Tory bully boys still putting the boots to Colvin
Posted By GREG WESTON
Posted 2 months ago
If you believe senior Canadian diplomat Richard Colvin, the Conservative government turned a blind eye to the abuse of Afghan prisoners for more than a year while publicly feigning ignorance of the problem.
If you believe Stephen Harper's bully boys putting the boots to Colvin this past week, the former top political attache in Afghanistan and now deputy intelligence chief in Washington has no credibility. Who's telling the truth? You be the judge.
In April 2006, Colvin began a 17-month posting in
Afghanistan as political director and deputy ambassador, one of only two officials there with access to the Canadian government's hyper-secure "C4" communications network.
A month after he arrived, Colvin issued his first of several dozen reports detailing concerns about Canadian forces turning over Afghan prisoners to "serious, imminent and alarming" abuse at the hands of local authorities.
Colvin reported his sources were "highly credible," adding he also "obtained first-hand reports of torture and personally saw evidence of injuries related to torture suffered by detainees."
No one called him crazy then.
In fact, the person with the big credibility problem in 2006 was (then) defence minister Gordon O'Connor.
The same month Colvin wrote his first report on likely abuse of detainees, O'Connor publicly declared: "If there is something wrong with their treatment, the Red Cross would inform us and we would take action."
O'Connor, a former general, make the same claim until the Red Cross finally issued a formal rebuke, saying it would never share information on Afghan prisoner abuse with Canada or any foreign government. The defence minister had to apologize for misleading Parliament, but claim there was no evidence Afghan prisoners were being tortured.
Peter MacKay, then foreign affairs minister, and the prime minister stuck to the same see-no- evil script.
Yet, during that time, Colvin sent almost two dozen memos on the abuse of detainees, circulating his missives to as many as 85 of the highest-ranking Canadian military honchos and federal bureaucrats.
Of course, it is possible the bureaucrats kept the potentially explosive detainee issue to themselves to give their political masters "plausible deniability" if it blew up.
More likely, the Harper government was just trying to cover up the whole thing -sacrificing Canadian lives to bring torture to Afghanistan isn't exactly the stuff to inspire public support.
Indeed, Colvin claims various superiors in Ottawa tried to get him to drop the detainee issue, but he persisted.
In January 2007, the government also tried to bury a human rights report on Afghanistan -an annual requirement of all Canadian embassies -that included a section on the abuse of Afghan detainees.
It was later released, but still with all references to prisoner abuse blacked out.
Not long after Stephen Harper subsequently sloughed off claims of detainee torture as "baseless allegations," the Canadian military suddenly stopped handing over prisoners to Afghan authorities for several months.
Canada's (then) top general Rick Hillier wrote in his recently released book that "we lost confidence that basic, reasonable measures were in place to ensure the humane treatment of prisoners."
Hillier bluntly rejects claims by Harper's officials that the PM was kept in the dark on the issue. Even to this day, despite Colvin's 17 months of memos, Harper and his ministers continue to plead ignorance.
On that point, Defence Minister MacKay succeeded in looking perfectly ignorant last week.
"There is no credible evidence that any Taliban prisoner transferred by Canadian forces was ever abused,"MacKay claimed.
Then why did the military stop transferring prisoners?
"It was because of the concerns that were being expressed by Colvin and others that we did so."
In the same breath, MacKay calls Colvin "not credible." Then why was he promoted after Afghanistan to the second highest intelligence post at the Canadian embassy in Washington?
"Let me be very clear: Nobody is attacking the individual," MacKay said as he viciously attacked Colvin.
The Harper government has now spent more than a year preventing a federal military complaints commission from probing the Afghan detainee issue and somehow MacKay can still keep a straight face.
"We have been nothing but up front and honest, and disclosing information about this, and will continue to do so."
greg.weston@sunmedia.ca
