That is very kind. Thank you.
Again, there are really two conditions.
First, if there isn't sufficient evidence to link a guy to the insurgency, then there's no point hanging on to him. You have to remember that the conditions under which people are taken off the battlefield are not exactly black and white. It isn't like making an arrest here in Ottawa or something. In the hurly-burly of combat, when you pick somebody up, you may detain a guy because he has gunshot residue on his hands or something of that nature. Then, when he comes back to the transfer facility and he's interviewed by the military police, we determine whether or not there's any evidence that would link him to the insurgency. That's the crime, if you would. That's what we're trying to root out.
The NDS, based on that evidence, will prosecute him inside of the Afghan justice system. If he ends up being a long-term prisoner, he ends up, as was the case for many of our people, in Sarposa prison. I haven't spoken about that because that's a completely different project.
It's almost like you have the county jail--that being the NDS facility in Kandahar City--and then down the street you have the prison, which is where you go after you have been prosecuted if you're found guilty.
So that's number one. If there isn't enough evidence, there's no point in turning the guy over.
I can talk about these poor folks of limited mental capacity. These are people who get wired up by the Taliban--who aren't nice, I think we all appreciate that--with bombs. The Taliban will wire up a guy who happens to be not completely with it and then walk him toward you so that they can detonate him by remote control. When we happen to defuse the thing, we take the guy in as a detainee. We have no idea who he is until we get him back and question him.
We realized, in at least two of these cases, that these guys weren't entirely with it and that they needed to be turned back to their families.
Point number one, then, is that if there is no evidence to link to him to the insurgency, there is no point transferring him--or keeping him, for that matter.
The second element is that of course we wouldn't transfer people if we knowingly knew that there would be--