23 Nov 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.