Thank you, Chair.
Thank you, gentlemen, for coming here today.
First of all, Mr. Lalani, you said that of course there were “shortcomings”. I would find that a rather soft euphemism for the concerns that have been raised before our committee in terms of the NDS with its culture of torture and abuse of prisoners, going back to the evidence we heard from Eileen Olexiuk, who produced several human rights reports; from what we heard from Mr. Colvin; and from what we heard from Cory Anderson, who was telling us three weeks ago that the NDS was not a viable partner in terms of operations in Afghanistan.
I'm concerned about two things that we heard. For example, David Mulroney told us that after we signed the second agreement in approximately May 2007, we started to develop a database, essentially indicating what you said, Mr. Sproule, which was that we didn't know very much before then.
Mr. Anderson told us three weeks ago, in terms of specific allegations of abuse, that “the reason there were no specific allegations of abuse prior to May of 2007 is that we didn't have an instrument in place that would allow us the ability to find out, and we weren't doing any monitoring”.
Would you agree, Mr. Sproule, that prior to the new agreement, at least, when you started a process of monitoring--we that know the ICRC, for example, wasn't reporting anything back to Canada; they were only reporting to Afghanistan--there's really kind of a black hole about what happened prior to May of 2007 in terms of who we passed over, what happened to them, whether they disappeared, and whether they were maltreated? Is that fair to say?