Ottawa Knew Of Alternative Prison Transfer Rroposal

The Harper government has always insisted it heard no warnings of torture risks facing Afghan detainees in 2006, but documents show that in the same year it was carefully following a NATO campaign to take responsibility for captured prisoners away from the country's notorious intelligence service.

A memo obtained by The Globe and Mail shows that in 2006 the federal government was briefed on a lobbying campaign by NATO allies aimed at getting the Kabul government to create stronger safeguards for detainees after prisoner abuses elsewhere.

"London, The Hague and Canberra [Australia] are deeply concerned about the absence of solid legal protections for detainees, which - in the age of Gitmo and Abu Ghraib - imperils domestic support for the Afghanistan mission," said the memo of Dec. 4, 2006, written by diplomat Richard Colvin.

The memo was written after consultation with Catherine Bloodworth, a Foreign Affairs colleague, as well as the military attaché in Canada's Kabul embassy. It was approved by David Sproule - then Canada's ambassador to Afghanistan - and was e-mailed to dozens of officials at Foreign Affairs, the Privy Council Office and National Defence.

The question of whether Canadian soldiers knowingly handed Afghan captives over to torture in 2006 and 2007 will soon dominate Parliament Hill as two separate hearings resume in coming weeks. The long-simmering issue flared up last fall when Mr. Colvin accused Ottawa of turning a blind eye to warnings of torture risks facing detainees. The 2006 NATO campaign to create a separate prison system for its captives envisioned the more respected Afghan Army assuming responsibility for prisoners. It ultimately failed in the face of intransigence from the Afghan government.

"Despite intense international lobbying - including personal interventions ... by President Bush and the Dutch PM - the detainee policy has gone nowhere," the memo said. But the NATO proposal was of "intense interest" to coalition partners including the British and Dutch, which were bound by a European human rights convention to keep track of detainees after transfer.

Existing detainee arrangements, the memo said, were "deeply problematic" because prisoners "are handed within 96 hours to the National Directorate of Security," the intelligence service, "and then typically vanish from sight."

It is unclear, the memo said, whether detainees are subsequently "tortured, held beyond legal limits or (all too frequently) released back to the battlefield." Canada was not party to the lobbying effort, sources say, but took a keen interest in the idea, which called for a new legal class of detainees in Afghanistan and, effectively, a duplicate jail system for them.

The International Committee of the Red Cross, a rights monitor, had even reviewed the NATO proposal early in its drafting. "They determined that, while imperfect, it meets the minimum standards of international humanitarian law," the memo said. "In addition to making it easier to monitor the location and condition of detainees, the ... [proposal] also promised to bring detainee policy within international law," it said. "Detainees, currently classified as 'enemies of Afghanistan' have no solid legal status."

This new prison system was opposed by General Abdul Rahim Wardak, Afghanistan's defence minister, despite pressure from the U.S., which was interested in transferring captives there from Guantanamo Bay. Gen. Wardak, the memo said, had no interest in drawing down valuable resources to be a jailer.

The Canadian military, determined to avoid a repeat of the Somalia affair, in which a captive died at the hands of Canadian soldiers, was only too keen to hand off all prisoners rounded up during military operations in Afghanistan.

In 2005, the former Liberal government signed a deal to hand captives to the Afghan government rather than see them transferred to the U.S. military in the wake of the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal.

Source: www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/ottawa-knew-of-alternative-prison-transfer-proposal/article1498217/