This past week Harjit Sajjan Singh made what should have been a good news announcement.

The Defence Minister, along with Foreign Affairs minister Chrystia Freeland, issued an edict prohibiting Canada’s military, diplomatic, and intelligence communities from using information that was likely obtained by torture.

On the surface, Singh’s announcement was consistent with earlier steps, welcome steps, the Trudeau government had taken to reverse years of ignominy on this file under the previous government of Stephen Harper.

In 2016, when Stephane Dion was Trudeau’s minister of Foreign Affairs, Canada finally joined dozens of other countries that had already signed the United Nations’ 2002 optional protocol to the convention against torture. Under its terms, Canada could press countries suspected of torture to open their facilities to inspection. The ultimate aim of the agreement was to rid the world of a barbaric practice that violates every norm of human dignity.

It’s hard to believe that it took Canada more than a decade to sign the protocol. Although former prime minister Harper twice promised to do so, he never did. In fact, in 2010 his government authorized using intelligence information even if it was produced by torture. Harper’s hypocrisy did not stop him from filing torture complaints against Sri Lanka at the United Nations.

But have the Liberals really made a clean break from the bad old days of then public safety minister Vic Toews and his thumbs up to torture? Regrettably, though they have definitely improved the situation as Amnesty International points out, the answer is no.

That’s because the prohibition against torture comes with exceptions. Canada will accept information likely obtained by torture to prevent “loss of life” or “significant personal injury”.

This raises the argument on principle.

The Liberal exceptions to accepting information on torture sour the government’s announcement. It is like saying that you are absolutely against sexual harassment of women, but some harassment under certain circumstances is okay. You can’t do that with principles. If it’s a principle, it is never okay to violate it.

As Randall Garrison, the NDP’s defence critic put it, either you prohibit torture or you don’t. If you turn it into a case of sometimes we ban, sometimes we don’t, you have left the moral high ground of principle for the ditches of public relations.

Compare what the Liberals have done to what former prime minister Brian Mulroney did in 1987. Mulroney’s government signed the UN treaty against torture without exceptions. Torture was banned and it was the duty of signatories like Canada to prosecute torturers. Mulroney did not equivocate on principle – at least that one.

Then there is the pragmatic argument.

The Trudeau government says that it will accept intelligence obtained by torture only if it saves lives or prevents serious injury. The predictive validity of that argument is dubious. It assumes that information obtained by torture is accurate. The overwhelming evidence suggests the opposite.

The US Senate Intelligence Committee’s 6,000-page report on the CIA’s detention and enhanced interrogation program concluded that torture doesn’t work. After pouring through millions of documents, the senators reported that no intelligence was gleaned by these CIA torture sessions that could not have been obtained through traditional interrogation techniques as laid in the US Army’s Field Manual.

President Obama ended the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques in 2009, a year before the Harper government allowed Canadian authorities to use information obtained by torture.

Why doesn’t torture work? That leads to the scientific argument.

Dr. Shane O’Mara, a professor of experimental brain research at Trinity College, Dublin, has made a convincing case that torture actually produces false information. Under physical abuse like water-boarding, those parts of the brain associated with memory are harmed.

Dr. O’Mara calls this the “diving reflex”, in which the brain moves from memory mode to survival mode. Anyone suffering hypoxia simply has their cognitive abilities impaired.

Sound like a good enough source?

Perhaps that’s why Tony Camerino, a former senior special forces interrogator for the US military in Iraq, also argues that other forms of torture, including sleep deprivation, are equally worthless. From his perspective in the field, sleep deprivation “harms memory and leads to inaccurate information.”

Malcolm Nance offers another reason why the Trudeau government has fundamentally missed the mark with their torture exceptions. Nance was an instructor at the US Navy’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape school. Based on his experience, he concluded that torture does not produce reliable information and for a very good reason.

“The captive will say absolutely anything and agree to anything to make the torture stop.”

US intelligence agencies, including the CIA, have since come to the conclusion that building rapport with a captive yields better information than by torturing him. A cigarette and a Coke work better than a hood and a snarling dog.

Under both Harper and Trudeau Canada has had a less than sterling reputation on steering clear of being complicit in torture. The Liberals have paid out $31 million in compensation to three people tortured in Syria with the complicity of Canadian agencies – Abdullah Amalki, Ahmad Elmaati, and Muayyed Nureddin.

Two other names capture Canada’s shame, Mahar Arar and Omar Khadr.

Now there is yet another. Djamel Ameziane, a fifty year-old Algerian who was held at Guantanamo Bay for eleven years, is suing the federal government for $50 million dollars.

While at Gitmo, Ameziane suffered genital “searches”, water-boarding, sleep deprivation, and physical assault. He alleges that he ended up in the infamous prison because of Canadian intelligence about him supplied to the Americans. His Canadian lawyer, Nate Whitling, says his client is willing to drop his financial claim in return for a public inquiry.

Don’t hold your breath. The Afghan detainee scandal has been the victim of a smother-up by both Conservative and Liberal governments.

Michel Cabana, the former RCMP Superintendent whose team members on Project O (later A-O, and C-O) told the Americans that Mahar Arar was an Islamic extremist with ties to Al Qaeda was subsequently promoted to assistant Commissioner.

And now the ban on using information obtained by torture that is no ban at all.

Spin it however they wish, the Liberals will never be able to talk away a simple fact: As long as you use information extracted by torture, you condone torture.

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