MacKay's Tortured Response: Massaging the Message
(and Wringing the Messenger's Neck)
by C. L. Cook
And so it begins; Stephen Harper's 'New Government of Canada' has come out swinging and slinging mud at the career diplomat whose testimony to the Military Police Complaints Commission (MPCC) revealed Harper et al's refusal to address the issue of his administration's complicity in the systemic torture of Afghani detainees Canadian Forces (CF) routinely turned over to Afghani police.

Predictably, now that the other shoe has dropped on the scandal and diplomat Richard Colvin is repeating his story to a House of Commons committee, Harper's Conservatives are using attacks against the messenger rather than deal with the substance of his message.

Belligerence in the face of the facts is of course the first refuge of scoundrels when caught out red-handed, and the Conservatives have very red hands on this, and had they any decency their faces would be as red.

 

But defence minister Peter MacKay was anything but contrite today. He blasted Colvin, saying his accounts of the "rampant rape and torture" of detainees was second and third-hand, sourced from "enemies,"and therefore not credible; adding his opinion, Richard Colvin was a "Taliban dupe."

Writing for the Toronto Sun, Kathleen Harris quotes the minister saying;

"What we’re talking about here is not only hearsay, we’re talking about basing much of his evidence on what the Taliban have been specifically instructed to lie about if captured."

If MacKay's line has a familiar ring, it's because it is the very one used by Bush administration flacks when they were faced with tales of torture and abuse inflicted on their enemies. It's a neat trick; anything anyone in the position to experience the not-so-gentle ministrations of security forces is automatically a terrorist, (Taliban, al Qaida, or other deserving recipient) and therefore an enemy trained to lie and propagandize, ergo "not credible."

The trouble with Peter MacKay's, (and George Bush's) logic here is the simple fact: Not all detainees tortured were enemies, or even fighters. Most, according to Colvin, were ordinary Afghanis swept up by CF dragnets, or turned over for rewards offered. He told the House Committee today;

"According to a very authoritative source, many of the Afghans we detained had no connection to insurgency whatsoever. From an intelligence point of view, they had little or no value."

Waving away Colvin's experience in Afghanistan, MacKay, the minister for foreign affairs at the time the reports were sent on to Ottawa, questioned his credibility, saying;

"Mr. Colvin had an opportunity to speak to me directly, to other ministers of the government who were in Afghanistan."

Richard Colvin, while serving as the political director of the provincial reconstruction team in Kandahar City in the Spring of 2006 says his initial report was spurred by a visit he paid to Sarpoza prison. He submitted to the Military Police Complaints Commission last month, he had gone to Sarpoza and other prisons where Canadian Forces' prisoners landed up, and said he wrote up reports based on concerns he had for both the well-being of the detainees, and Canada's complicity in the harsh treatment they received at the hands of their jailors.