Questioning Prisoners

I read in the newspaper today that CSIS officers questioned Taliban prisoners captured on the field of battle prior to being turned over to Afghan officials. The objective was to identify the rank of the prisoner and to obtain any information that may assist our troops fighting the Taliban in the field. Our intelligence officers were not torturing prisoners themselves, which is suggested by the headline "Canadian Spies Interrogated Afghan Prisoners."

I'm wondering how this is a controversy? I would be upset if we weren't asking any questions when we pick these fighters up on the battlefield. The alternative would have been handing over 100% of POWs directly to Afghan officials without any screening process by our military police of intelligence services. The longer it takes to obtain operational intelligence, the less effective is. If a Taliban militant knew for example the location of a planned ambush, the sooner you get the information the less likely Canadian soldiers are to be caught in a death trap.

When Paul Martin led our military into Kandahar province, they were completely unprepared to handle or process POWs. According to "intelligence expert" Wesley Wark "They didn't have a trained body of people with the language skills, knowledge of the country, knowledge of the tribal situation, who was in charge of which warlord group, what was the nature of the Taliban. Those are all issues they had to develop an expertise on after 2006." This suggests that our CSIS officers were not adequately trained for their purpose when the Liberals were running the military, and were only provided proper training after the Conservatives were elected. Wasn't John McCallum a defense minister once? Conservatives cleaned up the woefully inadequate Paul Martin prisoner transfer agreement.

This is the exact same debate we were having at the end of November, except that now the left is now accusing the Prime Minister of personally committing war crimes. There are even allegations on the CAPP website that Stephen Harper stole Sidney Crosby's hockey stick. I would be interested to see just how many times the word "neo con" has been used on that site since its beginning? It has to be at least a few thousand.