Hillier Pushed Flawed Detainee Plan

Another senior foreign-service officer gave a longer explanation: “Hillier went to Kabul thinking of them [the detainees] as ‘scumbags' and made the deal. Hillier wanted to sign it; he insisted on signing it,” he said. “Defence took the file and messed it up.” The comment played off a remark General Hillier, Chief of the Defence Staff, made in July, 2005, when he set off a national debate by referring to the Taliban as “detestable murderers and scumbags.” Some of the backlash from Foreign Affair officials is a response to a harsh condemnation of them by a defence official last week, who said they were too busy eating canapés to rally to embattled Defence Minster Gordon O'Connor under fire for the detainee-transfer agreement. “The bureaucrats at Foreign Affairs resisted getting stuck with this issue,” a defence source said. “They don't want this hornet's nest. They are happy going to their cocktail parties and eating little shrimps.” One angry diplomat said the Defence Department seemed to have forgotten Glyn Berry, the diplomat killed in a Taliban suicide attack soon after Canadian Forces moved into Kandahar. Now the interdepartmental spitting match has spread to include the matter of whether Gen. Hillier included, or should have included, Foreign Affairs in his original deal-making. The Foreign Affairs source said the department did have concerns about the Hillier deal, particularly with respect to the level of monitoring of detainees that Canada would be allowed. “Check the comparative assurances that the Dutch, for example, had compared to what we had. They had a higher level of oversight,” he said. The Dutch agreement, negotiated within weeks of the Canadian deal, allows for both Dutch diplomats and Dutch military officers to make unlimited follow-up visits of transferred prisoners to ensure they aren't tortured or abused or made to disappear; all of which occur in Afghan prisons. http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20070502.wdetainee02/BNStory/Afghanistan/home

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