Colvin Testimony; some highlights, vol I

This Colvin testimony is fascinating stuff, and most certainly incriminates the Liberal Martin Administration. It is tricky because when Mr. Colvin is discussing a Conservative, he provides their name rank and serial number. When referring to the previous Liberal Government, he says "Canada had decided that Canadians would not monitor". So when the Martin Administration fails to include a proper monitoring apparatus in the transfer agreement, blame Canada, not government Ministers. Got it.

We did not monitor our own detainees after their transfer. Again, unlike the British and Dutch, Canada's memorandum of understanding on detainees, signed by General Rick Hillier in December 2005, had no provision for our own officials to follow up on what happened to our detainees after they were handed to the Afghan intelligence service, the NDS, or National Directorate of Security.

In other words, in the critical days after a detainee was first transferred to the Afghan intelligence service, nobody was able to monitor them. Canada had decided that Canadians would not monitor. The AIHRC could not do so, because they had very weak capacity and were not allowed into NDS jails. The Red Cross in practice could not do so either, because we did not inform them until days, weeks, or months after we had handed over the detainee.

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.

Another consequence was that we ourselves did not know about the fate of a given detainee after transfer. Was he still in detention? Had he been released? Had he been transferred to a third party? Had he died under torture or been executed? We had no idea.

This was the system created by the Martin Administration, they ultimately determined that we should not monitor prisoners after we transferred them to Afghan sovereign custody. The Liberals failed to allow the Red Cross proper access to detainees. Their defense for this slice of life is that they couldn't have known about it, ergo because their own bureaucracy was not competent enough to determine that their own transfer agreement was in fact violating the Geneva Conventions, this absolves them of any shared responsibility.

To recap, Canada took far more detainees than the British and Dutch. Unlike our NATO allies, we conducted no monitoring. Instead of hours, we took days, weeks, or months to notify the Red Cross, which meant that nobody else could monitor. We kept hopeless records, and, apparently to prevent any scrutiny, the Canadian Forces leadership concealed all this behind walls of secrecy.

Again, this was the state of our military bureaucracy at the end of 12 years of Liberal mismanagement. They tripped and fell near the end of their leg of the race and then fumbled the baton pass to the new Conservative government. It took a moment for our newly elected government to recover the baton, get their footing, and take off. The Liberals created a flawed system and are furious that the government did not right their wrongs immediately after assuming power after 12 years out of office. Those are some very lofty expectations from the people who neglected our Armed Forces for a generation. Is it any shock that we did not have the bureaucratic resources in place at the end of Liberal rule to prevent these mistakes from ever happening in the first place? Given the deplorable Liberal neglect, I am amazed that the good men and women of our Armed Forces were still able to perform with such valour.

Hon. Bob Rae:

I want to ask you to try to explain for me why you think it took 17 months for the Canadian government to realize that something had to change.

You sent an action memo in May 2006, and in your affidavit to the military commission you describe a number of memos and information that you provided. I wonder if you can now, in reflection, tell us why you think it took so long for the Canadian government to realize that the procedures had to change because something had substantially gone wrong.

Mr. Richard Colvin:

That's a good question, Mr. Rae. There are perhaps two parts to it. At the beginning, in 2006—our first reports were in May and June 2006—the Canadian effort in Afghanistan was a bit disorganized, a bit under-resourced and a little bit disjointed.

Again, Mr. Colvin described the state of the leadership in Afghanistan when the Conservatives came to power. The military receives its orders from Ottawa. The Liberal leadership in Ottawa was doing an extremely poor job of administrating our Armed Forces, and Mr. Colvin discusses this in great detail in his testimony. The quotes above were just from the first few pages of the testimony, there are plenty more precious gems of Liberal failures yet to come. I still haven't even broached the subject of the admissibility of hearsay in our justice system.

Notice how Bob Rae is also taking a veiled shot at the Liberal Party in his questions? He admits that the Liberal transfer agreement had gone wrong and had to change, and he asks why it took the Tories over a year to correct all the Liberal mistakes in "procedures".