What are we doing in Afghanistan?

If you've had the chance to listen to various Conservatives on the floor on Monday speaking to their government's motion to extend the mission until 2011, you would assume that Canada wields a tremendous amount of power over the future of that country and that, as the Veterans Affair minister, Greg Thompson, stated (vilely) that those who oppose the extension are friends of the Taliban and enemies of our Canadian troops. Yes, he even repeated the smear (in the guise of hearing it from soldiers who live in his riding) that the NDP leader, Jack Layton, has been nicknamed "Taliban Jack". Speaking not long after that, Peter MacKay backed up Thompson's insults, feigning outrage to the point where he almost needed a fainting couch and a cold compress for his forehead. MacKay continued to hurl his insults at Alexa McDonough as she had the floor to the extent that she had to ask the chair to call for order.

This, from a government that vowed to restore dignity to the house.

But that's not my main point.

Last week, the British government admitted its part in torture flights at the behest of the US government. Today, a former member of the SAS revealed that:

Hundreds of Iraqis and Afghans captured by British and American special forces were rendered to prisons where they faced torture...
[...]
Ben Griffin said individuals detained by SAS troops in a joint UK-US special forces taskforce had ended up in interrogation centres in Iraq, including the notorious Abu Ghraib prison, and in Afghanistan, as well as Guantánamo Bay.

As we know, the US SecDef Robert Gates has been on a tour to guilt EU countries into sending more combat troops to Afghanistan. His repeated insults haven't worked. Nor should they.

The Bush administration and the Pentagon have undermined the Afghanistan mission for years by not providing enough troops, through the use of useless contractors like DynCorp who failed to train Afghanistan's police, by its unbalanced focus on military rather than reconstruction spending and by continuing to fund Musharraf to the tune of $10 billion while he has done nothing to stop the flow of fighters from Waziristan - not to mention the horrendous human rights abuses it continues to foist on the Afghan people, as noted above. Our Veterans Affairs minister stated very clearly on the floor today that Canada "will continue to support Pakistan" unconditionally despite concerns about its massive failures. And, as this government's record shows, it prefers to cover up allegations of torture and corruption rather than dealing with it head on.

So, as much as some Canadians might want to think that our troops can actually make a difference in Afghanistan, the larger picture shows that we are being hoodwinked, indeed sabotaged, every step of the way by the US government which only recently has taken a renewed interest in this forgotten war by resorting to the tactics it knows best: bullying and intimidation. Sound familiar?

The Conservatives, however, will have none of that talk. They prefer to push the idea that we are there in a peacekeeping role; that we have to stay there or else the scary terrorists will attack us here even though the longer we're there the more we place our country at risk. They proclaim from their moral pulpit that we owe it to the Afghan people to stay there until they are safe (which, apparently, will automagically happen in 2011 according to their motion). They certainly refuse to talk about their military spending increases because that's supposed to be seen as being patriotic. They rehash numbers about how things are going in Afghanistan that are the same ones they've been using since they first came into power. They believe that only foreign intervention can save the Afghan people while they spend massive amounts of money on military hardware. How insulting. They insist that Canada is such a great country that it can make all the difference there. What they fail to explain is how that's possible when our allies are detaining, torturing and killing innocent people.

That's the question that needs to be asked in all of this. The rest is just moot, empty rhetoric.

Related:

Since the Conservatives like to talk about how far Afghan women have supposedly come, I thought I'd provide this link to The Plight of the Afghan Woman for a realistic look at what they still face despite the fact that foreign forces have been in Afghanistan to "help" them for more than 6 years now.
 

Video: Maher Arar

Maher Arar speaks about his experience:



Last week, some US legislators apologized to Maher Arar for his kidnapping and rendition. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Hawkish Asshole), who didn't even know that Arar had a family apparently, (that's how much he gives a damn) called it a "mistake" - a "serious error" - while at the same time defending the hardass tactics that the US uses because, after all, there are SCARY TERRORISTS out there everywhere.

You can watch that exchange here:



Rohrabacher should have gotten a big dose of STFU.

On Wednesday, when she went to testify before the Senate Foreign Relations committee, Condi Rice was confronted by a Code Pink protester who repeatedly called her a "war criminal" (video) as security "escorted" (ie. manhandled) a couple of other protesters out of the room. Ms War Criminal admitted during the hearing that Arar's case wasn't handled properly. Nice diplomatic words meaning that they fucked up severely but she would not apologize.

"We have told the Canadian government we do not think this was handled particularly well … and we will try to do better in the future," Rice said while testifying before the House of Representatives foreign affairs committee.

Do you get the sense she's talking about a man who was traumatized by torture at the US's behest? No. Neither do I. They'll "try to do better"? What a huge insult. They have no intention of "doing better". They're just sorry they got caught.

The ever gracious Arar was thankful for the committee's attention to his case but this isn't over yet. Arar is still on the US no-fly list and has a court case pending in the US that had previously been rejected on the grounds of "national security" - that handy catch all phrase that provides cover for everything illegal the Bush administration and its cronies have perpetrated.

When comedian George Carlin was interviewed by Keith Olbermann on Tuesday nite, he said of the US, "this country is finished" (video). I agree.
 

Video: The Abuse of Secrecy in the Arar Affair

From CBC's The National, Alex Neve of Amnesty International Canada and security analyst Wesley Wark discuss the newly uncensored portions of the Arar Inquiry report.



As one who also covers American politics and the battles between congress, the White House and organizations like the ACLU over claims of executive privilege wrapped in the mantra of national security, I have to say that Canada's system appears to place us light years ahead when it comes to demanding and getting transparency in these types of cases (although sometimes these victories can take a very long time to be realized). That type of regime of secrecy cannot and will not be tolerated in this country, as much as Stephen Harper's paranoid Conservative government wishes to make it so.

I recently had the occasion to reread the Reader's Digest 2006 interview with Stephen Harper, Man With a Plan, in which he was asked about the comparisons made between him and Bush. Note his cluelessness:

RD: Are there comparisons that offend you?

Harper: Yes. The Bush comparisons offend me. And not because I have any kind of personal dislike of George W. Bush. I don’t. It’s that the comparisons generally are not thoughtful. Bush has SUVs in his motorcade, and I have SUVs in my motorcade—“Ha ha, he’s just like George Bush.” Well, of course, this is actually the decision of the RCMP, and I’m sure George Bush didn’t pick out the cars in his own motorcade either. That kind of thing bothers me because it’s just a stereotype designed for polemical purposes.

No, Steve, you're compared to Bush because of your love of absolute control and as these new Arar inquiry revelations show us, that hammer you like to bring down on the Canadian people by fighting against things that might embarrass security or other officials implies a twisted sort of reasoning that is well beyond what most Canadians ought to find acceptable.

One would think that, when it comes to ensuring the safety of all Canadians, allowing us to finally see the inner workings of CSIS and the RCMP and how they contributed to an innocent man being tortured would be considered to be an absolute necessity so the same behaviour will never be repeated again. We cannot rely on our security agencies to police themselves, obviously, and as the interviewees point out, the current oversight regime is "fractured".

The Harper government's attempt to cover that up serves no one except those who prefer to remain complicit in such human rights abuses. That was the bottom line in arguing that these documents remain censored. The revelations do not pose a threat to our national security. Not revealing those portions however had the potential to enable CSIS and the RCMP to continue ignoring their own, very serious problems.

In the inquiry report, RCMP officials seemed to be tripping all over themselves to claim that they hadn't worked with the CIA prior to 9/11 - as if that was a good enough excuse to not understand how the CIA operates. And of course we now know that CSIS knew about the CIA's extraordinary rendition (torture flights) practices and still either naively trusted the CIA or just didn't care enough to ensure a Canadian citizen's rights would be protected. The official line seems to be that the CIA just pulled a fast one of Canadian security officials who supposedly had years of experience. How can that possibly be justified and what kind of prime minister would choose to cover that up?

Harper needs to be reminded at every turn that he works for the Canadian people, not his own interests or those of people who have the power to place our lives in jeopardy.

As Alex Neve said, keep the pressure on your MPs and government officials by letting them know that we will not put up with this subversion of our right to know the facts. We will not allow Harper to operate as Bush Lite.
 

'UN investigator speaks out against torture, abuse'

That's the headline, but that doesn't exactly cover the whole story:

VIENNA, Austria (AP) - Soldiers from countries whose armies are suspected of engaging in torture or other abuse should not be considered for peacekeeping duty, the UN's chief anti-torture investigator says.

UN special rapporteur Manfred Nowak said in an interview for Monday's editions of the Austrian news magazine Profil that the world body's standards for selecting peacekeepers are too low, and suggested it should reconsider forming its own professional standing army.

Concerns about the quality, training and ethics of soldiers are growing as developing countries with questionable human rights records increasingly are tapped for troops for international peacekeeping operations, Nowak said.

"The criteria are not very high," he told Profil, which released excerpts of the interview on Saturday. "The UN must impose stricter standards in recruiting soldiers."

Nowak did not mention past abuses by soldiers from the U.S., Britain and other Western countries who have formed the bulk of many peacekeeping operations worldwide.

George Bush tried to fool the public when he issued his recent executive order supposedly banning torture but that's not what it actually does. As long as Bush permits so-called "alternative", classified interrogation techniques there is no guarantee that torture will not continue.

And today, The Independent reports:

The British Army is facing new allegations that it was involved in "forced disappearances", hostage-taking and torture of Iraqi civilians after the fall of the regime of Saddam Hussein.

One of the claims is made by the former chairman of the Red Crescent in Basra, who alleges he was beaten unconscious by British soldiers after they accused him of being a senior official in Saddam's Baath party.

The family of another Iraqi civilian claims he was arrested and kidnapped by the British in order to secure the surrender of his brother, who was also accused of being a high-ranking member of the party. He was later found shot dead, still handcuffed and wearing a UK prisoner name tag.

Both cases are being prepared for hearings in the High Court in which the Government will be accused of war crimes while carrying out the arrest and detention of alleged senior members of the Baath party.

So, why is the UN's "chief anti-torture investigator" refusing to acknowledge reality especially when he said this during an interview this past January?

Kanishk Tharoor: In what ways has the Bush administration directly or indirectly allowed for torture?

Manfred Nowak: The Bush administration has done quite a lot to undermine the absolute prohibition of torture, for instance by interpreting torture in a very restrictive manner and claiming they are not really torturing. To them, torture is only really something after which you suffer long-term mental disorder or organ failure. Everything else is called "humanely-degrading treatment" which needs to be balanced against the threat of terrorism - it's a trade-off between security and human rights.

One can employ these harsher interrogation methods against suspected terrorists because the United States feels itself to be in a war on terror. It's breaking a taboo and since the US was always a champion of human rights and democracy, and one of the oldest countries to have a bill of rights in their constitution, this negative example has many negative consequences for the US and many other states. If even the US considers these means of detention, these flights lawful then, other countries feel that they can do the same.

Kanishk Tharoor: With US actions, new sources of torture have come into place, most specifically the outsourcing of torture to countries like Syria, Egypt and Jordan. Is there any precedent for this? How has the Bush administration been engaged in it in recent years?

Manfred Nowak: I do not know any precedent for what they call "extraordinary rendition". There is a precedent for "ordinary rendition", of suspected terrorists abducted by the CIA, Israeli or other intelligence services in another country to be tried domestically. This has also been illegal but was at least done for the legitimate purpose of bringing someone to justice.

Extraordinary abduction is the opposite - depriving individuals of liberty without any legal remedies in order to send them to countries that are known for torture. This violates the absolute prohibition of refoulement: countries are not only not allowed to torture, but also not allowed to send suspects to countries that will torture them.

This was a systematic practice, and I'm afraid, an ongoing practice.

Kanishk Tharoor: What kind of incentives were governments given to allow rendition and to conduct the torture? Should equal pressure be brought to bear on the US as well as the cooperating governments, be they in Cairo, Damascus or Amman?

Manfred Nowak: Of course, this is also the responsibility of countries like Egypt or Syria who are well known for systematic practice of torture. They are the first ones violating international human rights law, even though they have ratified the United Nations convention against torture. They are thus obligated to criminalise torture. But also every state which sends suspects to torturing countries violates the convention.

Countries like the United Kingdom have tried to circumvent this problem by getting "diplomatic assurances" in which they ask those countries to be kind enough not to torture - These diplomatic assurances are a clear attempt to circumvent the absolute prevention of refoulement.
[...]
...the prohibition of torture is an "absolute right", which means that there is no proportionality to be applied. A little bit of torture doesn't make us safer, it's the opposite. As soon as you undermine the prohibition of torture, and you start in the "ticking bomb scenario" to apply torture, it very quickly spreads and creates new terrorism. We now have more terrorists since we are fighting terrorism by violating our own standards and the international rule of law.