Not my job (redux)
Posted: May 12, 2010 Filed under: Afghan Detainee Hearings, Parliament, Torture, Uncategorized | Tags: afghanistan, canada, carmen cheung, detainee hearings, dfait, documents, ed jager, mpcc, parliament, Torture 1 Comment »The BCCLA National Security blog is posting from sunny Ottawa today, where we finished up the last of the MPCC witnesses until hearings resume again in mid-June. Carmen Cheung, Counsel at the BCCLA, has been attending the past week of hearings, starting with the international law panel last Thursday.
Today, we heard from Mr. Ed Jager, a DFAIT officer who served as the Political Advisor (or PolAd) to BGen Guy Laroche, Commander of the Joint Task Force in Afghanistan. BGen Laroche testified yesterday, but didn’t finish giving his evidence; he’ll be called back at some later date, yet to be determined.
As you’ll recall from yesterday’s post , BGen Laroche testified that relied on his advisors — and in particular, his PolAd, Mr. Jager — to provide assessments as to whether detainees should be transferred to Afghan authorities. BGen Laroche also indicated that he believed that DFAIT was responsible for investigating whether allegations of torture made by CF-transferred detainees were substantiated.
Ed Jager, far right. Image: peru.gc.ca
For his part, Mr. Jager today denied that he provided BGen Laroche with any detainee assessments, and in fact, his role as Political Advisor — with respect to the detainee issue, at least — seemed to consist entirely of passing along copies of site visit reports and other primary source materials to BGen Laroche. When asked on cross examination whether he ever provided any assessments, commentary, or actual advice when passing along these materials, Mr. Jager responded — in effect — that it wasn’t his job to do so. (“Not my job” seems to be a pretty constant theme at these hearings.) Pretty interesting evidence, given BGen Laroche’s repeated assertions yesterday that he relied on assessments from Mr. Jager — assessments that Mr. Jager insists that he never provided.
Similarly, he could not provide any support for BGen Laroche’s assertion that DFAIT had responsibility for investigating whether allegations of torture are substantiated. And also of note was Mr. Jager’s testimony that he never felt it necessary to review DFAIT reports of purported torture in Afghan prisons — reports written mere weeks before his arrival in Afghanistan. Apparently, briefing himself on detainee issues — which he agreed were important and sensitive — wasn’t something he felt necessary to do, as part of his job as the individual responsible for providing political advice to the Commander of the entire Afghan mission.
Needless to say, it’ll be interesting to see what BGen Laroche will say about all this when he returns to finish his testimony.
Further on the document disclosures front, at the MPCC and elsewhere: Mr. Jager was shown today the index of a set of documents entitled “site visits”. According to this index, there were no site visit reports for December 2007, January 2008, or much of February 2008.
This is, of course, a crucial time period, given that transfers were suspended from November 2007 through the end of February 2008, so the details of these site visits would be critical in understanding whether transfers should’ve been resumed at all. Furthermore, according to BGen Laroche, one of the reasons he felt that transfers could be resumed was that more frequent site visits were implemented during the suspension of transfer — at the rate of one visit every 48 hours, in fact. So far, the Commission has been provided with no documentary evidence that any visits took place from the beginning of December 2007 through late February 2008. And meanwhile, Mr. Jager testified today that he could not recall whether any site visits took place during these missing months.
Over in Parliament, the deadline that Commons Speaker Peter Milliken has given for MPs and the government to come to some sort of resolution over disclosure of detainee documents has come and gone. MPs have sought and obtained an extension from the Speaker to extend time for negotiations until 1.30p on Friday, so more on this issue later this week.
Brigadier-General Laroche: “We had evidence that detainees were abused and tortured”
Posted: May 11, 2010 Filed under: Afghan Detainee Hearings, Torture | Tags: afghanistan, canada, detainee hearings, detainees, dfait, ed jager, grace pastine, laroche, mpcc, Torture 3 Comments »Today, the Military Police Complaints Commission heard testimony from Brigadier-General Guy Laroche, Commander of the Task Force in Afghanistan from November 2007 to May 2008. As we mentioned yesterday, BGen Laroche was Commander in Afghanistan when detainee transfers were suspended in November 2007.
Updated: Prism Magazine livestreamed the hearings today and will be doing it again tomorrow. The first half of today’s stream is in French only, but they sorted things out with the translation people in time for the second half. Tomorrow’s hearings should be available in English from the beginning.
BGen Laroche with Defence Minister Peter MacKay. Photo: Cpl Francis Gauthier
He told the Commission this morning that he approved of the halt in detainee transfers which occurred in November 2007. Transfers were suspended because Commanders in theatre were receiving credible allegations of torture. He testified that he and his second in command, Colonel Christian Juneau, were not receiving adequate reports on the post-transfer treatment of detainees.
Brig.-Gen. Laroche said the November 5, 2007 site visit to an Afghan prison, where DFAIT officials interviewed a prisoner had been beaten by Afghan captors and found the actual implements of torture in the interrogation room, was clear evidence of torture and required a halt in handovers.
“We had evidence that detainees were abused and tortured and that went beyond what was supposed to be happen,” Brig.-Gen. Laroche said.
Brig.-Gen. Laroche ordered that transfers be resumed in February. Between the cessation of transfers in November 2007 and the resumption in February 2008, had conditions appreciably improved for Afghan detainees who were handed over the NDS, the secret police service notorious for torture and abuse? Brig.-Gen. Laroche testified that one video camera had been installed in an NDS interrogation room. Clearly, the installation of one video camera is incapable of preventing systemic, widespread abuse. We’re incredulous that senior military officials would rely on such a paltry mechanism for the protection fundamental human rights.
Brigadier-General Laroche, like many other witnesses who have come before him, engaged in a denial of responsibility, testifying that it was the responsibility of DFAIT, not the Canadian Forces, to monitor the condition of detainees and ensure that Canada was meeting its domestic and international law obligations.
One thing seems clear. We have now heard from numerous Canadian Forces officials who stated they received few, if any, of the reports that were being prepared by DFAIT. Brigadier-General Laroche testified that there was a “larger systemic problem.” Was Ottawa trying to shield the Canadian Forces from receiving information that could implicate the Canadian Forces in violations of international law?
Tomorrow may be a more interesting day than we originally suspected. Ed Jager, policy advisor with DFAIT, is scheduled to appear tomorrow. We learned from Brigadier-General Laroche today that Mr. Jager was a member of a “core detainee group” who met frequently to discuss transfers and post-transfer treatment of detainees.
This week at the MPCC
Posted: May 10, 2010 Filed under: Afghan Detainee Hearings, Parliament, Torture | Tags: afghanistan, canada, carmen cheung, detainee hearings, detainees, dfait, mpcc, parliament, Torture Leave a comment »The Afghanistan Public Interest Hearings at the Military Police Complaints Commission continue this week before a month-long break while the Commission waits for the government to make the required document disclosures. BCCLA Counsel Carmen Cheung is in Ottawa again this week for the hearings.
On Tuesday, May 11, the MPCC will hear from Brigadier-General Guy Laroche, Commander of the Task Force in Afghanistan from November 2007 to May 2008. BGen Laroche was Commander in Afghanistan when detainee transfers were suspended in November 2007.
BGen Guy Laroche, May 2008
On November 25, 2007, he wrote to LGen Gauthier, Commander CEFCOM, about the suspension of transfers. He complained that his command was not being provided with adequate information on post-transfer monitoring visits, and that the findings of investigations into previous allegations of abuse were not being sent to him. Transfers were suspended in part because of credible allegations of torture in a November 5, 2007 report from Nicolas Gosselin, but largely because the Commander did not have enough information to satisfy the legal test for transfers.
Ed Jager, policy advisor with DFAIT, is scheduled to appear on Wednesday, May 12. Mr. Jager was not originally scheduled to appear before the MPCC, but he was called to appear after controversial testimony by Ahmadshah “Pacha” Malgarai before parliamentary committee in April. Pacha was a language and cultural advisor to the former Task Force Commander. He made two shocking claims regarding Mr. Jager.
Pacha suggested that during a detainee transfer, an NDS officer put his pistol on a table and told Mr. Jager to kill the detainee rather than transfer him. In an unrelated incident, the same NDS officer made thinly veiled threats to torture a detainee who was about to be transferred. He told Mr. Jager that when the detainee “gets to my room, he will speak.”
After these two witnesses, the MPCC will break until June 14, when BGen Laroche’s second in command, Colonel Christian Juneau, is scheduled to appear. Col Juneau was Acting Commander when transfers were suspended, and sent a letter to LGen Gauthier and other senior officials outlining his concerns about the lack of information flowing from CEFCOM and information regarding the credible allegations of torture contained in Mr. Gosselin’s November 5 report. Among the recipients of that letter were Chief of Defence Staff General Rick Hillier and Defence Minister Peter MacKay.
The month-long break at the MPCC comes just as a new poll indicates that Canadians are upset about the Afghan detainee issue. From the National Post:
Almost eight in 10 surveyed said that, assuming transferred detainees were tortured by the Afghan authorities, the actions are “wrong, and once known should have stopped.”
…
More than half — 52% — said they believe Prime Minister Stephen Harper knew what was going on, and the same percentage said they believe individual soldiers knew it was happening, according to the poll.
However, a much larger majority — 75% — said they believe senior Canadian military officials would have known that transferred prisoners were being tortured. Sixty-five per cent said they believe the minister of defence had to have known, and 66% said they believe the Defence or Foreign Affairs Department were in the know.
It’s interesting to note that Canadians aren’t placing the blame for transfers to torture on the heads of the soldiers on the ground in Afghanistan. The poll found that 93% of Canadians “are proud of the men and women serving in the armed forces, the highest rating ever recorded by the polling firm”. Instead, Canadians place the blame firmly on the government and the commanders:
Canadians see the story as a “chain-of-command issue” where responsibility rests at the top, and not with individual soldiers, said Mr. Wright, senior vice-president of Ipsos Reid.
…
A majority said that if it is determined that officials knew as far back as 2007 that torture was taking place and didn’t do anything to stop it, or denied it was happening at all, then top bosses should be ousted from their jobs.
Those same top bosses are the ones taking their time to make sure that documents are “good and ready” before the MPCC can see them.
CBSA laptop search documents
Posted: May 3, 2010 Filed under: Borders, Laptop Searches, Security | Tags: canada, cbsa, laptops, privacy, search 5 Comments »In late February, shortly after the story we posted about the Canada Border Services Agency delaying our request for documents on their policies on searching laptops and other personal electronics, a slim brown envelope arrived in our office. The response came just over two weeks after the extended deadline the CBSA set for itself had expired. The delay was frustrating, but not nearly as long as we’d feared given the abysmal state of access to information responses from other governmental agencies.
Image: jasonunbound on Flickr
Now that we’ve had a chance to go through the documents, there were few surprises. The documents provided by the CBSA were disorganized and still fail to provide a clear and complete picture of CBSA policies and practices on data search and retention. In the end, the documents raised more questions than they answered, but are fairly interesting in their own right, if only for the glimpse into the institutional culture of the CBSA they can provide.
Many categories of important information were completely redacted or exempted from disclosure. Some of the redactions were legitimate—legal opinions, for instance, would generally be covered by solicitor-client privilege. Other omissions were less convincing, and the practice of redacting in white rather than in black left it unclear whether information was missing or not. Some areas of the request were completely ignored or omitted. For instance, we asked for statistics on how many searches of personal electronics had been conducted. These statistics were not even referred to in the documents provided.
The BCCLA has filed another complaint with the Office of the Information Commissioner, this time regarding the exemptions and redactions from the documents provided by the CBSA in response to our request. For now, here’s a review of some of the highlights of the documents we have received:
The consistent:
- CBSA policy states that “the difference between a paper document and information stored electronically is only the medium it is stored on” (A-2009-01850-Vol2 on p. 5). We can think of lots of other differences—the kind and quantity of information that is regularly brought across the border by travellers bringing their laptops and smart phones, for instance—but this fits with what we had learned about CBSA search practices.
- The CBSA spends a lot of time thinking about child pornography. We’d always assumed this was the case, but the documents show that an entire chapter of the Customs Enforcement Manual is dedicated to the subject (A-2009-01850-Vol4).
- The CBSA can and does perform laptop searches at random, but “will only scan or peruse a document to the extent necessary to either confirm or negate its association to an offence or intelligence concern” (A-2009-01850-Vol2 on p. 2).
- Most screening is not at random, relying instead on various “indicators” including “known importers, exporters, known export locations (specific locations or geographical areas), the nature of the goods being imported (commodities known to be suspect) and/or information disseminated through regional or headquarters intelligence channels. … Officers should also be aware of high-risk geographical locations for child sex tourism” (A-2009-01850-Vol4 at p. 6). Specific indicators and suspect nations were redacted from the documents CBSA provided us. However, from court documents filed in the case of former Bishop Raymond Lahey, we know that “border officials flagged Lahey because he was a man travelling alone and his passport showed several trips to Southeast Asia, Germany, Spain and other areas known for child pornography”.
- Screening also relies on various databases, including the Integrated Primary Inspection Line system (IPIL) and Integrated Customs Enforcement System (ICES) for primary screening, and Field Operations Support System (FOSS), the Canadian Police Information Centre (CPIC), National Crime Information Center (NCIC), the sex offender database, Treasury Enforcement Communications System (TECS), and Police Information Records System for secondary screening (PIRS) (A-2009-01850-Vol6 on p. 14).
- The “Electronic Media Search Form” sets out a lot of what CBSA officers are looking for when they decide to search a computer. Officers will look for user accounts visible on the login screen, note the operating system, any encryption, and provides space for passwords provided, but also a box for “password not located”. There are also suggested image and keyword searches to guide officers (A-2009-01850-Vol6 on p. 6-8).
- The CBSA has software to assist border agents with laptop searches. If, after an initial search, the border agent feels further scrutiny is required, he or she uses software called ICWhatUC to scan images stored on the traveller’s hard drive. ICWhatUC only works on Windows machines. It scans for image files on a computer, including images in the web browser’s cache, image files with strange file extensions (like .doc instead of .jpg) and files in the recycle bin. Deleted files and files in archives do not show up. We’ve purchased a copy of the law enforcement version of ICWhatUC and will be doing an analysis of its capabilities and limitations in another post this month.
The weird:
A Powerpoint presentation illustrates the physical size of media that it is possible to store on media of various capacities. For instance, “one meter (or close to a yard) of shelved books” is about 100 megabytes, while a “pickup truck filled with books” is about 500 megabytes of data (A-2009-01850-Vol7 on p. 4). A USB key could “contain a stack of paper (8.5×11), 35 feet higher than the CN tower” that “would take two years to print @ 24/7″ (A-2009-01850-Vol7 on p. 1).- Another bizarre Powerpoint charts porn vs. time, showing that every second $3075 is spent on pornography, 28258 internet users are viewing pornography, and 372 people are typing adult search terms into search engines (A-2009-01850-Vol7 on p. 3). It follows this information up with statistics on youth viewing pornography, and then directly to statistics on seizures of child pornography (p. 4). This disingenuous attempt to link legal, adult pornography with the production and distribution of child pornography in its training materials may be part of the reason for CBSA’s continued targeting of legal materials it finds objectionable, like artsy queer films.
- A chart breaks down the difference between “child pornography” and “not child pornography”, in case there was any confusion (A-2009-01850-Vol4 on p. 16). This chart seems to be common sense, but given some of the ridiculous accusations that have been made in the past, it’s probably a good thing that CBSA agents are provided with this handy cheat sheet:
A later document notes another example: “Japanese Anime – most not child porn” (A-2009-01850-Vol6 on p. 13).
The missing:
Five key areas were not addressed adequately (or at all) in the CBSA’s response to our request:
- Criteria for selection of individuals for device inspection. Information was referred to, and some information provided, but the contents of these sections were heavily redacted.
- Policies for copying and retention of electronic information. Some information was provided, but it only referred to cases where potentially criminal conduct was detected during the CBSA’s initial search. Further information is required here.
- Statistics on the number and kinds of devices inspected.
- Demographic information on individuals whose devices have been inspected.
- Policies for the distribution of electronic information copied from electronic devices to other government agencies.
These areas make up the substance of our second complaint to the Information Commissioner.
Overall, the CBSA’s lack of transparency on this important issue is discouraging. While their policies on searches appear to be quite similar, the CBSA has not been as forthcoming with information as even the secretive U.S. Department of Homeland Security, which has made its policy publicly available.
The documents:
As promised, we’ve made all the documents we received available online. Download them and have a look through them yourself. If you see anything of special note, have your own story of having your electronics searched at the Canadian border, or have something to add, please let us know in the comments or by email: [greg]@[bccla].[org]
