It's not the torture, it's the cover-up

I haven’t followed the ins and outs of Richard Colvin’s testimony and the ensuing Conservative smear campaign super-closely, but I do have some thoughts here on what the issues are and how the opposition should be pursuing them.

To me, this isn’t so much about allegations of torture in Afghan prisons, and the program of the Canadian military transferring prisoners to Afghan custody where they could face abuse. When the government, after much public pressure and pressure from the opposition parties, finally revamped the transfer program a few years ago it was an acknowledgment by the government that yes, there is a problem here, and we need to take appropriate action to ensure our soldiers aren’t unknowingly complicit to abuse.

Colvin’s testimony served to underline the necessity for the reform of the transfer program, and again raise the question of who knew what when, and why the government took so long to act.

What is new, however, and newly damaging and meriting of close scrutiny, is Colvin’s testimony of how when he tried to raise these issues, he was constantly shut-down, told to report verbally so there would be no paper-trail, his memos sent to the circular-file.

You can say that the reports of torture and abuse he raised are hearsay and second or third-hand, whether that matters or not is debatable but it is a legitimate point.

But what is not second-hand, what is not hearsay, are the roadblocks he ran into from his superiors in government when he tried to pass these allegations and reports up the chain of command. He had direct, first-hand knowledge of being told to report verbally so there would be nothing on paper, nothing that could be released under Access to Information requests.

Whether the allegations of abuse were legitimate or not, and indeed if they weren’t the government wouldn’t have later revamped the transfer programs, they should have been evaluated and considered and not covered-up. This is compounded by the extraordinary lengths the Conservatives went to in attempting to stop Colvin from telling his story, whether to the courts or to parliament.

It’s not the crime, they say, it’s the cover-up. Here it’s probably both, but the cover-up may be more damming. The Conservatives are trying to distract attention by trying to discredit Colvin's testimony as third-hand hearsay. We need to pivot back to the cover-up, and the direct attempts to stifle and suppress his reports.

BY THE BY, speaking of Rick Hillier jumping in to take a few swings at Colvin and say he knew nothing about nothing, it's worth remembering that it was Hiller as Chief of Defence Staff who tried to clamp-down on the growing scandal in 2007 by ordering the halt of the release of any information on the detainnee program under Access to Information on flimsy national security grounds.

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