Journalists are a fraternity, as one of my friends remarked the other day at a funeral for a beloved one of our own. In the hurly-burly together, we are generally loath to publicly criticize one another.
That said, I confess to astonishment by reports which received big play in newspapers across the country last weekend, and which form part of the Afghan detainee narrative which in my view has been torqued from the get-go.
Not only were these particular reports wrong, they were so diametrically opposed to the facts that it is difficult to believe the writers read a word of the lengthy document upon which the stories were allegedly based.
This was, in the convoluted lingo of the Canadian Forces, the military Board of Inquiry into In-theatre Handling of Detainees.
Basically, it was about a June 14, 2006, incident involving a Canadian-detained prisoner who was allegedly abused by Afghan police.
The inquiry was ordered last December when Chief of Defence Staff Walt Natynczyk, a profoundly decent guy, was horrified to realize he'd never been told about the incident and actually held a news conference to correct testimony he'd given to a Parliamentary committee the day before.
That tale got plenty of play. The Globe and Mail headline - "Natynczyk in the dark on Afghan prisoner's history: In an explosive reversal, Canada's top soldier admits a prisoner taken into Canadian custody was abused by Afghan authorities after a report comes to light that contradicts his own testimony and [Defence Minister Peter]MacKay's repeated denials."
The story referred back to Richard Colvin, the diplomat who had alleged the month before that virtually all prisoners Canadians handed over were likely tortured and that most were also probably innocent farmers.
As it happens, before that same committee, Mr. Colvin's testimony has been politely but steadily chipped away by evidence from a cast that includes three former Canadian ambassadors to Afghanistan and other senior officials from the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade who were on the Afghanistan file, a representative from the Correctional Service of Canada (who was in Kandahar and made 47 visits to prisons, most of them unannounced) and an array of generals who were on the ground during the 2006-07 period.
Now a whistleblower, as Mr. Colvin has been painted, often stands alone. But the list of those whose evidence has sharply contradicted his is long, and includes distinguished diplomats who have worked for Liberal governments and would seem unlikely puppets of the one headed by Stephen Harper.
But back to the BOI report, released last Friday.
The stories which appeared in the Saturday Globe and Toronto Star were dead wrong. (The Globe corrected the record this week.)
The Globe used a Canadian Press story, which had been corrected later in the day but without an advisory alerting member papers to the mistake; the Star had its own reporter's name on a front-page piece.
Both claimed the BOI had found that in the spring of 2006, Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan knew local authorities routinely abused captives and doled out beatings "on a whim" (the Star story) and regularly beat enemy prisoners "in the street and elsewhere" and that most Canadian soldiers were well aware of the fact (the CP/Globe story).
The BOI report used those phrases alright, but to describe how Canadian troops saw Afghan security forces bash around their own civilians, not prisoners or captives.
Everyone who has been to Afghanistan has seen that. I saw it too, most notably during what's called a Village Medical Outreach in 2006. VMOs are feel-good events where army medics, dentists and doctors descend upon a village to treat the sick. The one I was at saw locals lining up for dusty blocks; Afghan troops kept them in line by whipping their legs with sticks, shoving them and shouting roughly.
It was appalling; it was also very Afghan. Canada doesn't tend to send her soldiers to first-world countries with first-rate democracies with first-class justice systems, but to places rife with casual violence and corruption. So it is in Afghanistan, so it was particularly that first year in Kandahar, and so it was in Sarajevo during the first summer of that war, when I saw a hotel manager smack a man in the face with the butt of machine gun in the lobby, because, you know, he could.
And that's what the soldiers of Task Force Orion, the lyrical name of the first battle group in Kandahar, who testified at the BOI saw, and what they said they saw. They quickly recognized Afghanistan as a brutal place. They suspected the cops they saw pushing around their own civilians were likely do the same to the prisoners they handed over, and so tried, as best they could, to make sure it didn't happen.
The BOI report lauds their efforts, marvelling at "how hard everyone strived, often to the very limits of human endurance, from the junior rifleman to the task force commander, to get it right" despite the exceptionally high operational tempo that meant the Canadians were then fighting the Taliban every freaking day.
The report concluded: "With respect to detainees, no matter what the circumstance, when Canadian and Afghan lives were literally on the line and notwithstanding some of the confusion around (the various orders for detainee handling), the soldiers of Task Force Orion always reverted to the bottom line - detainees were to be treated humanely…That Canadian soldiers consistently did so, in the face of grave personal danger, knowing that they may have been detaining individuals who had set roadside bombs or engaged in firefights where Canadians had been killed and wounded, attests to their professionalism and discipline."
As for the June 14, 2006, incident, the Afghan in question was indeed abused by the Afghan cops who transported him for a short distance. They were seen whacking him about with their shoes, a grievous insult but hardly torture. The Canadians retrieved him as soon as the police showed up, got him medical attention for his bloodied nose, and transferred him to a more trusted Afghan unit.
The incident was reported, but never made its way to General Natynczyk's (or Minister MacKay's) desk because it was confused with another, unrelated incident that had happened earlier the same day.
No conspiracy. No cover up. No shame - nothing, in fact, but praise for the moral manner in which Canadian troops conducted themselves. The day that makes it into a headline I will eat my hat, and yours.