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.

Royal Canadian Dragoons, Bravo Squadron, Corporal Judd Walsh mans the front gate of Patrol Base Marianne using a 50 caliber machine gun attached to a Light Armoured Vehicle (LAV). Photo credit: Master Corporal Matthew McGregor

Despite the myriad sources of information from which to draw in order to write a column that has a grain of truth to it, it would appear that the usual suspects from the usual media sources insist on getting it wrong. You can hardly blame them. Well, actually you can, but it will hardly help. At this point, people are merely going to believe what they want to believe, and truth be damned. When it comes to Afghanistan, has it ever been any different?

Thomas Walkom, in particular, seems to get it wrong the most frequently. This rather pathetic self-flagellation of Canadians throwing their hands up in the air and making excuses that nothing else could have been done, is as depressing as their inability to get basic facts correct. Journalists are treating this fluid battle with ever-changing dynamics as something static, as though everybody has morphed into Francis Fukuyama, mourning the end of history. Pakistan capturing half the Taliban leadership in the past month? Barely a whisper.

It’s certainly easier to report on a story if you have a prearranged view on what’s actually happening. The evolution of the detainee story is a prime example. What began as little more than hearsay from Amir Attaran in the CBC, became a report in the Canadian Press, which became a fact in the minds of the official opposition in the House of Commons, as Jack Layton and Ujjal Dosanjh asked ridiculous questions about secret spies, torture, and rendition. The latter word, as I mentioned before, being technically incorrect by definition alone.

The question is, what would make the critics of the treatment of captured detainees happy? It’s as though people actually expect that we can fight a battle against the Taliban, who abide by no rules of warfare, wear no uniforms, and respect no international laws, without ever making a mistake. It’s already disturbing enough that people seem more concerned about the treatment of men who are fighting for a way of life considered barbaric by just about everybody who isn’t an Islamic Fundamentalist, than they are for the women or children used as human meat shields in the Taliban quest to outlast our resolve. But to ignore these crimes, while sifting through every prison, poring through every report, to attempt to find one instance of injustice that might undermine our moral cause, is quite simply disgusting.

As Bruce writes on his blog:

So if we accept that the Afghan justice system was or is in no state to receive our detainees in anything like a just or efficient fashion, we are certainly justified in looking around for alternatives. The alternative the Americans came up with was American-run detention in Bagram, and we can see how well that’s worked out for them. I suppose a sort of Timurid approach of refusing to take any prisoners at all, ever, could be an option: not sure how well that would go over at home, though. Not really many other alternatives than those, though. Take them home in our kit bags? Soylent Green? What?

Good questions. What would make people happy? Take no prisoners? Inhuman. Hand prisoners over to their own legal authority? Inhumane. Build our own prisons? Well, then you get the complaints that it’s too expensive, or it’s an extra-judicial gulag, or it’s a sign of colonialism. And before long you can be sure Amir Attaran would find a document which proved that a detainee slipped in the shower and cut himself, and we’d be back in permanent scandal mode anyway.

The truth is that there’s probably nothing good enough for the critics of the Afghan war. Trying to appease people who are already dealing in bad faith is pointless. Trying to sanitize warfare is a comfortable illusion of a generation of Canadians who have been raised to believe that our military exists to “keep the peace”. They would be happy if we were deployed to sit in Kandahar Air Field with blue helmets and United Nations’ flags signifying the 1% of the province officially safe from the reach of the Taliban. That way, when the Taliban is massacring people 100 metres from the Air Field, we can cite our rules of engagement directive of non-interference, and never get our hands dirty. Sure, people will die. But at least we won’t run the risk of being the ones who handed over the Taliban fighter that wound up falling down in the shower.

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