I guess the Globe and Mail’s agenda-pusher-in-chief, Paul Koring (in Washington, D.C.!) wasn’t able to get in touch with his source-in-residence, Prof. Attaran.  But he can still fall back on Prince Paul Champ (more at Update thoughts here)–Mr Koring’s latest:

British documents reveal new claims of detainee abuse

Mark
Ottawa

It’s OK to transfer Afghan detainees to the NDS at Kandahar. That’s what the High Court in London has ruled:

UK troops can continue to transfer Taliban suspects to Afghan detention but not to a Kabul site subject to an existing ban, the High Court has ruled.

The legal challenge by anti-war activist Maya Evans, from East Sussex, claimed the policy led to “horrible abuse” and violated international law.

Judges said the practise could continue with other detention facilities if existing safeguards were strengthened.

The government welcomed the decision and said monitoring was in place.

The High Court judges said Ms Evans had won “a partial victory” but had not succeeded in her attempt to stop all transfers.

Ms Evans’s lawyers told the High Court that detainees handed over to the National Directorate of Security (NDS), a secret service organisation in Afghanistan, had been tortured.

They said detainees had suffered beatings, electrocution, sleep deprivation, been forced into stress positions, and undergone whipping with rubber cables…

But the judges refused to rule the transfer policy unlawful, considering instead the individual history of each NDS detention facility – NDS Kabul, NDS Kandahar and NDS Lashkar Gah…

Transfers could lawfully be made to NDS Kandahar and NDS Lashkar Gah, “provided that existing safeguards are strengthened by observance of specified conditions”.

The judges also ruled that isolated examples of abuse at those facilities “are possible, but the operation of the monitoring system – including observance of the specified conditions – will be sufficient to guard against abuse on such a scale as to give rise to a real risk of torture or serious mistreatment”…

Note there is no mention of war crimes on the part of the UK government, its officials, or British troops, past or present.

So why is Ardent Amir, our prince amongst professors, still knotting his knickers and so eager to try to throw a judicial book on this side of the pond (“Judgement at Kandahar“, eh)?

…
Still, Canadian officials must take heed of the ruling, says Amir Attaran, a lawyer and University of Ottawa law professor who has waged a multi-pronged legal battle to stop the Canadian Forces’ prisoner transfers.

“We’ve been put on notice by our closest ally that torture is real in their experience,” he said.

He added the British ruling flies in the face of the Canadian Conservative government’s positions that Ottawa has never exposed itself to credible allegations of complicity in torture in Afghanistan.

Mr. Attaran says Canadian officials must now change their prisoner-transfer policies, or run the risk of criminal charges. He said he may even try to initiate some proceedings himself.

“I have zero compunctions about taking steps of prosecuting Canadians for war crimes,” he said…

Has not the good professor noticed that the London court has ruled that transfers at Kandahar–where the CF do them–are in order with appropriate monitoring? Which is what we have been doing for some time now?  He “says Canadian officials must now change their prisoner-transfer policies”.  Why?  Our current policies seem to be exactly the sort of which the London court has just approved.

The dear fellow should get a grip.  Why no “zero compunctions” about going after the Taliban for war crimes?  Why not even any apparent interest?  By the way, I’ve seen no claims of  possible war crimes involving their forces made by UK politicians.  So why the obsession here (more)?  Some grip needed indeed.

Update thoughts: One awaits a reaction from Prince Paul–he’s a champ, this at his website:

…
MacKay says allegations in torture scandal ‘ridiculous’
November 19, 2009 – CTV, Canada AM (Interviewee: Amir Attaran); NewsNet (Interviewee: Paul Champ) – see menu next to video…

And just saw the Globe and Mail’s print headline for their story above quoting Prof. Attaran:

British detainees ruling puts heat on Canada

How, one wonders. This is the subhead from the online version of the story:

Following a recent British High Court of Justice ruling on U.K. transfers of Afghan prisoners, the pressure is on for Canadian officials to shape up their acts, too

Looks like some print headline writer decided to get the agenda right on top in big bold.

Predate: The Globe’s number one go-to guy sure is hard to satisfy (along with the Dippers):

Detainee documents deal is a mess, critic says
…
University of Ottawa professor Amir Attaran, an advocate for greater disclosure on detainees [amonst, er, other things, eh? rather limited descriptor], calls the deal a failure.

“It is an own-goal for the opposition if they sign this agreement, surpassing any fumble seen in the World Cup [more here],” Professor Attaran said.

Prof. Attaran laid out six criticisms of this version of the deal…

Mark
Ottawa

The latest allegations against the Conservative government being circulated in the media are based on unsubstantiated, uncorroborated assertions made by none other than Amir Attaran, law professor at the University of Ottawa. The entire premise to this story is that Mr.Attaran has seen portions of the unredacted documents, so he says, and that within them contain the smoking gun of evidence for complicity in torture by Canada’s government.

It’s already been widely circulated today that Mr.Attaran has strong ties to the Liberal party. During the 2008 federal election, the Conservatives pointed out that the non-partisan professor had donated “at least” $1,000 to the Liberals and NDP since 2006.

While it certainly doesn’t make one a partisan because one donates to a political party, when a man is asserting, without proof, that the government is directly involved in “war crimes”, one needs to assume all potential conflicts of interest.

Although the professor has never been a member of any political party, Mr.Attaran donated to former Liberal leader Stephane Dion, and also to federal NDP MP Dawn Black, whom he met during his work on the Afghan detainee file. He’s also donated to his local MP, NDP MP Paul Dewar. Mr.Dewar, as many will note, is the NDP Foreign Affairs Critic, and has been calling for withdrawal from Afghanistan since the beginning.

He also donated to Michael Ignatieff, who was his boss when he was on faculty at Harvard University. Mr.Attaran was an adjunct lecturer in Public Policy at Harvard University, publishing research as part of the Center for International Development and the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government. As it turns out, Michael Ignatieff directly intervened in order to save Mr.Attaran’s job.

Amir Attaran has a history of stirring the hornets nest without proof. Whether that’s out of genuine concern for human rights, or to cast aspersions on the Conservative government, we can’t know for sure, since conclusive evidence has never been forthcoming.

Back in February of 2007, he began the whole Afghan detainee allegations when he said he obtained proof that three Afghan prisoners were abused based on government documents obtained under the Access to Information Act. Not only did Mr.Attaran accuse Canadians of complicity in torture, he accused the detainees of being beaten by Canadian soldiers themselves.

A military investigation was launched immediately, as Defence Minister Gordon O’Connor came under attack. Amir Attaran had sent the information on the Military Police Complaints Commission, a civilian-run body that investigates complaints. There was no evidence of any mistreatment at the time of the investigation.

An April 23, 2007 article in the Toronto Star said of the investigation that Mr.Attaran was casting a “serious shadow” on Canada’s human-rights credibility, the latest blow to an oft criticized agreement “signed in the waning days of Paul Martin’s Liberal government.”

But along with Amir Attaran, another professor made his way into the spotlight in 2007, saying that the door had been opened for Canadian troops to be tried as “war criminals” if prisoners had been found to be tortured in Afghan prisons. Michael Byers, professor of political science at University of British Columbia, urged the Harper government at the time to build its own prisoner detention facility.

Michael Byers also has strong ties to the opposition parties in Canada. On July 2, 2008, Mr.Byers announced he was seeking the NDP nomination for the federal riding of Vancouver Centre, a seat held by Liberal Party of Canada incumbent Hedy Fry since 1993. After losing in the election, Mr.Byers then suggested an alliance between the Liberals and NDP, in order to assure that the left wouldn’t split the vote in ridings that the Conservatives could win.

A military police commission finally ended the controversy started by Mr.Attaran, declaring in early October of 2008 that Canadian military police did not abuse three suspected Taliban prisoners in April 2006.

In an online question and answer period from March of 2007 on the Globe and Mail, however, Mr.Attaran clearly had preconceived notions about our performance in the field:

It pains me to see the Canadian Forces reneging on their policy and obligation to uphold the Geneva Conventions, and it appalls me to see my government making excuses — some of them which are now proved untrue — to have stuck with torturers.

Amir Attaran contacted me recently via email, lawyer in tow, over comments I made about him in the National Post, referring to him as “hardly a human rights expert”, because he has a case before the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal to get OHIP to fund his wife’s invitro fertilization.

He threatened me with defamation and asked for a retraction. But what I found very interesting was the email address of Mr.Attaran’s lawyer, whom he had carbon copied in his correspondence with me. It’s none other than Paul Champ, the representative for Abousfian Abdelrazik, and public advocate in the case of Omar Khadr and Maher Arar. Talk about bringing a bazooka to a fair comment fight.

Mr.Champ has been vocal in the media on the Afghan detainee file as well, condemning Rick Hillier publicly for “trivializing torture”. Mr.Champ, representing Amnesty International and the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association, and retired diplomat Gar Pardy, former head of consular affairs, testified in December at an informal hearing of the Afghan detainee committee.

Mr.Champ was questioned by Liberal MP Bob Rae, their Foreign Affairs Critic, who responded:

“In my view, it’s an absurd statement to make and it’s a trivialization of what’s happening in Afghanistan and the absolutely terrible conditions in Afghan prisons. It’s not being frustrated with a prisoner and you hit him with a truncheon or something like that… This is planned, systemic torture. And to compare it to a Canadian prison, I would suggest, is indicating someone is not taking this matter very seriously at all.”

As of this writing, no evidence of Canadian complicity in torture has been provided.

Update

A little backgrounder. Damian Brooks had this right back in 2007.

Amir Attaran expressed “concerns” at a University of Ottawa conference in March of 2006:

“Soldiers risk involuntarily becoming accessory to torture, a war crime.”

This is a sort of cart before the horse thing, since the allegations of torture surfaced after Amir Attaran went looking for evidence of them. Any evidence.

Don’t tell Bill Prout, but Mullah Abdul Qayyum, freed from Guantanamo Bay more than two years ago after pleading he only wanted to see his family again, has become a senior Taliban commander in Afghanistan.

Thanks to the recent job openings in his organization, Mullah Qayyum is seen as a candidate to become the next second in command to Supreme Taliban Commander Mullah Omar.

This information seriously compromises the idea of closing Guantanamo Bay and sending the prisoners back to their own countries. Mullah Qayyum isn’t the first innocent farmer to become a senior commander in a terrorist organization upon his release. U.S. officials believe that two Saudis who were released from Guantanamo, one in 2006 and the other in 2007, have become heavily involved in al-Qaeda.

The SITE Intelligence Group, a US-based terrorist tracking organization, released a video last year showing speeches from al-Qaeda leaders in the Arabian Peninsula. One of those leaders was Guantanamo Prisoner Number 372, released back to Saudi Arabia in 2007, and now deputy commander of a regional group of al-Qaeda. The former detainee, Abu Sufyan al-Azdi al-Shahri, went through the “Saudi rehabilitation program”, but has resurfaced in Yemen with al-Qaeda.

Mullah Qayyum was given charge of the military campaign in southern Afghanistan about 14 months ago, which means he has been leading insurgent attacks against Canadian and coalition soldiers as they clear out Marjah during Operation Mushtaruk. He was reported captured in Quetta, Pakistan, last month, but those rumours have turned out to be false.

Meanwhile, last night the CBC’s Terry Milewski reported that Ottawa law professor Amir Attaran has found the smoking gun of Ottawa’s complicity in torture on Afghan detainees. Mr.Attaran claims, without any substantiating evidence whatsoever, that in the redacted government documents ordered released to Parliament is the proof that some detainees were ordered tortured by the Canadian government.

The entire report is based on the supposition of Mr.Attaran that evidence could be found which might possibly link the government to acts of complicity in torture. The report even includes an ominous looking photograph of JTF-2 special forces capturing Taliban detainees. Unfortunately for the accuracy of the CBC, that picture is from 2002, whereas the allegations pertaining to the government surround the time between late 2005 and early 2007. Which means that other than Mr.Colvin’s remarks that apprehending “high-value targets” would require special forces, there is no evidence to suggest their involvement whatsoever.

Of course, while the above story about a released Guantanamo Bay inmate running battles that kill Canadian troops will get quickly buried, you can be sure that come Monday the story will be “JTF-2 renditioned Afghans under orders from Canada to have them tortured in Afghan prisons.”

h/t BR

The Liberal Party held a public forum on consular issues today, in which “human rights experts” accused the federal Conservative government of deliberately not helping Canadians abroad because of racial or religious bias. Their selective consular assistance, they argued, is based on “inept, cruel and often racist” reasons:

“If I were a [Canadian] Muslim, I’d be quite terrified of travelling,” Amir Attaran, a law professor from the University of Ottawa, told a public forum on consular issues organized by the Liberals.

What’s interesting about this statement is that, unlike most other people, Mr.Attaran apparently isn’t concerned about the prospect of his plane being blown up by insane Muslim fundamentalists. Nor does he seem to think that the widespread perception of that danger is at all based on the previous actions of insane Muslim fundamentalists, but rather a racist government.

Yes, well, the problem with that theory is that the Conservative government, aside from having numerous MPs, aides, and government workers from all kinds of diverse backgrounds, including Muslims, sees the immigrant communities in Canada as their big ticket going forward:

“I strongly argued that the future of Canadian conservatism had to go through the increasingly diverse immigrant communities,” Mr. Kenney said in an interview.

His contention was that new Canadians are overwhelmingly conservative in their values. They’ve been in thrall to the Liberal Party of the Trudeau era largely because the Liberals introduced large-scale non-white immigration to Canada.

At any rate, Amir Attaran is hardly a “human rights expert”. The man has a case before the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal to try and get taxpayers to pay for his wife’s in-vitro fertilization. Apparently it’s now a “human right” to get other people to make your wife pregnant.