This Is What a Lack of Democracy Looks Like
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.”
November 20, 2009 15 Comments
