CHTV - snippet on Afghanistan

I found myself near a television last night, and my local station (CHTV) was showing its in-house news feature "Talk-Back Live." (I think that's what it's called.)

At one point in the show they had a professor from the University of Ottawa (whose name escapes me) and Colonel (retired) Chris Corrigan (executive director of the Royal Canadian Military Institute) who I'm familiar with because he'd written two pieces in the Hamilton Spectator defending Canada's presence in Afghanistan. I've actually been meaning to post a critique of his articles here but I have to get permission to reproduce them and I can't be bothered, so ... , the thing about Corrigan's articles was that whatever their other merits, they at least tried to address the specific issues raised by the peace movement, rather than following the usual pattern of talking past the peace movement about how wonderful we are, building schools and handing out candy.

The topic on the show was whether Canada was violating international law by handing over prisoners to the Afghan police and US military, both of whom are widely accused of practising torture. To their credit, the hosts of the show allowed both speakers a fairly equal amount of time to get their points across. To her discredit, the female co-host tried to look tough by saying stuff like "Is it really realistic in a 'WAR-ZONE' to bother about whether your prisoners are going to be tortured, perhaps to death, by some psychopathic sadistic goons?" My answer to that bit of inanity has always been that it's probably best not to put Canadian soldiers or citizens in such messy situations, engaged in questionable wars with questionable allies. I suppose if she, or someone she loved, was captured during a war, the issue of human rights even in a time of war, might then become important to her.

The U of O professor mentioned that Afghanistan's own government had found evidence of torture and that Canadian soldiers were complicit with this, knowingly handing-over prisoners to such people. Under International Law, we're responsible for what happens to our prisoners.

Sadly, Corrigan (as I saw it), took the opportunity to respond and went into an over-long description about how these were merely "allegations," simple "he said-she said" stuff, and that furthermore, there were layers and layers of oversight within the Canadian military that had been implemented after the Somalian travesty.

The U of O guy managed to get in that these weren't allegations, the Afghan government study had been confirmed by the UN. There was then some further back and forth about an arm's length official civilian investigation of complaints against the military, with the U of O professor saying that it was being overshadowed by two opaque, illegitimate, internal military investigations, and that was that.

So, inspired by this, here is my post for the day.

I was going to post links to the studies mentioned, ... but it turns out they're not so easily found.

At least I posted to my blog.