It's fine to tout the benefits of exporting democracy, but ultimately it's at home that we must show that we believe in these principles.

Now that the dust from the Vancouver Olympics has settled, two things are clear: First, if any of us ever hears the hackneyed phrase “Own the Podium” again, it’ll be too soon. Second, the warm glow of Canadian Olympic pride has apparently not outshone the spotlight on the Aghanistan detainee scandal, as some had feared, and others had probably hoped.

Now that the House has once again been permitted to sit, the matter continues to unfold. The latest developments involve another government official – this time a former second in command of the Canadian Embassy in Kabul – coming forward to say that she had warned the government of the day about of the likelihood of detainee torture as far back as 2005. In addition, the Harper administration has recently appointed former Supreme Court Justice Frank Iacobucci to review all of the government’s documentation relating to the issue, in order to help determine what should be released to Parliament. Not surprisingly, Parliament believes that it should see everything.

As a refresher to those who have had better things to do than tracking the myriad twists and turns of this saga, here is the basic story. For the past two years, the Military Police Complaints Commission has been investigating peripheral Canadian complicity in the torture of detainees in Afghanistan. The issue is whether Canada transferred prisoners when we knew, or should have known, that they were likely to be tortured – a violation of international law, this is serious business, indeed. The Conservative Government has repeatedly claimed it had no such knowledge, and never received credible evidence to support such allegations. In October 2009, an experienced diplomat who had been posted in Afghanistan, Richard Colvin, testified to the contrary, alleging that he had repeatedly warned the government of such events, and had included specific allegations of such torture made by a transferred detainee. So the question is: what, if anything, did the government know of this, and did it continue a policy of transferring prisoners to Canada’s Afghan partners, despite knowing that they would be tortured thereafter?

When Colvin’s assertions came to light, the Harper Administration’s response was to immediately shoot the proverbial messenger, unleashing a backlash of recrimination against the civil servant. The insinuations were ugly and far from subtle: Colvin was a “dupe” of the Taliban; he was naïve; he was a fool who had been misled by the terrorists, and now he was unwittingly being used as their tool. The subtext was that Mr. Colvin had been “had,” and, for all intents and purposes, had been subverted. In the government’s view, the allegations were absurd. After all, who could possibly have imagined that an experienced career diplomat, who had worked on a daily basis on the ground in Afghanistan for years, could possibly be as informed about the realities of the situation as a politician thousands of kilometres away who periodically received a briefing note about matters there? The very notion was apparently preposterous.

So when the diplomat’s testimony came to light, Peter McKay angrily stood in the House of Commons to denounce Mr. Colvin, thundering that there was not one shred of evidence or even one reported case supporting the claims.

Except, of course, it turned out there was. Within a couple of weeks, Canada’s top general would acknowledge that the military had received exactly that sort of claim: evidence that a prisoner captured by our military in 2006, and handed over to Afghan authorities had then been abused. From this, it would seem that Mr. Colvin wasn’t such a dupe after all. Not surprisingly, the furor surrounding this matter would then grow exponentially, with the Opposition parties baying for more information, while the Conservatives insisted that the issue wasn’t worth discussing. Tempers flared, allegations of a cover-up flourished and ultimately (though coincidentally, according to the Harper Administration) parliament would end up prorogued.