Former Canadian Diplomat Says Most Afghan Prisoners Were Tortured

A former Canadian diplomat, Richard Colvin, who worked in Afghanistan, told a House of Commons Committee on Wednesday that most Afghan prisoners captured by Canadian soldiers fighting the Taliban were tortured by Afghan intelligence services.

As reported by the CBC, Colvin, who worked in both Kandahar and Kabul for the Department of Foreign Affairs from 2006-2007, told the committee that during this period, prisoners captured by Canadian forces were handed over to the NDS, the Afghan intelligence service, with no oversight or monitoring of the prisoners' conditions. As a result, Colvin said embassy staff began to learn of widespread prisoner abuse in Afghan jails. "According to our information, the likelihood is that all the Afghans we handed over were tortured. For interrogators in Kandahar, it was a standard operating procedure," Colvin said, according to the same CBC report. Amnesty International has criticised the practices of most NATO countries in regards to handling of prisoners. In a 2007 report, Amnesty noted that countries such as Canada, Belgium and Britain frequently lost track of detainees and kept poor records. The human rights group noted reports of "torture and other ill-treatment at the hands of the NDS, including detainees being whipped, exposed to extreme cold and deprived of food. Many of them have been arrested arbitrarily and detained incommunicado, without access to lawyers and families." Perhaps more troubling, Colvin is alleging that prisoners abused in such ways may not have been involved with the Taliban at all. "According to a very authoritative source, many of the Afghans we detained had no connection to insurgency whatsoever," Covin said. ""In other words, we detained and handed over for severe torture a lot of innocent people." Opposition parties have long called for more oversight regarding the treatment of Afghan prisoners, but the Conservative government was reluctant to move on the issue. "I can understand the passion that the leader of the Opposition and members of his party feel for the Taliban prisoners," Prime Minister Stephen Harper said in 2007, lashing out at Opposition questioning. "I just wish occasionally they would show the same passion for Canadian soldiers." However, in the fall of 2007 the government moved to halt transfer of prisoners to Afghan authorities for several months, after a substantiated case of torture was admitted. Transfers now continue, resuming after new agreements between the Canadian and Afghan governments resulted in what they claimed to be better record-keeping, oversight and staffing changes.