By Deborah Gyapong

THE Liberal Party has launched an attack ad, accusing the Conservative government of covering up torture in Afghanistan. It shows Parliament Hill behind a high chain link fence, like one might find at a concentration camp.

It aims at Prime Minister Stephen Harper's decision to prorogue Parliament, ending the present session of Parliament after one year and starting afresh in March with a new agenda and budget.

At issue are allegations that Canadian Armed Forces personnel knowingly handed prisoners to Afghan authorities, who subsequently tortured them. Before Christmas, a parliamentary committee was investigating claims put forward by a former Canadian diplomat in Afghanistan that some detainees had been mistreated.

The Liberals have vowed to keep the pressure on the Conservatives, even threatening to return to Parliament in late January when the scheduled Christmas break would have ended.

Counterterrorism expert John Thompson said he believes the debate over the treatment of Afghan detainees is really a replay of the torture debate.

Thompson, the president of the Toronto-based Mackenzie Institute, is a Roman Catholic; he acknowledged that any cooperation in torture is against Catholic teaching.

However, he maintained, "This is a whole gray area. Some of the issues around abuse are very loose and undefined and people fill in the blanks on what's really happening.

"I'm not sure it really is definable," he said, recalling a case where a police officer "looking fiercely at a suspect constituted mental torture."

Thompson also raised concerns about tactics involving false claims of torture.

"It's axiomatic for anyone in the jihad movement to say they were tortured or abused as soon as is possible -- always," he said "It is actually in the Al Qaeda Internet manual."

Thompson said it is fine to argue about moral absolutes, but in the real world, in a war zone, other factors come into play. He noted that Afghanistan is a desperately poor country. While the prisoners live under harsh conditions, so do their guards.

"I defy anyone to show me a country that has a better standard of living for its prisoners than for its ordinary citizens," said Thompson.

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At the same time, he argued, Afghanistan has a far better quality of incarceration than it did shortly after Canada joined the conflict. Back in 2002, the Afghan allies were engaging in blood feuds, and taking revenge for the way they had often been treated by the Taliban, he said.

The first Taliban and Al Qaeda forces to be captured were stuffed into shipping crates and left in the sun, he said. In one instance, one of their captors emptied an automatic weapon into one of the crates.

With the pressure from Western allies, treatment of prisoners has improved immensely, Thompson said. But he acknowledged that human nature in a war zone means their treatment will not always be perfect.

"We're in a conflict. Things happen. We're in Afghanistan; things happen by their rules."

The Canadian military has the highest standards practiced anywhere, he asserted. While the Canadians operate under the Geneva Convention, neither Canada nor the Americans have fought an enemy that abides by it since World War II.

"We abide by conventions that almost no one else observes," he said. "That speaks a lot about the morality of our forces."

Thompson pointed out that while it is important to treat prisoners humanely, soldiers are bound by a series of obligations. First and foremost has been their mission to help stabilize Afghanistan and make it safe, to keep people from being terrorized and to help them get their infrastructure in place, he said.

He described the process as "three steps forward and two steps back."

Afghan authorities, he said, "know that torture is not something they can indulge in -- nor should they."

Conservative bloggers have compared the new attack ad to Liberal ads in the 2006 election campaign that warned of "Soldiers with guns. In our cities. In Canada." These ads were lampooned across the political spectrum. One Liberal pundit has compared the treatment of Afghan detainees to the abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib.

However, at Abu Ghraib, American soldiers were directly implicated in the torture and humiliation of prisoners. No one has accused Canadian soldiers of ill treatment.

Harper has denied the Afghan detainee issue played a role in his decision to prorogue Parliament. He has said he wants to start a new session to deal with economic issues.

Courtesy of Canadian Catholic News. Please do not reprint without permission.

January 13/2010