Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I will be brief.
That overview was helpful, Mr. Edwards, but I just can't get past this point that on some things you make a judgment call that the minister should be made aware of. If your minister were standing in the House of Commons being battered with questions demanding to know the state of detainees in Afghanistan, surely the deputy minister or somebody underneath you would say they'd better make the minister aware of this; he's getting the crap kicked out of him day after day in question period.
Let me summarize what we think went wrong here. When the original requests were made, your office tried its best to deny the existence. Mr. Esau went back. When you say the question was a little too global, too vague, let me tell you, Mr. Esau went back and said, and this is a quote from his e-mail:
If the records do exist but I failed to use the precise title of the reports, please let me know. I'm hearing from other sources that DFAIT does in fact produce human rights reports and I just want to confirm DFAIT's position on this, that human rights reports DO NOT exist and that my request was not interpreted with undue narrowness...
In other words, he did his best to negotiate with the ATIP officer to say that if he didn't use quite the right language, could he please be helped to phrase it in a way that he might use the right language. That was pretty serious. She got back and said she'd do some digging and get back to him. But then she said they felt they'd answered the letter of request.
So he got jerked around two or even three times by not using the magic words. This is where we used the Rumpelstiltskin reference. What does it take, some magic word before the information starts to flow? It's not supposed to be like that. The chairman read Treasury Board guidelines that they're supposed to err on the side of the applicant, not on the side of a minister who's trying to preserve himself from being embarrassed.
Then, when you had to admit these reports do exist, they started to get censored like crazy, in a way they were never censored before. This is what really concerns me.
The only question I have is a specific one. Who directed the censorship of the 2005 report, which was released in 2006, and the 2006 report, which was released in 2007? Who directed the blacking out of all reference to torture in those two documents?