Detainee torture continues, reports show

Compelling evidence that Canadian-transferred detainees are still being tortured in Afghan prisons has emerged from the government's own follow-up inspection reports, documents it has long tried to keep secret.

In one harrowing account, an Afghan turned over by Canadian soldiers told of being beaten unconscious and tortured in the secret police prison in Kandahar. He showed Canadian diplomats fresh welts and then backed up his story by revealing where the electrical cable and the rubber hose that had been used on him were hidden.

"Under the chair we found a large piece of braided electrical cable as well as a rubber hose," reads the subsequent diplomatic cable marked "secret" and distributed to some of the most senior officials in the Canadian government and officers in the Canadian military.

The Toronto Globe and Mail has established that the report of the case is recent, written after a Nov. 5, 2007, inspection of the National Directorate of Security prison in Kandahar. That was six months after a supposedly improved transfer agreement was put in place to monitor detainee treatment. The agreement was designed to address problems raised by critics about the ill treatment of prisoners taken by Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan and handed over to Afghan authorities with insufficient follow-up.

The documents were made available Monday by the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association, which, along with Amnesty International Canada, is seeking a federal court injunction to stop further prisoner transfers. Both rights groups have filed a federal court action contending that international law and Canada's own Constitution bar the government from transferring prisoners to those likely to torture or abuse them.

"The denial of torture is no longer a plausible position" for the government to take, Jason Gratl, president of the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association, said Monday. (Previous allegations of abuse and torture by transferred detainees have been dismissed by senior ministers as Taliban propaganda.)

"It's impossible to turn a blind eye to the discovery of the instruments of torture in the very interrogation room where the interview was being conducted," Gratl said in a telephone interview from Vancouver.

In Ottawa, under cross-examination before the parties are to appear in court Thursday, Nicholas Gosselin, Canada's human-rights officer stationed in Kandahar, confirmed that he was the diplomat who picked up, examined and then carefully returned the cable and hose to beneath the chair in the secret police prison interrogation room.

It is impossible to know whether the latest documents -- delivered to the court, Amnesty International Canada and the British Columbia Civil Liberties Association only days before the parties are due in court -- actually include the full range of the government's knowledge about ill treatment and abuse of transferred detainees. Even if they do, most of it is blacked out, including dates and other key information.

The following excerpt is typical. In other instances, entire pages are blacked out.

Some of the allegations describe abuse and torture as occurring in Kandahar, others in Kabul. In some, the secret police accuse the regular police of the beatings. One transferred detainee, apparently confused, incoherent and seemingly suffering from mental problems, had no toenails. Others reported beatings and ill treatment. Many said they had never seen a lawyer. Some apparently had never been visited by international monitoring groups.

Canadian soldiers are being ordered by the government to turn over prisoners the government knows face torture, Gratl said. The government has tried to deflect criticism of its detainee-transfer program in the past by suggesting that while there is torture in some Afghan prisons, there was no proof that it applied to detainees handed over by Canadian soldiers. However, the new documents provide specific evidence of torture and abuse of specific detainees known to have been handed over by Canadians and subsequently interviewed by Canadians. No agreements or assurances or inspections "will remove the risk in the foreseeable future" that Canadian soldiers are turning over prisoners that the government knows will be tortured, Gratl said.

(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)