Friday, February 01, 2008

Wow, covering up allegations of torture by the Governor of Khandahar!

So, our wonderful government had credible evidence that the Governor of Kandahar has been personally involved in torture ("involved" as in "personally beat prisoners").

Even worse, "Despite sharing the allegations with the Afghan government and outside agencies, Ottawa kept them from a Canadian Federal Court judge hearing a case brought by Canadian rights groups".

So, the good - when we learned of the allegations we (apparently) quickly (though, secretly) told the Karzai government (yeah, I'm sure they had no idea what their hand-picked Governor was up to!) the Red Cross, and the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission.

The bad (and ludicrous) - Despite telling a foreign government (admittedly, the directly involved foreign government) the ICRC AND the AIHRC, documents mentioning the torture were HEAVILY redacted (the words "the governor" repeatedly purged from documents (and much more)) and the government cited "security concerns" for not sharing the evidence with a federal court judge? Security concerns??? We told not one, but TWO independent human rights organizations, but we had to withhold it from a Canadian federal judge for "security concerns"??? Our government considers a federal judge a higher security risk than the Red Cross and the Karzai government???

Ridiculous.

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