Afghanistan Committee on Nov. 18th, 2009

[Paul Dewar, NDP, Ottawa Centre, ON]

How did you feel when no one did anything?

[Richard Colvin]

I should say, and I think I mentioned it at the beginning, this was one of maybe 15 issues I had. In the summer and fall of 2006, we were really caught up in Operation Medusa, trying to get forces down to replace the Canadians. There was a lot of activity just in security issues and narcotics issues, police reform. I was mostly busy with that. I wasn't really following this quite as closely as I should have.

Then in the late summer or fall we heard about problems. ISAF complained they weren't getting information from the Canadian Forces. That was when I began to think maybe something more systemic was going on.

Then around early 2007 it really began to sink in to me that these problems, which I thought had been rectified--and I should probably have followed up and checked--had not, or they had been temporarily fixed and then seem to have recurred. The underlying problem of transfer and what happened after transfer had not been addressed.

[Paul Dewar, NDP, Ottawa Centre, ON]

When we hear the government ministers say there was no evidence of torture during that period until they found out later and said they changed everything, your evidence would be that there was notification that this torture was going on and you had reported that?

[Richard Colvin]

Yes. There was this key message of June 2, 2006. In this context, in a public context, I can't reveal the source or sources of that information, but it was an extremely credible source or sources that had expressed serious concern about treatment after transfer and gave some adjectives describing the treatment and hinting at a lot of abuse.

That was sent June 2, 2006. It was in the context of a report on the Sarposa prison and the conditions of the prison. We were looking at renovating the infrastructure.

I was careful to flag at the beginning and at the end that the key issue or the key concern wasn't the prison but what was happening to the detainees after they had been transferred.

[Paul Dewar, NDP, Ottawa Centre, ON]

I received a note from someone who has had experience in the field, and they said they're still concerned about the transfer of detainees and the monitoring of prisoners. Do you share that concern, from what you know?

[Richard Colvin]

Yes. I'm a little bit removed from the mechanics and also the policy side, but from what I know of the NDS, my feeling was always that we shouldn't be giving detainees to the Kandahar NDS. I'm not pointing the finger at them; they are who they are. They've got a job they're trying to do it. There's a war going on in Kandahar. The Taliban are trying to kill them, are killing them, killing their families. It's a very harsh, violent environment. But knowing what we know about Kandahar NDS, I would say they're not a suitable partner to be giving our detainees to.

It's very hard to protect people. You need a very rigorous, aggressive monitoring system. I think you could probably create that, but you'd really have to let them know that the second anything happened, you'd be knocking on the door of President Karzai, if need be, and there would be consequences for them. You'd have to be in there, maybe not every day but certainly every week. You'd also need to have relationships with them where you could get access. There are all kinds of caveats you'd have to meet first.

[Paul Dewar, NDP, Ottawa Centre, ON]

Were you aware of problems around translation in terms of handing over of prisoners, that we didn't have people who actually spoke the language and that there were some concerns about who we handed over?

[The Chair, Conservative, Rick Casson]

A short response, please, Mr. Colvin.

[Richard Colvin]

No, I wasn't aware of those concerns, sir.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rick Casson]

Thank you.

That ends the opening round. We get into a five-minute round now. We're just about to our hour here, so we'll get started.

The way this goes of course is the government, official opposition, government, Bloc, government, official opposition, government, NDP. Let's see how far we get into the list here.

We start with the government.

[Cheryl Gallant, Conservative, Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. If I do have any time left, I'd like to share it with Mr. Hawn.

To the witness, insurgents are practised in the dissemination of false information and propaganda exercises. The al-Qaeda handbook devotes an entire chapter on getting information by pretending to be someone you're not.

While the story of Fatima was quite touching, it is quite typical for Taliban to send a seemingly innocuous individual in to gather information on where their fighters are being held. In fact, this entire exercise of attempting to draw a link between the Canadian Forces and prisoner treatment without a shred of evidence is playing right into the hands of the insurgents, which is the departure of security forces so the Taliban can retake Afghanistan to return it to training terrorists and forcing the people to grow opium to fund that illicit activity.

These allegations being discussed here today would not even hold up in a court of law. The fanning of the flames of outrage over allegations, however unproven, are having the desired effect on the Canadian people of wanting our troops to return even quicker.

Let's go to something that the Taliban and insurgents are very good at. General Atkinson himself has stated in defence committee that:

First of all, they are masters at information operations. Just because we are sitting inside the middle of Afghanistan, in the mountains, the desert, in areas where you could argue there is very little communication, there is cellular technology. They have access to the Internet through satellites. When there's a story being printed in the Ottawa Citizen today, it's being read. If it's on the BBC News or somewhere else, they have it. They know how to take and plant false stories and everything else. Their ability to react to things on the ground is something that is very practised. They have used it against us. It's something we combat and work on. It's called information operations. We do it to them; they do it to us.

That's a quote from General Atkinson in defence committee.

Let's go to the allegations that after the Canadian Forces transferred prisoners.... The Canadian Forces did not harm our prisoners. In fact, when the defence committee visited KAF, we saw Taliban prisoners who had been wounded and who were being treated with the same care that our very own soldiers, who they shot, were being treated. We have to make this very clear. Our soldiers have had nothing to do with these allegations of torture.

Are insurgent prisoners given private cells? You were visiting the prisons. Are they put in their own cells individually?

[Richard Colvin]

On your previous points, I would just confirm that I have never heard a hint of a Canadian who has been involved in any of these things. My sense of the Canadian Forces is that they're extremely professional, very well trained, and maybe one of the best militaries in the world. I would share your high view of them.

With respect to insurgent prisoners, I have to say that I've never seen a prisoner in a cell. The ones we were monitoring were brought to a separate location, and we were given a tour of the prison facility separately. In terms of going inside a cell when prisoners were in the cell, I didn't see that.

[Cheryl Gallant, Conservative, Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, ON]

So you don't know if they're held alone, or if they're with the other insurgents, or with the regular criminals from the population?

[Richard Colvin]

The information I had is that they were sharing cells. There were overcrowding problems in nearly all these prisons. In Sarposa in Kandahar, the so-called political, which are the security prisoners, are kept quite separate from the general criminal population. At the NDS jail we went to in Kabul, kind of by definition it has only political, meaning security prisoners. The NDS aren't holding common criminals there.

I think there are typically maybe four or five to a cell. That's what the NDS acknowledged. They said that they had overcrowding problems and that they would like us to build a bigger facility for them, because it was quite old. It was a Soviet-era prison. It was in poor condition.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rick Casson]

We ran a little bit over there. Thank you for that.

[Cheryl Gallant, Conservative, Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, ON]

Pardon me?

[The Chair, Conservative, Rick Casson]

We're out of time.

[Cheryl Gallant, Conservative, Renfrew—Nipissing—Pembroke, ON]

Five minutes?

[The Chair, Conservative, Rick Casson]

The five minutes are gone.

Over to the official opposition.

[Ujjal Dosanjh, Liberal, Vancouver South, BC]

Thank you.

Mr. Colvin, I'm going to ask you some very brief questions and I would like brief answers. As you know, we're running against time here.

You said that General Hillier knew about these allegations of torture. Can you tell me how and when?

[Richard Colvin]

My sense from early on is that Gauthier.... I made sure to put him on the address list for these reports, and he would have told General Hillier. In April 2007 I deliberately added General Hillier to a key report, to put him by name, but I think the Gauthier-to-Hillier channel was a very reliable one.

[Ujjal Dosanjh, Liberal, Vancouver South, BC]

You said that Margaret Bloodworth and Arif Lalani were the people who reinforced the issue about secrecy and not writing about these issues in the reports. When was that, and in what circumstances?

[Richard Colvin]

I should say it was David Mulroney rather than Margaret Bloodworth. So that came quite early. The first report I sent after Mr. Lalani arrived, he took my 75 names and reduced them to five for the distribution list. There was some very sensitive information, important information, I thought, that was removed from that report as well. That set the pattern. I mean, he was kind of inconsistent that way. He would sometimes sign things off without any changes, but typically reducing the distribution list, and some things were considered too sensitive to send.

[Ujjal Dosanjh, Liberal, Vancouver South, BC]

And when was that?

[Richard Colvin]

That began at the end of April 2007.