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COMMENTARY
May 5, 2010
State secrets
We are fighting in Afghanistan. It will be well to keep this plain assertion in mind through all the reasoning that follows. To make it plainer, let me gloss the assertion. By "fighting" I mean we have troops whose lives are on the line, in a "war-type" situation. And by "in Afghanistan" I mean that war is unlike any of which we had Canadian military experience, against an enemy different in kind from previous enemies.The issue which currently threatens to embroil our country in a constitutional crisis, to say nothing of an election campaign, began with political points the Opposition tried to score about the handover of captured Taliban to the Afghan government. (They are not "soldiers" by any of the received definitions of Geneva Conventions or other international law.) Perhaps the Afghan government tortured some of them: I wouldn't be surprised. There are other things we could have done with those prisoners. "Shoot them" comes to mind as one extreme option. Perhaps I am obtuse, but as they have no formal standing as prisoners of war, under the letter of those Geneva Conventions, I do not see a legal objection. Yet, while I also understand the temptation, I do have another objection. For even where there is no direct legal obstacle, in an environment that is for all practical purposes lawless, it is, from an arbitrarily Western point of view, bad form to go about gratuitously shooting persons who have already been rendered defenceless -- even if they are Taliban who think nothing of throwing acid in the faces of little girls for daring to attend school. No: the morale and discipline of a Western army requires more ceremonious procedures. At the other extreme, we could have them extradited to Canada, where we could put individual Taliban on trial in Canadian courts designed for far different purposes, and then after they'd laughed that off, grant them the usual refugee status along with welfare payments, and immigration assistance for their extended families. Let me guess that we are looking for a solution somewhere between these two extremes. Which is good, but I'm not sure we will find one better than handing them over to our arguably barbaric Afghan allies, and looking the other way. War is ugly, and as indicated above, the war in Afghanistan is ugly in ways that are novel, at least to us. We have seldom found an enemy whose indifference to our notions of law and decency is so complete. Tojo's Japanese, in launching the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, did at least target a naval base. I doubt even Hitler's more demented associates thought of flying commercial aircraft into Manhattan office buildings. The political tempest in Canada is over something, I suspect, the Canadian people do not much care about. In order to embarrass the government, while titillating our liberal elites, Michael Ignatieff and company needed more information. That information was privileged under the conventional intelligence arrangements, in which state secrets are not freely distributed among several hundred talkative Members of Parliament, but saved as much as possible for final review on the Day of Judgement. Meanwhile, as our ancestors would have understood, and as many living today still understand, "There's a war on, don't you know?" Speaker Peter Milliken's ruling, that Parliament must find a way for Parliament to review intelligence findings independently of the government of the day, is not entirely without merit. The legislative intelligence committees of the U.S. and some other countries have been known to function effectively, with the security-vetted politicians who sit on them able, within reason, to check their party political affiliations at the door, from a common understanding of the national interest. Alas, Canada has lagged in finding such an arrangement; until we have come to an age in which "the national interest" is not among concepts commonly understood. But that is just why the Speaker's exacting deadline, to come up with such an arrangement within a fortnight, was unreasonable. He is forcing a long-term solution to an invented short-term problem: the very formula for the creation of political, administrative, and constitutional monstrosities. A mature review would instead require very patient consideration of the implications to security across the board, of the way in which boxloads of detainee documents were handed over. The Speaker's suggestion that he was troubled by the notion that Parliamentarians could not be trusted with sensitive security information struck me as wilfully naïve, and his threat of constitutional crisis to push this point struck me as perhaps something worse. But I know these games play well in the liberal media. He told the Harper government, in effect: "You have two weeks to solve an insoluble problem, to the satisfaction of your political opponents, and if you fail, you alone will be held accountable." It is of course too late to change, not the government, but the Speaker. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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