Canada’s top soldier has reversed himself on testimony he gave this week, with Chief of the Defence Staff Walter Natynczyk now admitting that a prisoner severely beaten in 2006 by Afghan interrogators had earlier been taken into custody by Canadian soldiers.
“I want to correct my statement,” General Natynczyk announced at a hastily arranged news conference, saying he’d been misinformed.
“I intend to investigate why it took so long to get to the Chief of the Defence Staff.”
He couldn’t say whether the man taken into Canadian custody was also formally processed as a detainee of Canada. Gen Natynczyk said he’s ordering an investigation into this.
The question is important because it would contradict Defence Minister Peter MacKay’s repeated insistence that not a single case of torture of Canadian detainees could be proven.
Knowingly transferring a prisoner to torture or abuse is a Geneva Conventions-grade war crime. But in this case there is no evidence Canadians knew this detainee would be maltreated.
Gen. Natynczyk said he only learned he was in error today.
“This morning at about 9 o’clock, I was briefed by my staff who’d been researching the case – just to ensure the completeness of all the information we’d been using,” he said, adding his officials produced a report from the June 2006 incident that contradicted what he previously knew.
“When I read that report, I realized it was not totally consistent with the operations report and the information provided to me by the chain of command.”
Opposition parties immediately pounced on the reversal, with the Liberals renewing their call for a public inquiry and New Democrats asking again for Mr. MacKay’s resignation.
“It’s time to stop this nonsense and get a judge to sort it out,” Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff told reporters, noting that such an investigation would reach back to when his party was in office.
The NDP echoed the sentiment in a separate news conference, with foreign affairs critic Paul Dewar calling Gen. Natynczyk’s reversal a “bombshell” and defence critic Jack Harris saying Mr. MacKay must be held accountable.
Yesterday, Gen. Natynczyk had played down the case to MPs at a parliamentary committee. He had rejected detailed accounts, taken from a soldier’s contemporaneous field notes and the sworn affidavit of Canada’s first Kandahar Task Force Commander that a Canadian-captured detainee was beaten by Afghan security forces before Canadian soldiers intervened and rescued him in Jun 2006.
A Canadian soldier guards six of ten suspected Taliban prisoners captured in a raid on a compound in northern Kandahar province on May 10, 2006. — AFP/Getty Images
Gen. Natynczyk claimed Tuesday the case wasn’t one of a Canadian-transferred detainee being maltreated by Afghans because the man was never officially listed as captured, even though Canadian soldiers stopped, questioned, and photographed him. He had said the man wasn’t even considered to have been taken into Canadian custody, a precursor to officially taking responsibility for man as a detainee.
Gen. Natynczyk’s version on Tuesday contradicted the sworn affidavit, filed in Federal Court to counter the efforts of human-rights groups efforts to get transfers halted.
Then-Colonel Steve Noonan had been selected by the military to provide the sworn affidavit in the government’s defence in the case. His April, 2007, affidavit has never been corrected or withdrawn.
“There was one incident in which the CF took custody of detainee who had been turned over to the local ANP by the CF In this case, the CF “learned that the detainee had been beaten by the local ANP,” Col. Noonan said in his affidavit. He has since been promoted to Brigadier-General.
In his remarks Wednesday, Mr. Ignatieff said he was “fed up” with “all these stories circulating that just aren’t believable.”
The Liberal Leader said investigating the treatment of Afghan detainees is not a partisan issue.
“We need a judge to say ‘okay, let’s look at the whole track record, the whole period, and make sure we get this right’ because the honour of our country, the honour of our armed forces is at stake,” Mr. Ignatieff said.
“I think that’s a reasonable response and we’ve had months and months and months of [the Conservative government] inventing one story, then another story.”
Mr. Ignatieff suggested that Mr. MacKay is playing the “long game” on the issue, hoping that it will go away over the Christmas holidays. The House breaks at the end of this week and will not return until Jan. 25.
With a report from Jane Taber
