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?