Murray Brewster speaks to Centennial journalism students

'We knew that Afghanistan was a failed state'
Murray Brewster, CP's senior defence correspondent, came to Centennial to speak with us about journalism. In our question period (j-school, so a scrum) I asked him about the detainee document scandal. He was both thorough and kind enough to reply to my email pestering afterwards. I finally had a chance to sit down with his book and recommend it to anyone interested in Canadian political journalism. It will inform you, give you context and make you angry.


The story took a while to go through editing; it's dated October 15, 2011.



Canadian Press journalist Murray Brewster says a recent UN report corroborates his findings of severe mismanagement of Afghan detainees by Canadian bureaucracy.

Brewster, a journalist for 27 years, visited Centennial College on Wednesday to discuss his experience as a Canadian Press correspondent in Afghanistan.

“What you write could potentially get people killed, and that is a very, very sobering notion,” Brewster said. “Disagreements in that part of the world are often settled with a gun.”

He added that despite the dangers of reporting, it is essential to have independent journalists cover the wars their country fights.

“It is important for us to bear witness to those events because those events are happening in our name,” Brewster said.

His talk came two days after a UN report found “a compelling pattern and practice of systematic torture and ill-treatment” in Afghan detainee centres, with 46 per cent of randomly selected respondents reporting torture.

As senior defence correspondent with The Canadian Press, Brewster broke the late 2009 story of whistleblower Richard Colvin’s allegations that some Afghan detainees who Canadian soldiers had turned over to Afghanistan prisons were then tortured.

“That particular story came out of a healthy sense of outrage,” Brewster said. “What I was watching was a man who wanted to testify but the government wanted to silence him, and it just snowballed.”

The detainee scandal lead to a high-profile inquiry, thousands of released but redacted documents and unanswered questions about whether Canada violated international humanitarian law in a war it entered 10 years ago last week.

Last Monday's UN report is just one of ongoing developments surrounding the issue, one that Brewster says reinforces his findings, but is “not much different than the many U.S. State Department warnings over the years.”

In his talk, Brewster often touched on what he calls the federal government's “tight hold on information” around the war in Afghanistan.

“There was what I consider to be a burden that went with covering the story,” Brewster said. “A burden of responsibility to cut through a lot of the B.S. that we were being fed.”

His book, The Savage War: The Untold Battles of Afghanistan, was released this month. In one chapter, Brewster details the detainee document fiasco and subsequent document dumps.

In March 2010, the parliamentary committee examining the allegations released 2,628 pages of partially redacted documents, followed by 4,000 more this June.

“There was nothing in those documents that would have been considered a smoking gun; you wouldn’t expect it to be there,” he said. “Because government has become much more savvy about what it puts on paper.”

Brewster cited an internal 2007 memo released in June that warned the foreign affairs minister about Afghanistan-related documents released in an NGO-lead Federal Court case.

“A challenge will be managing the suggestion that the content of material released is inconsistent with government of Canada messaging,” reads the memo, originally classified as secret.

“The documents leave one with the impression of (redacted) flawed Afghan judicial system and of detention facilities that fall (sic) well below UN standards. The assembled material may seem to suggest that government of Canada messaging on the detainees issues for the last 12 months has been out of sync with reporting from the field.”

The memo then suggests that such material would “present significant political and communications challenges,” leaving the impression that the government should have known “there was the potential for mistreatment of detainees.”

Brewster said the memo “speaks volumes” about both a lack of transparency and bureaucratic failures in managing information. He stressed that the scandal does not concern the conduct of Canadian troops, but rather how Canada and NATO presided over detainees.

“I think the question revolves around whether they should have been handed over to Afghans,” he said. “We knew that Afghanistan was a failed state.”