On transference

Not surprisingly, the news that the Cons stopped Afghan detainee transfers in the spring of 2007 was thoroughly buried under yesterday's Obamathon. But there's plenty in the story which deserves to be unpacked over the next few weeks.

After all, there's a direct conflict between the Cons' official position and the testimony of the responsible military police. And if it weren't enough that the Cons are accusing the troops on the ground of making up stories, they're also preventing any public access to the documents which would provide evidence as to who's right:

In the witness interviews, Canadian military police who were stationed in Kandahar at the time and were guarding the detainees estimated that the halt occurred in late April during the political furor in Ottawa that took place after The Globe and Mail published detailed accounts of torture and abuse in Afghan prisons.

Day after day in the House of Commons, Mr. Harper and his ministers faced a barrage of demands that detainee transfers be stopped until better safeguards could be put in place.

“Allegations to the effect that we are not living up to our responsibilities are only being made by the Taliban,” Mr. Harper said on April 24, 2007, in an exchange with NDP Leader Jack Layton, who had demanded that “the Prime Minister put an end to this farce; stop the transfers.”

The government denies that the halt was linked to allegations of torture and insists that the military police were wrong in recalling that it came before a new agreement governing detainee transfers was put in place on May 3. In written answers, cleared by senior Canadian Forces officers and the Prime Minister's Office, to questions from The Globe and Mail, the Harper government insists on a different version of events. It says the halt came after the signing of the tougher transfer agreement.

The dates are crucial. “We were ordered not to actually do any transfers because we were waiting for the new agreement,” said Major Bernie Hudson, who commanded the Canadian military police contingent in Kandahar in the spring of 2007. He recalled at least one detainee who “was caught in sort of a loop and we ended up keeping him about xxx.” The length of time is blacked out...

The government declines to give dates for the halt and resumption of transfers, just as it declines to provide any numbers for captured, released or transferred detainees.

Now, it's worth noting that the Cons had to be dragged kicking and screaming into admitting that any halt in transfers ever took place later on. And the one in question was never known after the fact. So there's little if any reason to put any stock into the official position on the latest revelations.

But even by the Cons' low standards, the change in government spin since the first revelation of a transfer halt bears pointing out. At that time, the Cons' excuse for not making matters public was that the issue was dealt with at the military level - supposedly making it one which the Harper government wouldn't even have known at the time, and at the very least making it inappropriate to comment from a political perspective.

Given that the Cons originally tried to wriggle out of responsibility by placing all decisions and knowledge about detainee transfers at the feet of the military police involved, it takes a truly stunning amount of gall for them to now claim to know better than those same military police just what happened and when. And the fact that the Cons are taking that position should signal that however much change may have come to the U.S., we're in for more of the same from Harper and company.