I think there was very widespread and incredible understanding that there were lots of problems in the Afghan justice system and Afghan prisons with Afghan police, as there were many problems throughout the Afghan system. But the question is, how do we take that information and then relate it to the challenge we faced with the need to put people who we believed were a serious threat to Afghans and Canadians into the justice system?
This was an issue that faced all of our allies, and they worked on it in various ways. The Americans built their own prison at Bagram, but they were operating partly under NATO and partly independently. The British and the Dutch had set up monitoring regimes. We did not set up a monitoring regime in 2005, and it became very clear to us by the end of 2006 that we needed to move to do something along those lines.
We did not intend to be passive observers of the Afghan scene. What we wanted to do with our monitoring regime, and what we did do, was to include with it very clear expectations of the Afghan government, and to make explicit the right of the Red Cross and the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission to go into the prisons. While we were doing this, we were beefing up the capability of the AIHRC.
In negotiating the four prisons to which Canadian-transferred detainees would go, this was important to us, because we were concerned about how we would track them through the system, so we knew exactly where they would go. Then we wanted to do the monitoring, we wanted to do the equipment, and we felt very confident that we could ensure that our detainees moved through the system without substantial risk of torture. We worked hard on how we would identify these people as Canadian-transferred detainees, how we'd ensure that at Kandahar airfield they understood their rights.
We were very committed as a team to doing everything we could to protect our Canadian-transferred detainees and to make the Afghan prison system better. I think we did both of those things.