Afghanistan Committee on Nov. 26th, 2009

[His Excellency David Mulroney]

That's correct.

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

The process obviously was something that was also fixed or tidied up by the supplemental agreement. Is that a fair statement?

[His Excellency David Mulroney]

Well, one of things that happened and one of the things I worked on when I got to Foreign Affairs was to improve the capacity of civilians to play that role. What we began to see, and what my vision was, was a continuum that started with the forces—the people who actually went out and captured the IED makers and took the people on the battlefield—and went right through to the monitors from Foreign Affairs, Correctional Service Canada, the RCMP, the trainers, and the others, right through to the stage at which the detainee went into the Afghan justice system.

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

Could you talk about the contact you had with government departments engaged in Afghanistan? You alluded to some of it. Was it by phone, by e-mail messages, by video conference? How often did it occur? During all of this, did you hear from anybody—in DND, DFAIT, RCMP, etc.—before 2007 that there was systematic torture occurring?

[His Excellency David Mulroney]

We were all aware through 2006. The reason we did the 2005 arrangement was because we wanted to be sure that we were avoiding, to the extent possible, any threat of mistreatment.

Our understanding of the situation on the ground in Afghanistan grew month by month. Certainly through 2006 people were looking at whether we could work in Afghan prisons and how we'd do it in terms of capacity building. We were working with the AIHRC and the Red Cross to see what they could do. DFAIT and National Defence were working to see how they would divide up the responsibility for this process.

The work picked up speed tremendously in 2007. We understood more. We developed new processes. What we would do is we'd get everybody in a single room. Sometimes this would take all weekend. We'd go through every part of the process. We'd look people in the eye and say, “Do you understand this? Do we have the right understanding of this? Is this how we should move forward?”

We would have Kabul and Kandahar on the line. When I say Kandahar, I mean we'd have civilians with the PRT, we'd have the commander or the deputy commander of Joint Task Force Afghanistan, and we might have some of the other units that were involved in capturing detainees, as well as people from the Judge Advocate General.

We went through this in painstaking detail because we had to figure things out. Is this acceptable to the RCMP? Have we met their standards? Is the Correctional Service of Canada in line with this? Can the Correctional Service of Canada and DFAIT develop a single template that will allow us, visit after visit, to ask the same detailed questions? How do we report this responsibly in the system?

We crunched this in a period from March through April 2007 because we wanted to get a better arrangement and put it in place.

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

So it's safe to say, as the general said yesterday, that you're dealing with a mass of information from a wide variety of sources, national and international, of which Mr. Colvin was one source and one source only.

Could you talk about your contact with Ambassadors Sproule and Lalani? Was there a free flow of information there? Was there any substantive evidence of systematic torture coming from them or abuse of Canadian-transferred detainees?

[His Excellency David Mulroney]

There was no evidence of abuse of Canadian-transferred detainees, but one of the reasons we negotiated the new arrangement was so that we could develop a much better database and record system, and we'd have eyes on things through our monitoring. People had gone into the prisons, but it wasn't in terms of specific monitoring visits.

What we did with Arif's appointment was we made it very clear in the DFAIT system that he was the senior ambassador, as senior as our high commissioner in India or our ambassador to Germany. Under him, we then put a deputy head of mission. We put a senior civilian in the south.

We couldn't report if we didn't have the people and the systems in place to do that. We were steadily building up our resources so DFAIT could play a partnership role that was required of it with the forces. It didn't really have the resources in place to do that before then, and that was part of my job.

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

With the amount of information that was coming in—and I go back a little bit to Mr. Colvin here—you mentioned volume versus fact. Is it fair to say that it's very important in that environment to have very disciplined, coherent, and verifiable reporting going on?

[His Excellency David Mulroney]

That was what was expected of us. Of course the particular focus was on our responsibilities toward Canadian-transferred detainees, but also through human rights reports we were looking at the larger human rights situation in Afghanistan.

[Laurie Hawn, Conservative, Edmonton Centre, AB]

And you, as Mr. Colvin's superior, would probably have a better understanding of the broad aspects of all the sources of information and all the things that were being collected and would have a better understanding of where his information fits in all of that.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rick Casson]

A very short response, please, sir.

[His Excellency David Mulroney]

I made it my business to make sure that I talked to everybody in the system. I didn't think that had been done enough before.

[The Chair, Conservative, Rick Casson]

Thank you, Mr. Hawn.

Mr. Dewar, seven minutes, please.

[Paul Dewar, NDP, Ottawa Centre, ON]

Thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Mulroney.

I will just go over to Mr. Bachand's reference to a document where he was mentioning someone claiming to have been whipped with cable, shocked with electricity, kicked and beaten, sleep deprivation, etc. Would you consider that amalgamation of facts and descriptions to be torture, if someone was being whipped with cables, shocked with electricity?

[His Excellency David Mulroney]

Yes.

[Paul Dewar, NDP, Ottawa Centre, ON]

In that report, because I've read what I can, I don't think the word “torture” is written at all.

[His Excellency David Mulroney]

I'm sorry, in which report?

[Paul Dewar, NDP, Ottawa Centre, ON]

In the report you have in front of you.

[His Excellency David Mulroney]

In this report?

[Paul Dewar, NDP, Ottawa Centre, ON]

Yes. Is the word “torture” written?

[His Excellency David Mulroney]

I'd have to read it. If you don't see it....

[Paul Dewar, NDP, Ottawa Centre, ON]

I don't see it, but I only have what you have, and that's a lot of blacked-out words. The point is you could technically write a report like this one that you have without writing the word “torture”, yet describe that torture is occurring, right?

[His Excellency David Mulroney]

I don't see your point.

[Paul Dewar, NDP, Ottawa Centre, ON]

You could write a report about going into a prison and someone having said, as we had evidence before, that there was evidence of a cable and whips.... Actually, the government acknowledged that was one of the reports, not by Mr. Colvin but one of his associates, that was enough to move them to change the agreement. But the report didn't say torture was being conducted; there was evidence of mistreatment. So you could write a whole report without writing the word “torture”. Is that—

[His Excellency David Mulroney]

What you're talking about, I think, is the report from the November 5, 2007 business.