OTTAWA — It’s not easy for Rick Hillier to be overshadowed in a hearing of military men.
But the garrulous, blustery former chief of defence staff played second fiddle Wednesday to the quiet efficiency of the man seated to his left in a House of Commons committee room.
By the time Michel Gauthier, the recently retired lieutenant-general who was in charge of overseas deployment for the Canadian military, concluded his 22-minute opening statement into the treatment of Afghan detainees, stone-faced opposition MPs were rubbing their chins in consternation.
Liberals, New Democrats and the Bloc Quebecois are eagerly pursuing last week’s explosive testimony by Canadian diplomat Richard Colvin, who alleged that prisoners handed over to Afghan authorities by Canadian soldiers were routinely tortured and that Canadian officials did nothing to resolve the problem for 18 months.
Colvin, Canada’s No. 2 diplomat in Afghanistan at the time and now an intelligence officer in Washington, had cut a sympathetic figure at the committee — poised, cogent and committing apparent career suicide for what he believed was pursuit of the truth.
Gauthier, coming at the debate from the opposite side, was Colvin’s mirror image.
“I’m not shooting the messenger . . . I hardly know the man,” he told committee members.
But Gauthier painted a picture of a military that was acutely attuned to the detainee question from the outset, yet never had any reports detailing torture allegations until late in 2007.
“From the minute I became responsible for these challenges in February ‘06, I can say the entire chain of command understood the detainee policy to be a tough and highly sensitive issue,” he testified.
He acknowledged a long learning curve in a difficult environment — “We were at war and sometimes it just wasn’t very pretty” — but said he was personally briefed every single day on Afghans captured by Canadian soldiers.
His team, he said, understood it to be “a hot-button issue and one to be watched extremely closely.”
Along with Afghan casualties, and Canadian casualties, the detainee issue was explicitly recognized, said Gauthier, as one that “could lead to strategic failure” of the mission.
His testimony clearly deflated opposition MPs, who have argued vehemently that the Conservative government was wilfully negligent or asleep at the switch on the detainee issue.
And Gauthier managed to present his case without erecting any of the straw man arguments that have so tangled the political wrangling.
His voice sounded close to cracking when he described how “mortified” he and his wife had been last week to hear an MP accuse him personally of negligence or lying — “effectively branding us war criminals on national television” in the wake of Colvin’s testimony.
It was far more affecting testimony than Hillier’s Don Cherryesque bravado.
Absolutely no one in Ottawa has accused Canadian soldiers of abusing Afghan detainees, but that didn’t stop Hillier from raising the ugly spectre in his prepared comments.
He painted a graphic picture of Afghan combatants violently resisting detention after fighting to the last bullet — “and all were treated professionally, a great compliment and great credit to our Canadian soldiers and to their leadership, despite the emotion of grabbing somebody who had just shot your friend or had just blown up the vehicle in which the rest of your buddies were (driving).”
Hillier also noted that when Colvin was visiting Afghan prisons and other areas to prepare his diplomatic reports “he could not have done that without the work, the support and the protection of our soldiers.”
What exactly this aside had to do with the question at hand was unclear, as both Hillier and Gauthier testified it was not the role or mandate of the Canadian military to enter Afghan prisons and check on their condition after they were turned over to local authorities.
Hillier managed to plug his recently released memoir and even autographed a couple of copies for star-struck MPs after his testimony.
But it was Gauthier who stuck to the critical issues: who knew what, and when, and what they did about it.
He said he had read and re-read the full, uncensored reports of the time and can find no smoking gun. “There is in my view view little room for interpretation.”
And Gauthier said he hoped MPs on the committee will soon be permitted to see the full documentary evidence, which prompted a I’ll-believe-when-I-see-it laugh from NDP MP Paul Dewar.
The committee concluded its business Wednesday with a vote — in which Tories abstained — to call on the Conservative government to release all the documents. 19:22ET 25-11-09
