Photo: Liberal Party, Flickr

I don’t think the charmingly named “Liberal Express”, a bus tour that has spent many kilometres traversing the vast hills and plains of Canada, has been a mistake. It’s normal for the opposition party to try and use down-time to increase its visibility in the media and, more importantly, in the minds of Canadians. So when Michael Ignatieff embarked on his cross-country tour to meet and greet Canadians, I didn’t think it was a bad idea.

Since the Conservatives have mainly seemed to go into cottage country and frontiers beyond during the summer months, the Liberal party have had an opportunity to capitalize on the lull in messaging from the big blue machine. But what kind of message have they been getting out? Have the Liberals finally expanded upon their oft-touted plans to balance the budget while simultaneously continuing stimulus spending? Did they explain the fiscal logic behind their desire to erase the deficit while also rolling out a universal child care program?

Alas, we know that the off-season campaign trail is no time for clear answers. It’s much easier to hammer on the Conservative party with ironic messages about how the government is creating a climate of fear, and then proceed to make frightening statements about how scary the Conservatives are.

For instance, on a stop in the Liberal Express tour in West Vancouver today, Mr.Ignatieff said that Conservative politicians have tried to make people “afraid of people you don’t even know”.

“Politicians should shut up and let these people do their job,” Mr.Ignatieff declared, adding “we must always be a haven in a heartless world.”

But it isn’t scary Conservatives who are making people afraid of Tamils. According to a Leger Marketing poll, 52% of self-identified NDP voters think the Tamil boat should have been turned away as it approached Canada. In fact, a majority of political supporters across the spectrum, except for the Liberals, believe that the Tamils should have been turned away and escorted back to Sri Lanka by the Canadian Navy. This includes 65% of Bloc Quebecois voters and 62% of Green voters.

Mr.Ignatieff also slammed the Conservatives for “smearing” civil servant Richard Colvin over the handling of Afghan detainees.

Ah yes, Richard Colvin, the darling of the Liberal Party. You’ll find plenty of Richard Colvin all over the Liberal website, touting him as some kind of whistleblowing hero over allegations of torture in Afghanistan.

But what you won’t find are the names Gavin Buchan and Major-General Timothy Grant, two men who gave testimony to the Parliamentary Committee for the mission in Afghanistan on April 28, that directly contradicts Richard Colvin. That’s because neither of those men provided the narrative of torture, war crimes, and rendition that has been the modus operandi of the Liberals for over a year now.

Following the war crimes card, Mr.Ignatieff played his other go-to suit by saying the Conservatives have ignored Omar Khadr in Guantanamo Bay. Which, of course, is only telling half of the story. Omar Khadr has been detained in Cuba for eight years now, four of which took place under the Chretien-Martin governments. The only thing more disingenuous than demanding to know about alleged torture which may or may not have taken place under a Liberal government, is to inquire why nobody from the Conservative government has demanded the repatriation of a “child soldier” who sat in detention for the first four years under the reigning Liberals.

The Liberals have been masters of making you “afraid of people you don’t even know” for over six years now, beating on the hidden agenda rug and making absurd statements that are quite easily refuted. And yet of the many opportunities where they might have a legitimate cause to attack — the deficit, the spending, the bureaucracy — there is but a whimper, with no answers or alternatives to offer.

So while the Liberal Express may not be a “flop”, as some in the media have termed it, there’s certainly nothing new to offer beyond a novelty bus tour and Mr.Ignatieff’s rare appearance outside of formal speaking events in academia. But hey, at least he’s out there selling himself and his party and not “MIA” as he was last summer. For the Liberal Party, this can actually be called an improvement.

As if you needed any more evidence of the Liberal party of Canada’s singularly selfish strategy on Afghanistan, the front page of their website has a pretty snazzy looking map of the country, followed by a link to the Afghan detainee chronology.

Interesting chronology. Diplomat Richard Colvin features in it as some kind of central hero to a story, with the first mention coming in the sixth paragraph:

April 2006: Canadian diplomat Richard Colvin arrives in Afghanistan.

Richard Colvin then appears 26 more times on the same page.

But nowhere is there mention of the testimony given to the Parliamentary Committee for the mission in Afghanistan on April 28 from Gavin Buchan, Political Director of Canada’s reconstruction team in Kandahar from April 2006 to July of 2007, and representative of the DoD from October of 2007 to February of 2009. Nor does it mention the testimony of Major-General Timothy Grant on the same day, who served as Commander in Kandahar from November of 2006 to August of 2007.

Perhaps that’s because their testimony contradicts that of Richard Colvin’s and doesn’t provide quite the narrative of torture, war crimes, and rendition that the Liberal Party is looking for? I’m betting that’s it.

The picture on their website is almost a metaphor for their involvement in this mission. It’s some place on a map, slightly out of focus, coloured pink so that we can distinguish between it and the border of Pakistan and Turkmenistan. Anything beyond this vague notion of a faraway place where people are tortured isn’t essential to their central theme that the Conservative government is guilty of war crimes.

If you haven’t read Christie Blatchford’s fiery redemption piece from her earlier fall from grace at the Globe and Mail, then you can’t truly appreciate the full impact of the new information on the so-called “Afghan detainee torture scandal”, nor the extent to which the media has abdicated its responsibility of providing fair and impartial news.

As she writes in her article, few in the Ottawa press gallery have bothered to report on testimony to the Special Parliamentary Committee on Afghanistan given by Gavin Buchan, the former political director and senior official on the ground in Kandahar before he was replaced by lionized “whisteblower” hero, Richard Colvin. They were, after all, busy excoriating Rahim Jaffer and Nazim Gillani in the unending “busty hookers” saga, the same story that’s been leading because it’s bleeding for about 3 weeks now.

Major General Tim Grant, the commander of the Canadian military effort in Afghanistan during the same approximate time period, came to testify before the committee on Wednesday, and provided evidence along with Mr.Buchan that collectively provides a rather strong rebuttal to the claims of the whistleblower. Yet shamefully, this wasn’t reported with anywhere near the kind of energy and outrage as the “torture-rendition-war crimes” stories that brought Liberal MP after NDP spokesperson before cameras to talk about how much the Harper government is damaging our international reputation.

It wouldn’t surprise me to find the Ottawa press gallery of scandal-screaming sensationalists try and pass off their infotainment news as being more important than the truth. More than a few journalists have looked at their six figure salaries while trying to decide on whether to do real investigative journalism and being above the fold on page one, and chosen the latter. And boy, nothing sells quite like made-up stories of Canadians being “complicit” in torturing people, does it?

Why, the media had the Liberal and NDP voters so whipped up in a frenzy over it that they were calling for a veritable impromptu trial for Stephen Harper and the gang for war crimes, despite the fact that none of these alleged crimes have even been confirmed to have been committed yet. But the fair and balanced, impartial news networks like the CBC would never sensationalize something that wasn’t absolutely factual beyond a reasonable doubt, would they? You can trust them! They took ethics classes in journalism school, after all.

Perhaps the biggest rotting fish head in this entire affair is the fact that people are used to casting the worst kinds of aspersions on the Conservative Party to such an exaggerated degree, that the media groupthink had no choice but to oblige a willing public lapping up every last drop of pathetic manufactured innuendo. Let’s get Amir Attaran in front of a camera to tell us about all those documents he’s seen but can’t show us, and quickly! Hearsay and conjecture are valid forms of prosecutorial evidence in the court of public opinion, and the public jury isn’t too picky about it either.

If the government and the military are, at a later date, exonerated of all charges and allegations by the so-called whistleblowers, there will still be some penance to pay for those who participated in stirring the pot. The manner in which the opposition has acted has been nothing short of shameful, particularly at a time when our nation is involved in a military combat mission in which Canadian soldiers put their lives on the line to protect innocent women and children.

When all is said and done on the Afghan file, I think it will be remembered who stood behind the people struggling for a rudimentary democracy, and who decided to use wartime Taliban propaganda to score political points and sell newspapers.

RELATED

Tim Powers has also weighed in on this. No word on when the CBC bloggers will pull their heads out of their…

NATIONAL POST

I wrote a very modified version of the piece above for the National Post, including quotes from the testimony of Maj-Gen Grant and Gavin Buchan. You can read it here…

Christie Blatchford wrote a hard-hitting article about Afghan detainees on Friday makes mention of testimony given to the Special Committee on the Canadian Mission in Afghanistan [AFGH] on Wednesday, April 28.

Aside from a few references in the media, littlehas been printed as to the contents of the meeting. What is significant about the testimony is that it serves as a rebuttal to the claims made by diplomat Richard Colvin that Canadian Forces and the Department of Defence ignored warnings that torture was commonplace in Afghan prisons, and that this was “standard operating procedure.”

Read more…

Photo: Combat Camera, Canadian Forces

The Canadian Press has released what will surely add to the brushfire burning over the allegations of Canadian complicity, at times changing to direct involvement, in alleged torture of alleged Taliban detainees. But as though the somehow sinister speculation that JTF-2 has been involved in apprehending “high-value” targets, an oft-repeated term found only in testimony from low-ranking diplomat Richard Colvin, wasn’t enough, now we’re told that CSIS has been playing a “crucial role” as interrogators of a “vast swath” of captured Taliban fighters.

What’s most interesting about these articles of late, beginning with Professor Amir Attaran’s, and moving on down the line to this latest one, isn’t what is being written. It’s what is not being written.

What exactly is a “vast swath” of Taliban fighters supposed to look like? As with the supposed torture, and the supposed involvement of shadowy JTF-2 special forces, we’re supposed to use our imagination. I suppose.

According to the Canadian Press, CSIS began working with military police intelligence officers in Kandahar as the war “spiralled” out of control in 2006. This information comes from heavily redacted witness transcripts filed with the Military Police Complaints Commission.

The involvement of CSIS adds a new dimension to the controversy, the Canadian Press writes, surrounding the handling and alleged torture of prisoners. So to recap, the involvement of Canadian intelligence officials, unbeknownst until now, somehow compounds the unproven allegations of special forces involvement in apprehending unproven “high-value targets”, who were alleged to have been tortured. But this can’t be proven either.

The document obtained by the Canadian Press states that Canadian Military police weren’t involved in the interviewing or interrogation of detainees. That would have been left to some other trade [meaning a military profession other than MP] that had special training in interrogation. Unnamed “sources” in the article speculate that the redacted versions refer to CSIS.

Milblogger BruceR doesn’t seem to understand what the big deal of CSIS involvement is. If anything, he writes, the allegations of military commanders putting the orderly transfer of detainees ahead of intel-gathering seems more worthy of pursuit. All the Globe article seems to say is that military police aren’t trained to interrogate, and that Canadian Forces weren’t trained to interrogate either.

But throwing a wrench into the idea of CSIS interrogating “vast swaths” of Talib fighters is the 72-hour rule that was in place in 2007. All detainees were of very limited intelligence value at the time, since ISAF was obliged to turn over captured detainees to Afghan authorities within 72 hours. With a such a short time to get any information, the apprehension of fighters was more of a catch and release program than anything else.

As Bruce writes, during his time serving in Kandahar, most Taliban were not even “subject to even our initial questioning.” Most were captured in the field by the Afghan police or NDS [National Directorate of Security, like CSIS] which towed along with Canadian troops. Even the idea of outsourcing interrogation [or torture] to Afghans is flawed, since outsourcing the intel would imply we could get it back, and NDS is as likely to share information with other nations as any intelligence agency would be [read: little to none].

The Canadian Press article observes, without a hint of irony, that the revelations of CSIS being involved in interrogation or torture are also unusual, since CSIS would have no specialized knowledge of doing so either. So what this article has really done is paint a picture that neither outsourcing nor internalizing advanced interrogation techniques is very likely to have occurred under Canadian ISAF command.

As of the time of this writing, no government documents, declassified or otherwise, has suggested CSIS has done anything wrong or illegal in Afghanistan. Which means that, other than speculation, we’re back at square one.

Update

The Libs are buying this hook, line, and sinker. They think Amir Attaran’s assertions are unimpeachable.

Bruce Rolston, a Canadian intelligence officer with the Army reserves who served in Afghanistan, points out how Toronto Star Columnist Jim Travers’ story keeps changing about facts surrounding Afghan detainees.

The story goes from Richard Colvin’s testimony that three of the four detainees that had been transferred from the NDS in Kandahar to the NDS in Kabul disappeared…

… to a Travers story that the prisoners were caught by the JTF2…

… to a Travers story today that these were “high-value enemy targets” who vanished after being transferred to Afghans by “Canadian commandos”.

At this rate, the next Jim Travers column will claim the three detainees were senior al-Qaeda commanders.

As Bruce points out, there’s no direct evidence that JTF2 was involved or that these detainees were “high-value”.

Update

Damian Brooks takes issue with Jim Travers, and not for the first time, as you will see.