This Is What a Lack of Democracy Looks Like
I’m a little stunned at how dismissively and cavalierly the Conservative government of Canada is handling the current Afghan detainee scandal it has on its hands. Though, upon reflection, I probably shouldn’t be.
On Wednesday, former senior Canadian diplomat Richard Colvin testified in front of a House Commons committee saying that it was his opinion that, and I quote,
According to our information, the likelihood is that all the Afghans we handed over were tortured. For interrogators in Kandahar, it was a standard operating procedure.
Colvin was testifying in regards to the multiple year inquiry into the complicity of the Canadian government and Canadian Armed Forces in delivering Afghan detainees into environments run by Afghan forces that likely involved torture of those detainees. The government is responding to Colvin’s claims by questioning Colvin’s credibility and calling his claims unsubstantiated. I quote Defense Minister Peter McKay,
There has not been a single, solitary proven allegation of abuse involving a transferred Taliban prisoner by Canadian forces.
The CBC further reports that, “Conservative MPs dismissed Colvin’s testimony as being based on second- and third-hand information and suggested his allegations were part of a disinformation campaign.”
These kinds of tactics are all too familiar for Canada’s Conservative government. It seems like any time any concern is raised, the inevitable response from Harper et al is to wave it off as obvious partisan politicking from the Opposition parties that is hardly worth government’s time. And, to be certain, there is an element of truth to that hand waving some of the time, this is, afterall, politics.
But Colvin’s claims are serious and Colvin himself is hardly a source lacking credibility, contra McKay, neither is he part of the Opposition. I mean, not only was he a senior diplomat in Kandahar, but Colvin is currently First Secretary and Liaison Officer in the Intelligence Liaison Office of the Embassy of Canada in Washington. Titles aside, the point is that Colvin has a pretty distinguished career of service to the country at a pretty high level and he ought not to be written off like some inconvenient nut off the street.
That remains especially true given that there are reasonable questions about how government has acted towards Colvin’s concerns prior to this point. Allegations include instructions to diplomats like Colvin advising they, “hold back information in their reports to Ottawa about the handling of detainees” after one of Colvin’s seventeen memos on the topic made its way, “to one of Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s senior security advisers.”
Additionally, Colvin’s lawyer, Lori Bokenfohr has raised some significant concerns about the role that government has played in hampering the work of a a Military Police Complaint Commission in making determinations surrounding Colvin’s,
In a letter sent to the Department of Justice and obtained by CBC News, Lori Bokenfohr said the government has invoked the national security order in response to Richard Colvin’s decision to co-operate with the Military Police Complaints Commission.
The commission is examining whether military police officers had a duty to investigate the transfer of detainees when there were allegations of torture in Afghan prisons by Afghans.
But the order prohibits Colvin from telling the commission what he knows.
In the letter, Bokenfohr questions the government’s use of the orders, saying they were not “intended to be used tactically to intimidate witnesses from giving evidence in administrative proceedings carried out by government-created bodies.”
In fact, the Chair of that Commission had some rather harsh words for government, as well (emphasis mine),
This commission was so created in order to ensure its credibility and effectiveness in fostering public confidence in military policing, which effectively means the caring and enforcement of the laws and standards that Canadians expect within their military, including from the chain of command at home and abroad. Unfortunately, the fallibility of this arrangement has been exposed in the matter of the detainee complaints when quite out of step with the normal situation wherein the principle challenge to police oversight is what has been often referred to as “the blue wall”. The government becomes the obstacle in the oversight piece, as opposed to the police themselves.
And so, on the whole, I support the NDP’s call for a public inquiry. At this point, it seems like the only prudent thing to do. But it dumbfounds me to read Jack Layton’s reasoning on the matter,
I believe the pressure for a full public inquiry is going to grow.… We have to clear the air here. Get to the bottom of it and find out whether we are dealing with a coverup.
We certainly have to take the appropriate actions to deal with Canada’s reputation, which right now is taking a tumble.
Look, it is probably true that our national reputation is at stake here and that it is important to determine whether willfull ignorance or a full blown coverup is at play here. But what I don’t here anyone but Colvin noting is that the real urgency in these matters is that they have to do with the issue of torture, an abhorent practice that Canada ought to have not part in either directly or indirectly enabling. I could care less about our national reputation in the face of this possible fact (emphasis mine again),
Colvin told the committee that the detainees were not “high-value targets” such as IED bomb makers, al-Qaeda terrorists or Taliban commanders.
“According to a very authoritative source, many of the Afghans we detained had no connection to insurgency whatsoever,” he said. “From an intelligence point of view, they had little or no value.”
Colvin said some may have been foot soldiers or day fighters but many were just local people at the wrong place at the wrong time.
“In other words, we detained and handed over for severe torture a lot of innocent people.”
The long and the short of this whole affair is that the government’s dismissive attitude in the face of mounting evidence that some serious problems with Canadian actions in Afghanistan isn’t just a strategic mistake, it is hubris of the highest degree and potentially morally depraved. It is, sadly, only too predictible a response when the domestic politics of the land are seen as boring and unworthy of any real attention.
So, when I lament the state of Canadian politics, I’m not doing so out of envy over what I see in our American neighbours, I’m doing so because there are real and important ramifications at stake. Stakes that we as Canadians ought to care about.
(For more up-to-date coverage of this issue than I can supply, I recommend Aaron Wherry of MacLeans who is doing a bang up job.)
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15 comments
What’s to be done? Iggy is a dead end. When Layton starts sounding like the most reasonable political voice, there is indeed trouble in paradise.
Scott H. Payne
November 20th, 2009 at 3:02 pm
Cas, see my rant/diatribe in the Power, Politics, Palin post vis-a-vis flows of power. Starting at the leaders is the wrong starting place, by my lights.
Lord I wish that the political forces cutting the deadwood out of the Liberal Party would hurry the hell up. Unfortunately since we’re talking about a huge group of institutionalized people and worse yet Canadian Political institutionalized people I fear that it may take a while. The Liberals were in power a long time; that’s a lot of grown in idiocy and complacency. I’m a little shocked that the Tories have turned out to be so… I don’t know the exact word… venal? They’re not stupid exactly but they’re so… … Republican? No maybe that’s too harsh. I don’t know. It puzzles me why the NDP aren’t doing better though. Is the Green Party sucking all their blood or something?
Scott H. Payne
November 20th, 2009 at 3:00 pm
The Green Party did pick up the 3 points that the Liberals shed.
In the US there wouldn’t even have been hearings. Which is the country in North America that holds people without trial or accusation? Hmm.. not Canada or Mexico, it’s somewhere in between those two
Don Newman wrote an excellent piece on Parliament’s current poisonous climate. He traces the current contemptuous behaviour of the Conservative party back to its true origins as a regional protest party. I think this is largely sound. The Reform Party was entirely shut out from government for the entirety of its existence. The old Conservative hands in Parliament are gone, and the ones operating within the bureaucracy have little in common with the Reform-lite brand that’s currently running the country. The current Conservatives simply do not understand how to operate government, and cannot acknowledge that there are rules that must be followed. But they have a proven record of cheating reality – Harper’s outright lies about the coalition government being the most obvious example – and they will likely continue, as long as Canadians remain entrenched in apathy and/or pathological hatred of the Liberal brand.
North
November 21st, 2009 at 7:47 am
Zach, I generally agree but lets call a spade a spade. The Liberals are not in governing shape right now. They ran the country for like two decades and did a none too shabby job of it but that much time in power is bad for a party in terms of electoral fighting trim. They gotten metaphorically fat and they’ve grown a lot of rather shitty politicians into their hierarchy. Normally the other mature party would seize power at this point and the Liberals would be looking at a few cycles as the opposition party honing their electoral skills and discovering the incompetents in their ranks and heaving them out. There was an excellent post here on a league a while back about the usefulness of an effective opposition party that I’d recommend. The problem is that the other original “adult party” turned into a pumpkin in the 90’s and then this petulant republican light version has grown up in their place. So everything is in a terrible flux because even in the state they’re in now Iggy’s Liberals are close to being able to win the elections anyhow. This prevents house cleaning because their base doesn’t want to tear their party apart and clean house when it’s possible to get back into power. It’s like housecleaning; you don’t pull all the stuff in your garage out on the lawn to sort/throw away if you think the neighbors are showing up for tea at 3 pm.
I’ll admit that I am honestly surprised that none of the other parties have stepped up. But the Canadian left wing seems to be terribly fractured and with the PQ just sort of sitting there like a semi inert seat holding blob I guess there isn’t a constituency outside the Liberal caucus big enough to take over and run things while Papa Lib is sleeping off his hangover.
Regarding the national reputation, I suspect that Layton’s plan is to go after the Tory voters who are going to be turned off by this. Everybody who is strongly anti-torture is already in the lib/NDP camp and is always going to be. People in the Tory camp who were willing to support torture because it’s effective are going to be dissuaded by an argument from national reputation (which also alters the effectiveness equation, as being tied to torture can make Canada a target for future terror attacks) or they are going to be so gung-ho that nothing is going to get at them. So I see where he’s coming from, making that argument.
Scott H. Payne
November 23rd, 2009 at 9:34 am
Fair ball, I can see that angle. And, you know, I don’t think Layton was wrong to make the argument he did, at least per se. At the same time, I think Layton could have credibly made both arguments, could have, in fact, tied the two together strongly and credibly. My concern is that by giving in to the Conservative criticism and tacking to a different angle, you give their arguments merit and thereby weaken the moral case against torture. That is, of course, an inadvertent outcome, perhaps, but it is something I’m concerned about all the same. I would be happier if Layton and the NDP stood firm on the moral grounds against torture regardless of the recipients and found ways of tying those arguments in to arguments about national interest/security. I recognize that sometimes politicking is necessary and that the NDP desperately need to find way out of their 15-18% rut, but I don’t happen to think, in the long run, this is a topic on which they should be willing to bend or about which the should seem hesitant.
I agree. It’s sad that a party (Reform) that was built at least partly on strong public desire for greater participatory democracy has degenerated into one so contemptuous of the public.
As for Layton’s comment on “Canada’s reputation” – I think he’s trying to make his argument about this about Canada rather than about the human rights of detainees, because the Conservatives take every possible opportunity to say the NDP cares more about the Taliban than about the lives of Canadian troops and he’s probably getting a tiny bit sick of that line of argument. All the NDP’s supporters know this is about human rights, and I think other Canadians who oppose torture are as well.
The NDP have to be strong and persistent on this, as well as convincing the Liberal to vote for it. The Liberals are in no position to take point given that 1. they were responsible for handing people over to be tortured until 2006 and 2. Ignatieff has taken plenty of flak (deservedly) for supporting some forms of torture (sleep deprivation, noise, possibly stress positions – what he calls “torture lite” and I call torture) and people will go after him for hypocrisy if he makes a cause out of this.
I fear nothing’s going to get done. I’m not writing to the government about this, because they’ve made their position perfectly clear. The only thing in the balance is whether the Liberals support a public hearing into this – I know my MP will (Keith Martin, he’s a good sort, left Reform before the decay took hold) but I’m not so sure about the rest of the party.
Frankly, I don’t see this creating enough public uproar to tilt an election one way or the other, so the Conservatives are just going to keep throwing roadblocks in the way of truth or action and muddying the waters.
I think, if we’re going to stay in Afghanistan, the optimal solution is to start building and running our own POW camps. There’s no way we can hand people over to the Afghans without them being tortured – and that’s how this whole thing is more complicated than the US torture scandals. The solution for the US was fairly simple: stop torturing people. We’re supposed to be “capacity building”, meaning we get the Afghan army and police to do as much as possible, such as holding on to prisoners. At minimum, we need better tracking of prisoners, better access and information for the Red Cross, and a presumption of innocence for people the army isn’t sure were fighting them, so we’re detaining as few people as possible.
In a normal combat situation this wouldn’t apply, because people shooting at us because the Taliban hired them for the week and hardened Taliban solidiers would both be POWs and treated decently under the Geneva Conventions. But in this kind of an occupation/civil war/”capacity building” type of mission, there are no right choices. Stay and help an army, police force and illegitimate government that are morally and ethically destestable, or leave and risk handing over the country to people who manage to be even worse.
Zach
November 21st, 2009 at 11:16 pm
“I agree. It’s sad that a party (Reform) that was built at least partly on strong public desire for greater participatory democracy has degenerated into one so contemptuous of the public.”
As much as I disagree with Reform and the current Conservative party, I don’t regard them as deliberately contemptuous of the public. Rather, I think they’ve successfully used public distaste for government, or at least an abstract conception of government, to run roughshod over legitimate discourse, because they know that most Canadians think they are too busy to waste their time on politics. You’re right when you say this will not trigger an election, because most Canadians can’t be bothered to care. They care about Canada’s human rights record in an abstract sense, but there is no current collective will that could radically affect government sentiment.
No, most Canadians prefer to remain uninvolved in participating or even understanding the country’s issues. The lies about the coalition government were ably matched by a remarkable ignorance by the general public about how the country functions. As long as Canadians continue to think so little of their government, and to separate Parliament and the government from the imagined community, the Conservatives are only responding to a demand.
Katherine
November 22nd, 2009 at 12:06 am
I see them as contemptuous of the public because of the low level of discourse they use. A Liberal MP agrees with the Goldstone report, and they call him an anti-Semite. They send out other mailers saying the Bloc supports child molesters. The arguments they use are self-evidently specious – as are the ones they use against Colvin when they accuse him of believing anything the Taliban says when he points out many of our prisoners aren’t actually Taliban. Colvin sees prisoners with scars from torture, and the Conservatives insist the people did it to themselves for the purpose of propaganda.
They aren’t using arguments they even expect people to believe. They aren’t using any arguments a reasonable person would believe. That shows a deep contempt for people’s intelligence.
Zach
November 22nd, 2009 at 11:24 pm
“They aren’t using any arguments a reasonable person would believe. That shows a deep contempt for people’s intelligence.”
But how can you explain their standing with the Canadian public? The majority of Canadians may or may not support the Conservatives, but a significant percentage do, enough to assure their continued governance. I agree; their arguments are generally nonsensical ramblings that have little attachment to reality. Yet enough Canadians either subscribe to them or tolerate them enough to continue the status quo.
I think where we differ is in our conceptions of the public. To me, the Canadian public consistently ignores any duty to keep informed, or to elevate dialogue. The public contributes to the lowly political discourse we face. The possibility of improving discourse is strongest when more people actively engage in the process, as opposed to cheerleading ridiculous talking points that have no basis in reality. I am not naive enough to think this will include some acknowledgment of culpability, or that the majority of Canadians will in fact engage in the process, but until more do, public dialogue is inherently contemptuous.
Ok. Well, how about rather than simply saying, “let’s accept Richard Colvin’s assessment, let’s look at the BASIS of his assessment. He suggests the warnings came from the Red Cross. However, it now appears, that in fact, the Red Cross never suggested the detainees were in fact tortured. Colvin was very clear in his evidnece, that the Red Cross never once alleged the detainees were tortured in any of the emails he refers to.
They complained of delays in transmitting information and inadequate identification of detainees.
Today, the man on the ground, General Rick Hillier, gave his assessment of Colvin’s so called “evidence”, stating, unequivocally, the suggestion that all or most detainees were tortured was “ludicrous”. The suggestion that they arrested “innocents” was also derided, General Hillier confirming most of those detained were detained after fierce fighting with gunpowder residue all over their bodies.
Today we mourn the death of 164 true innocents in Mumbai, killed by Muslim extremists.
Pardon me if I ask for a little more than the Red Cross was “worried” before I decide to put my Canadian soliders on the spot, alleging they committed some sort of ‘war crimes’.
When the mouthpieces trying, desperately, to give the Liberal party of Canada some credibility decide to take up arms to protect someone else’s life, putting their own life on the line to do it, I’ll listen. Until then, just say “thank-you” to General Hillier and step aside.