At the risk of committing sociology, if not history, some thoughts on
an issue that has vanished almost completely from public sight:
Canada’s unresolved detainee dilemma and the Harper government’s policy
on torture.It is timely to raise these matters because of a devastating report released last week in the United States on the same subjects.
Reading the 577-page report by the Constitution Project Task Force on Detainee Treatment is like suffering blunt trauma. It was the unanimous conclusion of the eleven nonpartisan members of the Task Force that the United States had “indisputably” and “systematically” engaged in the torture of prisoners from the war on terror, a view that was “offered without reservation.”
The cases that were meticulously documented included examples where prisoner-suspects were tortured to death or died mysteriously while in custody. Detainees were hung by the wrists from ceilings for hours. Others were left in stress positions wearing soiled diapers that went unchanged during lengthy interrogations. Waterboarding was not just used for suspected al-Qaida members, as claimed by the CIA, but also for other persons of interest who had nothing to do with terrorism.
One of the searing ironies of the report is that these same practices were roundly denounced by the White House during the Bush presidency when they were being committed by countries like Jordan, Iran and Syria.
It is telling to note that grossly illegal acts under the Geneva Conventions, U.S. and international law enjoyed a staggering level of support from officials around President George W. Bush. Then-Justice Department lawyer John Yoo wrote the now-infamous memo that said the president could order torture because it was not a legal matter, but a policy issue. But there were scores of other Justice Department memos supporting torture. All of them have since been withdrawn.
Meanwhile, erstwhile champions of the rule of law and human rights looked the other way. The International Committee of the Red Cross decided against speaking out on torture it had personally uncovered because the practice had been sanctioned by the White House. Even doctors who monitored the tortured prisoners suggested ways that the torture might be more effective.
Nor was torture a partisan political matter. Although the worst offences occurred post-9/11 under President Bush, the practise of extraordinary rendition began under President Clinton. The report documents that under Clinton, Libyan dissidents were turned over to former dictator Moammar Gadhafi as “a favour.”
It also points out that although President Obama ended the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” on detainees, he continues to practice extraordinary rendition by sending terror suspects to friendly countries for further processing.
Despite being a signatory to the United Nations Convention Against Torture, which requires “a prompt investigation of all such allegations”, Obama turned down Senator Patrick Leahy’s request for a National Commission to investigate how the U.S. could have so completely lost its moral compass at the highest levels of government — and with the enabling hand of the Justice Department.
These days, it is fashionable to denounce inconvenient truths with the charge of partisanship. It would be challenging, though, to impugn the findings of this Task Force by an appeal to political affiliation. Its co-chair, Asa Hutchinson, was one of the leading Republicans in the impeachment of Bill Clinton. He went on to head up the Drug Enforcement Agency and was later under-secretary in the Department of Homeland Security under President Bush.
Another Task Force member, William Sessions, was Director of the FBI under both presidents Reagan and Bush.
And if you were looking for the perfect example of libertarian conservatism, you could do no better than Professor Richard Epstein, an avowed enemy of Obamacare and most other government interventions.
The Task Force’s most important finding? The road to hell for any democracy is excessive secrecy used to conceal illegal acts. And the way out of hell is allowing citizens to fully understand what was done in their name. A necessary reckoning. Unless that happens, there is every chance that official torture will happen again, and a fundamental American value will be darkly transformed.
That’s why the Task Force believes that the United States is at a truth-and-reconciliation moment. That’s why it recommends that President Obama make public the 6000-page, secret Senate Intelligence report on the issue of treatment of detainees. The senators used government reports, millions of them, to examine in detail every interrogation conducted by the CIA — at least the ones whose records the Agency didn’t destroy.
As Task Force member and former under-secretary of state Thomas Pickering put it, “By authorizing and permitting torture in respect to a global terror threat, U.S. leaders committed a grave error that has undermined our values, principles and moral stature, eroded our global influence and placed our soldiers, diplomats and intelligence officers in even greater jeopardy.”
And so back to Canada, where no darker shadow of secrecy has ever lain across so many facets of our public life. Of all the subjects that have been so assiduously hidden by the Harper government, none has been as deeply buried as the facts about the transfer of detainees in Canadian custody to Afghan authorities.
First, the PM prorogued the House of Commons after the Opposition jointly demanded the unredacted documents concerning the treatment of detainees. Five months later, former Speaker of the House Peter Milliken found that it was a prima facie violation of the members’ privileges to be denied that information. Well, the committee that originally asked for them still hasn’t seen the documents.
Instead, a political deal was hatched — without the participation of the NDP. An ad hoc committee of MPs, sworn to secrecy, and a panel of judges, would get a look at the documents. The judges would have the final say on which “relevant” documents would be released. The ad hoc committee ended miserably. It saw only half of the documents, and as the NDP put it, only the scrubbed version of some of them were ever released.
For the record, the ad hoc committee itself was never reconvened after the election of 2011, and the whole underwhelming exercise was summarily abandoned with the government claiming that the release of the first tranche of approved documents in June 2011, and the expenditure of $12 million, was enough.
When the NDP asked if the government had ever provided documents to Canadian law enforcement agencies for investigation, the answer came back ‘no’. Canada, the government claimed, had no jurisdiction to investigate events in a foreign country, and it would be inappropriate given the relationship with the Karzai government. Canadians never found out what was done in their name with detainees, though people like Richard Colvin did their best to raise the subject.
And so we are left with this. Despite the fact that Canada ratified the United Nations Convention Against Torture, which expressly forbids the use as evidence of any statement obtained by torture, that is exactly what the Harper government has decided to do. Public Safety Minister Vic Toews has given CSIS, the Canada Border Service Agency and the RCMP the authority to not only use, but also to share, information that was “likely” obtained through torture.
This the government justifies by calling the fight against terror its top national security priority. That assertion, and all that it has led to, should be viewed against the findings of the Constitution Project Task Force. In case Vic Toews doesn’t have time to read the full report, there is a more laconic version of the same stirring truth. It comes from the Cadet’s Prayer at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point:
“Make us to choose the harder right instead of the easier wrong and never to be content with a half truth when the whole truth can be won. Endow us with courage that is born of loyalty to all that is noble and worthy, that scorns compromise with vice and injustice and knows no fear when truth and right are in jeopardy …”
Original Article
Source: ipolitics.ca
Author: Michael Harris
No comments:
Post a Comment