Detainee Torture Remains a Reality, Reports Show

[babylonsister]

Detainee Torture Remains a Reality, Reports Show
Document tells of Canadian official finding instruments of torture beneath a chair in interrogation room of an Afghan police prison
by Paul Koring


Compelling evidence that Canadian-transferred detainees are still being tortured in Afghan prisons emerged yesterday from the government’s own follow-up inspection reports, documents it has long tried to keep secret.

In one harrowing account, an Afghan turned over by Canadian soldiers told of being beaten unconscious and tortured in the secret police prison in Kandahar. He showed Canadian diplomats fresh welts and then backed up his story by revealing where the electrical cable and the rubber hose that had been used on him were hidden.

“Under the chair we found a large piece of braided electrical cable as well as a rubber hose,” reads the subsequent diplomatic cable marked “secret” and distributed to some of the most senior officials in the Canadian government and officers in the Canadian military.

The Globe and Mail has established that the report of the case is recent, written after a Nov. 5, 2007, inspection of the National Directorate of Security prison in Kandahar. That was six months after a supposedly improved transfer agreement was put in place to monitor detainee treatment. The agreement was designed to address problems raised by critics about the ill treatment of prisoners taken by Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan and handed over to Afghan authorities with insufficient follow-up.

The documents were made available yesterday by the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association, which, along with Amnesty International Canada, is seeking a Federal Court injunction to stop further prisoner transfers. Both rights groups have filed a Federal Court action contending that international law and Canada’s own Constitution bar the government from transferring prisoners to those likely to torture or abuse them.

“The denial of torture is no longer a plausible position” for the Harper government to take, Jason Gratl, president of the B.C. Civil Liberties Association, said yesterday. (Previous allegations of abuse and torture by transferred detainees have been dismissed by senior ministers as Taliban propaganda.) “It’s impossible to turn a blind eye to the discovery of the instruments of torture in the very interrogation room where the interview was being conducted.” Mr. Gratl said yesterday in a telephone interview from Vancouver.

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http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/01/23/6552/

[Supersedeas]

1. and Condi (Prof of Sovietology) Rice wants to filibuster and change the subject