Afghan detainees and Richard Colvin

Here is the text of Mr Colvin' s letter to the Commons' Special Committee on the Canadian Mission in Afghanistan.

I think this Globe and Mail editorial (their editorial board is actually, in my view, much less agenda-driven than the news staff) gets things about right--excerpts:

Foot-dragging and fudging
...
The senior bureaucrat David Mulroney told Canada's ambassador to Afghanistan, Arif Lalani, not to mention the deterioration of security [emphasis added] in his reports to Ottawa. “The ambassador accordingly sent a report in which he said security was improving,” Mr. Colvin says...

...[the government] has tried to evade, duck and otherwise hide from the obvious fact that everyone and her brother – except those in the upper echelons of the Canadian government and military in Ottawa – knew about the propensity of Afghan authorities in Kandahar to torture prisoners. Long before senior ministers claimed they learned about it by reading The Globe and Mail in April, 2007 [the piece, however, omits to mention that in February 2007 the Globe tried very hard to pin ungrounded charges of prisoner abuse on CF members, more here].

What everyone knew is summarized nicely in the letter by Mr. Colvin, a former senior official in this country's Afghan mission. In March, 2006, separate reports from the U.S. State Department and Kofi Annan, who was then the secretary-general of the United Nations, discussed torture and official impunity.

On concerns around detainee treatment, up to and including torture, the Canadian embassy and the Provincial Reconstruction Team reported to Ottawa on May 26, June 2, Sept. 19, Sept. 28 and Dec. 4, 2006. At the end of December, the embassy's human-rights report said torture was rife.

Canada tried very hard not to know, Mr. Colvin charges. For instance, its ambassador edited out “the most important information in the report, directly related to our detainee concerns, and from a highly credible source.” And even when Canada did fix the problems in May, 2007 (after officially discovering it in The Globe and Mail), its fix didn't work properly for five months, and detainees were still exposed to a high risk of torture...

More from the paper's Margaret Wente:

...the detainee issue has turned into another symbolic story about morality and virtue. “I feel ashamed to be Canadian,” letters to the editor frequently proclaim, which really means the writer thinks the heavy-handed Harper government (or the oil sands) is evil.

The nub of the story – that some Afghan prisoners detained by Canadian soldiers were abused in Afghan jails – is neither new nor particularly surprising. The problem was resolved long ago, although it probably should have been fixed sooner than it was. Now the story is about the Harper government's obstructive tactics to hush it up. It's about who knew what, when did they know it, what they claim they knew, and whether information was suppressed or ignored. These are good questions. But the story has been turned by all sides into political theatre...

See also this recent post by Damian. And note also this post of mine:

Afghan detainees and the former Liberal government/Human rights Update