Afghanistan committee  Yes.

Afghanistan committee  I should say, and I think I mentioned it at the beginning, this was one of maybe 15 issues I had. In the summer and fall of 2006, we were really caught up in Operation Medusa, trying to get forces down to replace the Canadians. There was a lot of activity just in security issues and narcotics issues, police reform.

Afghanistan committee  Yes. There was this key message of June 2, 2006. In this context, in a public context, I can't reveal the source or sources of that information, but it was an extremely credible source or sources that had expressed serious concern about treatment after transfer and gave some adjectives describing the treatment and hinting at a lot of abuse.

Afghanistan committee  Yes. I'm a little bit removed from the mechanics and also the policy side, but from what I know of the NDS, my feeling was always that we shouldn't be giving detainees to the Kandahar NDS. I'm not pointing the finger at them; they are who they are. They've got a job they're trying to do it.

Afghanistan committee  Mostly I authored them, but sometimes other people were consulted on them. Generally, I signed them and sent them myself.

Afghanistan committee  Sure. Usually there'd be on these reports four people on the “To” line, which were the kind of key divisions of DFAIT who I expected would reply, and then the other 72 would be on the “cc” line--you know, “For your information”. It could be anyone from our mission to NATO, to different DND departments.

Afghanistan committee  Yes, I have a pretty good sense.

Afghanistan committee  At the time—this may be surprising, and I was surprised—there were very few of us in the field, so the volume of reporting was actually quite modest. If you added the numbers, certainly the list would be longer. Maybe it would be in the order of twice as much on the civilian side.

Afghanistan committee  The way I report and I think most of my colleagues report, usually it does have quite a specific subject and the subject matter refers to that. You would have sometimes omnibus topics, if there was a meeting that dealt with a lot of issues, but the ones on detainees usually dealt only with detainees and were quite narrowly focused.

Afghanistan committee  Some of those were passed on orally and some in written reporting.

Afghanistan committee  Yes.

Afghanistan committee  Yes--not usually such a big distribution list, usually more tightly focused.

Afghanistan committee  That's a good question. I don't have most of my reporting from the PRT, but I believe I wrote on it from the PRT, so that would have been probably June of 2006, certainly in the summer of 2006 and past.

Afghanistan committee  Yes, he was there when I arrived in April 2006 and he was still there when I left in October of 2007.

Afghanistan committee  No, I haven't.