation of international and Canadian law. Complicity in torture is a war crime. It is illegal and prosecutable.”

Colvin’s testimony comes close to demonstrating reasonable and probable cause that Canadian officials were complicit in torture.