PUBLICATION: The Toronto Star
DATE: 2006.05.15
EDITION: ONT
SECTION: News
PAGE: A2
BYLINE: Rosie DiManno
ILLUSTRATION: John D. McHugh AFP Getty Images A suspected Taliban prisoneris searched, handcuffed and processed by members of the 1st Princess Patricia's Canadian Light Infantry, after a raid on a compound in Kandahar last Wednesday. Ten suspects were handed over to the Afghan police.
WORD COUNT: 1093
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Military tries to massage message
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On Friday, The Globe and Mail ran a striking five-column-wide photograph on its front page of Canadian troops in Afghanistan taking suspected Taliban militants into custody.
The picture was worthy of such display on its own merits A lot of Canadians continue to ask what Canadian soldiers are doing in Afghanistan - although this question has been answered ad infinitum by the media, the military, the Conservative government and the Liberals who were in power (and sent Canadian troops overseas) before them.
There was further news value in the fact that Canadian military authorities had tried to suppress publication of the pictures, which were taken earlier in the week by an Agence France-Presse photographer embedded with Canadian troops in Kandahar.
Indeed, other embedded reporters didn't even learn about the incident - the largest-ever capture of Taliban insurgents by Canadian soldiers since their deployment as part of a multinational coalition - until three days after it happened, when the photographer returned to base. (More about the faltering embed program in a later column.) The lensman was met by military lawyers sternly warning that the shots couldn't be published because doing so breached articles of the Geneva Conventions.
This is profoundly untrue.
The Toronto Star didn't publish the photos; apparently, we weren't even aware of their existence. Frankly, that's embarrassing. We did run a short news story about the raid and the large number of Taliban taken into custody.
This had been, palpably, a banner day for Canadian troops. It was a successful mission, conducted on the fly as commanders learned that suspected Taliban were hiding out in a compound near the Canadian platoon house at their Gombad forward operating base, 70 kilometres north of Kandahar.
It appears to have been an utterly professional raid of which the Canadian military should be proud and so too the public back home. There was no mistreatment of those captured, as the eyewitness photographer himself described the operation afterwards, nobody mishandled, water provided, etc.
The Geneva Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War protects PoWs from "insults and public curiosity." More specifically, it prohibits parading prisoners of war through towns or caging them in areas accessible to the general public. The document, to which Canada is a signatory, does not address the question of whether media should be allowed to film enemy captives.
The United States has taken that view, if largely to serve its own purpose. American army regulations prohibit the filming, photographing and videotaping of captured enemy personnel for other than "facility administration or intelligence purposes." In truth, the government glommed onto the Geneva Conventions - which it had formerly argued didn't even apply to "non-conventional" combatants and insurgents, those who fought not under a nation's flag, in uniform, but for amorphous terrorist organizations and radical revolutionary causes - to prevent publication of photos depicting abuse of detainees in Iraq prisons.
In 2003, the Pentagon also cautioned the American media against running images of captive U.S. soldiers, originally broadcast by Al-Jazeera, the Arab satellite news channel that shows pitifully little discretion in what it puts on the airwaves.
The Canadian military appears to be taking its censorious cue from the U.S., and at a time when Ottawa is having immense difficulty trying to justify its politically induced ban against media coverage of dead soldiers coming home in a box.
This latest attempt at sanitizing the image and massaging the message makes even less sense. There is no legal underpinning for it, as courts have repeatedly ruled.
Legal experts have pointed out that publishing such pictures could establish that enemy combatants are being treated humanely; might even encourage other fighters to surrender, in the knowledge they will be fairly handled and protected.
These Canadian troops were doing their job and doing it well, which should have been fulsomely relayed to the public rather than smothered. In any event, the depictions of the prisoners were so discreet that none could be identified.
Keep in mind, also, that photographs of criminal suspects are routinely published, even in this exhaustively ethical newspaper, as they're stuffed into the back of police cars or brought into court, pictures that clearly show their faces.
I submit that it's important to see faces. And no one has given me a defensible explanation for why suspected militants - such as those who have been killing Canadian troops - are entitled to greater privacy rights than young men arrested for committing murder in Toronto.
The more pertinent question is why Canadian troops are handing over suspects to Afghan military commanders and their intelligence services when everybody knows that one of two things will likely happen Either the suspects will be let go, out of tribal and ethnic sympathies (the "get out of jail free card," as one exasperated Canadian major in Afghanistan put it to me last month), probably to redouble insurgency efforts, or, alternately, if their intelligence value is deemed to be sufficiently high, those prisoners will disappear into a black hole of injustice, somewhere inside Afghanistan's miserable jail system, never to be heard from again, subjected to who knows what tortures.
Canada quietly made that agreement with the Afghan government in a bilateral treaty signed last December, the thrust of which was to avoid handing over captured prisoners to the Americans because Canadians do not run their own military jails. Assuredly, some American soldiers, particularly military interrogators, disgraced themselves, and their country, by the indignities and even lethal treatment inflicted on captives in both Iraq and Afghanistan.
But so out of proportion to reality have these dismal incidents become - so exaggerated the scathing indictment of all U.S. troops, and America itself - that political optics now demand Canada abandon prisoners to the tender mercies of Afghan authorities instead, even though that country has no judicial institutions to speak of, no prisoner oversight system and a deeply ingrained culture of vengeance.
I'm not attacking Afghans, whom I admire. Their practices have always worked for them. They shouldn't work for us.
Canada, unlike the Dutch, did not even build into their prisoner transfer treaty assurances that humanitarian agencies such as the Red Cross monitor the treatment of these captives. And that makes us culpable in whatever harm befalls them.
None of which is the fault of Canadian soldiers.
But the concept of fault and conduct vaguely unseemly, however erroneous, will take further hold in this country - where much of the hand-wringing public is increasingly conflicted about the Afghan mission - if our own military command acts as if those hard-humping troops have got something to hide.
They don't.
