(The following article is from the December 1-31, 2009, issue of People's Voice, Canada's leading communist newspaper. Articles can be reprinted free if the source is credited. Subscription rates in Canada: $30/year, or $15 low income rate; for U.S. readers - $45 US per year; other overseas readers - $45 US or $50 CDN per year. Send to: People's Voice, c/o PV Business Manager, 133 Herkimer St., Unit 502, Hamilton, ON, L8P 2H3.)

One of Ottawa's top diplomats told a Parliamentary committee on the Afghan mission that Canadian troops transferred detainees to local authorities, despite knowing that all would face torture. Richard Colvin, who is now a high-level intelligence official in the Canadian embassy in Washington, said on Nov. 18 that "Instead of winning hearts and minds, we caused Kandaharis to fear the foreigners. Canada's detainee practices alienated us from the population and strengthened the insurgency."

     The Harper Tories have frantically denied Colvin's charges that they ignored his warnings of "imminent and alarming" problems with the treatment of detainees as early as May 2006, a time when Canada was taking far more prisoners than other NATO allies. But his testimony bears the authenticity of a whistle-blower who is risking his entire career to confirm what opponents of the war have said for years - that Canada's military mission has done nothing to advance democracy or social progress in Afghanistan.

     Asking MPs "why should Canadians care if Afghan detainees were being tortured," Colvin gave several reasons.

     First, he said, "our detainees were not what intelligence services would call `high-value targets,' such as IED (improvised explosive device) bomb-makers, al-Qaeda terrorists or Taliban commanders." The Afghans he refers to "were picked up by conventional forces during routine military operations, and on the basis typically not of intelligence but suspicion or unproven denunciation."

     These were men with "little or no value" from an intelligence point of view, said Colvin: "Some may have been foot soldiers or day fighters. But many were just local people - farmers, truck drivers, tailors, peasants; random human beings in the wrong place at the wrong time; young men in their fields and villages who were completely innocent but were nevertheless rounded up. In other words, we detained, and handed over for severe torture, a lot of innocent people."

     Colvin continued that "seizing people and rendering them for torture is a very serious violation of international and Canadian law. Complicity in torture is a war crime. It is illegal and prosecutable."

     Third, he said, "Canada has always been a powerful advocate of international law and human rights... If we disregard our core principles and values, we also lose our moral authority abroad."

     Fourth, such actions were counter to PM Stephen Harper's claim that Canadian military officials don't send individuals off to be tortured. "Behind the military's wall of secrecy," said Colvin, "that, unfortunately, is exactly what we were doing."

     "Even if all the Afghans we detained had been Taliban, it would still have been wrong to have them tortured," concluded Colvin, quoting an authoritative military manual on counter-insurgency which says "the abuse of detained persons is immoral, illegal and unprofessional..."