Mr. Chair, it may not be of any great surprise to you that I vehemently object to having this committee study this. I appreciate the position of Mr. Ménard and his party with respect to this whole thing, but he has brought in a whole raft of things that have absolutely nothing to do with this committee, the extension of the tour, and so on.
More importantly, if we're going to look at this, we're going to have to go back to 2001 and bring in the former Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs, who signed an original agreement that's now obviously in the public domain.
I see no value to this. The best part is that these two members of Correctional Service Canada were there to help the Afghanis improve their prison system. They were not there to monitor what was going on.
We've thrown around the terms of the Geneva Convention pretty freely with respect to this particular conflict. I believe that in the documents signed by the former government—We agree that we want to see the terms of the Geneva Convention applied, but in the strictest sense, the Geneva Convention applies between two warring countries, armies with uniforms, and so on. I think Canadians understand that in this case these are not prisoners of war; these are insurgents. They are not necessarily even citizens of the country that has asked us to be there. We're not an invading army; we're there at the request of the Afghani people and part of a NATO mission.
This motion, as Mr. Ménard brought it forward and spoke to it, was way broader than this committee. It doesn't make sense to ask two members of Correctional Service Canada, who are there to help the Afghani improve their prison system—
I would say that their prison system is not what we have. In many respects, I suspect that most of the country is medieval in terms of what we're used to. Their homes are not what we're used to, or their schools, and so their prisons probably aren't either. Our people are there to help and train them. They have made some changes. They're not there as monitors of the prison system.
The other important issue—which many Canadians understand, although sometimes in Parliament we miss the point—is that I'm not sure whether the prisoners who alleged torture were turned over to the Afghanis by Canadians or by other forces. That part I don't think has ever been made clear.
So when there are other committees studying this, perhaps looking at it from a broader perspective—I'm not saying there aren't issues that Canadians aren't interested in and wouldn't like to know; I just don't think this committee is the proper one to bring this matter forward, in order to deal with a small part of what Mr. Ménard talked about in the bigger picture. If we are going to do that, then I think we'll leave ourselves open to a fair amount of criticism with respect to this committee's role and what other committees, whether foreign affairs or defence, are looking at.
But if we're going to look at this issue, I firmly believe we need to bring in the people who have been involved since 2001 to set the stage. I don't think that was the intent of what Mr. Ménard had here, but it certainly has to be, if we're going to look at the issue. We can't just start with yesterday, because this goes back a long time.