The Death Of Outrage

Don't expect too many people to get upset by this, for too long. Since Canadians don't give a shit about handing our own children over for torture, I doubt they will much care if our government is handing over foreign children. They are all the wrong color and belong to the wrong religion, for Canadian tastes, I'm afraid.

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An Unfortunate Event

This is the reason strictly following the Geneva Conventions is a good thing. Always remember, it is not about whether one loves an enemy that determines how a prisoner should be treated. It is how you want your soldiers treated in return, if captured, that determines how you treat your prisoners. I am not naive, if these poor men are mistreated, the people who have been gung ho about torturing Taliban prisoners will be "shocked, shocked" at the treatment of good Christian souls. The fact that they were sanguine about torture when it was the other guy, will be conveniently forgotten. What we will hear instead is "See, we were right, the Taliban wouldn't live up to the Geneva Conventions anyway". Hate induced blindness is an unfortunate side effect of war.

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Well Let's Not Even Try Then

Robopundit, with his finger on the pulse of Official Opposition thinking, pens this bizarre paragraph today:

Iacobucci's document review serves the useful purpose of putting on hold a test of wills between Parliament and the Prime Minister that could provoke an election the Opposition doesn't want now and would be foolish to ever fight on the abuse issue. But the ultimate result will be more foot-dragging if Iacobucci is kept too far from the truth to explain why ministers let generals play loose and fast with Afghan prisoners. (emphasis mine)

This logic is, not to put too fine a point on it, insane. It is the logic that will keep Harper in power forever. The thinking goes, "We can't defeat Harper on X, because he has a solid, if small block behind him, while we have a larger, but divided block with us. Best wait until we can find an issue over which everyone coalesces around us." The opposition parties and in particular the Liberals, have been waiting for that magic issue for four plus years. That is not how it works. As Warren Kinsella is fond of saying, campaigns matter. It seems to me that Canadians would see the worth of having an election over whether or not our government is comprised of war criminals. And even if that is not so, some hills are worth dying over. Holding a government to account over torture, is one of those hills.

Also, does anyone believe Harper would like to dissolve the Parliament and hold an election to avoid being held in contempt by Parliament? How would that look to the average voter two weeks after the end of prorogation? The opposition would have a field day with that. So, even from a crass political viewpoint, the opposition has little to lose by bringing forward its motion of privilege.

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Drip, Drip, Drip

Now CSIS has been implicated. No wonder the government is digging in for the final defense of Berlin. The opposition has no choice but to get those documents, now.

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Question Of The Day

When will the smears against Amir Attaran begin? We all know they are coming. It's what the Conservatives do.

Almost Instant Update: Oops, they already started, nearly a month ago. Very efficient, PMO. Way to go!

Later Thought: Oh and Terry Milewski had better watch his back. The Conservatives are not known to play well with reporters from the CBC who cross them. Just ask Krista Erikson. I just hope the CBC brass put up a better fight for him, than they did with Ms. Erikson.

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Liars

So, now it turns out that government ministers were meeting with the Red Cross in 2006. At this rate, Parliament will never be recalled again.

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The Ring Of Truth

An official in DFAIT says in the Globe and Mail, about the situation in Afghanistan after Harper took control:

“The few people … in Foreign Affairs that had been working on the [torture] file up until that point were basically told, there's a new regime in town, and it's going to be top-down. We're not looking so much for advice,”

Is it a stretch to believe Harper's people would carry that message? Not for me, either.

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Don Martin, C'Mon Down

Don Martin writes:

Okay, reality check here, one Afghan getting whacked around by some shoes in the middle of a war zone does not fit my definition of torture.

Don Martin, are you willing to take the Shoe Torture Challenge?

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On "Being Hit By A Shoe Is Not Torture"

For those who say being hit by a shoe is not torture, I have a proposition. If they themselves are willing to be hit by a shoe, repeatedly, with no power to tell the other person to stop, for as long as it lasts and no matter what damage is done to them and they come out the other side and say it isn't torture, I might listen to them. Otherwise, it is all just blah, blah, blah. Torture is about power and who holds it. It is about making the victim feel that his body is of no consequence and that another person holds the power to decide whether pain is inflicted upon it. It doesn't matter if it is a shoe or a whip. If you don't get to decide when enough is enough, you are being tortured.

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Did. Didn't.

Monty Python demonstrates the government's idea of "refuting" Richard Colvin.

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Rosie DiManno Got It Right

In May 2006 DiManno wrote:

The more pertinent question is why Canadian troops are handing over suspects to Afghan military commanders and their intelligence services when everybody knows that one of two things will likely happen Either the suspects will be let go, out of tribal and ethnic sympathies (the "get out of jail free card," as one exasperated Canadian major in Afghanistan put it to me last month), probably to redouble insurgency efforts, or, alternately, if their intelligence value is deemed to be sufficiently high, those prisoners will disappear into a black hole of injustice, somewhere inside Afghanistan's miserable jail system, never to be heard from again, subjected to who knows what tortures.

Canada quietly made that agreement with the Afghan government in a bilateral treaty signed last December, the thrust of which was to avoid handing over captured prisoners to the Americans because Canadians do not run their own military jails. Assuredly, some American soldiers, particularly military interrogators, disgraced themselves, and their country, by the indignities and even lethal treatment inflicted on captives in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

But so out of proportion to reality have these dismal incidents become - so exaggerated the scathing indictment of all U.S. troops, and America itself - that political optics now demand Canada abandon prisoners to the tender mercies of Afghan authorities instead, even though that country has no judicial institutions to speak of, no prisoner oversight system and a deeply ingrained culture of vengeance.

I'm not attacking Afghans, whom I admire. Their practices have always worked for them. They shouldn't work for us.

Canada, unlike the Dutch, did not even build into their prisoner transfer treaty assurances that humanitarian agencies such as the Red Cross monitor the treatment of these captives. And that makes us culpable in whatever harm befalls them. From: Military tries to massage message May 15, 2006

So, a few in the media anyway were giving warnings (but not in any sustained way). It is clear, at least to me that they were merely repeating what was common knowledge by everyone involved in the Afghan mission. Protests of "We didn't know" from the government are ludicrous on their face.

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Talk About Explaining

On Saturday, Christie Blatchford wrote:

I spent a good part of 2006 in Kandahar - three tours of between four to six weeks each in about 10 months, with another tour in '07 - as an embedded reporter, which means I traveled with Canadian troops. I counted on them to keep my ass safe, and they did. I liked them hugely. The experience was one of the most significant of my life (if not on a par with the drama of being, say, in a budget lockup) and I treasure every minute of it. I made some lifelong friends, and I love some of these men.

Yesterday it was reported that Richard Colvin wrote in 2007, about Asadullah Khalid :

"He runs at least one private detention facility, at which he personally has tortured detainees. ... His record is well known in Kandahar, including among the Canadian press corps."

If you put the two quotes together, they open some interesting avenues of questioning. The MSM needs to explain why, if this was common knowledge "among the Canadian press corps", its reporters were silent in 2006?

Update: To be fair, Paul Koring started ringing alarm bells about torture in general, as far back as March 2006.

Update 2: What is interesting is in Koring's March 2006 article, public warnings were being issued about our crappy agreement with the Afghan government. It is the first instance I can find where someone mentions that Canada might be complicit in torture. It is also interesting to note Hillier's response.

Among the most glaring differences between the two agreements is that the Dutch government insists on the right to follow, monitor and visit detainees it hands over to Afghan authorities.

Dutch military officers and diplomats can check up on the condition of anyone originally captured by Dutch troops.

No such provision appears in the Canadian "arrangement," as it is officially described.

"The Dutch agreement is written to genuinely protect detainees; the Canadian agreement is written with the clear intention of laundering them," said Amir Attaran, a law professor at the University of Ottawa, who believes that Canada may be complicit in the torture or abuse of detainees by handing them over without sufficient safeguards to the Afghan military.

The Canadian "arrangement" -- a two-page, 13-clause document signed Dec. 18 in Kabul by Chief of the Defence Staff General Rick Hillier -- includes no provision for Canadian officials to check up on what happens to detainees once they are handed over.

It does require that the International Committee of the Red Cross has that right.

Gen. Hillier, who signed the arrangement "for the minister of defence" has defended handing detainees over to Kabul's military and police as an important part of Canada's nation-building effort in Afghanistan.

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Congratulations Stephen Harper

You have managed to turn back the clock. You have taken Franklin Roosevelt's words: "They may be sons-of bitches, but they're our sons-of-bitches" and adopted them as your foreign policy. Your dream has come true. It's 1939 in Canada, once more. No wonder you don't recognize your responsibility under the Geneva Convention on Torture. For you, it hasn't been written yet.

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As An Aside

I wish there was a Youtube copy of Sue Sylvester's denial of wrongdoing, at her hearing with the principal from last week's Glee. It is a masterwork of denial in the face of overwhelming evidence (to the point of head exploding lunacy). It was the perfect metaphor for the Conservative government and the detainees. If you haven't seen the episode, you can watch the whole thing, here.

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More Simple Answers To Simple Questions

Christie Blatchford:

But neither can Opposition members casually toss around words like torture and phrases like complicity in torture and expect to be simultaneously seen as defenders of the troops: After all who, if not the Canadian Forces, would have been complicit in the torture they allege?

To which I reply, the government dear lady, the government. The same folks who are hiding the documents and heading the country toward a constitutional crisis. The people who are responsible are the ones who put our troops in an untenable position and then did nothing to fix it until forced to by bad press. Simple.

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Canadian Post-Modern Politics

What is wrong with our politics, part 127. Chantel Hebert writes:

According to a CBC-EKOS poll completed earlier in the week, a majority of Canadians already did not buy the government's assertion that it did not overlook the strong possibility the prisoners Canada was handing over to the Afghan authorities would be tortured.

That makes the detainee issue one of this government's biggest public relations flops since it was caught off guard on the environment in the fall of 2006.

But that is not to say that anyone on Parliament Hill believes it could lead to a snap election. The government is hoping the storm will blow over during the parliamentary break. But even if it flares up again in the new year, few opposition strategists believe it will resonate loudly at the ballot box. (emphasis mine)

In other words, objectively torture is wrong. However, subjectively, in Canada, torture is politically survivable and so is, if not accepted, tolerated. If Hebert is correct in her assessment, we are totally, totally fucked. We may as well throw in the towel and declare Harper president for life.

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35.6

That's the government's polling number this week. Even after it has been made clear to everyone that the government knew about, but did nothing to stop, prisoners from being tortured for over a year, over one in three voters are willing to back the Conservatives. While, in a normal world, this would be not a bad outcome (after all a majority of Canadians don't support the thugs who are running the place), we don't live in a normal world. We live in a first past the post world, where over one in three is still in government territory. What I am saying is, until we get rid of FPTP, we will be ruled by people who turn a blind eye to torture, supported by people who don't think that is a bad thing.

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Baa, Baa, Baa

John Ibbitson outlines all the reasons Peter MacKay will not be fired, even though he is either incompetent or a war criminal. I agree with Ibbitson. Canada has come to the point where the idea of Afghans being tortured is just fine with a huge chunk of the population. Canada is also a place where the phrase "objectively wrong" has been wiped from the public domain and has been replaced by "politically survivable". We have become a nation of apathetic sheep, led by a group of cynical wolves. Peter MacKay is safe because Harper believes Canadians will be too busy watching the World Juniors to care whether or not his Defense Minister is a war criminal. The unfortunate thing is, I believe he is right. Peter MacKay should not run anything larger than a fruit stand on the highway. He will however be a Minister of the Crown for as long as we let his boss get away with it.

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Attention War Crimes Prosecutors

The Globe and Mail has a handy, dandy time line for your edification.

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Peter MacKay Incompetent Or Disingenuous?

Take your pick.

Update: In re-reading the article, it makes clear what has been obvious from the beginning. Our soldiers have behaved correctly in the field and have followed the law, to the best of their ability. The problem has been higher up in the chain of command and the policy makers in Ottawa.

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