Thanks to Bruce for the heads up on this story, also covered here:  http://northerntruthseeker.blogspot.com/2010/03/canada-is-now-land-of-tyranny-canadian.html

http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2010/03/05/afghan-attaran005.html
March 5, 2010
Canada wanted Afghan prisoners tortured: lawyer

CBC News
Federal government documents on Afghan detainees suggest that Canadian officials intended some prisoners to be tortured in order to gather intelligence, according to a legal expert.

If the allegation is true, such actions would constitute a war crime, said University of Ottawa law professor Amir Attaran, who has been digging deep into the issue and told CBC News he has seen uncensored versions of government documents released last year.

“If these documents were released [in full], what they will show is that Canada partnered deliberately with the torturers in Afghanistan for the interrogation of detainees,” he said.

“There would be a question of rendition and a question of war crimes on the part of certain Canadian officials. That’s what’s in these documents, and that’s why the government is covering up as hard as it can.”

Detainee abuse became the subject of national debate last year after heavily redacted versions of the documents were made public after Attaran filed an access to information request. They revealed the Canadian military was not monitoring detainees who had been transferred from Canadian to Afghan custody. It was later alleged that some of those detainees were being mistreated.

Until now, the controversy has centred on whether the government turned a blind eye to abuse of Afghan detainees.

However, Attaran said the full versions of the documents show that Canada went even further in intentionally handing over prisoners to torturers.

“And it wasn’t accidental; it was done for a reason,” he said. “It was done so that they could be interrogated using harsher methods.”

The government maintains that nothing improper happened.

“The Canadian Forces have conducted themselves with the highest performance of all countries,” Prime Minister Stephen Harper told the House of Commons Thursday.

But many facets of the issue remain top secret, such as the role of Canada’s elite Joint Task Force 2, or JTF2. There have been hints that JTF2 might be handling so-called high-value prisoners.

“High-value targets would be detained under a completely different mechanism that involved special forces and targeted, intelligence-driven operations,” Richard Colvin, a former senior diplomat with Canada’s mission in Afghanistan, told a parliamentary committee last November.

Colvin claimed that all detainees transferred by Canadians to Afghan prisons were likely tortured by Afghan officials. He also said that his concerns were ignored by top government officials and that the government might have tried to cover up the issue.

Opposition parties have been trying to get the Conservative government to release the uncensored versions of the documents pertaining to the handling of Afghan detainees.

The Conservatives insist that releasing uncensored files on the issue would damage national security. On Friday, Justice Minister Rob Nicholson asked former Supreme Court of Canada Justice Frank Iacobucci to review whether there would be “injurious” effects if some Afghan detainee documents were made public.

Nicholson did not give full details on Iacobucci’s assignment or a timetable for when the review might be completed.

However, opposition parties said Parliament is entitled to those documents regardless of what Iacobucci decides.

“Parliament is supreme,” said Ontario NDP MP Paul Dewar. “What this is, is a skate around Parliament.”

Liberal MP Ujjal Dosanjh said the government still has many questions to answer on the subject of detainees.

“Who knew what and when, and who allowed the continuing saga of Afghan detainees being sent to a potential risk of torture?” Dosanjh said.

It’s not clear whether the government will make Iacobucci’s advice public. Moreover, he is not a sitting judge and can’t legally rule or force the government to do anything.

Canadian Broadcasting Corporation

Now put that together with the fact that CSIS has been interrogating prisoners, and you get a more complete picture of Canada’s Depravity - Thanks Fredd for the link!

http://www.thestar.com/news/canada/afghanmission/article/776514–csis-secretly-interrogated-afghan-prisoners?bn=1

New documents show CSIS had a role in the interrogation of Taliban suspects captured by Canadians.

JOHN D. MCHUGH, AFP/GETTY IMAGES FILE PHOTO

OTTAWA–Canadian spies have been interrogating captured Taliban fighters in Afghanistan since 2006.

Officers with the Canadian Security Intelligence Service have been working with Canadian military police intelligence officers, according to heavily censored witness transcripts filed with the Military Police Complaints Commission.

CSIS acknowledged in 2006 that its members gathered intelligence in Afghanistan, but the spy service’s precise role has remained in the shadows until now.

Intelligence expert Wesley Wark says the revelations are disturbing, partly because CSIS would have had no specialized knowledge of how to elicit information from Afghan prisoners at the time.

“I find that stunning,” said Wark, a University of Toronto historian who believes when it came to skill in interrogating prisoners of war, CSIS “lacked it in spades” in 2006.

Maj. Kevin Rowcliffe, former staff adviser to Canada’s overseas operations commander, told investigators with the commission (which handles complaints about the military police) there was debate within the army itself about how much experience its intelligence officers had in grilling prisoners.

“There was a lot of discussion in my headquarters about who was qualified to do interrogations, because we’re not talking the normal police interview, we’re talking interrogations, which (censored) were doing, not (military police),” he says in an edited transcript of an interview on Dec. 6, 2007.

A copy of the transcript was obtained by The Canadian Press.

“(Military police) were involved in that, but they weren’t necessarily involved in interviewing or interrogation-related issues,” Rowcliffe, who has since retired from the military, told the investigators. “That would be (censored) or some other parade that had special training in interrogation.”

Sources familiar with the unedited version say the blanked-out references are to CSIS.

The spy agency is legally permitted to gather intelligence anywhere in the world concerning threats to the security of Canada. In recent years, it has increasingly operated abroad.

Another source familiar with the process said CSIS officers in Kandahar carried out what’s known as tactical field questioning, essentially the initial interrogations of suspects. They tried to sort out who was a simple field soldier and who was a bona fide insurgent commander.

The spies would sometimes make recommendations on which Taliban prisoners to hand over to the National Directorate of Security, Afghanistan’s notorious intelligence service, the sources said.

The final say on whether to transfer always rested with the military task force commander.

The Military Police Complaints Commission tried to ask questions about CSIS’s role in Kandahar but abandoned that approach when it became bogged down in legal challenges about its authority to investigate Ottawa’s overall prisoner transfer policy.

Last November diplomat-whistleblower Richard Colvin testified before a special House of Commons committee that most prisoners Canada handed over to the Afghan intelligence service were tortured – a claim the Conservative government and military commanders, past and present, angrily denied.

Rowcliffe’s interview transcript prompts questions about whether the military and CSIS officers had enough time to conduct proper interrogations so early on in the insurgency, when newly arrived troops had little intelligence on the threats they faced.

The military has 96 hours after capture to decide whether to hand a prisoner over to Afghan authorities, but Rowcliffe said there was pressure to turn them over sooner.

He said he took up the concerns with the commander of overseas operations, saying: “I understand the time sensitiveness of this issue to the Government of Canada, but we may have Osama bin Laden, yet you are trying to get me to give him over as quickly as possible.”

Often his superior’s answer was “no.” His boss, Lt.-Gen. Michel Gauthier, indicated his hands were tied and told Rowcliffe the federal government’s policy was firm.

“I said we need to take the time to do a proper investigation, interview, interrogation, whatever you want to call it, to confirm who we have and what has this guy done or gal done,” Rowcliffe said in his statement.

He was asked by commission investigators how he thought the military would obtain its intelligence if the instructions were to transfer detainees quickly to the Afghans.

“My impression was they didn’t seem to care about that,” said Rowcliffe. “I don’t know if they didn’t grasp the importance of it, or just that it was not important because the pressure was … to get rid of them because of the Government of Canada.”

He said he wasn’t sure whether there was pressure from the defence minister and chief of defence staff.

“I have no idea, but I know from Gen. Gauthier’s position that (it was): Get rid of them as quickly as you can and what’s taking so long? That’s the kind of questions I’d get.”

Security expert Wark said these latest revelations will likely fuel human rights groups’ fears that Canada was outsourcing interrogation to the Afghan security forces.

Canada went into Kandahar thinking the Taliban and Al Qaeda were merely “a nuisance,” he said, and there was a “ferocious underestimation” of the mission.

“The military simply had no expertise. It had been decades since they had to interrogate prisoners of war,” Wark said. “And if the military lacked that expertise, you can be sure, CSIS lacked it in spades.”

He said hard questions must be asked about how much knowledge CSIS had of Afghanistan and its complex tribal network in 2006.

“The answer would be very little,” he said. “They didn’t have a trained body of people with the language skills, knowledge of the country, knowledge of the tribal situation, who was in charge of which warlord group, what was the nature of the Taliban. Those are all issues they had to develop an expertise on after 2006.”

CSIS spokeswoman Isabelle Scott, in response to media questions, said the agency does not publicly discuss operations.

She did confirm CSIS has had a presence in Afghanistan “for the past few years” and provides intelligence “in support of the safety and security of Canadian and allied forces on the ground.” She also said CSIS gathers intelligence in Afghanistan “to mitigate potential security threats to Canada.”

It was CSIS activities in Kandahar that caught the attention of the spy agency’s inspector general, Eva Plunkett, who investigated “policy gaps and inconsistencies.”

The declassified version of Plunkett’s 2007 certificate – a top secret report card on CSIS prepared for the public safety minister – contained no suggestion that the spy service had done anything wrong or illegal.

The certificate noted Afghanistan was “a fundamental intelligence priority” and commended CSIS for impressive work “in an extremely challenging environment.”

But it warned that CSIS and National Defence lacked clear policies that would “guide future (censored) activities in this theatre.”

Agreements between the spy service and military were out of date, said the annual certificate, made public in May 2008.

“I do believe that those who serve in this environment deserve to be equipped with the policy framework to guide their work.”