Mike Oldham's Virtual Pen

Parliament trumps PM; What's next?

    House of Commons Speaker Peter Milliken's ruling against the Conservative government on the Afghan detainee issue may be a victory for Parliament, and indeed for the democratic process. And that's important.
    But now what?
    This historic ruling in Canadian politics stems from the country's controversy over the way detainees captured by Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan were treated after they were handed over to Afghan authorities. Many were tortured once in Afghanistan's custody. The controversy here has been about whether the Canadian government knew about the probability of torture but maintained the policy of handing over prisoners anyway. Such a practice would put Canada in violation of the Geneva Conventions.
    Prime minister Stephen Harper's government has been stonewalling, refusing opposition and media demands to provide answers and releasing heavily blacked-out documents on the case. The Conservatives are hiding behind the excuse that releasing pertinent details would jeopardize national security and Canadian military operations in Afghanistan. But the equally plausible explanation is that the government is holding back the details because it doesn't want to incriminate itself.
    The Speaker's ruling, while shaking a finger at the government's antics, is a very thoughtful attempt at trying to resolve the situation through compromise. He wants the government and the Opposition to agree within two weeks on a way to have the uncensored documents examined without jeopardizing national security.
    The possible outcomes have all been well reported in the past 24 hours. The two sides could come up with an agreement. The government could appeal the Speaker's ruling to the Supreme Court of Canada, but everyone seems to think that's unlikely, and even if Harper chooses that route the Court may well refuse. The government could co-opt one of the opposition parties to back down. Or Harper could force a snap election.
    The possible compromise solutions have also been well elucidated. One involves swearing in certain MPs so they'd have the security clearance to view the uncensored documents. Another involves changing the mandate of a retired judge, Frank Iacobucci, who's already looking at the secret documents, at the government's request, to determine how much detail it could safely release. Problem is, he's under instruction to report back only to the government, not publicly. Under those constraints the government would be under no obligation to tell us what Iacobucci said. His mandate, though, could be changed so that he reports back to Parliament, instead of the government.
    But here's the really important issue out of all this:  will Canadians ever find out what's in these documents? Having MPs cleared for security and examining them - even having Iacobucci report to Parliament on his findings - may not yield answers if those people are sworn to secrecy beforehand. And such a demand could be the government's price for not triggering an election.
    Surely the answer is straightforward. Let an impartial party examine the documents and report back to Parliament. If any details are found that are genuinely important to national security, then that party, or Parliament, could simply say so, without revealing what they are.
    However, if, as I and many Canadians suspect, the details reveal that the Harper Conservatives knew about the torture but failed to act, that should be made public.

Canada, Afghan detainees & "1984"

    My son is working on a college project in which he is to find aspects of George Orwell's 1984 mirrored in modern society.
    He asked me to cast an eye over his outline. Modern-day examples abound and I'm sure we can all think of at least a few. His include the Patriot Act introduced in the United States after the 9/11 attacks (used in some cases to give the government more leeway in overriding civil liberties when it comes to things such as spying on citizens, wiretaps, etc.); the recent proliferation of surveillance cameras in Britain (now the world's most surveilled country); misinformation (he talked about the U.S. TV channel Fox, but an example truer to the spirit of 1984 would be the Bush administration's insistence on the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq as a justification for going to war, when in fact there were none); doublespeak (one might think of phrases like "enhanced interrogation" in place of the word "torture"); and generally maintaining a climate of fear to keep the population cowed.
     We're all familiar with 1984, Orwell's vision of a future society (the book was written in 1949) that was kept in its place through just such techniques by a totalitarian "big brother" government.
    This week, Canadians were reminded that they are not immune from such tendencies, revolving around the continuing dispute over the handling of Afghan detainees who were captured by Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan. Since the troops didn't have the capability of keeping their detainees incarcerated, they were handed over to the Afghan authorities and, in many cases, subsequently tortured in Afghan jails.
    The opposition parties, the media, and by extension the Canadian public, have been trying to find out why the government was slow to stop the transfers when it was common knowledge that torture was rampant in Afghanistan. Also, why the Canadian government wasn't aware of the situation (or so it claims) when everyone else involved in Afghanistan knew. And, finally, why the government refuses to come clean on the issue.
    In short, who knew what, and when, and how quickly did the government act, if it acted at all, after being warned about Afghan prisoner abuse.
    The government has done everything it can to avoid releasing any information. It has defied Parliamentary committees looking into the affair. It has similarly defied the Military Police Complaints Commission, which is also investigating. The government has released documents so heavily blacked out (censored) as to be unreadable. It even resorted to the extremely obstructive tactic of dumping a huge load of boxes containing thousands of blacked-out documents in the Parliament building. M-Ps were welcome to look at them. They were in no order and it turned out, upon examination, that they were old documents which had previously been released. In other words, the manoeuvre was a time-waster to further delay progress in getting to the bottom of this affair.
    Then this week, a new and Orwellian twist. Yesterday, the Military Police Complaints Commission started hearing the first evidence from Canadians who have fought in Afghanistan. These are supposed to be public hearings. But with only a couple of hours' notice, the justice department closed the hearings to the public and the media.
    The justification? Security concerns. And the real 1984 spin: the reasons for the decision are confidential. The lead lawyer for the commission can't even tell us exactly why the hearings have gone into two days of closed sessions.
    Anything can be cloaked under this post-9/11 secrecy. We can't give you any details of what's happening because of security, and for the same reason we can't tell you why (except that it's because of security).
    For a democracy, the Canadian government's behaviour in the Afghan detainee case has been scandalous. It is doing everything it can to prevent the truth from coming out, even to the point of almost being in contempt of Parliament.
    It might as well just be upfront about it and announce the creation of a Ministry of Truth, the ironically-named government department in 1984 responsible for creating propaganda by changing the historical record.
    Fear, indeed, is playing a role in this affair - the government's fear that if the truth does come out, Canada could be implicated in war crimes for failing to stop a practice that was in violation of the Geneva Conventions.

The Liberals not there yet, but trying

    So, do we have a new Liberal Party in Canada?
    Not exactly. But after a weekend convention in which the party tried to come up with enough ideas to constitute some sort of identifiable policy, we may have a start.
    At the end of the conference, a plan was announced. If elected, the Liberals would cancel the Conservative government's promise to cut corporate taxes.
    The Conservatives think reducing corporate tax would help stimulate economic recovery. The Liberals would spend the money saved by cancelling the tax cut on health care and environmental protection.
    The Liberals have had trouble coming up with anything concrete since electing Michael Ignatieff as leader. Now there's a least one vision by which to distinguish them from the Conservatives.
    The interesting thing about this idea is that it seems to be in tune with what the majority of Canadian business leaders are saying, in a broad sense. A new survey (by the Globe and Mail and the Business News Network) shows most of them agree (58%) that tax increases are likely necessary to put the country back on a sound financial footing and reduce the deficit after the global economic crunch (40% disagreed). These are tax increases in general. However, business leaders say they would accept higher corporate tax in the near term if that would help.
    Compare that with the reaction of the Conservative government to the Liberals' proposal. Stephen Harper's office calls the idea "bizarre" given what it says is the fragile condition of the economy right now (that's despite the fact that the latest figures show Canada's economy is much more robust than expected).
    A strange situation: at the moment, the Conservatives seem to be out of step with the business community and the Liberals more in sync with it.
    (That's not the only thing the Conservatives seem adrift on. They propose to increase the budget for prisons by 27% while cutting costs in other departments. That's despite consistent statistics showing Canada's crime rate has been going down in recent years; and multi-year studies which have shown that increased prison time is ineffective in curbing many serious crimes. However, the Conservatives are hell-bent on a "tough on crime" agenda as an ideology, regardless of the evidence.)
    The Liberals are still a long way from presenting a set of tangible policies so voters have a clear choice in the next election (whenever that is). And I wish Michael Ignatieff would stop making such grandiose statements as: "We changed Canadian politics this weekend and it will never be the same".
    Get a grip, Michael. Nothing could be further from the truth. You've taken a step, but a lot more needs to be done.

Recalibrate? More like "steady as she goes"

    Regular visitors to this blog may have noticed its recent inactivity. I've been off, recalibrating (including a ski trip to Banff). Upon return, there was nothing new of note. Life burbled on as usual. The house was still here, unchanged.
    Just like our political leaders in Ottawa. They went off, supposedly to "recalibrate". Now that they're back we can see that the House (of Parliament) is still the same. There's definitely nothing new or noteworthy. In fact, after a Speech From the Throne opening a new session and a budget, the only thing people could find to get worked up about was a proposal to change a few words in Canada's national anthem. That elicited almost as much negative reaction as the prime minister's decision to prorogue Parliament in the first place and was duly dropped as quickly as a hot briquette.
    Now a poll (by the national broadcaster and Ekos) has confirmed what was evident about the Throne Speech and the budget: a deafening lack of interest among Canadians (or as the sharp-witted political observer Chantal Hébert put it in a recent column, they were unable to provoke "more than a national shrug" outside Ottawa's political circles).
    It's easy to see why. First, there was nothing in the hour-long tedium of the Throne Speech (except the aforementioned, now defunct, anthem renovation proposal) or the budget. The latter document was designed to offend the fewest number of people so as not to provoke a non-confidence vote, thereby triggering an election. We are told repeatedly, after all, that Canadians just don't want one.
    But it's our politicians who really don't want an election because as things stand no party is in a position to win decisively. The governing Conservatives see no point unless they can turn their minority into a majority. The opposition Liberals know they can't win at the moment. The other two parties with seats in Parliament are stuck in their usual positions as also-rans with no hope of forming a government - minority or otherwise.
    So we have a government presenting a non-event budget and three opposing parties who say they can't support it. But since the budget is a confidence document, actually defeating it would lead to the dreaded election. So the three opposition parties make sure they have enough members in the House to register a symbolic vote against, but not enough to prevent the budget from passing.
    No wonder the general reaction is nothing more than a national shrug. Canadians are fed up with the posturing, game playing, jockeying and partisanship that has been the defining characteristic of national politics under the successive minority governments of the last few years. We have a cynical, bullying Conservative Party under prime minister Stephen Harper; a weak, bleating Liberal Party that can't present a coherent vision or  viable  alternative no matter what it tries; and two parties that aren't  even factors: a stale NDP spinning its wheels and a special interest Quebec nationalist party that doesn't seem to care much about what happens as long as it's good for one province.
    We can add to this the pathetic spectacle of buck-passing over the Afghan detainee issue (how much did the government know, and when, about the torture of detainees captured by Canadian troops and turned over to Afghan authorities). Much of this transpired under the Conservatives but goes back to the previous Liberal government. So now, as the Conservatives do everything they can to avoid handing over documents that might reveal who knew what and when, both parties stand in the House of Commons and blame each other for the scandal.
    There's still the residual effect of the global economic crisis to be dealt with. That's something people should care about. Yet it's somewhat muted here. The latest figures show unemployment is down, the economy is picking up and Canada's banking sector remains strong. The Conservative government will take credit for that, naturally, attributing it to their economic stimulus efforts. The fact is, though, that of all the stimulus programs announced, many have not started. A lot of them haven't even received their money. It looks as if the latest signs of recovery are happening in spite of, not because of, the government. And that's just often the way with the waxing and waning of economies, isn't it? Global influences play such an important role that the efforts of a single country's government often don't contribute much to that country's own fortunes. In Canada's case, however, the health of the banking sector derives greatly from decisions made by earlier Liberal governments, rather than anything Harper's Conservatives have done. The one thing they've managed is to wipe out the decent surplus Canada had accumulated under the Liberal finance minister, Paul Martin.
    Now the minority Conservatives are outlining what they'll do in the coming years to clean up the deficit that was created under their own watch. They'll make this one of their main planks and few will argue with it. Somehow, they're going achieve this feat without raising taxes. Of course, the quickest and most sensible way to eliminate a large chunk of the deficit would be to restore the Goods and Services Tax to its previous level. That would fatten up the federal coffers in no time. However, the Conservatives were the ones who cut two percent off the GST in the first place, even though in terms of stimulating economic growth it was the least effective thing to do. It didn't do much for the population in terms of savings on spending either - especially after the economic crisis hit, people lost jobs and started spending less.
    The GST cut was a rabbit-out-of-a-hat medicine show trick that has benefitted individual Canadians little and severely limited the ability to curtail the deficit. The Conservatives, in effect, picked the government's pocket and that of Canadians.
      They're pinning their hopes mainly on cuts - to programs and the public service. Now how convenient is that? Cutting the public service plays directly into one of the Conservatives' main goals - smaller government. They can use the global economic meltdown and the need to eliminate the deficit as a smoke screen to reduce the size of government. And they'll probably hear little complaint from the population, since most Canadians look on those in the public sector as unfairly entitled in their job security and benefits in the first place.
     We'll see what happens when services start getting cut and national assets sold.
    In the midst of all this, it's no wonder Canadians are tuning out. The political rabble in Ottawa are so busy heckling each other that they don't have time to do anything - not even to articulate a vision for the country. Yet Canada's doing comparatively well. Why? Probably because Canadians are doing what they do best: they are going diligently about their business. The country, in essence, is running itself while the political sideshow in Ottawa is cocooned inside its own bubble. In a way, the country may as well not have a government.
    There seems a large disengagement of the electorate. Who can blame them? And it's hard to see that changing. Short of a major scandal or a riveting new vision for the country, one can only foresee a new low turnout when the next election comes around.

Adam's rib

    Usually I don't spend much time commenting on local politics but let's consider, for a moment, the case of Adam Giambrone.
    The candidate for mayor of Toronto has run into a spot of bother over his personal relationships. To wit: his "inappropriate" (his word) affair with a younger woman (she was 19, now 20; he's 32). And his latest admission: that she hasn't been the only one he's dated in the past year.
    People may be shrugging over his revelation. He is, after all, a single guy in his early 30s. It seems normal that someone in those circumstances could be seeing more than one person. And that's raised the questions of whether it's anyone else's business, whether anyone cares, and whether it might hurt his mayoral chances.
    On the face of it, the answer to those questions is probably no. This salacious tidbit hardly puts Giambrone on the level of big-league straying politicians like Bill Clinton or John Edwards. But...
    This became the public's business because Giambrone chose to make a statement about it and apologize. Why offer an apology? Because he already has a relationship with a woman he describes as a serious partner. Even so, some political observers and many media reports have pointed out, the man isn't married and isn't doing anything that others in his age group aren't doing. The problem with this analysis is that it focuses on his flings. It ignores what appear to be to me to be the more important aspects of this scenario.
    One is the way in which Giambrone described his "partner" to his 19-year-old girlfriend. He said she was in his life for political reasons. That he had announced he had a serious partner because it would look good for his political campaign.
    I don't know about Sarah McQuarrie, but if my partner described me that way, I'd be insulted. Apparently she's politically correct window dressing for his political aspirations. It's conventionally proper, when running for political office, to show your steady character by trotting out your family, if you're married, and if not, then at least show the public you have a serious relationship. Giambrone's dismissive way of describing McQuarrie's role in his life says a lot about his character.
    Then there's the matter of Toronto's public transit system. It's a sad, inadequate, outdated thing, incapable of giving the level of service required by Canada's largest city. Everyone agrees big improvements are needed, expansion of the subway system being at the top of the list. Toronto covers a sprawling geographic area and it's growing steadily. And yet, for a variety of reasons, it's incapable of making a serious commitment to its woeful transit system.
    And who heads the Toronto Transit Commission? Adam Giambrone. Its current troubles alone might be enough to make one wonder about his chances as candidate for mayor.
    So when analyzing his situation and his prospects, it's not enough just to look at his admission of multiple affairs and how he's misled his various partners about the number of people he's been seeing. We have to look at the whole package, including his handling of both the TTC and his supposedly serious partner.
    And that begs this question: if Giambrone is apparently incapable of running not only the transit system but his personal life, how capable is he of running the country's largest city?

* As this was posted, Adam Giambrone announced his withdrawal from the mayoral race, proving he is at least smarter than the various pundits who predicted this would not have any harmful effect on his electoral chances.

Are we still a democracy?

    For the second time in a year, Canada's minority government has prorogued, or suspended, Parliament for partisan reasons.
    On both occasions, Stephen Harper's Conservatives have found themselves in a jam they wanted to get out of. Last time they avoided a no-confidence motion. This year's prorogation shuts down a Parliamentary committee inquiry into the torture of detainees by Afghan authorities after they were handed over by Canadian troops there.
    The Conservatives have been trying to stymie this inquiry from the beginning - first, slagging the civil servant who came out with the revelations about torture, then refusing to co-operate with the Parliamentary committee, and finally suspending Parliament. That stops not only the committee's work (and the work of all other Parliamentary committees), but also embarrassing challenges to the government in the televised Question Period.
    An official government spokesman dismisses the Afghan detainee issue, claiming it's of no interest to Canadians. Old news, he calls it. No real concern to most of us. He's entirely wrong. Canada's international reputation is at stake here - a reputation in which our country was respected for its fairness and integrity. Now we're dealing with an issue that actually violates the Geneva Conventions and the government is trying to sweep it under the carpet, claiming people aren't interested.
    As I said in an earlier post, if the government is going to stifle official debate about this scandal then it's up to Canadians and the media to make sure the issue does not fade from public attention. That's what the government is counting on - that by the time we get through the excitement of hosting the Winter Olympics and March rolls around, we'll have forgotten about the detainee issue. Let's make sure that doesn't happen.
    Suspending Parliament also gives Stephen Harper the chance to stack the Senate with more Conservative appointees (this from a man who has practically made a career out of championing an elected Senate). And come March 4th you can bet his government will have come up with another budget that puts the Opposition parties over a barrel. They'll be given just enough to force them to continue supporting the Conservative minority.
    Harper and his government continue to engage in the most callous political game-playing. But they have stooped to new lows in using prorogation as a convenient door stop to keep themselves in power.
    Harper is not just suspending Parliament. He's suspending the democratic process.
    The Conservatives came to power in the wake of the old Liberal sponsorship scandal with Harper promising to make government more open and accountable. He's done exactly the opposite. His period in power has been secretive, controlling, opaque and completely disdainful of Parliament and the people.
    The Conservatives have faced numerous problems since being elected. It's often been observed by commentators that no one issue has been enough to cause their overthrow in an election. There hasn't been a dynamic alternative in the Opposition and Canadians appear to have been satisfied that the Harper Conservatives' worst tendencies have been held in check by their minority government status.
    But I think we've crossed that threshold. Harper has proved that he does not value democracy in this country. He values power, he wants a stranglehold on it and there's little he won't do to achieve that.
    Canadians now have a principle on which to go to the polls: respect for the very Parliamentary democracy on which this country operates.

Afghan detainees and Canada's dictatorial politics

    As hard as the government tries, it cannot make the furor over the Afghan detainee scandal go away.
    A brief bit of background: this all began when a former Canadian diplomat in Afghanistan, Richard Colvin, revealed that Canadian political and military officials were alerted as early as 2006 that Afghans rounded up by Canadian soldiers and handed over to the authorities in Afghanistan were at serious risk of torture.
    Transferring detainees to those who would torture them is a violation of the Geneva Conventions.
    The Canadian government's first reaction was an effort to smear Colvin's reputation. Government officials and former military leaders slammed Colvin's credentials, claiming that he lacked the knowledge and experience to make such assertions. They implied that Colvin was a Taliban sympathizer, or at the very least was naive enough to swallow Taliban propaganda. They maintained he spent all his time in Afghanistan inside Canadian compounds and, since he didn't go out into the countryside, did not know the situation "on the ground", as they like to say.
    The government's tactics shifted once it became clear that torture in Afghan prisons was pretty much common knowledge, and if that was the case, how could the Canadian government not have been aware of it?
    The Conservatives tried saying they didn't receive reliable information until at least November of 2007, at which point they renegotiated the arrangements for detainees handed over by Canadian troops. Despite that renegotiation, some detainees still proved difficult to track because they were transferred to "black site" detention facilities, to which foreigner monitors don't have access.
    The government alleged that Colvin's reports had not clearly mentioned torture. In a weak effort to support that claim, it released heavily censored documents for a Parliamentary committee to examine - documents with so much of their text blacked out they were useless in trying to ascertain the truth.
    All of the government's arguments have either turned out to be lame or have been disproved.
    For example, the Conservatives used national security as an excuse for releasing censored documents instead of the full originals, which they claim would reveal too much sensitive information about Canada's operations in Afghanistan, which then could be used by the Taliban and al-Qaeda. The argument is bunk. The government is suggesting that Members of Parliament can't be trusted to view secure documents. What do the Conservatives think? That MPs on the committee, once they've seen the documents, are going to display them publicly or will blab about sensitive Canadian security details? Hardly. The government looks even more ridiculous when it uses the same justification for refusing to let the Military Police Complaints Commission examine the documents - a group that actually does have the required security clearance to do so.
    The only thing Parliamentarians would be likely to reveal is that the full, uncensored documents show the government is lying about what it knew and when. They also might implicate some high-level cabinet ministers the government can ill afford to lose because, surely, if it were to become known that senior officials were aware of the probability of torture but did nothing there would be calls for their resignations. Who are the Conservatives trying to protect?
    The government's tactic in releasing blacked-out documents didn't sit well with the public, nor did their slandering of Colvin. So they tried another tack: they accused the opposition parties of being unpatriotic and unsupportive of our troops in Afghanistan.
    That's not even bunk, it's bullshit. This was never about Canadian soldiers and their conduct in the field. They were doing their jobs as directed by their military and political masters. This is entirely about the fact that clear warnings were issued to those in charge, torture in Afghan prisons by Afghan authorities was well-known yet Canadian officials did not act for at least a year. The public (that would be voters, remember) is not snowed by the attempt to equate this issue with a betrayal of Canadian troops.
    Now the government is boycotting the Parliamentary committee looking into this affair. It's also considering shutting down this session of Parliament and not opening a new session until March, after Canada finishes hosting the 2010 Olympics. That, the Conservatives hope, will provide enough time and distraction for this scandal to fade from the public memory.
    Yesterday, Richard Colvin spoke for the first time since his initial appearance before the committee. He rebutted each of the government's claims against him and his reports, presenting further documentation. It shows the word torture was used clearly in his reports. There were six such reports in 2006 citing not only his and the embassy's observations but concerns voiced by allies in the war against the Taliban.
    Yesterday's documents also reveal how Colvin tried to track down the fates of three detainees handed over to the Afghan intelligence service in May of 2007. That contradicts the government's line that it did not have what it calls credible evidence that there was a torture problem in Afghanistan until November of that year.
    Colvin also presented evidence that he made trips outside the Canadian compound in Kandahar about a dozen times and that he left the grounds of the embassy in Kabul at least 500 times to investigate what was going on in the country so he could file his reports.
    Colvin was a senior Canadian diplomat in Afghanistan. He made himself very familiar with the country. He certainly was not someone who lacked the knowledge or experience to make the assessments he provided to Canada's political and military leaders. He was a man who did his job, did it well, and is now being verbally attacked by the government because his revelations have put it in an embarrassing position.
    The government's excuses are getting weaker by the day. On Tuesday, the Parliamentary secretary for the defence minister offered this justification: "It's not the time [the holiday period] to be having meetings implying...that Canadians are somehow guilty of war crimes" (because of the Geneva Conventions prohibition on handing people over to torture).
    Gee, we wouldn't want to upset your Christmas pudding.
    The government's tactics in this affair are increasingly dictatorial. You know the situation's getting bad when one of the Globe and Mail's leading columnists, Lawrence Martin in this case, writes a damning piece along those lines since that paper and columnist have tended to be generally sympathetic to Stephen Harper.
     Harper's Conservatives are using the method they know best when stuck in a corner or having trouble getting their agenda through: bullying. They love to intimidate, block inquiry, shut down debate or even conversation.
    They also love using or creating situations for partisan political gain. Well, they are politicians, after all. But one angle to shutting down Parliament now is particularly cynical. Five seats in the Canadian Senate will be vacant in January. When Harper fills those he could change the make-up of Senate committees if the current session of Parliament is over. The balance of power can change in the Senate, but the balance on the committees is allowed to change only when a Parliamentary session ends. So if Parliament is prorogued, the government will be sure of having more Conservatives on the Senate committees when the new session starts. Therefore it will be harder for Opposition Senators to amend proposed government bills.
    Political games-playing, not policy, seems to be the main focus in Ottawa.
    The Afghan torture scandal is one of the most serious the Harper Conservatives have faced since they came to power. But I agree with columnist Chantal Hébert (The Toronto Star, CBC News At Issue panel): it may not be enough to justify, in the public's mind, the Opposition bringing down the minority government and forcing an election. This has been a problem for the Opposition all along. While the Conservatives keep putting their foot in it, no one issue so far has been big enough to provoke an election. However, since Harper's Conservatives do seem to have a penchant for stirring up controversy, the Opposition can still hope that an outrage seismic enough to justify a vote will come along. Or, if the government keeps stepping in cow patties, that there will eventually be enough accumulation of incidents that voters will a) remember (the electorate tends to have a short memory) and b) become tired enough of the Conservatives to want to turf them.
    In the meantime, it's up to all of us - citizens, the media and politicians - to ensure that even if the Conservatives succeed in short circuiting the committee meetings on this issue by boycotting them, and silencing questions in the House of Commons by proroguing Parliament, that we do not let this issue fade by forgetting about it. Because Canadians really are owed an explanation over the handling of the Afghan detainee situation.

Conservative tactics backfiring on Afghan torture

    No amount of nattering by our federal government can now change the widely held perception that it is involved in a cover-up regarding the handling of detainees in Afghanistan.
    There are allegations that Ottawa was warned about torture in Afghan prisons early in Canada's military mission there. The Canadian government at the time was Liberal. It's Stephen Harper's Conservatives, who were in power when the issue of detainee transfers came to a head, doing the back pedaling.
    It was pretty common knowledge that torture was used in Afghan prisons when Canadian soldiers started transferring those it had rounded up in patrols or fighting to local authorities. Diplomats and organizations from various countries were aware of the problem. Some have been quoted on the issue from as far back as 2004 - before Canadian diplomat Richard Colvin says he started alerting Canadian officials in his memos.
    But the government persists in trying to avoid this controversy by defaming Colvin as some sort of Taliban sympathizer and accusing the Opposition parties of being disloyal to our troops by even raising the issue. In short, the government is doing everything but telling the truth.
    Its release of documents on the handling of Afghan prisoners is simply adding some pretty volatile fuel to an already burning fire. These documents are heavily censored - so much so that they throw doubt on the government's claims that they are redacted for security reasons. So many sections are blacked out that observers can only come to one conclusion: the government must be hiding something.
    Suspicions are only bolstered by the fact that even those with the proper security clearance - like the Military Police Complaints Commission - are being denied access to uncensored versions of the documents.
    Does Harper's government really think people believe this spin, this poor attempt at propaganda, because they don't.
    This story is also a good example of why even apparently healthy democracies need a free and functioning media. The media on all political sides have been doing a good job of investigating this affair and holding the government's feet to the fire over its excuses.
    The Canadian government is not acquitting itself well in this matter. The public are not buying its broadsides against Colvin or the opposition. Each newly released blacked out document and government denial adds to the growing sense the government is trying to hide what it knew and when it knew it.
    Stephen Harper's Conservatives have nothing to learn from Tiger Woods when it comes to embarrassing themselves in public. With the Afghan torture affair, they're doing the political equivalent of driving their car into a tree and fire hydrant with each passing day.
    The only way out for them is to come clean and release all the relevant documents, uncensored.

Demonizing the whistleblower

    When someone blows the whistle on wrongdoing, the first reaction you often see is an effort to marginalize the person and deride their credibility.
    The Canadian government and segments of its military are currently trying to do an effective job of that on Richard Colvin. He's the diplomat alleging that the government and military knew detainees handed over by Canadian soldiers to authorities in Afghanistan were likely to be tortured.
    Questions about possible torture were raised soon after Canadian troops started their Afghan mission. The government answer was always the same: that if Afghans rounded up by Canada's forces were being tortured after they had been transferred to Afghan custody, the Red Cross would find out and inform Canadian officials.
    But Colvin maintains attempts by the Red Cross to contact our military officials were ignored. He himself provided written assessments on the situation when he was serving in Afghanistan as a diplomat in 2006 and '07. Ottawa asked him to stop writing reports and discuss it over the phone instead.
    Why would you want someone to tell you things only over the phone? So there's no paper trail. So, if questioned in future, you could maintain that you don't remember ever receiving such a call. And if it was all handled orally, you're reasonably assured that the other person can't go digging in their files and produce some awkward memo with the original date on it contradicting you.
    Concerns about the possibility of a Canadian link to torture were well covered in the media at the time. So were the government's assurances that it wasn't happening. Then, as the concerns persisted, its assurances that a new system had been set up to monitor detainees to be sure those handed over by Canadian troops weren't being tortured. (Our original decision to hand over those captured to the Afghans was a way of getting around concerns that if they were turned over to the U.S. they could be tortured and shipped to Guantanamo Bay).
    Our government and former chief of the armed forces, retired General Rick Hillier are doing their best to malign Colvin. Hillier says he doubts whether Colvin is qualified to talk about the issues he's raising. Defence minister Peter MacKay says there are incredible holes in his story. MacKay says Colvin was taken in by Taliban lies. "We're being asked," says MacKay, "to accept testimony from people who throw acid in the faces of school children and blow up buses of civilians".
    But Colvin maintains that many of those rounded up by Canadian troops were just ordinary Afghans swept up in a broad net, I guess kind of like factory trawler fishing: you get some of the fish you want but capture a lot of innocent ones in the process. It certainly isn't the word of just Taliban, as MacKay contends.
    But Colvin isn't the only one who rang alarm bells about torture in Afghan custody. And even today, in an interview in the Globe and Mail, Malalai Joya, a young Afghan parliamentarian currently visiting Canada, says in regard to the torture issue: "It's an open secret that this happens. The Canadian government is still supporting this." Common knowledge - except to Canadian officials who didn't want to listen.
    Colvin is being described as a "rogue diplomat". If that's the case, why would Ottawa have given him a job as a senior intelligence officer in Canada's Washington embassy after he finished his Afghan stint? Perhaps, after his ringing of alarm bells, the federal government thought a plum job might keep him quiet.
    The government doesn't want Colvin's allegations to come out. On one hand, they show that federal and military leaders were made aware of a situation but didn't bother to act on it and, indeed, denied knowledge of it. They're also afraid that Colvin's testimony will taint their mission, perhaps hurt Canadian public support for the military role in Afghanistan.
    Bravo to Mr. Colvin for blowing this particular whistle.

Obama's "oops" moment

    Barack Obama crossed a line yesterday, a surprising line for a law school graduate and former legal professor.
    He commented publicly about a case that is going before the courts.
    It's the pending trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, accused of helping to plan the 9/11 attacks. Mohammed admits to his role.
    Obama, in his comments about the case, said: "I don't think it will be offensive at all when he's convicted and when the death penalty is applied to him". Obama later denied that he was prejudging the case. But that is exactly what he was doing. He gave his prediction, in no uncertain terms, not only of the outcome of the trial but of the sentence.
    The U.S. government decided to move this case to civilian court. Elected officials now have no business predicting its outcome. Obama should know that as well as anyone. His statement might be par for the course in, say, a dictatorship. But in a free society with a court system, it's a violation of normal jurisprudence.
    If an elected official in Canada had said such a thing about a pending case, it would be thrown out and the official would likely face consequences.
    It's bad enough that the Attorney-General, Eric Holder, in answering a question, alluded to the fact that no matter what happens, Mohammed at the very least will remain in custody.
    Holder was asked a hypothetical question about the government's response if the civilian court should, for example, order Mohammed released for some reason. What if he's acquitted? Holder replied that in such a scenario, Mohammed could always be moved to the Bagram detention facility in Afghanistan, where he'd be out of the legal jurisdiction of the U.S.
    I'm not advocating on Mohammed's behalf, here. He admits to planning a crime against humanity. I have no particular reason to doubt him.
    However, a judicial process has been set up. Obama, other elected officials and government representatives in the U.S. now have to keep mum on the case and let it work its way through the court system. If you're going to tell people what the outcome is going to be, regardless of what the judge and jury decide, then there's no point in having the trial in the first place.
    Unless you simply want a legal rubber stamp for executing the guy.