Amnesty International wants all NATO forces in Afghanistan to stop transferring prisoners to the National Directorate for Security, that country's secret police service.
Amnesty alleges the NDS routinely tortures captives and handing over detainees to torturers violates international law. From the Globe & Mail:
The government of Stephen Harper has scoffed at detainee accounts of torture, dismissing them as enemy propaganda.
"We do expect these kinds of allegations from the Taliban," Tory House Leader Peter Van Loan said when the latest horrific accounts were published last month.
Isn't that the same logic once used in witch trials? If they complain about abuse they must be the evil enemy? Does that mean that, if the detainees were innocent, they'd take their torture like good men and keep their mouths shut?
Nevertheless, the United Nations, international organizations, and even Afghanistan's own tiny and underfunded rights group consistently find that detainees are tortured by the NDS.
Canadian diplomats in Kabul also found that torture was rife in NDS prisons, but Ottawa blacked out every instance of the word "torture" in the annual report on Afghanistan.
If our detainees are being tortured on handover to the Afghanis, and it certainly appears to be the case, allowing it to continue brings disgrace upon all of us. It's strange but I'm not surprised that the Harper regime would be indifferent to it. Then again, what does this say for the supposedly wonderful Karzai government our troops are dying in order to prop up?
I find it curious that we can act decently and be disgusted when Bush/Cheney pack Maher Arar off to Syria for a bout of rendition torture but show not the slightest concern when we hand over mere suspects to the Afghanis knowing they'll get the same thing, perhaps even worse.
If you needed another reason to get rid of Harper, there it is.
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