Canada can't find 50 Afghan detainees

The Globe & Mail is once again harping on the Afghan detainees issue.

Canada can't find 50 Afghan detainees

Apparently 50 detainees are un-accounted for after being handed to the Afghan authorities. There are all kinds of possibilities as to what may have happened to them.

• They could have been released or bribed their way to freedom, as what often occurs, in that country.
• They could have been transferred to another prison, but due to shoddy record keeping, it was not recorded.
• They could have escaped from custody and gone back to the Taliban.
• In the worse case scenario, they could have been tortured and executed in captivity, but there is no evidence to support this scenario.

Afghanistan is still dealing with over 30 years of civil war, and there have not been effective government institutions for a very long time, so record keeping is shoddy at best.

The article mentions that Canada struck a deal with the Afghan authorities to monitor detainees handed over to them by Canadian forces after May 3rd. The detainees mentioned were handed over to the Afghan authorities before this agreement was in place, so tracking them down is en extremely difficult and complicated exercise.

Detainees transferred after May 3 have been monitored under a deal struck in reaction to uproar over the issue, but the Canadians were also anxious to know about the earlier transfers. Sending detainees into places where they face abuse or torture might constitute a violation of the Geneva Conventions.

Months later, however, a quarter of those 200 detainees remain missing, neither listed as released nor still in custody.

As usual, in their zeal to promote their agenda against the Afghan mission, the G&M automatically assumes the worst-case scenario without any evidence and automatically brings up the possible violation of the Geneva Convention.

Sending detainees into places where they face abuse or torture might constitute a violation of the Geneva Conventions.

There is no evidence that Canadian forces are intentionally sending detainees to be tortured and it is not known if these unaccounted detainees have been tortured, but that does not stop the G&M from bringing it up. Also, for the Geneva Convention to be violated, prisoners would have to be knowingly transferred to places for the purpose of torture, but this in fact has not occurred, so there is no basis for a possible violation of the Geneva Convention.