Afghan detainees: Who's the mouthpiece?

Earlier:

Afghan detainees: The Globe and Mail's curious failure to mention Attaran at one's side...

Now. Normally a lawyer represents the client's interests; one wonders if the roles are rather reversed in the case of Messrs Malgarai and Attaran. From BruceR. at Flit:

...It's notable to me how the witness' prepared statement ("The military used the NDS as subcontractors for abuse and torture") and his extemporaneous remarks ("I don’t call nobody a liar") differ, indicating extensive preparation, possibly by his interlocutor, Prof. Attaran, who himself has a long history of making allegations later found to be unsupported about the Canadian Forces...

More from the post, which makes an effort at, er, balance:

On the latest allegations

No point in ignoring it.

The current story does highlight the importance to our operations of those few Afghan-Canadians who work as LCAs (language and cultural advisors) [e.g. Mr Malgarai]. Because you had to be a Canadian to get a security clearance, and you had to have a security clearance to be allowed into Canadian military facilities overseas, our commanders and the like couldn't do what my group did and hire local interpreters, and often had to rely on a very small group of expatriates with the freedom from other gainful employment or obligations here in Canada. All the LCAs I worked with were nice guys, don't get me wrong. I wish we could have used them more to help with our desperate need for written translation. But among the ANA, where I worked, local guys had their advantages, too...

That said, anything any LCA says about his own experience would likely be unimpeachable by me and most other Canadians on tour. As the task force commander's "terp," he would have been literally by his side whenever he left KAF. LCAs, having the run of KAF, heard as much gossip as any soldier did. And he would have understood more about a passing encounter with an Afghan civilian or an NDS member than he ever could have explained to his Canadian colleagues...

I would advise remaining highly skeptical that the NDS were requested by or provided Canadians with any substantive reports derived from questioning these or any other individuals, either those few Canadian detainees (on which I had no visibility at all), but also the much larger number of "Afghan" detainees -- meaning those taken with ANA or ANP present at the point of capture (by late 2008, that was pretty much all of them) -- that I would have been involved with. I certainly never saw any such reports. Ever.

The NDS officers I encountered during my tour were astonishingly and famously reticent, and entirely uninterested in our queries or counsel regarding "their" detainees, and they didn't often share anything they knew of value with their own army, let alone ISAF forces. As far as we and the other Afghan security forces were concerned, the transfer of a detainee from the ANA or ANP to the NDS ended all possibility of further information from them, or influence on their disposition (positive or negative) for that matter. It certainly didn't stimulate it. And to be fair neither the Afghan soldiers nor we tended to push that issue, as I often complained about at the time. But "outsourcing" or "subcontracting" anything to those men with the expectation of getting any kind of a straight answer back would simply have seemed ludicrous to us.

Update:

Soldiers did not unlawfully shoot unarmed Afghan: Natynczyk
Chief of Defence Staff fires back against allegations by former military interpreter