Over the weekend, the Sunday Star-Times published a story suggesting that New Zealand SAS troops deployed to Afghanistan in 2002 had committed war crimes:
International legal experts say New Zealand broke the Geneva Convention and laws against torture when, from 2002, our elite SAS troops transferred 50-70 prisoners to the Americans at the Kandahar detention centre in southern Afghanistan.Prisoners were turned over to the Americans despite the NZ soldiers knowing that they were likely to be tortured and abused - a basic violation of the Convention Against Torture. In addition, the SAS did not take proper details of those prisoners, effectively helping the Americans create "ghost detainees". Several of them are believed to have ended up in the US gulag in Guantanamo.The centre was known by US soldiers as "Camp Slappy", and prisoners there have described being severely beaten and tortured, drenched with water and left to freeze outside in winter.
It should be deeply shaming that New Zealand troops were involved in this. It should be even more shaming that there has been no official inquiry, no serious attempt to learn what happened and establish policies to prevent it happening in future. Instead it has all been quietly swept under the rug.
It should also ring alarm bells about any future military cooperation with the US. According to a BBC report, the Americans were still torturing prisoners in Afghanistan as late as last year. The question the government needs to answer before it makes any further troop commitment to Afghanistan is how it will ensure that prisoners taken by NZ troops and handed over to the US are treated humanely and in accordance with international law. And if it can not or will not answer that question, it should not contribute. It is that simple.
(More on Pundit here)
