Colvin disputes witnesses' detainee testimony

CBC News

Former Afghanistan diplomat Richard Colvin slammed back at some of the testimony heard from witnesses at the committee investigating the Afghan detainee affair, insisting that he had warned Canadian officials that prisoners were being abused.
In a detailed 16-page letter, Colvin outlines 17 statements he takes issue with that were made by witnesses at the parliamentary committee looking into the Afghan detainee affair.
"Some of their evidence, with respect, was inaccurate or incomplete," Colvin wrote.
He fires back at witnesses who rejected his claims that he warned top Canadian officials in 2006-07 that Afghan detainees handed over to Afghans were subsequently being tortured.
In his letter, Colvin highlights six reports sent to Ottawa in 2006, including one he said noted that "torture is rife" in Afghan jails.
"The report used the word 'torture' repeatedly," Colvin wrote.
Colvin writes that during a meeting in March 2007 with 12 to 15 officials in Ottawa, he informed them that the Afghan intelligence service "tortures people, that's what they do, and if we don't want our detainees tortured, we shouldn't give them to the [Afghans]."
Colvin said that at that point, the note-taker stopped writing and put down her pen.
Colvin worked in Kandahar for the Department of Foreign Affairs in 2006. He later moved to Kabul, where he was second-in-command at the Canadian Embassy. In both jobs, Colvin visited detainees transferred by Canadian soldiers to Afghan prisons. He wrote reports about those visits and sent them to Ottawa.
Colvin also stuck by his claim that all detainees transferred by Canadians were likely tortured. He wrote that that information came from "highly credible sources" and not from detainees.

Innocent Afghans detained, Colvin insists

Colvin also takes issue with testimony that denied that innocent people were detained, saying Afghanistan's own intelligence service claimed most of the detainees were unconnected to the insurgency.
During his testimony, Rick Hillier, former chief of the defence staff, said it was "ludicrous" for Colvin to claim all detainees were tortured. As for Colvin's assertion that most of those detained were innocent, Hillier had said "nothing could be further from the truth."
The committee heard from David Mulroney, the government's former senior adviser on Afghanistan, who denied Colvin's claims that he tried to muzzle Colvin.
Colleen Swords, a former assistant deputy minister at Foreign Affairs, also denied Colvin's allegations she had told him to stop writing things down.
But Colvin writes that embassy staffers were told "they should not report information, however accurate, that conflicted with the government's public messaging."
He writes that after the embassy put out a 2006 human rights report which repeatedly used the word torture, "Mulroney told us in person that we should be very careful about what we put in future reports."
As for Swords, Colvin disputes her testimony that those with concerns were told to use the phone first, and then write things down later.
"This is incorrect. Her message to me was that I should use the phone instead of writing," Colvin writes.
Colvin also rejected witness claims that Afghan detainees are trained to say they have been tortured. He wrote that those witnesses "seemed to be confusing Taliban insurgents (poorly educated Pashtuns, usually illiterate, with a parochial, Afghanistan-centred agenda) with al-Qaeda terrorists (international jihadists, often highly educated)."
Colvin also responds to criticisms that he never raised his concerns personally to Defence Minister Peter MacKay, despite having met with him.
"It was not the job of [Foreign Affairs] officials in Afghanistan to push our concerns on ministers, unless they explicitly invited them, which none ever did. Doing so would have invited a reprimand from our superiors," he wrote.

Seniors separate 'on a regular basis' to afford care

CBC News

Senior New Brunswick couples commonly get divorced or legally separated so they can afford nursing home care, says a seniors advocate.

'It is happening I would say on a regular basis and I think the reason why we do not hear about it is I feel that people are afraid.'— Veronica Ratchford, seniors advocate

As more people enter nursing homes, Veronica Ratchford, a representative from the Coalition for Seniors and Nursing Home Residents' Rights, said an increasing number of couples are legally splitting up so they can get government help with the cost of that care.
"It is happening, I would say, on a regular basis and I think the reason why we do not hear about it is I feel that people are afraid," Ratchford said.
"They're afraid to speak up against government policies and also they are embarrassed for the public to know their income and what financial situation that they're left with."
Judy MacKenzie, 66, and her husband, Alton, legally separated on Dec. 11 after 45 years of marriage.
Alton had at least two strokes in 2003 and has had to be cared for in a Miramichi nursing home ever since.
Judy, who now lives in Fredericton, said the bill for her husband's care is about $2,500 a month and the Department of Social Development is requiring her to pay about $700 of that.
After paying her rent, car payment and power bill, MacKenzie said she's left with less than $500 a month to cover groceries, prescriptions, gas and insurance.
The only way to pay less for her husband's care is to get a legal separation, she said.
Once it goes through, the cost of Alton's care will be based solely on his income, which should reduce the cost to the MacKenzies.
The Department of Social Development said last week that they wouldn't comment on individual cases, but a spokesperson said the provincial government offers financial assistance to clients who struggle to pay for care.

Seniors private about finances

Ratchford said this isn't an issue many people are aware of because seniors are often very private about their finances.
"A lot of the seniors feel that it's a government policy, this is the rules and they're left with no choice if they want their loved one to be placed in a nursing home then these are the dollars that they're obligated to pay," Ratchford said.
"So they don't speak out and they don't say anything and then the public is not made aware of it and then government really is not forced to make any changes."
Ratchford said she wants more seniors to speak out about the impact on their lives in an effort to embarrass the New Brunswick government into making changes.

Anatomy of a spin gone wrong

Don Newman: The Colvin allegations 

  

It is fascinating to watch the Conservative spin doctors worry among themselves about the fallout from the Afghan prisoners' revelations and then go into full spin mode whenever a journalist or a camera comes into view.

"Nobody cares beyond the Queensway," they intone as one, referring to the expressway that marks the end of downtown Ottawa, about 25 blocks from Parliament Hill.
These spin doctors are the party faithful who receive the emails with the talking points that the government puts out to try and shape the political argument of the day.
All the parties do it. But as with most of the tools of modern political campaigning, the Conservatives do it best.
In this case, Conservative spin doctors have also been doing it full bore since Nov. 18, when Canadian diplomat Richard Colvin began his testimony before a parliamentary committee.
Chief of the Defence Staff Walter Natynczyk holds a news conference at National Defence headquarters in Ottawa on Dec. 9, 2009. (Fred Chartrand/Canadian Press) Colvin testified that during his posting in Afghanistan in 2006 and 2007 he had attempted to warn his superiors of the possible abuse and torture of Afghan detainees after they were turned over to local authorities.
Six days later, he told the committee that officials in Ottawa ignored and then tried to suppress his warnings that prisoners transferred to Afghan authorities were likely tortured.

Stopping the spin

The organized response by the spin doctors was to question Colvin's integrity, character and motives.
The more public response by the government was to bring forward the retired generals who had served in Afghanistan during that period — including the former chief of the defence staff Rick Hillier — to deny the allegations and say no warnings were received.
Only this time, the spin hasn't worked.
And now the Harper government has been stopped in its tracks.
Stopped by the current chief of the defence staff, Gen. Walt Natynczyk, who now acknowledges he wasn't fully informed of everything that went on.
Stopped by the signatures of 71 retired Canadian ambassadors on a letter in support of Colvin. And stopped by the common sense of Canadians who could not see any motive or benefit for Colvin in coming forward as he did.
Indeed, despite the attacks on Colvin, in particular by Defence Minister Peter MacKay, and the full-court press by the spin doctors that no one cares anyway, it turns that many Canadians think Colvin has been telling the truth.
The latest EKOS poll, for example, shows a majority believe that at least some of the prisoners transferred by Canadian troops to Afghan authorities were tortured.
What's more, among the people who think that, over 80 per cent believe there is a strong chance that people in the government were aware of that possibility.

The dominos fall

That poll was taken before the bombshell news conference on Wednesday by Natynczyk, just a day after testifying at the Commons committee.
Natynczyk told reporters he had just received information that confirmed that a prisoner taken into custody by Canadian troops in 2006, and then transferred to Afghan authorities, had indeed been severely beaten.
Not only did that new information contradict Natynczyk's testimony before the committee, it contradicted what Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Defence Minister MacKay, former defence minister Gordon O'Connor and Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon have been saying.
It also contradicts the testimony of Rick Hillier, who was the top guy in 2006 when the transfer and beating took place.

One name stands out

Natynczyk's move to set the record straight was an honourable one and it didn't surprise anyone who knows the general as a man of principle.
The fact that, as the chief of the defence staff, he took his lumps and used the public route of a press conference to correct the record is particularly impressive.
So too, is the letter from the former diplomats, generally models of discretion, reproaching the government for attacking Colvin in the first place.
Many of the signatories are former stars of the Canadian diplomatic service but one name that really stands out is that of Robert Fowler.
He is, of course, the former ambassador who was kidnapped and held for ransom along with a colleague last year around this time in Niger, while on a special mission for the UN.
The other signatories also had distinguished foreign service careers, but Fowler's recent travails — and his exemplary international reputation — give the letter added profile.
Faced with Natynczyk's reversal and the diplomats' letter, the government has been trying a new spin cycle.
Incredibly, some Conservative politicians and their acolytes are now claiming that Natynczyk's new information confirms what they have been saying all along, that the detainee system needed to be tightened up.
MacKay, who is the primary target of the diplomats' letter for slamming Colvin in the first place, is now praising the military and the foreign service, while claiming, along with the prime minister, that those opposition politicians who want more information on detainee transfers are in fact attacking these two institutions.
Maybe that new spin will work. But the more likely case is that the information and advice from trained military and foreign service professionals who know what they are doing, will trump the webs woven by politicians and their spinners who often seem as though they don't.

Protest grows against Tory attack on Colvin

More than 35 top diplomats add names to list as MacKay faces mounting pressure in detainee-abuse case

Paul Koring and Steven Chase

Washington and Ottawa — From Wednesday's Globe and Mail Published on Wednesday, Dec. 09, 2009 12:00AM EST Last updated on Wednesday, Dec. 09, 2009 12:11PM EST

The number of former ambassadors protesting the Conservative government's attacks on diplomat Richard Colvin is snowballing, with organizers saying the list will exceed 35 today and is headed for 50.
The initiative began days ago after more than 20 former diplomatic heads of mission banded together to speak out against Ottawa's response to Mr. Colvin's testimony on Afghan-detainee abuse. They warned that it threatens to cast a chill over the foreign service and they singled out Defence Minister Peter MacKay for having "savaged" the diplomat in public.
"It's quite amazing," organizer and ex-Canadian ambassador Gar Pardy said of the growing response from former top diplomats. "People just want to be part of it."
Furor over the matter boiled over in the House of Commons yesterday, where Mr. MacKay faced the first public calls for his resignation over allegations that Canadian-captured prisoners handed over to Afghans were later tortured.
Although Mr. MacKay has repeatedly insisted that not a single case of torture could be proven, he acknowledged through a spokesman yesterday there is "credible evidence" that detainees transferred to Afghan security forces have been tortured.
That acknowledgment marks a significant departure for Mr. MacKay who for years has repeatedly insisted that not a single case of torture could be proven. Yesterday, his spokesman confirmed that the "minister has not denied being advised of credible evidence" of post-transfer torture.
However, Mr. McKay still maintains no absolute proof exists, his officials said yesterday.
In Parliament yesterday, the NDP said Canadians no longer have confidence in the minister.
"The minister has on nine separate occasions told the House there is not a scintilla of evidence of mistreatment even as the entire country was shown evidence that torture did take place," said the NDP's defence critic Jack Harris. "Will he resign?"
Instead, Mr. MacKay's parliamentary secretary, Laurie Hawn, mouthed "bullshit" as opposition MPs insisted the government knew of transfers to torture.
Knowingly transferring a prisoner to torture or abuse is a Geneva-Conventions-grade war crime.
Mr. MacKay has based his denials on information he said was handed to him by the advice of generals and senior officials within the Department of Defence.
Yesterday, General Walter Natynczyk said that he wasn't among the military officers who advised Mr. MacKay there was no evidence of detainee torture.
"I know that I didn't, so you would have to ask the minister's office in terms of who advised him," Canada's chief of defence staff said.
According to one senior military source, Mr. MacKay has never broached the subject with Gen. Natynczyk since he replaced now-retired general Rick Hillier more than a year ago.
As Mr. MacKay's office sought to justify the basis for the minister's long series of denials, spokesman Dan Dugas pointed to public statements by retired generals, including Mr. Hillier, who was chief of defence staff when Mr. MacKay made the first of his sweeping denials in November of 2007.
Although the "credible evidence" phrase with respect to transferred detainees has been used by ministers in the past, it was only to refer to what soldiers and diplomats were reporting from Afghanistan.
Detainee transfers have been halted at least five times since The Globe and Mail first published, in April of 2007, harrowing accounts of post-transfer torture and beatings. Mr. Dugas said yesterday that it would be incorrect to connect all halts of transfers with "credible evidence" of torture. Some might be for other reasons, he said.
However, the Minister's office came closer than ever to admitting that on at least one occasion, the evidence was so compelling that an Afghan prison warden was removed as a direct consequence.
" 'Credible evidence' is where you have an allegation supported by substantive evidence, such as that which was identified in November, 2007," Mr. Dugas said, referring to an instance in which a Canadian-transferred detainee pointed out to Canadian diplomats the electrical cables with which he claimed to have been beaten.
Mr. Dugas said "this evidence would not have been found, and the [prison] warden would not have been removed, if our government had not acted to improve the detainee transfer arrangement."
The shifting positions come two weeks after the long-simmering detainee-abuse issue was reignited by allegations from Canadian diplomat Richard Colvin that likely all prisoners captured by Canada in 2006 and 2007 were tortured after being handed over to the Afghans. But nearly 14 days of questions have produced little in the way of new disclosures on the matter from the Harper government.
Gen. Natynczyk, who appeared yesterday before a defence committee, contradicted the sworn affidavit of another senior Canadian officer who has detailed an instance of a post-transfer beating more than two years ago.
According to a soldier's field notes and the sworn affidavit of Colonel Steve Noonan, Canada's first Kandahar Task Force Commander, a Canadian-captured detainee was beaten by Afghan security forces before Canadian soldiers intervened and rescued him in June of 2006.
Gen. Natynczyk claimed the case wasn't one of a Canadian-transferred detainee being maltreated by Afghans because the man was never officially listed as captured, even though Canadian soldiers stopped, questioned, and photographed him.
Col. Noonan had been selected by the military to provide the sworn affidavit in the government's defence in the case. His affidavit of April, 2007, has never been corrected or withdrawn.
 
With a report from Jane Taber

The Urgent Threat to World Peace is … Canada

Posted December 1, 2009

The harm this country could do in the next two weeks will outweigh all the good it has done in a century.

By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 20th November 2009
When you think of Canada, which qualities come to mind? The world’s peace-keeper, the friendly nation, a liberal counterweight to the harsher pieties of its southern neighbour, decent, civilised, fair, well-governed? Think again. This country’s government is now behaving with all the sophistication of a chimpanzee’s tea party. So amazingly destructive has Canada become, and so insistent have my Canadian friends been that I weigh into this fight, that I’ve broken my self-imposed ban on flying and come to Toronto.
So here I am, watching the astonishing spectacle of a beautiful, cultured nation turning itself into a corrupt petrostate. Canada is slipping down the development ladder, retreating from a complex, diverse economy towards dependence on a single primary resource, which happens to be the dirtiest commodity known to man. The price of this transition is the brutalisation of the country, and a government campaign against multilateralism as savage as any waged by George Bush.
Until now I believed that the nation which has done most to sabotage a new climate change agreement was the United States. I was wrong. The real villain is Canada. Unless we can stop it, the harm done by Canada in December 2009 will outweigh a century of good works.
In 2006 the new Canadian government announced that it was abandoning its targets to cut greenhouse gases under the Kyoto Protocol. No other country that had ratified the treaty has done this. Canada was meant to have cut emissions by 6% between 1990 and 2012. Instead they have already risen by 26%(1).
It’s now clear that Canada will refuse to be sanctioned for abandoning its legal obligations. The Kyoto Protocol can be enforced only through goodwill: countries must agree to accept punitive future obligations if they miss their current targets. But the future cut Canada has volunteered is smaller than that of any other rich nation(2). Never mind special measures; it won’t accept even an equal share. The Canadian government is testing the international process to destruction and finding that it breaks all too easily. By demonstrating that climate sanctions aren’t worth the paper they’re written on, it threatens to render any treaty struck at Copenhagen void.
After giving the finger to Kyoto, Canada then set out to prevent the other nations from striking a successor agreement. At the end of 2007 it single-handedly blocked a Commonwealth resolution to support binding targets for industrialised nations(3). After the climate talks in Poland in December 2008, it won the Fossil of the Year award, presented by environmental groups to the country which had done most to disrupt the talks(4). The climate change performance index, which assesses the efforts of the world’s 60 richest nations, was published in the same month. Saudi Arabia came 60th. Canada came 59th(5).
In June this year the media obtained Canadian briefing documents which showed that the government was scheming to divide the Europeans(6). During the meeting in Bangkok in October, almost the entire developing world bloc walked out when the Canadian delegate was speaking, as they were so revolted by his bullying(7). Last week the Commonwealth heads of government battled for hours (and eventually won) against Canada’s obstructions. A concerted campaign has now begun to expel Canada from the Commonwealth(8).
In Copenhagen next week, this country will do everything in its power to wreck the talks. The rest of the world must do everything in its power to stop it. But such is the fragile nature of climate agreements that one rich nation – especially a member of the G8, the Commonwealth and the Kyoto group of industrialised countries – could scupper the treaty. Canada now threatens the well-being of the world.
Why? There’s a simple answer. Canada is developing the world’s second largest reserve of oil. Did I say oil? It’s actually a filthy mixture of bitumen, sand, heavy metals and toxic organic chemicals. The tar sands, most of which occur in Alberta, are being extracted by the biggest opencast mining operation on earth. An area the size of England, of pristine forests and marshes, will be dug up, unless the Canadians can stop this madness. Already it looks like a scene from the end of the world: the strip-miners are creating a churned black hell on an unimaginable scale.
To extract oil from this mess, it needs to be heated and washed. Three barrels of water are used to process one barrel of oil(9). The contaminated water is held in vast tailing ponds, some of which are so toxic that the tar companies employ people to scoop dead birds off the surface(10). Most are unlined. They leak organic poisons, arsenic and mercury into the rivers. The First Nations people living downstream have developed a range of exotic cancers and auto-immune diseases(11).
Refining tar sands requires two to three times as much energy as refining crude oil. The companies exploiting them burn enough natural gas to heat six million homes(12). Alberta’s tar sands operation is the world’s biggest single industrial source of carbon emissions(13). By 2020, if the current growth continues, it will produce more greenhouse gases than Ireland or Denmark(14). Already, thanks in part to the tar mining, Canadians have almost the highest per capita emissions on earth, and the stripping of Alberta has scarcely begun.
Canada hasn’t acted alone. The biggest leaseholder in the tar sands is Shell(15), a company that has spent millions persuading the public that it respects the environment. The other great greenwasher, BP, initially decided to stay out of tar. Now it has invested in plants built to process it(16). The British bank RBS, 70% of which belongs to you and me (the government’s share will soon rise to 84%), has lent or underwritten £8bn for exploiting the tar sands(17).
The purpose of Canada’s assault on the international talks is to protect this industry. This is not a poor nation. It does not depend for its economic survival on exploiting this resource. But the tar barons of Alberta have been able to hold the whole country to ransom. They have captured Canada’s politics and are turning this lovely country into a cruel and thuggish place.
Canada is a cultured, peaceful nation, which every so often allows a band of rampaging Neanderthals to trample all over it. Timber companies were licensed to log the old-growth forest in Clayaquot Sound; fishing companies were permitted to destroy the Grand Banks: in both cases these get-rich-quick schemes impoverished Canada and its reputation. But this is much worse, as it affects the whole world. The government’s scheming at the climate talks is doing for its national image what whaling has done for Japan.
I will not pretend that this country is the only obstacle to an agreement at Copenhagen. But it is the major one. It feels odd to be writing this. The immediate threat to the global effort to sustain a peaceful and stable world comes not from Saudi Arabia or Iran or China. It comes from Canada. How could that be true?

www.monbiot.com


References:
1. http://www.ec.gc.ca/pdb/ghg/inventory_report/2007/som-sum_eng.cfm
2. The government has pledged to match the (feeble) US 2020 target (which in Canada’s case means just 3% against 1990 levels) , but unlike the United States, Canada has proposed no cuts beyond that date.
3. Eg http://www.canada.com/story_print.html?id=a1a6748c-ef0c-4acf-acad-1cef2bdae5b7&sponsor=
4. Andrew Nikiforuk, September 2009. How The Tar Sands Are Fueling The Global Climate Crisis.
Greenpeace Canada. ***
5. http://www.germanwatch.org/klima/ccpi09res.pdf
6. Lee Berthiaume, 17th June 2009. Government Planned to Split EU On Climate Change Talks. Embassy Magazine. Cited by Andrew Nikiforuk, ibid.
7. http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/print/CTVNews/20091012/kyoto_091012/20091012/?hub=Canada&subhub=PrintStory
8. http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/nov/26/canada-criticised-over-climate-change
9. WWF, 2008. Scraping the Bottom of the Barrel?, Page 27.
http://assets.panda.org/downloads/unconventional_oil_final_lowres.pdf
10. http://peopleandplanet.org/tarsands/localimpacts
11. Environmental Defence, February 2008. Canada’s Toxic Tar Sands: the most destructive project on earth.
http://www.environmentaldefence.ca/reports/pdf/TarSands_TheReport.pdf
12. Andrew Nikiforuk, ibid.
13. http://peopleandplanet.org/tarsands/localimpacts
14. Andrew Nikiforuk, ibid.
15. ibid.
16. ibid.
17. Ed Crooks, 16th November 2009. Canadian Protest Over RBS Oil Sands Role. The Financial Times.