http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080201.wdetainee01/BNStory/Afghanistan/home
(first part)
Ottawa kept abuse charges against Afghan ally secret
Kandahar governor accused of beating and electrocuting detainees in secret prisons
PAUL KORING
From Friday's Globe and Mail
February 1, 2008 at 2:00 AM EST
The Harper government knew, but tried to keep secret since last spring, allegations that the governor of Kandahar was personally involved in torture and abuse of detainees.
The allegations against Governor Asadullah Khalid, appointed directly by President Hamid Karzai and a key political partner to Canada's nation-building efforts in southern Afghanistan, were regarded as sufficiently credible that senior officials in Ottawa were immediately informed and Canadian diplomats secretly reported them to the International Red Cross and Afghanistan's main human-rights group.
Government documents detailing the accusations were heavily censored by the government which, claiming national security, blacked out the references to “the governor.” But multiple sources, both inside and outside the government, confirm that the words “the governor” have been censored as have whole passages referring to secret cells allegedly run by Mr. Khalid outside the official prison system.
Rumours have long linked Mr. Khalid to secret prisons. That he had close ties with U.S. intelligence agents and special forces had been known since Canadian troops arrived in southern Afghanistan in early 2006. But Ottawa didn't confront an accusation of the governor's direct involvement in the interrogation and torture of prisoners until it sent diplomats to inspect the main secret police prison in Kandahar on April 25, 2007.
“Another prisoner beckoned to us,” begins the crucial passages describing the first inspection of the secret National Directorate of Security police prison in Kandahar city.
The detainee, like others in the secret police jail, was in leg irons, according to the documents. He told the Canadians his name and described how he initially had been imprisoned for nearly a year, most of the time shackled alone in a room in one of the governor's private prisons. “He went on to state he had been interrogated by foreigners and the governor,” said the report by Gavin Buchan, a Canadian diplomat and Linda Garwood-Filbert, the head of the Canadian Corrections team in Afghanistan.
“He alleged that the governor beat him and gave him electric shocks,” Ms. Garwood-Filbert wrote in her inspection report. Eventually the prisoner was moved to the NDS prison where he gave his account to Canadian officials.
Within days, senior Canadian diplomats had passed on the reports to both the International Committee of the Red Cross and the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission.
Another document, marked “For AIHRC and ICRC eyes only” was used as a briefing note by Canadian diplomats at two meetings in early May.
One meeting was with the International Committee of the Red Cross; the other with the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission. When the briefing note was finally made public late last year as part of the government's delivery of documents in the Federal Court case brought by Amnesty International Canada and the B.C. Civil Liberties Association, it also had the words “the governor” blacked out, multiple sources have confirmed.
Despite sharing the allegations with the Afghan government and outside agencies, Ottawa kept them from a Canadian Federal Court judge hearing a case brought by Canadian rights groups. It claimed the national security exemption.
