Roy G Biv
Senior Member
This is truly shocking. Unfortunately Afghan prisioner rights isn't a wedge issue here, and most potential CPC voters won't care. The cover-up is disgusting.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news...nnocent-afghans-diplomat-says/article1369069/
Most of the detainees Canada collected were not what Afghan intelligence services would call “high value targets” such as Taliban commanders, al-Qaeda terrorists or bomb makers, Mr. Colvin told MPs in testimony Wednesday.
“Many were just local people: farmers; truck drivers; tailors, peasants – random human beings in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
Yet, he said, they all faced the same fate. “According to our information, the likelihood is that all the Afghans we handed over were tortured. For interrogators in Kandahar, it was standard operating procedure,” Mr. Colvin said.
“In other words, we detained, and handed over for severe torture, a lot of innocent people.”
The diplomat said the Canadian government responded to his frequent warnings by telling him to stop writing these concerns into reports. He said those asking him to censor himself included David Mulroney, then the senior point man on Afghanistan, as well as Colleen Swords, a senior official at the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade (DFAIT).
At first, we were mostly ignored. However by April 2007 we were receiving written messages from the senior Canadian government co-ordinator for Afghanistan to the effect that I should be quiet and do what I was told, and also phone messages from a DFAIT assistant deputy minister suggesting that, in future, we should not put things on paper, but instead use the telephone,” Mr. Colvin told MPs.
He said censorship expanded with the arrival of Arif Lalani as Canada's new ambassador to Afghanistan in May 2007.
“Immediately, thereafter, the paper trail on detainees was reduced,” he said. “Reports on detainees began sometimes to be censored with crucial information removed.”
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news...nnocent-afghans-diplomat-says/article1369069/
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