[This web page was first
posted on 2002 April 18. It was
revised and re-posted on 2002 April 25.
It was revised and re-posted on 2002 May 28.]
a philosopher speaks out
against the Canadian involvement
in the war in Afghanistan
Background
– 2002 May 28
I
eventually received a reply from Art Eggleton, who was dismissed recently as
Defence Minister. The tenor of
that reply, as well as one I received from the Prime Minister’s Office,
is that this campaign is a struggle for justice and that it is sensible to
trust the American assurances that the detainees captured by Canadian forces
will be treated according to the ‘principles of the Geneva
Convention’, despite not being accorded the status of Prisoners of War.
I
don’t yet share this opinion, but I might be persuaded to accept it if
the detainees captured in January
(the ‘Eggleton detainees’, so called because of the confusion into
which the whole business plunged Mr. Eggleton) were identified. This is the basic first step in
ensuring that their human rights are being observed. Accordingly I have sent a fresh letter to the Prime Minister
(the new Defence Minister won’t have an e-mail address “until this
Friday”) requesting that the Eggleton detainees be publicly identified.
If
this request can’t be met, that confirms my suspicion that the current
campaign is in effect an internationally illegal vigilante raid, which has
brought disgrace to Canada and to its military tradition.
If
I receive a reply from the Prime Minister to this letter, I will post it here.
-- D. S. Hutchinson
2002 May 28
subject: please identify
the ‘Eggleton detainees’
The Right Honourable Jean
Chrétien
Prime Minister of Canada
Dear Sir,
Thank you for dismissing
Art Eggleton as Defence Minister.
He has given us Canadians ample cause to merit being fired, especially
in January and February when he apparently misled the House of Commons about
the combatants captured and detained by Canadian armed forces in Afghanistan
(the ‘Eggleton detainees’).
I regret that you didn’t fire him at that point, and I suppose you
also regret your decision to defend your incompetent Defence Minister.
Before he was dismissed,
Mr. Eggleton found time on 14 May, to reply to my letter of 30 January, in the
following terms: “The Canadian government is acting in accordance with
the Geneva conventions and Canadian law with respect to the detainees. Furthermore, Canadian Forces members
are well trained to handle detainee situations. The transfer of detainees taken by Canadian Forces members
to the United States authorities is also permitted under international
law. The United States has assured
Canada that the detainees, irrespective of their status under international
law, will be treated in accordance with the principles of the Geneva
Convention.”
I am grateful to see this
spelled out. I’m sure
it’s true that the American government has given Canada assurances, but
I’m also sure it is foolish for Canada to trust those assurances. The United States of America at present
is a badly wounded and dangerously angry brute of a superpower which has no
regard for international standards of justice, as was witnessed quite recently
when they decided to renege on their commitment to the Rome Treaty on the
International Criminal Court (ICC), the international initiative to create a
permanent war crimes tribunal.
I also wrote to you on 18
April, to urge the withdrawal of our troops, in light of the American
incompetence displayed in the bombing of our Canadian soldiers, especially
given that the mission was intended to capture combatants and ship them off to
the concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay.
(You may recall the reason why I call that detention facility a
concentration camp; if not, that letter is easily available at my University of
Toronto academic web site: http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~dhutchin/eggletonletter.htm,
where I will also post this letter.)
You didn’t take my advice, instead deciding not to renew the
Canadian contingent after the end of the present tour of duty, for the worst
possible reason: Canada has so poorly invested in its armed forces that they
cannot engage in sustained combat.
In your reply to my letter
(dated 26 April, signed by T. Robbins), you offered the following argument:
“The campaign against terrorism is the first great global struggle for
justice of the 21st century. As in
all such conflicts of the past, Canada has been on the front lines.”
<Unstated conclusion: Canadians must fight in the Afghan campaign.> But I think you made an elementary
mistake: no struggle can be a struggle for justice if it is conducted unjustly. It can be at best vigilante justice,
not real Canadian justice, to capture men and ship them off to a concentration
camp, where they enjoy neither the protection of accused criminals, nor the
protection of Prisoners of War.
Nor is it even made known who they are, so they could be in contact, if
only by letter, with the people who are important to them.
A responsible Canadian
government should be able to give a public answer to the following questions:
What are the names and nationalities of the combatants captured by Canadian
troops in Afghanistan in January (the ‘Eggleton detainees’)? Where are they currently being
detained? What charges have been
laid against them, if any? Please
answer those questions in your reply.
If you can’t or
won’t answer those questions, then I think the following argument is the only
valid one: ‘this Afghan campaign is a vigilante raid; Canadian forces
have no business taking part in vigilante raids; so Canadian forces should
never have taken part in this Afghan imbroglio.’
If so, since this was your
decision as well as Mr. Eggleton’s, you share in the disgrace.
Yours very truly, Douglas
S. Hutchinson
copies:
Hon. Dennis Mills, M.P.,
Broadview-Danforth
(my Member of Parliament)
Lachlin McKinnon, B.A.,
(Hons), LL.B, A.R.C.T
Special Advisor to the
Governor General of Canada
Paul Knox, The Globe and
Mail
Rick Salutin, The Globe and
Mail
Professor Cheryl Misak,
Chair, Department of Philosophy, University of Toronto
Amnesty International Canada
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Background
– 2002 April 25
Please
see below for earlier episodes of this correspondence.
On
2002 April 19, following up on this same business, I sent an e-mail message to
Hon. Dennis Mills, the Member of Parliament who represents me in my home riding
in Toronto. He replied very
courteously and promptly, a few hours later, in the following terms:
Dear Dr. Hutchinson
Thank you very much for taking the time to communicate with me
regarding the situation in Afghanistan.
The events of this week have certainly been distressing.
I have, as requested, forwarded your letters with a covering supporting
note from myself to the Prime Minister and to the Minister of Defence.
Sincerely, Dennis Mills
However,
until today I had not heard anything from either the Prime Minister or the Defence
Minister. Today’s post
brought the following message:
Dear Mr. Hutchinson:
On behalf of the Honourable Art Eggleton, Minister of National Defence,
I would like to acknowledge receipt of your correspondence on February 5, 2002.
Please be assured that your correspondence will be reviewed and a
response will be forthcoming, if required.
Sincerely
(signed)
Kevin DeGaust
Special Assistant <to the Minister of National Defence>
This
letter was postmarked 2002 April 18, and I believe it was stimulated by a
communication from the Prime Minister’s Office, in response to my
publicly calling attention to the fact that my letter of late January had so
far gone unacknowledged.
The
only remarkable thing is that the above letter from Kevin DeGaust is dated
April 15, which would seem to be a keystroke error, if not a deliberate attempt
to conceal the fact the letter was stimulated into existence by a directive
from the Prime Minister’s office on the 18th of April. It seems hard to believe that it would
take 3 days for his letter to move from signature to franking. It is also difficult for me to believe
that my letter would suddenly have been attended to on 15 April, 3 days before
I communicated with the Prime Minister, when it had already languished for 61 days,
after having been received by the
MND on February 5 and by the MND Registry on February 13 and stamped with the
file number MCU 2002-01076, and processed by the following procedure:
“Referred to <space left blank>” and “Charged to
<space left blank>”.
In other words, it was not dealt with by anybody, until suddenly Mr.
Eggleton’s special assistant attended to it in mid-April. However, the facts are not directly at
my disposal, and I leave it to readers to drawn their own conclusions.
Regrettably,
there does seem to be some confusion at times in the Ministry of National
Defence about when certain communications were sent and received, a confusion
that sometimes afflicts the Minister himself, as a Parliamentary Commission of
Inquiry has been told in its February hearings into the alleged concealment of
information from Parliament (about the three combatants captured by Canadian
forces in January in the Kandahar region) on the part of Mr. Eggleton. I wonder what that Commission of
Inquiry has concluded?
I
still await a more substantial and accurately dated reply from the Minister of
National Defence, or from the Prime Minister.
--
D. S. Hutchinson
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Background
– 2002 April 18
On
2002 January 30, I sent the following letter to the Minister of Defence, Art
Eggleton. He has not replied, at
least not yet (2002 April 18). In
light of yesterday’s blunder, in which American air force personnel
mistakenly dropped a 500-pound bomb from their F-16 fighter plane onto a
battalion of Canadian troops, killing and seriously injuring many of them, I
sent to the Prime Minister an urgent request for an immediate withdrawal of
Canadian troops from Afghanistan.
The text of that letter (sent today,
2002 April 18) is also attached below.
D.
S. Hutchinson
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(the second letter)
2002 April 18
Right Hon. Jean Chretien
Prime Minister of Canada
Sir; I demand the immediate
withdrawal of all Canadian troops from Afghanistan, in light of the following
three urgent considerations.
As yesterday's events
demonstrated, the American military force in Afghanistan is not well enough
trained and co-ordinated for it to be appropriate for our troops to engage in
joint military combat with theirs.
This is not the first time that Americans have dropped bombs in
Afghanistan on "friendly" troops and killed them; but it is the first
time that it has killed friendly non-American troops. It must be the last.
As events of the last few months
have demonstrated, the American military force has had little success in its
military objectives, and its military campaign seems headed for the sort of
stalemate and quagmire that has predictably frustrated various attempts by
foreign powers over the last few centuries to control the Afghan hinterland by
military force.
As responsible voices
around the world have been arguing, the American conduct of the war in
Afghanistan is contrary to international law and the principles of fundamental
justice. For a succinct
explanation of exactly why the American treatment of its captured combatants is
illegal, please refer to the recent article by the leading legal theorist
Ronald Dworkin (an American), "The Trouble with the Tribunals",
published recently in The New
York Review of Books. To link to Professor Dworkin’s article, click here.
In my opinion,
"concentration camp" is the only accurate term to describe the
American facility at Guantanamo Bay, which is characterized by the following
features: the prisoners are not identified as to name or nationality (with a
few exceptions, who are citizens of 'friendly' nations); there is no limit set
as to how long they can be incarcerated, and no right of habeas corpus; they
enjoy neither the treatment due to Prisoners of War (a status which the
Americans have refused to accord them, despite wide and strong international
pressure), nor the treatment due to persons accused of crimes; they cannot be
assured that they will even be informed about the evidence which might form the
basis for a verdict of guilty by the tribunal, and for an American-administered
punishment. It was in precisely in
this frame of mind (a firm subjective conviction that the captured men don't
deserve the full protection of the law because they are evidently enemies of
the state) that the Nazi authorities justified to themselves their various
Konzentrationslager.
I have already expressed my
alarm about the involvement of Canadian troops in this military campaign, which
has illegal rules of engagement in respect of captured combatants. I expressed my alarm to the Defence
Minister Mr. Eggleton, copying my letter to you. I wrote this letter on 2002 January 30, and I have yet to
receive an answer, or even an acknowledgement. So this is another thing I earnestly request you, as well as
issuing the order to recall our troops from Afghanistan: please either persuade
your Defence Minister (or his staff) to attend to his correspondence properly,
or else ask for his resignation.
If either you or Mr.
Eggleton needs to be reminded of my January letter, it is posted on a web site
associated with my University of Toronto philosophy course PHL200Y, at this
URL: http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/~dhutchin/eggletonletter.htm.
I have also posted, at the
same URL, the text of this present letter, and I hope I will be able to report
publicly in due course that I received an acknowledgement from you.
Yours sincerely,
Doug Hutchinson
Professor of Philosophy
Trinity College and
University of Toronto
copies: Faculty and
Graduate Students of Philosophy, University of Toronto;
Heather Mallick, The Globe and Mail.
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(the
first letter)
2002 January 30
Hon. Art Eggleton
Minister of Defence
Parliament, Ottawa
Sir; you should be ashamed
of yourself for having ordered Canadian soldiers into combat without the
corresponding obligation to treat any captured combatants as Prisoners of
War. In modern times Canadian
soldiers have never acted under these rules of engagement, and you have brought
disgrace to Canadian military tradition, and offended the sensibilities of all
right-thinking Canadians.
If you don’t yet
understand my outrage I would ask you to read the enclosed opinion piece by
Heather Mallick, published in the Globe and Mail on 26 January, a piece
which expresses my sentiments exactly.
Every single Canadian that I have spoken to during these last few days
shares these opinions.
I accept that it can be
right and in the public interest to outmanoeuvre our enemies, and to neutralize
or perhaps even kill them, if they threaten us; but it can never be right or in
the public interest to humiliate our enemies. The United States of America is making this mistake, and it
is imperative that we inform them that it is unacceptable and that we will have
nothing to do with it.
I accept that the United
States is our ally and friend; but that is no reason to follow it into
disgraceful and foolish behaviour.
The Roman statesman and philosopher Cicero discussed this question in
his book On Friendship, saying that it can be right to break off a
friendship if the friend asks you to do what is wrong, and that if you follow
your friend into crime, to claim that one did it for the sake of a friend
“is no excuse” (sec. xi.37).
I write not only as an
ordinary private Canadian, but also as a Professor of Philosophy at the
University of Toronto. I have a
large audience of students and colleagues who are hearing my view of your
un-Canadian conduct. My Canadian
values are consonant with those of the late Pierre Trudeau, who, had he been
still with us, would surely have been able to explain to you the difference
between the illegitimate use of force and the legitimate use of force, in
keeping with our Canadian tradition.
I urge you, for all our sakes, to reconsider.
Yours very sincerely,
Doug Hutchinson
Professor of Philosophy
Trinity College and
University of Toronto
copies: Prime Minister Chretien, Parliament;
Hon. John Godfrey, Parliament;
Heather Mallick, Globe
and Mail
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[This web page was first posted on 2002 April 18. It was revised and re-posted on 2002 April 25. It was revised and re-posted on 2002 May 28.]