In it together: Anglos dodging responsibility, spending (and earning) a fortune

In the UK, the acquittal of two British officers in the killing of Baha Mousa in Basra in 2003 led many to question the use of military trials. The proceedings against a number of officers involved in the death of Mousa all led to acquittals, an apparently cost the British taxpayer over £20 million. The judge who acquitted the men said there was no evidence against the men because there was an obvious, inpenetrable code of silence among those involved. And just today, we learn that 10 British detainees in Basra pulled a quite simple escape.

In Canada, the controversy over the investigation of the "handing over" and disappearance of a Taliban soldier captured on the battlefield to the Afghan Army rages on. Meanwhile, miltary lawyers appointed to defend Canadian Omar Khadr, the only juvenile brought to Guantanamo from Afghanistan, say the cards are stacked against him. The US has used coercion and torture to gather the majority of "admissable evidence." His lawyers also claim the Canadian government is abandonning the now 20-year-old Khadr.

In the US, the beginning of a hearing to determine whether the only officer charged with Abu Ghraib abuses shall face court martial hearings revealed that Sgt Steven Jordan plans to dispute the legality of evidence against him. He claims that investigating Generals Fay and Taguba did not properly inform him of his rights.

Also, Staff Sgt. Ray Girouard was found guilty of negligent homicide in relation to the killings of three prisoners north-west of Baghdad in May 2006. The maximum sentence for this is three years, whereas premeditated murder carries up to life without parole. He was also convicted of covering up the crimes. His attempts to prove he was under orders to "kill at military-age men" and pass responsibility up the military command seemed to have failed. But he raised significant questions about the orders he was given.

Australian Prime Minister's surprise visit to the troops in southern Afghanistan reminds that Australian David Hicks, captured in Afghanistan in 2001, is awaiting his military commission trial. His lawyers are attempting to delay the proceedings, challenging the his very detention in US courts. He will in any case appear in a hearing on March 23, the first time he will have seen his family in 2 1/2 years. Meanwhile, an Australian firm Morris Corporation, won the $65 million contract to supply meals at US Detention facilities in Iraq.

Canadians take bold step to curb abuse

The Canadian Press reported today that Canadian forces in Kandahar will work together with the Afghanistan Independent Commission for Human Rights (AICHR) to ensure that no detainee abuse occurs under Canada's watch.

Earlier allegations of physical abuse of detainees at Kandahar Base in 2006 marred the Canadian force's image in the south of Afghanistan. Official investigations in these are on-going. Concerns over torture in Afghan prisons will also be a focus of the AICHR, which will now be notified when detainees are handed from Canadian to Afghan custody. This makes Canada the only NATO partner with this policy so far.

The Kandahar office of Afghanistan's human rights commission has agreed to act as a watchdog for detainees captured by Canadians to ensure that valid complaints of abuse are investigated, the Canadian Press has learned.

The secret agreement with military commanders papers over concerns raised by human rights groups about the practice of handing captured Taliban prisoners over to Afghan authorities who have a reputation for torture. It could also take some of the fire out of a burning debate over allegations that Canadian troops abused detainees last spring.

"Canadians respect human rights very well," Abdul Quadar Noorzai, the Kandahar manager of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission, said in an interview. He was eager to trumpet the agreement signed last Friday with Brig.-Gen. Tim Grant, commander of Canadian troops in Afghanistan.

"It is one of the greatest acts taken by them and I really appreciate it from the core of my heart," said a beaming Noorzai, who's been working for a year to carve out such an arrangement.

Marc Raider, a spokesman for the Defence Department in Ottawa, confirmed the existence of the agreement and said it builds on a December 2005 technical arrangement signed between Afghanistan's defence minister and Canadian Chief of Defence Staff Gen. Rick Hillier.

[...]The negotiations were started almost a year ago when Nader Naderi, commissioner of the Afghan human rights commission based in Kabul, went to Canada and met with the minister of defence.

Noorzai said eventually he would like to see the agreement expanded, or a separate arrangement signed, that would allow the commission to report on civilian shootings by foreign troops.

Over the past month, four Afghan bystanders have been killed in shootings involving Canadian soldiers.

Political firestorm in Ottawa over allegations

The Canadian press certainly jumped on the allegations of detainee abuse by Canadian troops at Kandahar Base in spring 2006. The headline from the Globe and Mail says it all:

Full inquiry ordered into treatment of detainees

Defence Minister vows findings will be made public: 'This is not Somalia'; Military officials will scour Afghanistan looking for 3 men who had been held by soldiers

Canadian CNews gauged the reaction of Afghans to these latest allegations:

Allegations that Afghan detainees were abused after they were captured by Canadians came as no surprise Tuesday to Kandahar residents who have mixed feelings about the soldiers from Canada.

Residents remember shooting incidents that have killed at least two Afghans over the past year and injured several others, many of them motorists or motorcyclists who failed to obey Canadian orders to stop. The latest reports of alleged abuse touched a raw nerve in Kandahar, even though the suspects involved were believed to be Taliban insurgents.

"They promised to do reconstruction," Afadullah, 30, an auto mechanic with a shop near the city's gate, said about the Canadians through a translator.

"If (the Canadians) cannot co-operate with us, they should go home and then the Americans should send somebody else."

But others in Kandahar were prepared to give Canadians the benefit of the doubt. They urged patience while the allegation is being checked out.

"Canadians are better than Americans; more humble," said Abdul Khan, a taxi driver.

"They can be forgiven as long as they promise to stop shooting at civilians."

Alleged recent Canadian detainee abuse, Kandahar

It appears that the US forces are not the only ones accused of beating three detainees in Afghanistan. The alleged incidents occurred in April 2006, at Kandahar base. There have been prior incidents of abuse at Kandahar.

A Canadian Law Professor at University of Ottawa, Amir Attaran, requested documents relating to the incident under Canada's Access to Information Act.

From CBC News:

Attaran said he received three documents from the Department of National Defence, hand-written reports from Canadian military police in Kandahar. The documents show three men were brought to military police by a single interrogator in one day and all had a pattern of injuries to their faces, heads and upper bodies, he told CBC Tuesday.

"It seems to me that if one interrogator has brought in three people in a single day with very similar injuries, this is something that merits investigation," he said.

Attaran sent the information to the Military Police Complaints Commission, a civilian-run body that investigates complaints.

Commission head Peter Tinsley informed Chief of Defence Staff Gen. Rick Hillier and the head of the military police, Capt. Steve Moore, of the allegations, said a report Tuesday in the Globe and Mail.

Attaran said he doesn't know all the details surrounding the incident because DND has refused to provide all the documents he has requested, including a photo of one of the men.

"Only yesterday, because this was about to break in the press, did the DND agree to conduct an internal investigation. An inquiry of this kind should be open to the public," he said.

A group of Canadian soldiers captured the Afghans near a small town about 50 kilometres west of Kandahar, where more than 2,000 Canadians are serving. The men were taken to the medical centre on the Kandahar base.

A military report says the man with the most serious injuries — bruises and cuts to his arm, back and chest — was injured when his hands were tied behind his back.

The military initially said "appropriate force" was used against the man, who it said was a bomb-maker.

One of the detainees was described in military reports as "non-compliant," while a second was described as "extremely belligerent," taking four men to subdue him.

Khadr, only juvenile at Guantanamo, charged

Omar Khadr, a Canadian who was imprisoned at age 15 in Afghanistan in 2002, has been charged with murder after waiting more than four years in Guantanamo Bay. Although charges were made against Khadr last year, they were dropped after the Supreme Court found the planned tribunals unconstitutional.

Although Khadr has appeared in court a couple of times, no new photos of him have been made available, so the photo of him at age 15 is the only one available. It looks like a school photo.



From Canadian CBC news:

Khadr, who was born in Toronto and lived for years in various southern Ontario communities, was arrested in Afghanistan in July 2002. The U.S. military alleges that he killed an American medic in a grenade attack, which wounded several other American soldiers.

Khadr has been held ever since in Guantanamo. His lawyers and human rights groups say he has been abused in the prison.

The charges against Khadr, the Australian and the Yemeni are not considered formal until they are approved by a U.S. Defence Department legal adviser and an official who oversees the trials.

The process should take two weeks, said Davis. He said the trials will not begin until at least the spring.

The chief prosecutor said it made sense to start with charges against Khadr, who is the only Canadian at Guantanamo, and the other two men.

"Those three have been around for a while, and they were prepared and ready to go," he said.

Khadr and nine other prisoners were previously charged with various offenses, but the charges were dropped in June 2006, when the U.S. Supreme Court intervened.

The court ruled that President George W. Bush overstepped his authority when he ordered the initial military tribunals at Guantanamo. The court also said the tribunal rules violated international and U.S. laws.

U.S. Congress passed a new bill authorizing new military hearings, with new rules, and Bush signed it into law in October 2006. Some of the rules have drawn criticisms from activists because they allow for the use of hearsay and coerced evidence.

The military plans to charge 60 to 80 Guantanamo prisoners under the new system.

Khadr has been accused of training with al-Qaeda.

His father, Ahmed Said Khadr, was reportedly a close associate of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. The elder Khadr, who moved his family from Canada to Afghanistan in the 1980s, was killed in a gun battle in Pakistan in 2003.

Along with Khadr, Australian David Hicks was also charged. His legal team accused the US Military of harassing them and attempting to undermine them by announcing the charges the day they had left the prison.

US court: green light for CIA renditions

This week the Village Voice's Nat Hentoff analyzes the decision of a federal judge to throw out a suit by a Canadian citizen, alleging the US sent him illegally to be tortured in Syria.

In 2002, Maher Arar, who was born in Syria, was stopped while in transit through the US home to Canada. After being held incommunicado, he was "extraordinarily rendered" by the US to Jordan and then Syria, a country that State Department alleges tortures people regularly. In Syria, Arar was tortured and held in solitary confinement for nearly a year.

The Voice calls Judge David Trager's decision last month to throw out Arar's civil suit "startling" and "ominous." The suit was seeking damages from former US Attorney General John Ashcroft.



According to the Voice article, Trager's decision is a green light for the government to continue the CIA "extraordinary renditions." The conditions placed on detainee treatment by Congress last year do NOT apply to the CIA. Trager, unsurprisingly, is one of a large crop of Bush administration appointees.

The Trager decision tramples on the concept of "judicial review" of the Legislative and Executive branches of government. In his decision he writes the other branches of government decide where judicial oversight is appropriate.

What about the separation of powers? Ah, said Trager, "the coordinate branches of our government [executive and legislative] are those in whom the Constitution imposes responsibility for our foreign affairs and national security. Those branches have the responsibility to determine whether judicial oversight is appropriate."

Gee, I thought that the checks and balances of our constitutional system depend on the independence of the federal judiciary, which itself decides to exercise judicial review.

Judge Trager went further to protect the Bush administration's juggernaut conduct of foreign policy: "One need not have much imagination to contemplate the negative effect on our relations with Canada if discovery were to proceed in this case, and were it to turn out that certain high Canadian officials had, despite public denials, acquiesced in Arar's removal to Syria."

"More generally," Trager went on, "governments that do not wish to acknowledge publicly that they are assisting us would certainly hesitate to do so if our judicial discovery process could compromise them."

But judge, the Canadian government itself is now actively involved in an inquiry to discover, among other things, what happened to Arar, and how. And in Europe, there is a fierce controversy over whether governments there have been covertly involved in facilitating the CIA's kidnapping of terror suspects from other lands.

Is it the job of a federal judge here to protect other governments from embarrassment and eventual punishment by their own courts for helping the United States commit crimes?

And what about our own government's criminal accountability? The February 17 New York Law Journal noted that "Judge Trager said that even assuming the government had intended to remove Maher Arar to Syria for torture, the federal judiciary was in no position to hold our government officials liable for damages 'in the absence of explicit direction by Congress . . . even if such conduct violates our treaty obligations or customary international law.' " (Emphasis added.)

Detained (&disappeared) at age 15 in Afghanistan

The story of Omar Khadr, a kid who was captured "on the battlefield" at age 15 in Afghanistan, has been of great interest to Canadians and child-rights activists.



For the past 4 years, the Canadian of Egyptian descent has been encarcerated in Camp Iguana (the juvenile section of Guantantamo) where Americans claim he received preferential treatment due to his young age. When he arrived there at age 16, however, the US refused to treat him as a minor under international law.

The Toronto Star feature on Khadr bends over backwards to achieve balance, interviewing some of the American soldiers who captured the boy after a firefight in Afghanistan. (His father was an Al-Qaeda fundraiser and Bin Laden confidant who was finally killed in 2003.)

The story is worth reading in its entirety.

Khadr faces arraignment by military tribunal today, January 11, after spending almost a fifth of his young life in custody with no notion of his fate.

Dutch doubts dog Coalition in Afghanistan

The Australian reports that the Dutch government's hesistation to deploy forces to troubled Uruzgan province in 2006 as a part of an expanded NATO contingent of the Coalition (ISAF) is causing consternation in Canberra.

Australia is worried that 200 engineers, poised to take over from the US the Provincial Reconstruction Team based in Tarin Kwot (Uruzgan), will be held in limbo waiting for protection. The Dutch are their would-be protectors in that trouble spot.

The Dutch Prime Minister recently stated he will allow Parliament to decide whether the deployment to Uruzgan will go forward, facing dissent from a party in the ruling coalition and opinion polls that show 68% opposition to the increased troop contribution. Issues of concern are almost certain increased casualties, the potential "partner" in Uruzgan a controversial Governor-warlord featured in Taliban Country, and more generally concern with the strategy of conducting a counter-insurgency in remote Afghanistan.

Dutch Defense Minister Henk Kamp stated that Dutch forces would not be "hunting Taliban" (like American forces there).

From the Australian side, the opposition Labor party commented today that no Australian servicemen should go into a "hostile sphere" for reconstruction projects without troop and air support.

The other NATO partners are worried (UK and Canada) that they may have to increase their contributions, something they have sworn they cannot afford.

Dutch question Afghanistan mission

After much debate in the alternative and mainstream media in the Netherlands, it seems that the Dutch Left has come together against the decision of Defence Minister Henk Kamp to authorize a deployment of 1,200 Dutch troops to Afghanistan in mid 2006. The troops would be deployed under the increased NATO contingent to the ISAF (International Security Assistance Force) to the troubled "Taliban country" of Uruzgan Province, in the south central area of the country near Kandahar.


Taliban country? Must we?

Reuters reports that three parties, one of which is part of the ruling coalition, have expressed their opposition to the deployment. According to the New York Times, the issue will be debated in the Dutch parliament in a special hearing on January 26. A vote will take place on February 2, but the parliament does not appear to have the power to veto the deployment.

A Dutch opinion poll shows that 68% of the public is against the increased deployment to Uruzgan.

The Dutch opposition bases its objection to the mission on reports of anarchy, failed counter-insurgency and abuse by mainly US forces in Uruzgan.

A major worry for the Dutch opposition is the issue of detention during the inevitable counter-insurgency missions in the troubled region.

A number of sources have pointed to the film Taliban Country as a source for these doubts, after the film was featured in an Amsterdam magazine and on Dutch television.

Dutch rejection of the Uruzgan mission could cause big problems for NATO, as other contributing countries (Canada and the UK) claim they have already reached their deployment and funding limits.

"Rendition" AKA Outsourcing Torture

The full story of "rendition" or the tactic used by the US government to detain "suspected terrorists" either on US or foreign soil and hand them over to notoriously human-rights-abusing and torturing governments has long been documented. But the fact is, very few people are aware this happens. And it does. Read the story of Syrian-born Canadian immigrant below, from the New Yorker.

Arar, a thirty-four-year-old graduate of McGill University whose family emigrated to Canada when he was a teen-ager, was arrested on September 26, 2002, at John F. Kennedy Airport. He was changing planes; he had been on vacation with his family in Tunisia, and was returning to Canada. Arar was detained because his name had been placed on the United States Watch List of terrorist suspects. He was held for the next thirteen days, as American officials questioned him about possible links to another suspected terrorist. Arar said that he barely knew the suspect, although he had worked with the man's brother. Arar, who was not formally charged, was placed in handcuffs and leg irons by plainclothes officials and transferred to an executive jet. The plane flew to Washington, continued to Portland, Maine, stopped in Rome, Italy, then landed in Amman, Jordan.

During the flight, Arar said, he heard the pilots and crew identify themselves in radio communications as members of "the Special Removal Unit." The Americans, he learned, planned to take him next to Syria. Having been told by his parents about the barbaric practices of the police in Syria, Arar begged crew members not to send him there, arguing that he would surely be tortured. His captors did not respond to his request; instead, they invited him to watch a spy thriller that was aired on board.

Ten hours after landing in Jordan, Arar said, he was driven to Syria, where interrogators, after a day of threats, "just began beating on me." They whipped his hands repeatedly with two-inch-thick electrical cables, and kept him in a windowless underground cell that he likened to a grave. "Not even animals could withstand it," he said. Although he initially tried to assert his innocence, he eventually confessed to anything his tormentors wanted him to say. "You just give up," he said. "You become like an animal."

A year later, in October, 2003, Arar was released without charges, after the Canadian government took up his cause.