Guantanamo judge may suspend trial for Canadian detainee

 

A military judge threatened to suspend the war-crimes trial of a Canadian detainee, scolding the government Thursday for failing to provide records of his confinement at Guantanamo.

Attorneys for Omar Khadr say details of his interrogations and mental health could provide grounds to suppress self-incriminating statements at the U.S. Navy base in southeast Cuba. Khadr is accused of killing a U.S. soldier in Afghanistan.

At a pretrial hearing, Judge Peter Brownback, an Army colonel, criticized the prosecution team led by Marine Maj. Jeffrey Groharing for demanding an expedited trial despite failing to obtain the documents from the detention center.

“I have been badgered, beaten and bruised by Maj. Groharing since the 7th of November to set a trial date,” Brownback said. “To get a trial date, I need to get discovery done.”

His frustration highlights the dueling interests of two military entities at Guantanamo — the tribunal system, which airs the backgrounds of terror suspects in detail, and the Joint Task Force, which tightly restricts information about inmates whom officials describe as some of America’s most dangerous enemies.

Brownback said he understands the military’s worry that the documents might identify prison officials who fear retribution. But he ordered the government to provide the records of Khadr’s day-to-day confinement by May 22, in complete or edited form, or he will suspend proceedings.

The Toronto-born Khadr was captured in Afghanistan in 2002 at the age of 15 and was taken to Guantanamo four months later. In a sworn affidavit, he said he was threatened with rape and left short-shackled to a bolt in the floor for as long as six hours. He claims he was so scared that he told interrogators what they wanted to hear.

Khadr is accused of lobbing a grenade that killed Army Sgt. 1st Class Christopher Speer during a firefight at an al-Qaida compound in eastern Afghanistan. He faces a maximum sentence of life in prison if convicted on charges including murder, conspiracy and supporting terrorism.

His Pentagon-appointed attorney, Navy Lt. Cmdr. William Kuebler, said he believes Khadr’s treatment at Guantanamo was designed to prevent him from recanting a false confession that he made under coercion at Bagram air base in Afghanistan.

“He was essentially punished for not cooperating with interrogators while at Guantanamo Bay,” Kuebler said.

Failure to produce the documents could derail what was likely to be the first trial of a terror suspect at Guantanamo, where the U.S. holds about 270 men on suspicion of links to al-Qaida or the Taliban. Military prosecutors say they plan to prosecute as many as 80 of the suspects.

The judge could eventually dismiss the case if the military does not deliver the documents, said Air Force Maj. Gail Crawford, a spokeswoman for the Pentagon office overseeing the tribunals.

But Kuebler said that possibility unlikely. He has urged Canada to demand Khadr’s repatriation to spare him a trial he says is guaranteed to produce a conviction.

Omar Khadr: A most peculiar young offender

 He should be dealt with here in Canada, as a juvenile who was involved in terrorism

The civilized world condemns the recruitment of child soldiers. Yet Canada sits quietly by as one of its citizens, Omar Khadr, is prosecuted by the United States for war crimes he allegedly committed at age 15 as a member of al-Qaeda.

It is impossible to square. Al-Qaeda’s recruitment of child soldiers is immoral and abusive; consequently, it is immoral and abusive to prosecute as a war criminal a child recruited by al-Qaeda, and punish him accordingly. We can’t have it both ways.

Lately, it has dawned on Canadians that the United States may well have lied about its evidence against Mr. Khadr. Far from having proof that only he could have thrown the grenade that killed their soldier, the U.S. appears to have hidden the truth: that the teenage Canadian was in the company of an adult al-Qaeda fighter and was himself unarmed, on his knees and facing away from battle when a U.S. soldier shot him twice — in the back.

But the falsehoods are only part of the reasons why Canadians let the 15-year-old disappear six years ago into the legal black hole of Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in which he had no access to a lawyer for the first 27 months and no way to contest his detention. Canadians accepted that Mr. Khadr be held fully responsible for his actions. As if he were an adult.

The irony has never really penetrated Canadians’ consciousness. Canada, the country of the liberal Youth Criminal Justice Act, is the only Western nation to give the United States carte blanche with one of its nationals at Guantanamo. Britain, Australia, Sweden and Germany fought to repatriate their nationals — adults, all of them. And Canada let a juvenile languish.

The reply from our government is but a single, vapid refrain: “Let the process work.” But this is a process that, even apart from its other flaws, aims at punishing Omar Khadr for the accident of his birth in an al-Qaeda family.

A VICTIM OF HIS OWN HOME

When a young person raised in a terrorist family becomes a terrorist at 15, does he join voluntarily? Can he give free and informed consent? To say yes is to let al-Qaeda and Toronto’s Khadr family off the hook for grooming children for terrorism. It puts the onus on the children to resist.

Most Canadian children grow up in circles within circles of benign, positive influences — family, school, neighbourhood, the larger culture. Omar’s circles of influence were pro-terror. His late father, Ahmed Said Khadr, was a senior financier with al-Qaeda who prodded Abdurahman, Omar’s elder brother, to become a suicide bomber. Even his mother and sister boasted on national television of the glories of terrorism.

From age 11, Omar was inculcated in terror, according to the U.S. charge sheets. “From 1996 to 2001, the Khadr family travelled throughout Afghanistan and Pakistan, including yearly trips to Usama bin Laden’s compound in Jalalabad for the Eid celebration at the end of Ramadan. While travelling with his father, Omar Khadr saw or personally met senior al-Qaeda leaders, including Usama bin Laden, Doctor Ayman Al-Zawahiri, Muhammad Atef (aka Abu Hafs al Masri), and Saif al Adel. Khadr also visited various al Qaeda training camps and guest houses.”

Only an extraordinary 15-year-old could have withstood that grooming process. The Khadr son who did resist, Abdurahman, did not do so until he was in his 20s. A younger brother, Abdul Karim, was paralyzed in battle in Pakistan in 2004 at 14. (His father was killed in the same battle.) The oldest brother, Abdullah, faces extradition from Toronto to the United States on terrorism charges from Afghanistan.

Yet many Canadians insist he acted of his free will. “Real child soldiers are forcibly taken from their parents (who are often killed),” one Globe reader wrote in an unpublished letter to the editor. “These children are drugged, brainwashed, and abused so they become killers. Khadr became a soldier/terrorist because his family encouraged it. He was a willing participant. Where was the coercion?”

This is a narrow view of coercion. Could there be a worse form of coercion than that in a father’s wish that his son become a suicide bomber? “Blow yourself up or lose your father’s esteem.” Omar’s family culture promoted dying for the cause. That was what it meant to be a good boy in that family.

CHILD SOLDIERS ELSEWHERE

The world is rife with child soldiers. Peter Singer of the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., estimates that as many as 300,000 child soldiers are in combat around the world. Yet none of today’s international war-crimes tribunals prosecute child soldiers or terrorists.

No one under 18 has been charged before the tribunals for Rwanda or the former Yugoslavia. No one has been charged in East Timor, in Cambodia, in Bosnia and Herzegovina. “To date, there is no precedent in history for the prosecution of a child soldier before an international criminal tribunal, and similarly there is no precedent in the Western world for prosecution of a child soldier before any state tribunal,” says Sarah Paoletti, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania School of Law, in a friend-of-the-court brief to the military commission that is to try Mr. Khadr. (Among those whose names are on that brief are former Canadian justice ministers Irwin Cotler and Allan Rock.) The U.S. says there are in fact precedents, but its examples predate the Nuremberg Tribunals. For instance, a British Military Court in northwestern Germany convicted and jailed a 15-year-old Hitler Youth member for his role in killing a British serviceman.

More recently, at the Special Court for Sierra Leone in 2004, the U.S. prosecutor, David Crane, was given the option of putting on trial, in a court without punishment, those age 15 to 17 who committed war crimes. Memorably, Mr. Crane rejected that idea. “The children of Sierra Leone have suffered enough both as victims and perpetrators. I want to prosecute the people who forced thousands of children to commit unspeakable crimes.”

If international practice is clear, the law as written is less so.

The relevant text is the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the Involvement of Children in Armed Conflict. Both Canada and the U.S. are among the 150 signatories. “The Protocol prohibits the United States from using child soldiers, not from prosecuting them,” says the U.S. brief to the military commission.

It’s right. The protocol is silent on its face. Emboldened by that silence, the U.S. stretches the point: “If anything, the Protocol obligates the United States to prosecute Khadr” because not punishing Mr. Khadr would “further incentivize” al-Qaeda in recruiting young people.

If the U.S. is right, where is the outcry that all the world’s child soldiers are going unpunished at all the world’s tribunals except this one?

Omar Khadr was a war crime waiting to happen. Anyone in al-Qaeda or the Taliban is an unlawful enemy combatant under U.S. law. Anything such a combatant does to fight, even in battle, is a war crime.

“In a normal war,” explained John Bellinger, a legal adviser to the U.S. state department, “where both sides have a right to engage in combat with one another, if a soldier kills a soldier on the other side, it’s not murder unless it is done somehow contrary to the laws of war perfidiously, or killing someone when they have already surrendered.

“In this case, though, the members of al-Qaeda and the Taliban, while they may have thought they were defending themselves, they had no legal right under the laws of war to be engaging in combat.” There’s a legitimate expectation that young people know and abide by the criminal law of their countries; the minimum age of criminal responsibility is usually 12 (as it is in Canada). But how could a 15-year-old of Mr. Khadr’s experience and background have been aware of the laws of war, especially laws that hadn’t been invented yet?

And speaking of inventions: “According to the reports of the action we have available, the last surviving enemy in that compound … as his last act at the firefight rose up with a pistol and hand grenade, and engaged the coalition forces, threw the grenade,” Col. Roger King, a U.S. spokesman based in Afghanistan, told the Associated Press in September, 2002. We now know that the U.S. had an eyewitness report that painted a very different picture.

A CASE FOR CANADIAN PROCESSES

And what has Canada done to help Mr. Khadr? It sent intelligence officers to interrogate him without counsel, and passed summaries of the interrogations to the Americans. Some help. (The Supreme Court of Canada is hearing Mr. Khadr’s request next week for access to Canada’s files from those visits.)

“The recruitment and use of child soldiers is one of the most flagrant violations of international norms,” says Mr. Singer. Why? Because children are not to be made a mere instrument of the state or terror group. Because children are manipulable. Because children cannot assess risk as adults can. To prosecute children as if they were fully responsible for war crimes is to legitimize their recruitment.

As other Western countries have repatriated adult suspected terrorists — several, in Britain’s case — it seems strange that Canada would not bring a lone 21-year-old home to face fair processes that would take into account his age and background, and his long incarceration at Guantanamo. Omar Khadr, child soldier, has been dehumanized enough. Bring him home.

U.S. says no one too young for Guantanamo court

GUANTANAMO BAY U.S. NAVAL BASE, Cuba – A Canadian accused of killing a U.S. soldier in Afghanistan should not be tried as a war criminal because he was a child soldier for al Qaeda, too young to voluntarily join its forces, his military defense lawyer told a U.S. war court on Monday.

Navy Lt. William Kuebler asked a military judge to throw out the charges against Canadian defendant Omar Khadr, who was shot and captured at age 15 in a firefight at a suspected al Qaeda compound in Afghanistan in 2002.

“He is a victim of al Qaeda, not a member of al Qaeda,” Kuebler said.

Khadr is the Toronto-born son of an alleged al Qaeda financier. He is accused of throwing a grenade that killed U.S. Army Sgt. 1st Class Christopher Speer in the firefight and planting roadside bombs intended to kill other U.S. or coalition soldiers in Afghanistan.

Khadr is charged in the Guantanamo war court with murder, attempted murder, conspiring with al Qaeda, providing material support for terrorism and spying by conducting surveillance of U.S. military convoys in Afghanistan. He faces life in prison if convicted.

Kuebler argued that U.S. and international law assume that children involved in an armed conflict are not there voluntarily, because they lack the experience and judgment to understand the risk of joining armed forces. Defense attorneys contend that any charges against Khadr should be pursued in a civilian court in a juvenile system where the goal is rehabilitation rather than punishment.

If the U.S. Congress intended to try children as war criminals, it would have explicitly authorized that in the 2006 law that serves as a framework for the Guantanamo court, Kuebler said.

But a U.S. Department of Justice attorney, arguing for the prosecution, said that if Congress intended to exclude juveniles from the Guantanamo war court, it would have explicitly written that, because lawmakers knew Khadr could face charges. Instead, Congress wrote the law using the term “person,” which legally refers to “anyone born alive,” Justice Department attorney Andy Oldham said.

LAST WESTERNER

Khadr is the last citizen of a Western nation among the 275 captives being held at Guantanamo as part of the Bush administration’s war on terrorism.

Charges are now pending against five of the Guantanamo prisoners. The Pentagon plans to try about 80 of them. But six years after the detention camp opened, only one captive has been convicted in Guantanamo’s widely criticized tribunal system and that was through a plea deal.

Khadr sat quietly during the hearing, clad in a white tunic and trouser uniform signifying that he complies with camp rules. In his more than five years at Guantanamo, the once pimply faced boy has grown into a 21-year-old man with a short, bushy beard.

The judge, Army Col. Peter Brownback, did not indicate when he would rule on the request to drop the charges. The case is scheduled for trial in May, though Kuebler said it probably would be delayed.

The court released documents describing the battle in which Khadr was captured. U.S. forces entered the suspected al Qaeda compound after an aerial bombing and were fired upon with a rifle and with the grenade that killed Speer, it said.

An unidentified witness, who is apparently a member of the U.S. armed forces, said he found two wounded people still alive inside — a man lying near an AK-47 assault rifle, whom he shot in the head and killed, and Khadr, who was seated on the ground facing away.

The witness said he shot Khadr twice in the back and that Khadr replied repeatedly in English, “Kill me.”

Khadr was instead given medical treatment and sent to Guantanamo.

Kandahar governor denies torture claim

Khalid says he’s never interrogated or abused a prisoner in custody; Hillier says governor is doing “phenomenal work”

 OTTAWA and WASHINGTON — The governor of Kandahar says he’s never interrogated, much less abused, a prisoner in his government’s custody.

Asadullah Khalid told The Canadian Press that the treatment of Afghan prisoners should be a military issue, not a political one.

Mr. Khalid’s response to allegations he was involved in the torture and abuse of prisoners comes a day after Canada’s top soldier, General Rick Hillier, praised him for doing “phenomenal work.”

Mr. Khalid said he doesn’t go around to prisons and interrogate people because it isn’t his job. And he said his accuser likely never met him but was just looking for a way out of jail.

Mr. Khalid said the government of Afghanistan is stronger now and in control of the conditions in prison.

Canada’s top soldier says the governor of Kandahar province is doing “phenomenal work,” and that allegations of torture against him are up to Afghans to investigate.

While the opposition has asked why Canadians weren’t informed about the allegations 10 months ago, Defence Minister Peter MacKay said the prisoner who made the charges against Mr. Khalid was not handed over by Canadians and that it’s an issue for Kabul to deal with.

Mr. MacKay and Gen. Hillier made their remarks as opposition members demanded that the Harper government put pressure on Afghan President Hamid Karzai to investigate the allegations. They also wanted to know what the Department of Foreign Affairs did with the information and why it has taken this long for it to emerge.

Gen. Hillier confirmed he was aware of allegations against the governor, but said it is up to the Afghan government to deal with them. He also praised Mr. Khalid for the work he has done in Kandahar.

“Governor Asadullah has been doing some phenomenal work in Kandahar province. Obviously, we have worked with him because he is the governor there. And we have seen some incredible changes in the province, and if there’s an issue of any kind of impropriety whatsoever, that’s an issue for the Afghanistan government.”

According to a censored report published in The Globe and Mail yesterday, a prisoner held in Kandahar told two Canadian officials last April of interrogations as well as a beating and electric shocks he received from an individual whose identification was blacked out. Sources have told The Globe that “the governor” were the censored words, in reference to Mr. Khalid.

Outside the House of Commons, Liberal foreign affairs critic Bob Rae said Canada should use its influence with Mr. Karzai to have the matter investigated. He was also angry that the federal government did not disclose the incident when it first occurred.

“We’re not there to cover things up, we’re not there to cover up for some guy who’s corrupt. We’re not there to cover up for some guy who’s allowing beatings to go on in a private jail,” Mr. Rae said.

In the House, Liberal House Leader Ralph Goodale called the incident a cover-up.

“Has the government even bothered to investigate the allegations against Mr. Khalid as specifically required under Canada’s detainee-transfer agreement?”

Mr. MacKay said that the prisoner who made the complaint had not been transferred by Canadian Forces into Afghan detention.

“The allegation with respect to the governor is not a Canadian-transferred prisoner,” Mr. MacKay said.

“Second, with respect to the governor of Kandahar, let us not forget that this is an individual appointed by the sovereign elected government of Afghanistan.”

He noted that when Canada did hear of a credible complaint from a Canadian-transferred prisoner, an investigation was launched. The government also stopped transferring detainees in early November after that incident.

In Kandahar, Mr. Khalid’s staff said yesterday that the governor would respond to the allegations that a secret prison was located inside his compound and that he had personally engaged in torture and abuse of detainees. However, the governor didn’t return calls yesterday.

The International Committee of the Red Cross was told last spring by Canadian diplomats of the allegations against Mr. Khalid, Graziella Piccolo, an ICRC spokeswoman in Kabul, confirmed.

But the ICRC won’t tell Canada whether it investigated the allegations nor the outcome of any investigation.

“Should an authority, such as the Canadian government, decide to share information with the ICRC about detainees held by another authority, such as the Afghan government, the ICRC would address these concerns only with the detaining authorities.”

Former foreign affairs minister John Manley, who headed a recent panel looking into the Canadian mission in Afghanistan, could not be reached for comment over the allegations against Mr. Khalid.

Meanwhile, Gen. Hillier said yesterday that Canadian soldiers won’t be able to avoid combat if they remain in Kandahar and that switching places with a NATO country in a quieter region of Afghanistan is not an option, The Canadian Press reported.

While the Liberals have suggested remaining in Afghanistan only for training rather than combat, Gen. Hillier said the need for troops is in the south and that means combat.

“Certainly, if you’re in Kandahar, you’re going to be in combat operations,” he said.

Gen. Hillier said that the report of the panel led by Mr. Manley that more troops are needed in the south only echoes the frustration of NATO military commanders from many countries.

Finally, Gen. Hillier told reporters that he was not angry last week when he heard that Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s communications director, Sandra Buckler, had said the military did not inform the government that transfers of prisoners had been suspended, a statement she retracted the next day.

“I was on the beach in the Dominican Republic. I had a little break, and I heard about that, and, can I say this without everybody beating up on me across Canada? I was on my third rum and Coke, and I really didn’t give a damn.”

Gen. Hillier said the military did inform the government right away when the transfers were suspended in November.

Government can’t be trusted on Afghanistan

OTTAWA — Human-rights lawyers pushing for a stop to prisoner transfers argued in court Thursday that Canada’s government cannot be trusted to tell the truth about what goes on in Afghanistan.

Lawyer Paul Champ told a Federal Court hearing that the government would clearly have covered up prisoner abuses by Afghan authorities had it not been for the ongoing legal battle.

In a secret policy shift almost three months ago, Canadian soldiers stopped transferring detainees to Afghan authorities after they were convinced some had been beaten in violation of the Geneva conventions.

“The government shouldn’t be making those decisions,” Mr. Champ said during a break in proceedings.

“It should be the court because (the government has) shown in the past they’re wrong and the consequence of their errors has been that torture had been committed.”

The move came after the government spent nearly a year dismissing abuse allegations and ridiculing opponents who raised them.

The policy shift only came to light after Mr. Champ fought in court for access to government documents, which he finally received along with a letter from a federal lawyer announcing the change.

Mr. Champ fears that many of the captives taken by Canadian troops are not even Taliban combatants but civilians sympathetic to the insurgency. Previously secret documents suggest some have disappeared in custody and he fears they could have been killed.

He wants transfers suspended indefinitely and is seeking a Federal Court injunction to that effect.

“Transfers could resume next week — or tomorrow — and no one would know,” said Mr. Champ, a lawyer for Amnesty International and the B.C. Civil Liberties Association.

“This is not a moot issue.”

He is pushing to have the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms apply to interactions between Canadian soldiers and their prisoners — even in foreign countries.

Mr. Champ said other countries have adopted similar models and that Canada should follow suit.

A federal lawyer argued that Mr. Champ’s quest for an injunction is now moot because the transfers have stopped. But he was cut off by the judge when he suggested the controversy was over.

“Up until noon on Tuesday we thought there was a live controversy,” said Federal Court Justice Anne Mactavish.

She added that the prisoner policy could change at a moment’s notice and nobody would ever know.

But the federal lawyer said Afghan detainees are and will remain safe from torture.

“The facts that are before this court offer no indication that anyone’s rights are being threatened,” said federal attorney J. Sanderson Graham.

“What will happen in two weeks, or two months, is mere speculation.”

An army general told the court that Canadian troops stopped transferring enemy prisoners to Afghan authorities the day after a Nov. 5 prison visit found evidence of torture.

Brigadier-General André Deschamps, chief of staff to Canada’s Expeditionary Forces Command and the first witness to testify at the injunction hearing, said the decision was made by Col. Christian Juneau.

Col. Juneau was acting commander of Canada’s military effort in Afghanistan when Canadian officials heard stories of abuse from prisoners at a Kandahar prison.

The decision came after the Conservative government ridiculed its opponents for raising torture allegations and Prime Minister Stephen Harper accused them of being pro-Taliban.

Brig.-Gen. Deschamps said no prisoners have been transferred since that prison visit.

But human-rights lawyers were continually thwarted in their efforts to learn more as the defence sprang up and claimed National Defence Act protections following a number of Champ’s questions.

Mr. Graham rose and repeated, “I object,” when Mr. Champ asked why the government never told Canadians about the policy change, where the detainees are now, and how many there are.

Brig.-Gen. Deschamps did say the prisoner facility at Kandahar airfield has not been expanded since the decision.

During their Nov. 5 visit, Canadian officials saw what they described as credible evidence of torture.

They had documented a number of other allegations — at one point seeing scars on a man who said he received electric shocks — but they only shifted their policy after that visit.

On that day, a prisoner told the Canadians he’d been beaten unconscious, whipped with electrical cables, and belted with a rubber hose. He showed them his bruises and told them exactly where they could find the torture instruments.

He then led them to his prison cell, where they found the hose and cables under a chair.

The human-rights lawyers expressed doubt that the decision to halt transfers was made by a colonel in Kandahar.

They said it must have been made in Ottawa, and that the Prime Minister’s Office would likely have been aware of such a major policy shift.

The government kept its decision under wraps, even as it prepared to fight rights groups seeking a halt to transfers in court Thursday.

“Canadian authorities were informed on November 5, 2007, by Canada’s monitoring team, of a credible allegation of mistreatment pertaining to one Canadian-transferred detainee held in an Afghan detention facility,” the lawyers said in a letter to Amnesty International Canada and the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association.

“As a consequence there have been no transfers of detainees to Afghan authorities since that date,” the letter confirmed.

“It’s staggering,” Jason Gratl, president of the BCCLA said of the government’s belated admission. “In matters as important as complicity in torture and its conduct of war, the government owes Canadians some explanations in an open and frank manner.”

The government, which is trying to drum up support for extending the Afghan mission, only revealed it had ceased transfers as it tried to make a deal with Amnesty and the BCCLA to drop their application for an injunction.

But Ottawa refused a counteroffer in which it would have agreed to give seven days notice before resuming transfers.

It’s not clear whether troops are still taking prisoners only to release them, holding them in temporary cells run by Canadian Military Police on Kandahar Air Base or once again turning prisoners over to U.S. forces, which operate a prison at Bagram in Afghanistan.

“Concerning the matter of detainees, the number of detainees, if they are being transferred or not, these are all operational matters and are the responsibility of the Canadian Forces. The Government will not provide any comment on operational matters,” said Sandra Buckler, spokeswoman for Mr. Harper.

The letter to Amnesty and the BCCLA continued: “Canada will resume transferring detainees when it believes it can do so in accordance with its international legal obligations.”

Among those obligations is a Geneva Conventions prohibition against handing prisoners over to those who would abuse or torture them.

Given the widely documented and widespread abuse and ill-treatment that is rife in Afghan prisons, Mr. Gratl said he “could not foresee detainee transfers resuming in the foreseeable future.

“The government’s decision amounts to a concession that the May, 2007, monitoring agreement has failed to prevent torture by Afghan authorities,” he said.

That agreement, which allows for follow-up inspections, was negotiated only after former defence minister Gordon O’Connor’s assurances that the International Committee of the Red Cross would report abuse of transferred prisoners back to the Harper government were shown to be wrong.

More than a month after it stopped handing prisoners over to Afghanistan’s National Directorate of Security, the Harper government sent a senior general to give a sworn affidavit in the case brought by Amnesty and BCCLA.

The rights groups wanted transfers banned, claiming the government is bound by both international law and the Canadian Constitution from delivering detainees to those likely to torture or abuse them.

Building a NATO detention facility, perhaps on the Kandahar base, which currently houses more than 10,000 troops, has been repeatedly suggested by international human-rights groups. Canada and most NATO nations are opposed.

Detainee timeline

2001

Dec. 19: Then-defence-minister Art Eggleton reveals that Canadian forces, specifically commandos from Joint Task Force 2, have joined the war, sparking concerns about whether troops would turn captured Afghans over to U.S. authorities.

2002

Jan. 21: Canadian commandos turn three captured al-Qaeda fighters over to the U.S. military.

Jan. 28: Then-prime-minister Jean Chrétien says the government is reviewing its policy on prisoners and that opposition concerns are “hypothetical” because none have been taken.

Jan. 29: Mr. Eggleton admits he learned eight days earlier that Canadian commandos had turned over prisoners without any assurances about whether they would be treated as prisoners of war.

Feb. 6: U.S. President George W. Bush says that Taliban prisoners would be considered POWs under the Geneva Conventions, but al-Qaeda prisoners would not.

Feb. 7: Both Mr. Chrétien and Mr. Eggleton say they are satisfied with this guarantee.

2005

Dec. 18: General Rick Hillier, Chief of the Defence Staff, signs an agreement with Afghanistan’s Defence Minister stipulating that detainees handed from Canadian to Afghan custody will be treated in accordance with the third Geneva convention, which forbids torture and other inhumane treatment.

2006

May 31: Defence Minister Dennis O’Connor says the International Committee of the Red Cross is monitoring detainees, and will report prisoner abuse to Canada.

2007

February: Investigations are launched into the treatment of Afghan detainees after The Globe and Mail publishes allegations of abuse.

Feb. 21: Amnesty International and the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association file an application in Federal Court seeking a judicial review of the military’s detainee-handover policy, questioning whether Canadian soldiers abroad are legally bound by the Geneva Conventions.

March 21: Mr. O’Connor apologizes for providing inaccurate information. “I would like to be clear: The International Committee of the Red Cross is under no obligation to share information with Canada on the treatment of detainees transferred by Canada to Afghan authorities,” he tells the House of Commons. “The International Committee of the Red Cross provides this information to the country that has the detainees in its custody, in this case, Afghanistan.”

April 23: During 30 face-to-face interviews with The Globe and Mail, Afghans detained by Canadian soldiers and sent to Kandahar’s notorious jails say they were beaten, whipped, starved, frozen, choked and subjected to electric shocks during interrogation.

April 24: Stephen Harper brushes off calls for his Defence Minister’s head and dismisses the furor over the torture of Afghans captured by Canadian soldiers as “allegations of the Taliban. … We do not have evidence that [the torture] is true.”

April 26: The Harper government buckles and announces a new deal providing Canadian officials with full access to Afghan jails.

July 9: It is learned that Gen. Hillier’s office has halted the release of documents relating to detainees captured in Afghanistan under the federal Access to Information Act, claiming that disclosure of any such information could endanger Canadian troops.

Sept. 22: Canada is unable to account for at least 50 prisoners it captured and turned over to Afghan authorities, frustrating efforts to put to rest concerns the detainees were subject to torture. Canadian sources blame the Afghans’ shoddy record-keeping and suggest the detainees have likely returned safely to their homes. But officials familiar with Kandahar’s justice system say the possibility of foul play cannot be dismissed.

Nov. 13: Turning Afghan detainees over to known torturers breaks international law, and Canada, along with other NATO countries should impose an immediate halt to transfers, Amnesty International says.

Nov. 15: Canadian officials confirm they have evidence a Taliban detainee showed signs of physical abuse, the seventh such allegation made by detainees since Canada began systematically visiting Afghan prisoners in May.

2008

Jan. 22: Compelling evidence that Canadian-transferred detainees are still being tortured in Afghan prisons emerges from the government’s own follow-up inspection reports.