Stephen Harper - Prime Minister of Torture

November 19, 2009

My apologies if I seem to have abandoned the word warriors project – I am hoping to get it back on track having been diverted by time spent on my blog. I think the letter writing is as important as ever – and with the Harper Conservatives ahead in the pools it may be even more important.
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It was hard to listen to the reports today (read here) by the courageous career diplomat Richard Colvin as he revealed the sickening details of the Harper government’s casual disregard for the torture of Afghan prisoners – and the blatant cover-up. In a world of shocking political scandals I can’t think of any in a log time – Somalia comes to mind – that leave me feeling so ashamed to be a Canadian.

We must portray that shame and anger at what has been done in our names. In the next few weeks this issue will dominate the news out of Ottawa – though Harper will try to bury it at his Minister of defence Peter McKay did today in the House of Commons when he referred to questions from the opposition as “huffing and puffing …and pontificating.”

Today they are viciously attacking Colvin’s credibility – even though he remains the senior intelligence officer at our embassy in Washington.

PLEASE  write a letter today to your local paper and to the Globe and Mail, and the National Post and the Ottawa Citizen.  If your local paper is a weekly, also copy the nearest daily paper.

You can send your letters to most Canadian newspapers from the Word Warriors web site at: http://www.canadians.org/wordwarriors/letter.html

Any number of points can be made but key ones are:

• We must have a full public inquiry with subpoena powers and the broadest possible  mandate to investigate every aspect of the scandal.
• We  should  use this horrific development to call for the immediate withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan.
• We should demand to know exactly what is happening regarding Afghan “detainees” today – they are still being handed over to Afghan “authorities.”
• Condemn the Harper government for attacking Colvin instead of answering his charges.

You can also speak to why we should care (see the excerpt from Colvin’s testimony below). There is a significant portion of the Canadian of population who have a limited understanding of the Geneva Convention and other laws protecting prisoners – and little sympathy for the ruthless Taliban. We need to remind Canadians why this issue is so critical.

FRAMING:  The charges made by this extremely credible, senior diplomat are as serious as have ever been made against a Canadian government – if substantiated they constitute war crimes, crimes – complicity in torture - that are prosecutable. Canada’s reputation in the community if nations is on the line and the only way we can recover it is to have a robust judicial public inquiry with all the requisite powers of investigation.

Some facts and arguments to use in you letters…(and of course you can add in any new details that emerge)…

• The Harper government has severely damaged Canada’s reputation as a country in the forefront of protecting human rights – we must now repair that damage by a judicial inquiry that gets to the bottom of the issue and assigns responsibility for wrong-doing
• The government attacks the credibility of Mr Colvin yet saw fit to prevent him from testifying before the Military Police Complaints Commission because he might damage national security. If he isn’t credible, what information could he have that would be damaging? [more here]
• The government is guilty of the most shameless and blatant cover up of any government in recent memory. It prevented Mr. Colvin and several other witnesses from testifying, citing concerns about national security. This effort was just one of “a string of roadblocks raised by federal lawyers that have delayed and severely limited the scope of the inquiry.” [more here]
• Both the US military and the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission report that torture is still a routine feature of the Afghan government’s prison authorities – what assurance do we have that those we are still handing over are not being tortured today?
• The Canadian military manual on counter-insurgency says: “the abuse of detained persons is immoral, illegal and unprofessional .... Torture, and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, is never a morally permissible option, even if lives depend on gaining information.... The methods used (by the military) must reflect the nation's commitment to human dignity and international humanitarian law.”
• Canadians are sickened by the knowledge that many – perhaps most – of the detainees handed over were completely innocent of any crime. Our policy of arresting locals saw us detain 20 times as many Afghans as the Dutch and six times as many as the British – meaning that we swept up scores of innocents.  This has – and perhaps still does – makes it impossible for our counterinsurgency strategy to succeed: We should withdraw from Afghanistan as soon as possible. [more here]
• To quote Mr Colvin: “Instead of winning hearts and minds, we caused Kandaharis to fear the foreigners. Canada's detainee practices alienated us from the population and strengthened the insurgency.”
• While the prospect is terrible to contemplate, if  an inquiry finds that Canada was indeed complicit in war crimes we should be prosecuted – to seek otherwise would be hypocritical and a terrible double standard.
• We will never again be able to credibly challenge any other country on the issue of human rights until we purge our selves of this crime.

Click here to SEND YOUR LETTER NOW!