Didn't see Afghan torture memos: Harper
Last Updated: Friday, October 16, 2009 | 7:48 PM ET
CBC News
Prime Minister Stephen Harper tells reporters in Toronto on Friday that he did not see reports suggesting detainees had been tortured in Afghanistan.
(Nathan Denette/Canadian Press)Prime Minister Stephen Harper said Friday that he did not see reports in 2006 that suggested there was evidence detainees had been tortured after they were handed over to Afghan prisons by Canadian Forces in Afghanistan.
Speaking in Toronto, where he was making a funding announcement, Harper said he didn't see the reports "at the time."
"There were allegations of Canadian troops involved in torture. We’ve been very clear that's not the case," the prime minister said.
Harper said a new Afghan prisoner transfer agreement was put in place 2½ years ago.
When the allegations of abuse surfaced in 2007, Harper described them as "baseless."
In an affidavit filed with the Military Police Complaints Commission that was made public on Wednesday, former senior diplomat Richard Colvin said that he wrote a memo in 2006 to senior military and Foreign Affairs officials describing what he thought were "serious, imminent and alarming" problems with the handling of detainees by Afghan security forces.
Colvin, who also worked in Kabul, said he wrote about 16 more memos about the issue over the next year and a half.
In one of the memos, Colvin, who is now an intelligence officer at the Canadian Embassy in Washington, outlined specific allegations of torture made by a detainee transferred to an Afghan prison by Canadian soldiers.
On Thursday, Defence Minister Peter MacKay, who was foreign affairs minister at the time the allegations were raised, also said he had not seen Colvin's reports.
Meanwhile, the federal government has removed one of the roadblocks to the testimony of Colvin at the Military Police Complaints Commission
Justice Department lawyers had blocked Colvin from appearing before the commission by trying to have him stricken from a list of subpoenaed witnesses who were due to testify at the agency's public hearings.
Government lawyers and senior cabinet ministers had insisted that Colvin had no information relevant to the commission's narrow mandate, which is to investigate what military police knew — or should have known — about possible torture by Afghan authorities.
But several lawyers involved in the case say that objection was withdrawn after Colvin filed an affidavit with the police commission earlier this week.
With files from The Canadian Press
