punditman says...
For those who have followed the Afghan conflict with an honest eye, there is not a lot that is surprising in the WikiLeaks documents. The war is going badly. We knew that. Elements of Pakistan's intelligence service support the Taliban. We knew that. NATO routinely kills civilians. Ditto. However, to quote Noam Chomsky, "details happen to be important." In this case, journalist Thomas Walkom demonstrates just how important they are when it comes to Canada's role. In particular, the relationship between the American CIA and the Afghan National Directorate of Security is crucial and it explains why Harper's government wants to keep its files on the detainee issue away from public scrutinty. In flaunting both Canadian and international law, will they ever be held to account?
Thomas Walkom
For Canadians trying to puzzle out the so-called Afghan detainees scandal, one item stands out from the mass of raw intelligence leaked this week.
It’s the second-last line in a report of a March 8, 2008, meeting with Amrullah Saleh, at the time head of Afghanistan’s National Directorate of Security. And it casually notes that until 2009, the entire budget of this secret police force was provided by America’s Central Intelligence Agency.
As the New York Times, one of the handful of newspapers first given the documents by the non-profit group WikiLeaks put it: “For years, the CIA had essentially run the NDS as a subsidiary.”
Why this matters in the Canadian context is that it destroys the rationale for the elaborate Afghan prisoner transfer system, first established in late 2005 during the dying days of the then Liberal government and now fiercely defended by Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s Conservatives.
