One of the government’s main lines of attack on Opposition MPs is to question their loyalty to the Canadian Forces and the people serving in Afghanistan (that link takes you to one of many examples – it’s become a standard response in Question Period). But at the Military Police Complaints Commission Tuesday, one of their civil servants seemed to voice some doubts about the credibility of Canadian soldiers.
It happened during questioning by a lawyer for rogue diplomat Richard Colvin.
Owen Rees went almost line-by-line through a memo released to the media Monday. The memo called on Foreign Affairs to rein in Colvin or reassign him, for several reasons laid out in the document.
In questioning Gabrielle Duschner, a former foreign affairs rep at CEFCOM known as the J9, Rees was trying to build a case that Colvin was giving his best advice as head of the diplomatic mission – and that the bureaucracy’s response was to ignore it.
Rees zeroed in on one Colvin report the brass at CEFCOM found to be problematic. Colvin had recommended the Canadian Forces take in fewer detainees.
“This recommendation is based on regular and lengthy discussions on detainee issues over the past year in both Kabul and Kandahar,” with the Government of Afghanistan, their National Directorate of Security, the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission and the Canadian military, Colvin wrote in the report.
But Duschner didn’t give much credence to the advice.
“These are highly reliable sources?” Rees asked.
“Unless you identify the individual…I don’t know who ‘Canadian Forces’ could be necessarily,” Gabrielle Duschner said. “It doesn’t identify who those individuals are.”
Rees started to press again, and Duschner continued, “Who the Canadian Forces individuals he spoke with, I don’t know,” she added.
Duschner also said she couldn’t be certain the AIHRC and the Afghan government sources were credible.
Duschner was the direct supervisor to Mike Carter, who wrote the memo to her recommending Colvin be removed from his post. Duschner said she agreed with the assessments in the memo but not with that recommendation. She’s now director of cabinet affairs for the Department of Public Safety.
