I'm waiting...

...for the apology. I mean, an upstanding straight-shooter like Amir Attaran should have no problem coming out and saying up front that his calculated attack upon the reputation of the Canadian Forces was completely unjustified, right?

A military investigation two years in the making has cleared Canadian soldiers of any wrongdoing in the handling of captured Taliban fighters in Kandahar.

A board of inquiry report into allegations that troops mistreat and beat prisoners taken during heavy fighting in April 2006 found, instead, they were treated "professionally and humanely."

After talking to hundreds of witnesses and examining thousands of pages of documentation it was determined the conduct of soldiers during those early bloody days of the mission was "consistently above reproach," said the inquiry’s final report, which was completed on Feb. 6, 2009, but only released on Tuesday.

The inquiry "heard no evidence suggesting that members of the Canadian Forces have mistreated detainees in Afghanistan," the document said.

"Indeed, we heard of several instances where CF members went far beyond what was expected of them to protect the lives of Afghan detainees, even though doing so dramatically increased the risk to themselves and their allies."

Here's where you can read the BOI report for yourself, by the way. Always better to go to the source document than let a reporter or...ahem...activist lawyer interpret it for you.

For those who don't remember what I had to say at the time about Attaran's spurious allegations that CF members had abused Afghan detainees:

Let me be perfectly clear: I believe that Attaran's entire motivation in pushing this story into the press was to get the CF on the ropes so he could hammer them over detainee transfer policy. That was the impetus for his initial Access to Information requests. I doubt that he particularly cares that the reputation of the CF is being unceremoniously dragged through the mud in order to facilitate his attack on a Government of Canada policy implemented by the CF. I don't know that it would even occur to him that he doesn't really want the military picking and choosing which government directives it will or will not follow.

What all this means is that even if the abuse by Canadian soldiers story is still-born after the investigations conclude there was no wrongdoing by CF members, he can still push the 'but you're turning prisoners over to known torturers' angle and keep the story above the fold on page one of the newspapers. It's a classic 'bait and switch': hook the public on the idea of soldiers abusing detainees, and even if that's proven false, feed them the completely separate issue of detainee transfers to the Afghan government.

I've reread my original piece, and I can't see any point I've gotten wrong: it was, and continues to be a 'bait and switch'; just look at where Attaran's name pops up in the news these days:

The effectiveness of a rare public probe into Canada's treatment of Afghan detainees is being challenged by the Ottawa lawyer who first called for the Military Police Complaints Commission to investigate.

Amir Attaran, a University of Ottawa law professor who raised concerns with the commission more than two years ago over the issue of Afghan detainees, said the process outlined in Monday's opening hearing is unacceptable.

...

“If the Military Police Complaints Commission proves, in this week particularly but also in coming months, that the best it can muster is a non-adversarial process in which it won't use its subpoena powers, well, then one wonders why it exists,” Mr. Attaran said.

Surprise, surprise: it's all about the detainee transfer agreement.

Oh, and as far as that apology he owes our men and women in uniform, here's what he had to say:

The disagreement left Amir Attaran, an Ottawa lawyer and human-rights advocate whose complaints about potential abuse sparked the investigation into the handling of the three detainees, wondering how top officials can disagree over the fundamental question of why the detainee transfer program exists. He called it “quite a major disagreement.”

The report also shows that one of the detainees – who was the most heavily injured, having been punched in the arms and head, kicked in the arms and torso, hit with a weapon in his torso and head, had a soldier's knee pressed into his head before he was “forced into compliance” by soldiers during an attempted arrest – wasn't questioned before being handed over to Afghan police.

The report suggests that was because of a pressure for rapid transfer (the military set a 96-hour window to capture a suspected insurgent and hand him over to Afghan forces) as well as a presumption that the man had been sedated for his injuries, which he had not.

It also notes that information and paperwork around the men's arrests was not passed on because of privacy concerns and a time crunch, and highlights a lack of communication with the Ottawa headquarters, CEFCOM, which didn't have around-the-clock operation at the time. Those procedures could be a breach of military protocol, Mr. Attaran believes.

“The repeated violation of basic, standard operating procedures, which the [Canadian Forces] now admit, is hardly professional or confidence-inspiring,” he said in an e-mail.

Professional? Confidence-inspiring?

What the hell does this insipid twit know about professionalism or inspirational leadership? When was the last time he was physically attacked, bombed and shot at, and then provided his attackers with medical attention and protected them from potential harm (the tender mercies of the ANSF troops they attacked), as Canadian soldiers have done?

That he's not apologetic in the slightest, that he continues to pick nits on administrative matters when the main thrust of his accusations were found to be completely baseless tells me all I need to know about this poor excuse of a man. For shame.