Canada Complicit in TORTURE: Volume 2

Fidel wrote:

If our stoogeocrats will cooperate with Warshington to torture Afghans, would they nod up and down in rapid agreement to torturing Canadians, too? Is this what they really think of ordinary people in general?

Of course. Can't you think of a few prominent cases?

Absolutely. Arar and Khadr for starters. So, yes they have already gone right along with torture of Canadians, from Ewen Cameron's contract job for the CIA to the phony war on terror. Aye-aye, uncle Sam!

Perhaps Hillier, like Hermann Göring before him, is looking for a Ministerial post in the new regime.

I found Craig Murray, and the title of one of his blogs is Torturing Ordinary People.

ReeferMadness wrote:

It's looking more like the cover-up might be successful.  Colvin has been banned from sharing his documents with parliament.

Quote:

Justice Department lawyers have told Colvin - through the Foreign Affairs Department - that they do not accept the view that testimony before Parliament is exempt from national security provisions of the Canada Evidence Act.

As a result, Colvin's lawyer has written to the committee advising that Colvin won't be able to provide documents to Parliament as he was instructed to do last week.

National security - what damned bullshit!!  More like Conservative rule security.

There must be a way of getting at the truth.  According to this, Colvin is the only one of twenty-two diplomats subpoenaed by the MPCC to testify.  Obvisously, the government, Hillier and David Mulroney are trying to make it rough enough on him that nobody else will be tempted to change their minds.  

Colvin claimed that the Red Cross was complaining about lack of access.  Should we expect corroboration from the ICRC?  Apparently not.

I think the only way we'd get to the truth is if someone had the guts to launch a criminal investigation and people had to testify under oath.

The Official Secrets Act isn't meant to protect secrets. It's meant to protect officials.

Not so long ago, the CBC was reporting how Richard Colvin and others who wished to testify before the Military Police Complaints Commission into this matter were intimidated by the Harper administration: The government threatened to take these people to court themselves, threatened to sue them, threatened to destroy their careers and threatened to destroy their reputations.

The case for the ICRC is not so bad. Go to the site you highlighted, under The ICRC's testimony policy in action, it says: "...'the ICRC need not testify'. In other words, the rule is that the ICRC may not be forced to testify, but the decision to do so (or not) is to be made by the ICRC itself, on a case-by-case basis."

A Canadian criminal investigation could be launched against the government.

Better still, would be for the U.N. to issue a warrant for Harper's, MacKay's and Hillier's (and whoever else's) arrest and for them to be tried at the World Court at the Hague for war crimes.

Fidel wrote:

Absolutely. Arar and Khadr for starters. So, yes they have already gone right along with torture of Canadians, from Ewen Cameron's contract job for the CIA to the phony war on terror. Aye-aye, uncle Sam!

Good. So the question is answered. They will. Now work forward from there...

I'm glad there's a thread on this here.  The Toronto Star had a good article yesterday in the paper written by Errol P. Mendes a professor of constitutional and international law at the University of Ottawa.  I wanted to comment on this article, but couldn't find it online and the current mainpage article on the issue didn't allow online comments.  Here are exerpts from Mendes' article:

"In the context of an international or non-international conflict, the transfer of detainees where there is a substantial risk of torture is a most serious war crime under the Geneva Conventions and the Canadian Crimes Against Humanity and War Crimes Act, which is part of the Criminal Code of Canada.  The act was also designed to implement the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court , which codifies much of the Geneva Conventions provisions on war crimes and goes even further than them in certain areas...

"It is worth noting that the jurisprudence of international criminal tribunals reveals that actual knowledge can be gleaned not only from direct evidence, but also from circumstantial evidence, for example by the widespread nature, severity or notoriety of the alleged war crimes...

"The jurisprudence from the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia and, most importantly, a recent decision from the International Criminal Court itself, has ruled that even if it is established that military and civilian commanders did not have actual knowledge, that is no defence to a charge of complicity in a war crime...

"..Canada has a legal duty under the Rome Statute and possibly under the Canadian Criminal Code to start a judicial inquiry."

The legal obligations outlined in the article are clear.  No claims of ignorance or word games around specific use/definition of 'torture', or attempts to hide evidence by Harper, Mackay, Hillier or other officials should be tolerated.

The matter is beyond the scope of a committee.

Residents of this country need to demand a fully public judicial inquiry.

THERE IS NO EXCUSE FOR WAR CRIMES !!!!!!

Is Barbara Yaffe auditioning for an appointment to the senate?

Quote:

It's also important to note the allegations do not relate to Canadian soldiers torturing Afghans, but rather Afghans torturing Afghans.

Moreover, any mistreatment would have occurred around the time Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan like Trevor Green were getting axed in the head or blown up by improvised explosive devices, and when schoolgirls were having acid thrown in their faces.

In other words, people generally understand that war is ugly and Afghan society is deeply troubled.

Besides, Canadian Forces at the time did not have at their disposal a better prison in Afghanistan to which to direct their prisoners. And, as the allegations became known, Ottawa contributed $132 million to upgrade prison facilities.

How else could you explain this shameful op-ed piece in which Yaffe offers excuse after excuse for Canada's shameful behaviour; without even mentioning that being complicit to torture is a war crime?

This is to be expected from the likes of Yaffe and the right wing punditocracy. They say war is ugly and Canadians are at war so Canadians must be ugly. Suddenly the rule of law and civilized behaviour is no longer part of the mission. But the war has been going on since 2001, so has it ever been part of the mission? And if it was but no longer is, why are we still there bringing to Afghanistan the brutality and criminality they already know so well? And why are we spilling Canadian blood for the purpose?

Unionist wrote:

Barbara Yaffe wrote:

It's also important to note the allegations do not relate to Canadian soldiers torturing Afghans, but rather Afghans torturing Afghans.

This sounds like some of the posts I've read on this board:

Quote:

Are Canadians tourturing Afghanistan people in a prison somewhere?

I thought this was about Canadians handing over prisoners who are tourture BY other Afghanistan people.  Wouldn't it make more sense to have that abu ghraib man picture on an Afghanistan flag?

Connection seems pretty lame.

Well, it puzzles me, and sort of bothers me, that the media (at least) and the public (I hope) have finally started to react to just one of the many stories of Canadian complicity we've been building up over the last decade.

CSIS agents and reps from DFAIT have been actively complicit in the torture of a number of Canadian citizens and residents. CSIS and federal lawyers have clearly knowingly used tainted testimony from witnesses subjected to torture against at least one of the people held on a security certificate, and probably more (and the courts are allowing them to get away with that if they just withdraw cases, which they are doing). They probably would have used Khadr's coerced testimony against Arar against him, as the Americans are still doing, except for Justice O'Connor. What kind of testimony were they using against Abdelrazik? (Abu Zubaydah would be a good guess.) What strange information is Border Services running on? And what about successive governments that have directed all this paranoid activity? The list could go on.

It puzzles me in the first place that the government would be stupid enough to let the detainee transfers go on long enough that incompetence finally did turn into complicity, since they have much worse cases of complicity still to answer for. I'm guessing that racism and xenophobia, mixed in with bureaucratic fear and indolence and political cynicism, explain how they got caught with a cover-up that needn't have been a crime in the first place. You listen to Hillier as he bellies up to the witness table, with all his cliches about the Taliban, and you just know that he not only did not care what happened to those caught in area sweeps but probably took some active joy in the thought.

But beyond that, it puzzles me that people will react to this story when they have not reacted to the plight of Arar's three fellow victims (see Iacobucci inquiry), whose misery continues, or to that of the refugee applicants held on security certificates, or even to Omar Khadr.

Graeme Smith, Globe correspondent who first blew the whistle on torture of detainees has just confirmed on CBCs As It Happens that the generals and their neo-con fronts are lying and ignorant (in some combination) and he supports Colvin absolutely. Not that I needed confirmation from Graeme, but knowing the guy is the original straight arrow, wraps it for me.

Quote:

KABUL, Afghanistan - Two Afghan teenagers held in U.S. detention north of Kabul this year said they were beaten by American guards, photographed naked, deprived of sleep and held in solitary confinement in concrete cells for at least two weeks while undergoing daily interrogation about their alleged links to the Taliban. .....

The holding center described by the teenagers appeared to have been a facility run by U.S. Special Operations forces that is separate from the Bagram Theater Internment Facility, the main American-run prison, which holds about 700 detainees. The teenagers' descriptions of a holding area on a different part of the Bagram base are consistent with the accounts of two other former detainees, who say they endured similar mistreatment, but not beatings, while being held last year at what Afghans call Bagram's "black" prison.

A Defense Department spokesman, Lt. Col. Mark Wright, said that the military does not respond to each allegation of detainee abuse, but that all prisoners are treated humanely and in accordance with the Geneva Conventions and U.S. law.

"Department of Defense policy is and always has been to treat detainees humanely. There have been well-documented instances where that policy was not followed, and service members have been held accountable for their actions in those cases," he said.

More 'freedom' for Afghans courtesy of the freedom loving Americans.