Push poll?

A blogger known as CathiefromCanada reports (h/t pogge) that Harris-Decima called her with some interesting poll questions:

Along with questions about whether I buy store-brand vegetables, there were two questions about the Afghan prisoner/Parliamentary privledge issue.

The first was a scenario I have already heard about, whether I would support MPs signing a confidentiality oath to see the prisoner documents. (And actually, no I wouldn't.)

But the second was interesting -- whether I would support an election being called because the Bloc Quebecois should not be permitted to sign a confidentiality oath and therefore should not be permitted to see the documents.

I wonder who commissioned this?

Milliken upholds supremacy of Parliament

Looks like a victory for the Opposition (and for parliamentary democracy):

Prime Minister Stephen Harper has lost his battle to keep documents related to the detention of Afghan detainees out of the hands of opposition members.

In a precedent-setting ruling Tuesday, Speaker Peter Milliken said the House of Commons has the right to request any documents it needs and that the government must turn them over or risk being found in contempt of Parliament.

Mr. Milliken gave both sides two weeks to reach a compromise. If none is obtained, the House of Commons could vote to find the government in contempt of Parliament.

From the Globe. And given the latest Harris-Decima poll, the Cons are likely a bit worried about a vote of no confidence.

Speaker to rule on government's conduct in detainee scandal

Speaker Peter Milliken will rule shortly on whether the Cons are in contempt of Parliament:

Either Thursday or next week, House Speaker Peter Milliken will rule on whether Stephen Harper’s Conservative government is in contempt of Parliament.

If Mr. Milliken finds in favour of the opposition parties that made the claim, then thousands of pages of heavily censored documents could be made public, showing whether the government and armed forces knew they were sending detainees to be tortured in Afghan jails.

If he rules in favour of the government, an already powerful executive will grow yet more powerful.

“It’s huge,” said Errol Mendes, a professor of law at University of Ottawa and constitutional expert. Centuries of precedent dictate that Parliament is supreme in holding the government to account, he observed.

“If the Speaker rules against the opposition motions, it would not be too hyperbolic to say we have changed our system of governance,” he maintained. “The executive would no longer be accountable to the House of Commons.”

From the Globe. To my mind this seems like a pretty clear case, despite the Cons' protests about "national security" (which, as I've said before, most likely means Harper's job security). There's a complication, though:

Mr. Milliken’s word is not the final word. Technically, he will rule only on whether the government appears to be in contempt. If he finds against the government, a parliamentary committee will thrash out the issue, and the matter will be brought back to the House for a final vote.

Rather than release the material, the Conservatives could force an election by making that vote a matter of confidence in the government.

The question then becomes, how would an election arising from this play out? Stay tuned.

The latest twist in the detainee scandal

Richard Colvin, the diplomat who says he warned the government that detainees were being tortured, is being barred from discussing material that could corroborate his story:

Franz Kafka would have been proud to have penned an episode from Tuesday's Afghan detainee hearings where the government sought to undermine testimony from one of its own civil servants.

The catch, for the civil servant, is he can't talk about information the government has censored. Even if it could vindicate him.

As readers will know, the Harper government has censored diplomat Richard Colvin's email records and won't even let the Military Police Complaints Commission see the unredacted versions. This is the civilian-run watchdog charged with reviewing Canada's record on Afghan detainees.

Just before a couple of prickly exchanges take place (transcript below), Department of Justice lawyer Alain Préfontaine argues Mr. Colvin did not provide clear warning to Ottawa in 2006 that Canadian-transferred detainees were at serious risk of abuse. Using the censored version of the email records, the government lawyer says Mr. Colvin's warnings weren't that urgently or sharply worded.

Defending himself, Mr. Colvin says the censored portions of his emails bear out his assertion that he offered significant warnings. He is barred from speaking about these blacked out passages, however.

Source. Let's hope the public doesn't forget this come election time.

Detainee scandal update

While we're waiting for a retired judge hired by the Tories to determine if the documents that a majority of Parliament has demanded can be safely released, the Cons have released 2600 highly redacted pages of material. A few interesting things have emerged:

The newly disclosed reports include an incident in 2006 in which an Afghan soldier strikes a bound prisoner in the back of the head with a rocket launcher; a nudge-and-wink admission by one Canadian soldier that Afghan counterparts “don’t necessarily follow our policies on detainee handling if you know what I mean”; and allegations by one soldier being treated for post-traumatic stress that detainees handed over to Afghan authorities were taken behind a building and executed.

All of the incidents are deemed unfounded by military investigators, but the documents also show a disturbing trend of front-line soldiers and senior military officials keeping their own police investigators in the dark and even threatening them at a time when sensitivity to how Canadians treat and handle their Afghan detainees was at its highest.

In January 2008, for example, the Canadian Forces Provost Marshall reports that a military policewoman was grabbed by two unknown assailants at Kandahar Airfield as she was leaving the shower one night. They “grabbed her arms, pushed her against the shower wall and told her: ‘MPs mind your own business.’“

Even after the troubled Canadian detainee transfer system was first exposed in mid-2007, there was a “preference to keep MP (military police) from advising and investigating rather than adopting a transparent and proactive approach,” according to a Feb. 27, 2008 report by Provost Marshall Capt. Steve Moore.

From the Star. Nothing to see here, move along. Equally interesting is this:

An apparent slipup in the federal government’s censoring of Afghan detainee documents shows Ottawa is using its black marker to hide potentially embarrassing information, a military and information law expert says.

Under pressure from opposition parties, the Harper government made public 2,600 pages of heavily censored records on the detainee controversy this week. It insisted that civil servants, not Conservative staff, decided what to keep secret – only withholding information judged to be injurious to national security.

But in one instance, a description of rebellious activity by detainees is apparently blacked out in one portion of the 2,600 documents but inadvertently disclosed in another section. It’s presumably the result of diverging censorship decisions by separate officials.

The sentences in question describe how detainees began testing and challenging their Canadian captors in early 2008. Prisoners are held in a short-term Forces detention facility before being transferred to Afghan authorities.

Oopsie. What's interesting about this is that it's pretty hard to see why this should have been redacted; it's not going to help your average Taliban dude. In other words, to nobody's surprise, stuff is being redacted that doesn't relate directly to matters of security (except perhaps Stephen Harper's job security).

A new wrinkle in the detainee scandal

Looks like it may implicate the Liberals as well:

A Canadian diplomat with extensive experience in Afghanistan says she raised the possibility that detainees transferred from Canadian to Afghan custody were at risk of torture back in 2005.

But Eillen Olexiuk says her concerns were ignored.

She tells the CBC she arrived in Afghanistan in 2002 and was second in command at the Canadian Embassy in Kabul.

Ms. Olexiuk says she told the Liberal government in power at the time that the transfer agreement didn't do enough to protect detainees.

She said Canadian officials didn't monitor detainees after the transfer, and that left detainees vulnerable once they were in Afghan hands.

From the Globe. Unfortunately, this may reduce the likelyhood that any high-ranking officials will be prosecuted, since it will diminish the Liberals' enthusiasm for a public inquiry.

Looks like the Cons knew trouble was coming...

... unfortunately, they did not respond by stopping the detainee transfers but by planning how to spin the issue:

Prime Minister Stephen Harper downplayed revelations of a "contingency plan" to deal with accusations that prisoners handed over to Afghan authorities were tortured.

As first reported by CBC News on Monday, Canadian officials started drafting a plan on how to deal with accusations that prisoners in Afghan custody were being tortured as early as March 2007 — months before allegations of prisoner abuse at the hands of Afghan authorities first appeared in the media.

Source. The more we see, the more it looks like a lot of top officials (military officers, senior civil servants, cabinet ministers, and maybe the PM himself) ought to be facing war crimes trials. Whether they will, of course, is another question.

The detainee scandal just got worse

What, you might ask, could be worse than Canadian officials handing prisoners over to people who are likely to torture them? How about handing prisoners over with the expectation that they will be tortured and provide them with information they want?

Until now, the controversy has centred on whether the government turned a blind eye to abuse of Afghan detainees.

However, Attaran said the full versions of the documents show that Canada went even further in intentionally handing over prisoners to torturers.

"And it wasn't accidental; it was done for a reason," he said. "It was done so that they could be interrogated using harsher methods."

Source. If this is true, it's no wonder the government is so desperate to avoid having to turn the documents over to Parliament...