Intelligence officer and ex-diplomat Richard Colvin testifies at a commons special committee hearing on transfer of Afghan detainees on Parliament Hill in Ottawa on Nov. 18, 2009.Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press
The diplomat Richard Colvin was Canada's eyes and ears in Afghanistan, and there is no reason to believe he has acted with anything but integrity in his public testimony about the routine torture of detainees, and Ottawa's alleged policy not to know about it.
Mr. Colvin served as acting ambassador for more than a year, overseeing security and intelligence and a myriad of other issues for the foreign affairs department. His eyes and ears were justifiably alert to the problem of torture among detainees turned over by Canadian forces to the Afghan authorities. And now senior Conservatives, up to Defence Minister Peter MacKay, are taking aim at his credibility.
Torture in Afghanistan is far from a well kept secret. A police chief once told The Globe that if he'd had another month to torture his prisoner he would have got the truth out of him. The Globe's Graeme Smith reported in April, 2007, on a pattern of extreme abuse including the use of electrical currents, boiling water and beatings with cables. Ottawa was not blind to this pattern, thanks in part to the still classified reports of Mr. Colvin. It only pretended to be. Its see-nothing, hear-nothing act, with former defence minister Gordon O'Connor in a starring role (but not the only one), would have been comical but for the subject matter.
Even after all that, Mr. Colvin's testimony was horrifying. It was not bomb-makers, Al-Qaeda terrorists or Taliban commanders who were being detained, but mainly just "farmers, truck drivers, tailors, peasants, random human beings in the wrong place at the wrong time." All of them were likely tortured, for days or months. "For interrogators in Kandahar, it was standard operating procedure." A year after the first warnings, Ottawa put in place a policy to monitor the detainees, but did such a poor job of monitoring for several months that some detainees were still tortured, Mr. Colvin said.
If his research is sound, Mr. Colvin could do nothing but speak out in these circumstances. If he is correct, Canada was engaged in an immoral and illegal exercise, under Canadian and international law. In doing so it was undermining the success of its mission. The Canadian Forces' own manual on how to conduct a counterinsurgency campaign makes clear that breaches of the law of armed conflict will send local citizens over to the side of the insurgents.
Thank goodness for civil servants who breach the walls of government secrecy and obfuscation and speak out for principle, knowing they will be subject to public attack by their very powerful employer.