Votes from Canada that condone torture

Later this week, our two leading political parties are expected
to join forces and commit Canada to another three years
of military intervention in support of the Afghan government –
which we know practises torture.

This is a curious development, since most Canadians –
like civilized people around the world – find torture abhorrent
and utterly at odds with their values.

Yet the barbaric practice has achieved post-9/11 acceptability
in some circles in the so-called advanced world, in the guise of
being a necessary tool to fight terror. It's been a prominent
feature of the Afghan war, which has spawned Guantanamo
Bay, among other horrific prisons.

All this seems far from mind as Stephen Harper's Conservative
government and Stephane Dion's Liberals have moved toward
agreement to extend Canada's involvement in that war until
2011. MPs are expected to vote on the extension on Thursday.

In recent weeks, the media have focused almost exclusively on the
pro-war narrative presented by the government-appointed
Manley panel, with its emphasis on the mission's good intentions.

Good intentions or not, the simple truth is Canadian
troops are over there supporting a government that has
been caught time and time again with its hand on the
electric prod.

Only last month, a front-page story in the Globe and Mail
reported allegations that the notoriously brutal Governor
Asadullah Khalid, the top Afghan official in Kandahar –
with whom the Canadian military closely collaborates –
has personally administered torture at his private prisons.

So mainstream is torture in the "war on terror" era
that U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia recently
told the BBC that if a hidden bomb were about to blow
up, "it would be absurd to say you couldn't, I don't know,
stick something under the fingernail, smack him in the
face. It would be absurd to say you couldn't."

Such a flippant approach to torture from one of America's
top judges is in sharp contrast to the more enlightened
position taken by Canadian justice Dennis O'Connor,
who investigated the torture of Maher Arar. As
O'Connor wrote: "The infliction of torture, for any
purpose, is so fundamental a violation of human
dignity that it can never be legally justified."
O'Connor went on to cite former UN secretary-general
Kofi Annan: "Let us be clear: torture can never be an
instrument to fight terror, for torture is an instrument of terror."

This clear, moral stand against torture doesn't seem to be
shared by the Canadian government or military. Indeed,
attempts by human rights advocates over the past two
years to create protections for detainees transferred from
Canadian to Afghan custody have been mostly resisted
by Canadian officials.

An initial set of safeguards, signed by Gen. Rick Hillier in
December 2005, provided almost no protection. It was
only after media investigations, an uproar in Parliament
and a court action by Amnesty International that Harper
reluctantly toughened the safeguards last May.

Yet even these proved ineffective. Last November,
Canadian officials visiting a Kandahar jail encountered a
detainee who was able to show them where the equipment
used to torture him was hidden in the room.

For several months after that, Ottawa stopped
transferring detainees. But it resumed the transfers late
last month, with fresh assurances that there will be
adequate monitoring. Apparently we have the word of
Afghan authorities.

No doubt, Governor Khalid has seen the error of his ways.
MPs voting on Thursday to extend the mission can
surely count on that.