Scammer
Banned
JTF2 soldiers, including Denis Morisset, fourth from right, pose for a group photo. CBC has blurred the faces of the soldiers.
Canadian military forces should be subject to the same level of oversight as law enforcement agencies, a Liberal MP said Thursday.
Dominic LeBlanc, the party's defence critic, made the comment following a joint investigation by CBC and Radio-Canada that revealed details of two military probes into the behaviour of Canada's covert elite Joint Task Force 2 (JTF2) unit in Afghanistan.
The closed-door investigations are linked to allegations that members of JTF2 witnessed American soldiers killing an unarmed man and, in a separate incident, that a member of JTF2 killed a man who was surrendering.
One military probe, dubbed Sand Trap, investigated claims that a Canadian was involved in the 2006 shooting death of an Afghan who had his hands up in the act of surrender. That probe ended without any charges.
Another military investigation, Sand Trap 2, which is looking into the claims against American forces, is still ongoing. The allegations have led to calls for more oversight of the covert unit.
LeBlanc said oversight could come without compromising JTF2's ability to do its job.
"Nobody’s suggesting that the operational details of a unit as important as JTF2 need to be made public," LeBlanc said.
"Nobody is suggesting that security needs to be breached or compromised and the lives of Canadian Forces put in danger by having an adequate oversight."
Claude Bachand, the Bloc Québécois defence critic, said there are ways that Parliament can obtain public oversight of the unit.
"It could be a small group of members of Parliament that have a high level of security," Bachand told CBC News.
"Of course, they’d be stuck with the information afterwards, but at least we’d be reassured that they're doing a job and they're overseeing what is going on in that group."
