OTTAWA — The firing of an Afghan prison official after a braided cable was found in his office backs diplomat Richard Colvin’s testimony that detainees were being tortured after they were turned over to Afghan authorities, say opposition MPs.
“If you have an instrument of torture in the office of someone who is responsible for the treatment of prisoners, you have a significant problem,” Liberal MP Bob Rae said.
The government, however, downplayed the information, saying the transfer of detainees was halted after the cable was discovered in November 2007.
The government also questioned revelations that the International Red Cross met with Canadian officials in Kandahar to warn them about the risk of torture in Afghan jails. According to uncensored copies of memos examined by The Canadian Press, the Red Cross warned in 2006, a year before Canada changed its detainee procedure, that there was “a lack of judicial safeguards” — diplomatic code for torture.
“The representative of the Red Cross in Washington said they would not operate that way — that’s good enough for me,” said Laurie Hawn, parliamentary secretary to Defence Minister Peter MacKay.
The report of Red Cross warnings came as the government made public more than 100 pages of heavily censored documents concerning the transfer of detainees arrested by Canadian Forces to Afghan jails.
While entire pages are blacked out, what remained, including a report by Colvin detailing detainee claims of torture, was more than enough to fuel opposition questions during testimony Wednesday of three government officials before the special committee on the Afghan mission.
Linda Garwood-Filbert, a Correctional Service Canada manager who served in Afghanistan, said she never personally saw any sign of abuse of detainees during 47 visits to Afghan prisons. She said she was not there when Canadian officials discovered a braided cable in a prison official’s office.
Colleen Swords, a senior official in Foreign Affairs at the time, said Canada acted once it saw the first credible sign of abuse in April 2007.
“I believe we did take all measures that were reasonable at the time to minimize that there would be a substantial risk. You can never eliminate risk altogether.”
Meanwhile, Colvin’s testimony has bolstered a war-crimes complaint by two Canadian human rights experts to the International Criminal Court.
Prof. William Schabas, director of the Irish Centre for Human Rights at the National University of Ireland, Galway, told Sun Media the ICC’s top prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, has recently been in contact with him and colleague Michel Byers, of the University of British Columbia, about a complaint they filed in 2007 following the first reports of abuse of Afghan detainees.
— with files from Christina Spencer
elizabeth.thompson@sunmedia.ca
