Whooee! I reckon one big difference between Merkans an’ Canajuns is we say we wouldn’t stand fer stuff like Gitmo an’ the Patriot Act an’ human rights abuses by our own gummint.

I gotta bigass problem with this here detainee issue. When US tropps commit war crimes, the US gummint sez it’s only a few bad apples an’ whenever they’ve had court cases, that’s how they sold it. In Canada’s case, it ain’t the bad apples at the bottom of the heap who’s spittin’ at the Geneva Conventions, it’s their political masters.

I figger it’s partially to the HarpoonTossers’ credit that they ain’t blamed bad apple soldiers. They ain’t denyin’ that it’s official Canajun gummint war policy to hand over captured suspects to Karzai’s bunch.

That sez that the buck don’t stop with the fellers an’ gals riskin’ their asses in Afstan.

Handin’ over prisoners to known torturers is a war crime. The Harper gummint policy of handin’ over prisoners to Karzai has Canajun soldiers stuck between a rock an’ a hard place. The orders from Ottawa sez they gotta hand over them detainees but the Geneva Conventions sez they’ll be war criminals if they do that.

If the Harper gummint has any respect fer our brave troops, they won’t put them in such an untenable, Catch-22 situation.

Even if the Cons don’t care about the welfare of detainees or about upholdin’ Canada’s resonsibilities under the Geneva Conventions an’ International Law, they oughta be more concerned about the legal jeopardy into which they’ve tossed our troops. I reckon the ICC has a pretty good basis on which to bring charges against Harper and O’Connor. Will they go into hidin’ like Radovan Karadic an’ Ratco Mladic?

JimBobby

“To whom do you propose to hand over prisoners?”

The Geneva Conventions prohibit us from handing them over to known torturers. We are not upholding our longstanding obligations under the Geneva Conventions. We are handing suspects over to the corrupt, warlord-dominated, Islamic Republic of Afghanistan.

In 4 years, we have only captured and handed over about 40 detainees. We could easily build a POW camp inside Afstan to house and guard 10 captives per year. If we continue to hand them over for abuse, we are indeed committing war crimes.

It’s not the fault of a few bad apples ion the military. It’s the fault of a few bad apples in Ottawa who seem to think we can ignore international treaties when it suits us. In WW2, we housed 40,000 POW’s in Canada. Surely, we can look after 1/1000th as many today.

Harper’s big argument for staying the course and defending the indefensible is that we’ve made an international committment as a member of NATO. We’ve also made an international committment as a signatory to the Geneva Conventions. Picking and choosing which international commitments to honour and which to ignore is not the prerogative of the Defence Minister or the PM.

Imposing a top-down policy on our troops that puts them in legal jeopardy wrt international law is unconscionable. We cannot descend into lawlessness and we cannot condone policies which put our troops into such an untenable position.

Torture is wrong. It is an affront to our values. It is a crime under international law. Torture cannot be condoned by civilized nations and we have affirmed as much by our signing on to Geneva. Compliance with the law is not optional. Human decency does not permit us to condone or participate in the torture of human beings.

If the comedy of errors we’ve witnessed in the House of Comments this week did not concern such a serious issue, it would be laughable. Noboby in the Harper government seems to have a clue and they can’t even get their lying stories straight. It’s disgraceful and Canada’s reputation is being sullied by our leaders. Canada deserves better.

JimBobby

“Those suspected of crimes against Afghanistan law must be turned over to Afghan authorities.”

Right. Did you forget that it is a crime against Afghanistan law(enshrined in Karzai’s new constitution and punishable by death) for an Afghani Muslim to convert to Christianity?

We need to be assured that these prisoners will be afforded a trial and will be treated humanely. If the Karzai, or subsequent Afghan governments, can provide that assurance, we can legally hand over the POW’s. If the Afghan government cannot assure us that they will treat human beings like human beings, we should not be supporting them and we should not be dying for the warlords who run the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan.

When we assist in human rights abuse, we degrade and dehumanize ourselves and the troops who fight for Canada. I agree that it is our government leaders who need to take legal responsibility for ordering our troops to commit war crimes. However, as I recall, the “I was only following orders” defense doesn’t generally hold water.

If the Afghan government can’t control it’s prisoner treatment, we can’t turn them over to be tortured. If the Afghan regime cannot devbelop a justice system that respects human rights, maybe the prisoners can be charged and tried by the ICC.

No one has ever suggested that they be afforded refugee status in Canada.

Weaseling out of the Geneva Conventions with an excuse that adherence to norms of human decency prevents us from winning wars and promoting human decency, is oxymoronic. If we must sink to the level of torturers and human rights abusers to win, we aren’t winning anything. We lose too much of our own humanity with such actions.

This has nothing to do with petty politics and who’s in power in Ottawa. It has to do with basic human decency and Canada’s reputation on the world stage. I do not believe that this is a Con-devised policy. I think they likely inherited the policy from the Liberals. The Cons management of it — evidenced by this week’s utter confusion in QP — has been deplorable and insults the intelligence of Canadians.

JB

It doesn’t matter what is punishable by death in Afghanistan. It is not our country. One day we will leave. We are not going to impose Canadian political and social standards on Afghanistan. They will do as they see fit. Most people opposed to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan include that as one of their objections: outsiders will not be able to significantly change their customs. Either we accept the slight distance we can move the goalposts in any given situation into which we interject ourselves, or we should not intervene in any situation in which the local customs are not in accord with our own standards of conduct.

>No one has ever suggested that they be afforded refugee status in Canada.

Show some perspicacity. People who object to handing over detainees right now will either have to object to handing them over in the future when we end our mission, or be exposed as rank hypocrites who sought only temporary political advantage. Where will the detainees at risk in the nations of their citizenship go, if not to Canada? And for those who are in fact only using this as a domestic political foil, I see no reason to respect their claims right now if their claims will not be consistent down the road.

The overwhelming majority of the current objections and obstructionism are, no offence, political bullshit being thrown around for purely domestic political advantage. No one really gave a flying fuck when the Liberals got us stuck in as a political calculation to maintain the fiction we had no resources to assist the US anywhere; this is only a big deal now because the government changed. Very few people are genuinely concerned with human welfare: you can identify them by paying attention to who objected to our campaigns in the Balkans and elsewhere regardless of which party sat on the government benches. They are few in number.

Contrary to what you believe, if we are to ever win a conflict - which is to say, to achieve any meaningful result which outlasts the time at which the last outbound flight leaves for Canada - we will have to get our hands dirty and be prepared to tolerate some indecencies. International humanitarian law is exploited as a tool of information warfare, with the aim of discrediting and hamstringing our efforts. No interpretation is too trivial to not be exploited in the media. I frankly have no interest in risking any more service lives abroad if the domestic support for a conflict is subordinated to the political exigencies of political parties. We can stop speculating about intervention in Darfur or anywhere else, ever, because there will be crimes of one definition or another committed.

All sorts of laws are suspended in war IrC, but not all of them, that’s why we have the Geneva Conventions, a set of international laws that Canada is a signatory to.

Knowing that prisoners turned over to the Afghan government have a high probability of being tortured makes turning those prisoners over to the Afghan government illegal. That poses a problem for our military, for our government, and for us as a nation of law abiding people - the answer to that problem is not, as you suggest, to simply shrug and say ‘oh well, that’s the way they do things in Afghanistan’, because that’s the convenient thing to do.

I wonder, were it Canadians being turned over to system that engaged in torture would you feel the same way?