Excessive secrecy

CTV reports that the Con government's obsession with secrecy has reached the point where it won't even let the public know when it makes a rare reasonable decision:

The Canadian government halted the transfer of Afghan detainees last November after a "credible allegation" that a prisoner had been tortured by local authorities, but didn't reveal the decision until this week.

Officials acted after a prisoner told Canadian diplomats he had allegedly been beaten with electrical cables and a rubber hose by Afghan secret police in Kandahar...

On Tuesday, the Department of Justice sent a letter to the (B.C. Civil Liberties Association's) lawyers, saying that soldiers had temporarily halted the transfers.

"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," wrote senior counsel J. Sanderson Graham. "As a consequence there have been no transfers of detainees to Afghan authorities since that date. The allegation is under investigation by the Afghan authorities. Canada will resume transferring detainees when it believes it can do so in accordance with its international legal obligations.

Amnesty International said Wednesday that the government had kept the decision to halt transfers a "secret," and revealed the move only because of legal action by the groups.

Of course, the change in policy does call into question the previous transfers of detainees - not to mention the ones which the Con government apparently plans to carry out in the future if the single allegation they're now bothering to investigate doesn't lead to any definitive conclusions.

But it still seems remarkable that the Cons preferred to be seen as utterly refusing to do anything about detainee transfers if it meant giving less press to the issue, rather than pointing out a response which may well have eased some doubts about their handling of the problem. And that policy of simply pretending that any area which might carry negative political ramifications doesn't exist - rather than defending even reasonable choices on the merits - may be far more dangerous than any single decision the Cons could otherwise have to justify.