Video: The Abuse of Secrecy in the Arar Affair

From CBC's The National, Alex Neve of Amnesty International Canada and security analyst Wesley Wark discuss the newly uncensored portions of the Arar Inquiry report.



As one who also covers American politics and the battles between congress, the White House and organizations like the ACLU over claims of executive privilege wrapped in the mantra of national security, I have to say that Canada's system appears to place us light years ahead when it comes to demanding and getting transparency in these types of cases (although sometimes these victories can take a very long time to be realized). That type of regime of secrecy cannot and will not be tolerated in this country, as much as Stephen Harper's paranoid Conservative government wishes to make it so.

I recently had the occasion to reread the Reader's Digest 2006 interview with Stephen Harper, Man With a Plan, in which he was asked about the comparisons made between him and Bush. Note his cluelessness:

RD: Are there comparisons that offend you?

Harper: Yes. The Bush comparisons offend me. And not because I have any kind of personal dislike of George W. Bush. I don’t. It’s that the comparisons generally are not thoughtful. Bush has SUVs in his motorcade, and I have SUVs in my motorcade—“Ha ha, he’s just like George Bush.” Well, of course, this is actually the decision of the RCMP, and I’m sure George Bush didn’t pick out the cars in his own motorcade either. That kind of thing bothers me because it’s just a stereotype designed for polemical purposes.

No, Steve, you're compared to Bush because of your love of absolute control and as these new Arar inquiry revelations show us, that hammer you like to bring down on the Canadian people by fighting against things that might embarrass security or other officials implies a twisted sort of reasoning that is well beyond what most Canadians ought to find acceptable.

One would think that, when it comes to ensuring the safety of all Canadians, allowing us to finally see the inner workings of CSIS and the RCMP and how they contributed to an innocent man being tortured would be considered to be an absolute necessity so the same behaviour will never be repeated again. We cannot rely on our security agencies to police themselves, obviously, and as the interviewees point out, the current oversight regime is "fractured".

The Harper government's attempt to cover that up serves no one except those who prefer to remain complicit in such human rights abuses. That was the bottom line in arguing that these documents remain censored. The revelations do not pose a threat to our national security. Not revealing those portions however had the potential to enable CSIS and the RCMP to continue ignoring their own, very serious problems.

In the inquiry report, RCMP officials seemed to be tripping all over themselves to claim that they hadn't worked with the CIA prior to 9/11 - as if that was a good enough excuse to not understand how the CIA operates. And of course we now know that CSIS knew about the CIA's extraordinary rendition (torture flights) practices and still either naively trusted the CIA or just didn't care enough to ensure a Canadian citizen's rights would be protected. The official line seems to be that the CIA just pulled a fast one of Canadian security officials who supposedly had years of experience. How can that possibly be justified and what kind of prime minister would choose to cover that up?

Harper needs to be reminded at every turn that he works for the Canadian people, not his own interests or those of people who have the power to place our lives in jeopardy.

As Alex Neve said, keep the pressure on your MPs and government officials by letting them know that we will not put up with this subversion of our right to know the facts. We will not allow Harper to operate as Bush Lite.
 

Some Censored Portions of the Arar Report Released

Newly released portions of the Arar Inquiry report which had previously been censored - apparently to protect CSIS, the CIA, the FBI and the RCMP - show that Canadian security officials knew that information they relied on that damned Arar to a one year stay via "extraordinary rendition" in a Syrian jail had been obtained through the use of torture and that he most likely would be tortured as well.

The Globe and Mail offers the following summary but you can read the documents here (.pdf file - the previously censored material is highlighted by bold text).

Newly declassified findings of Judge O'Connor's report indicate a host of foreign agencies shoulder the blame for what happened:

• Investigating Mounties had no experience in dealing with the CIA before 2001, but a relationship began to develop after the Sept. 11 attacks that year.

• As anticipated, information from abroad – likely the statements by Mr. El Maati* – found its way into Canadian searches and interviews conducted in January, 2002. "When applying for search warrants, Project A-O Canada relied on information obtained from a country with a poor human rights record." The report adds that "no assessment was made of the reliability of that information."

• In the fall of 2002, the information was still being treated as credible. "In September 2002, the RCMP filed an application for a telephone warrant … [it] referred to [Ahmed Abou El Maati's] confession to the Syrians that he undertook pilot training at the request of his brother and that he accepted a mission to be a suicide bomber by exploding a truck bomb on Parliament hill."

• Even though the RCMP was made aware that the confession was extracted by "extreme coercion," they insisted that it was "still accurate and continues to be true." In this period, RCMP investigators had heard of Mr. El Maati's complaints of torture but dismissed them as "damage control" and asserted the confession corroborated their earlier investigation of him.

• It was the CIA that sent questions to Canada about Mr. Arar when U.S. border guards arrested him in October, 2002. The CIA, which sent him to the Middle East in shackles aboard a leased Gulfstream jet, appears to have been driving the process to send Mr. Arar to Syria.

• Canadian officials were knowledgeable about the U.S. practice of "rendering" suspects to harsh interrogations third-countries. "I think the U.S. would like to get Arar to Jordan where they can have their way with him," one CSIS official wrote in an email on October 10, 2002 – two days after Mr. Arar was quietly sent to that country, and on to Syria, for questioning.

• CSIS visited Syria once Mr. Arar was in custody and came back with the impression that officials there "looked upon the matter as more of a nuisance than anything." He remained jailed there for nearly a year.

(* Truck driver Ahmad Abou El Maati, just two months after 9/11, “confessed” in Syria to plotting a truck bomb attack in Canada at the behest of his brother, who is still considered a fugitive al-Qaeda suspect.

The truck driver has since returned to Canada, uncharged, and recanted his statements as purely the product of torture. He has also expressed regret that he was forced into naming Canadian associates of his, including Maher Arar, including saying that he saw the telecommunications engineer in Afghanistan in the early 1990s.)

It shouldn't come as a surprise that Canadian intelligence agencies knew about the CIA's "extraordinary rendition" practices since that program was authorized by Clinton in 1995. But, for the RCMP to expect that a warning it sent out with the supposed intel it had on Arar would cause the CIA not to act without its permission shows how incredibly naive Canadian officials chose to be in this case.

Again, members of Project A-O Canada had little experience or training to
assist them in handling the information-sharing challenges confronting them. This was a new environment for them. For example, they had never dealt with the CIA. As observed by the Assistant Criminal Operations (CROPS) officer, with “A” Division, Inspector Garry Clement, the CIA had a lot more latitude than law enforcement agencies when it came to the war on terror. Project A-O Canada was dealing with American agencies that were more sophisticated in matters of national security and might not always play by the rules Project members would expect.

Considering the CIA's shady reputation and history of illegal, covert activities - including projects like MKULTRA in Canada - one would think the average Canadian intelligence official would know better than to trust the CIA to do everything above board.

To suddenly feign surprise, after providing information on Mr Arar that was false and that was known to have been coerced via the torture of El Maati (a fact which, as the newly revealed portions reveal, was not presented to the judge who handled the telephone warrant in this case) truly rings hollow.

There is definitely enough blame to go around and while Bush repeated again during a press conference today that that the US does not torture, anyone with any knowledge of the CIA's history should have known better than to believe that Mr Arar - or anyone in CIA custody - would be safe.

The judge who ordered the release of these censored passages should be applauded for shedding ever more light on exactly how these ugly covert actions operate because, as much as the Bush administration bloviates about its so-called respect for human rights, the reality is painfully obvious: they'll do anything if they think it will advance the "war on terror", even if that means siding with people and other governments who use torture.

And the Democrats certainly don't get a free pass on this issue either, some of whom helped pass the Military Commissions Act - enabling prosecutorial immunity for CIA torturers - and further eroding legal rights by enabling the passage of the FISA bill last week. The heavy-handedness of the US government is institutional.

This isn't over yet. US officials must be held accountable.

Update: See my related post - Video: The Abuse of Secrecy in the Arar Affair
 

Release of Censored Portion of Arar Inquiry Report Ordered

A judge has ordered the release of some censored material in the Maher Arar inquiry report.

Via the Ottawa Citizen:

Though the censored information represents less than one per cent of the 1,200-page report, Paul Cavalluzzo, the commission's counsel, said yesterday the issue goes to the heart of government accountability.

"Even though we're dealing with national security issues, this was a public inquiry called by the government and our view is that by bringing disclosure to the public, government actors become more accountable and the transparency of the process is an important part of making government actors more accountable.

But:

If either side appeals yesterday's judgment, the attorney general has the new power, under the 2001 Anti-terrorism Act, to issue a certificate prohibiting disclosure of the information, effectively overruling any court judgment ordering disclosure.

"That's the draconian nature of Section 38," said Mr. Cavalluzzo. "We could go right to the Supreme Court of Canada and win and then, when we're carrying away the victorious judgment, they could slap us with a ministerial certificate saying, 'You (still) can't disclose it'."

I don't know how parliament let this language stand in Section 38:

* the requirement to provide notice to the Attorney General of Canada in circumstances where it is foreseeable that the disclosure of information in connection with or in the course of proceedings could be injurious to international relations or national defence or national security;

Just how do they decide what might be "injurious"? What's the standard? Is simple embarrassment of a foreign government enough?

One important point that the Ottawa Citizen's article doesn't disclose is that the Attorney General's decision can be appealed and overturned by a judge, so at least there is some protection from dictatorial powers being in the hands of a government appointee.

At issue are these matters:

"According to Mr. Arar, he has a right to know the facts relating to his detention, deportation and torture. Furthermore, he claims that the redactions within the public report may contain information which is necessary for the public to understand the actions of the RCMP and CSIS in the Arar affair.

"In particular, he believes that at least some of the redactions relate to the candour of certain CSIS operatives, who may have misled their superiors. Mr. Arar also argues that the redactions conceal the fact that briefings to numerous ministers were inadequate and that the RCMP's investigation and adherence to information sharing protocols was deficient.

If the Harper government decides to appeal this latest decision, there will definitely be questions raised about who they might be trying to protect and why. The utter incompetence of the RCMP in this affair surely doesn't end with the resignation of the now disgraced former commissioner Giuliano Zaccardelli.

Related: Maher Arar's site

The Arar inquiry - Recommendations

British report on U.S. rendition echoes Arar experience

OTTAWA — A scathing new British report about how the United States has exploited British intelligence information to seize three individuals and fly them to secret prisons for terrorism interrogations echoes the troubling case of Canada’s Maher Arar.

An investigation by the parliamentary intelligence and security committee has found the U.S. ignored British security officials’ insistence that no actions were to be taken against the individuals based on information they shared with their American counterparts.

But three men with British connections were still swept up in the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency’s “rendition” program in 2002 and taken to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and other “black” holding centres in Europe. U.S. officials, the report said, knew the British had no intention of arresting them.