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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

All of the prisoners Canada handed over to Afghanistan's notorious intelligence service in 2006-07 were tortured and many of them were likely innocent, a federal official has testified.

Intelligence officer Richard Colvin, a former diplomat in Afghanistan, testified before a special House of Commons committee Wednesday.

He told MPs that captives taken by Canadian troops and handed over to the Afghans were subjected to beatings and electric shocks in 2006 and early 2007.

"According to our information, the likelihood is that all the Afghans we handed over were tortured," he said in his opening statement.

"For interrogators in Kandahar, it was standard operating procedure."

Mr. Colvin was careful not to blame Canadian soldiers for carrying out the transfer orders, rather accusing the civilian and military leadership of creating the legal framework and policies that created the danger.

In a blistering indictment of Ottawa's handling of the situation, he said the Red Cross tried for three months in 2006 to warn the Canadian army in Kandahar about what was happening to prisoners, but no one would "even take their phone calls."

Canada took a staggering amount of prisoners, roughly six times more than British forces and 20 times more than the Dutch, he told the committee.

The vast majority of them were not "high-value targets" such as Taliban commanders, Al-Qaeda operatives or bomb-makers, but rather ordinary Afghans, many with no connection to the insurgency.

Some of them may have occasionally carried a gun for the Taliban, either having been bought or coerced, he said, but many were farmers, truck drivers and peasants "in the wrong place at the wrong time.

"In other words, we detained and handed over for severe torture, a lot of innocent people."

Mr. Colvin painted a dramatic picture of institutional indifference that morphed into an exercise in damage control by the federal government once allegations of abuse became public in April 2007.

He said he was ordered not to write about prisoners, and soon afterward reports from the field began to be "censored" and revised to the point where diplomats could "no longer write that the security situation in Afghanistan was deteriorating."

Before his testimony, opposition MPs attacked the Conservative government during question period, accusing it of orchestrating a cover up.

Senior ministers tried to deflect the blame to the former Liberal government, which instituted the original transfer agreement that provided Canada with no means of checking on its prisoners.

"We inherited an inadequate transfer arrangement left in place by the previous government," said Defence Minister Peter MacKay.

But the Opposition zeroed in on the orders to hold back information, as outlined in a story by The Canadian Press on Tuesday.





They demanded to know the names of the officials who tried to shut down Mr. Colvin's reports and sanitize the reports of other diplomats. Mr. Colvin had filed reports in 2006 warning of the torture, but Mr. MacKay, Prime Minister Stephen Harper and other cabinet minister say they were never informed and first heard such allegations in 2007.

"Who in this government issued that order?" asked Liberal defence critic Ujjal Dosanjh. "Why is this government creating a culture - an un-Canadian culture - of secrecy about an issue as abhorrent as torture?"

Peter Kent, parliamentary secretary for Foreign Affairs, called it an "outrageous" question and denied there was a cover-up. He said since the new transfer agreement was signed, the government has received no complaints of torture.

But Ottawa did halt the transfer of prisoners in the fall of 2007 when a prisoner was found to have been tortured. It is the only case of abuse the Conservative government has ever been willing to acknowledge as "credible."

Yet, prison visit reports - leaked to The Canadian Press on Wednesday - suggest that other cases came to light between April and October of 2007 as Canadian officials stepped up inspections of Sarpoza prison and the separate Afghan intelligence jails.

Several prisoners complained of being abused during that time frame and one even showed officials bruises on his back, but the allegation were chalked up as being unverified.

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