Colvin vs. Mulroney - Read News Back2Front

G&M B2F: Mr. Mulroney, who was Prime Minister Stephen Harper's foreign policy adviser in 2006, said he did not recall briefing Mr. Harper on detainee issues in that period. But he said that after he moved to the Foreign Affairs department in early 2007, he briefed then-Foreign Affairs minister Peter MacKay – who is now Defence Minister – but he did not describe those briefings. The clash, according to sources, came when Mr. Mulroney issued instructions for diplomats to register complaints with the Afghan government if evidence emerged that a transferred detainee was tortured. Mr. Colvin responded with a memo insisting that Canada had to monitor the detainees – and Mr. Mulroney copied a rebuke to a long list of recipients. He said that after long debate inside government, senior officials decided in April, 2007, on a “diplomatic contingency plan,” and Mr. Colvin responded by reopening the debate, muddying the waters when officials needed to know it was time to act. And he said he asked Mr. Colvin to express his opinions over the phone before he put them in writing. The view that I muzzled him or any other official is wrong,” he said. But he insisted that he never tried to shut down Mr. Covin's reporting. Mr. Mulroney dismissed as speculation Mr. Colvin's claim in testimony last week that all detainees transferred by Canadian troops were likely tortured, adding that after he became co-ordinator for Afghanistan, he demanded that diplomats distinguish in their reports between hard fact and speculation or opinion. “I can't say whether he was or wasn't,” Mr. Mulroney said. He dodged the question when asked whether he is certain that none were transferred before then. And when asked about a prisoner at Kabul's Sederat prison that Mr. Colvin reported in June, 2007, had been whipped with cables and shocked months before, Mr. Mulroney admitted he did not know if the detainee was transferred by Canadian troops. Mr. Mulroney insisted that before reports appeared in The Globe and Mail in April, 2007, Ottawa had no evidence that transferred detainees might have been tortured, but he conceded that Canadians did not monitor what happened to them until May, 2007. Mr. Mulroney said that by the end of 2006, Ottawa realized it had to arrange for Canadian officials to monitor detainees in Afghan jails – as the British and Dutch did – but needed to set up a system staffed by Canadian civilians. The government had arranged in 2005 for the Red Cross to monitor detainees, but the agency did not report to Canadian officials – and Mr. Colvin reported in 2006 that it did not get enough information to locate prisoners. Etc.