Censored Details Of Arar Affair Revealed
I don’t know how better to present this, so I’m just going to quote the article that appeared in this morning’s Globe & Mail entitled Court lifts lid on secret Arar details…
“Newly declassified information shows that that Canadian agencies worked directly with the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and also received information known to be likely derived from Syrian torture during a post-9/11 investigation that culminated in the Maher Arar scandal.
The disclosure follows a pitched legal battle by Mr. Justice Dennis O’Connor, who fought to make public 1,500 words that the Canadian federal government had excised from his four-volume report released last year.
A Federal Court decision resulted in the release of some of the information Thursday morning.
Almost universally, the blotted out passages referred to the CIA or information most likely derived from Syrian torture.
There had been almost no direct references to this until now. As a result, Canadian agencies have borne the brunt of the blame for the scandal.
There had been almost no direct references to this until now. As a result, Canadian agencies have borne the brunt of the blame for the scandal.
Ottawa officials fought to keep the information secret, frequently arguing that it did not want to compromise the goodwill of foreign allies who sent in intelligence from abroad.
As anticipated, the Maher Arar affair was found to be the result of a chain of detentions of Canadian suspects in Syria. Much of what happened appears to have been influenced by the coerced confession of the first Canadian suspect to be jailed there.
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.”
Thus, based on intelligence elicited from a false confession under torture, Maher Arar was rendered to Syria, where he himself was held and tortured for a year and the government of this country willfully attempted to protect the CIA’s involvement in the matter.
The article continues…
“Judge O’Connor found that Mr. Arar was never a threat to Canadian national security and that authorities here had no case against him, but still spread incorrect and misleading information that may have caused the United States to send him to the Middle East, where he was jailed for a year. Canada has since compensated Mr. Arar $10-million.
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.”
The complicity of our government agencies (the Chrétien era included), and the current government’s willingness to attempt to protect the role and influence of the Central Intelligence Agency in this matter, is, to me, simply incomprehensible. The truth is, an innocent Canadian was sold out to a foreign power by his own government based on lies and engineered falsehoods, and then, after his release, those that were responsible for playing the most significant role in the matter, a foreign intelligence agency, were purposely protected by our government at the expense of our own agencies.
Today, from coast to coast, Canadians should be ashamed of the unscrupulous actions of both this government and that of Mr. Chrétien’s, as well as enraged that any Canadian government would willfully protect the role of a foreign country in the illegal seizure, rendition, imprisonment, and torture of a Canadian citizen. And to think that someone like Mr. Justice Simon Noel would actually exclaim in defense of the matter that…
“The third-party rule is one that is sacred among law-enforcement and intelligence agencies, and is premised on mutual confidence, reliability and trust.”
The truth. Now there’s something, Mr. Noel. In this case, the truth is that an innocent man lost a year of his life and endured God knows what at the hands of jailers in a foreign country based on faulty intelligence provided by a foreign intelligence service that, at the time, was so hyper-sensitive that it was probably willing to believe that pigs could fly if someone they had captured and rendered to one of numerous countries was willing to say as much. And yet when it comes to the truth of the matter, we’re willing to protect them in favour of disregarding the truth.
Now you tell me – what, exactly, is defensible about that?
The Globe was not alone is reporting this story today. The Toronto Star also ran a piece…
“New information made public this morning after a long legal battle with the federal government reveals CSIS suspected within weeks of Maher Arar’s arrest that the United States would ship him off to the Middle East where he likely faced torture.
It also shows Canada’s spy agency received information from Syria barely two months later that even Syrian authorities viewed Arar as a “nuisance” and not “as a major case.”
One can only imagine how Maher Arar must feel this morning.
The CBC provides a link to the original censored report here (.pdf).
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August 9th, 2007 at 1:25 pm
And all along I thought Canada knew nothing about this…
Christ… you are becoming as bad as us…
August 9th, 2007 at 1:34 pm
This just makes me sick, and sadly I thought Canada was better then this kind of thing. I guess it is about time I stop trusting our government, if our government was that easily swayed to the CIA’s way of thinking this isn’t going to turn out well for us.
RIP Canada :(
August 9th, 2007 at 1:50 pm
Im sorry, its the end of the day and my brain isn’t working correctly
I see the RCMP informing the CIA that Arar is associated with this El Maati guy (who confessed to an act of terrorism while under the duress of tortue)
I see that the CSIS knew that Arar would be heading to a torture camp
What am I missing here?
August 9th, 2007 at 2:17 pm
[quote comment="22625"]And all along I thought Canada knew nothing about this…
Christ… you are becoming as bad as us…[/quote]
How familiar are you with our PM Harper and his friends in the infamous Calgary School? Or Michael Ignatieff, for that matter, the man who wants to replace Harper as the Poodle Minister. I mean Prime Minister. We’re as bad, I would say, just less loud about it.
Enjoy some quotes from Ignatieff as he attempts a mea culpa on why he supported Bush’s Iraq adventure…from a piece he recently had in the NYTimes…
“The lesson I draw for the future is to be less influenced by the passions of people I admire — Iraqi exiles, for example — and to be less swayed by my emotions.”
“As a former denizen of Harvard, I’ve had to learn that a sense of reality doesn’t always flourish in elite institutions. It is the street virtue par excellence. Bus drivers can display a shrewder grasp of what’s what than Nobel Prize winners.”
“Democratic peoples should always be looking for something more than prudence in a leader: daring, vision and — what goes with both — a willingness to risk failure. Daring leaders can be trusted as long as they give some inkling of knowing what it is to fail. ”
“I’ve learned that good judgment in politics looks different from good judgment in intellectual life. Among intellectuals, judgment is about generalizing and interpreting particular facts as instances of some big idea. In politics, everything is what it is and not another thing.”
“To bring the new into being, a politician needs a sense of timing, of when to leap and when to remain still. Bismarck famously remarked that political judgment was the ability to hear, before anyone else, the distant hoofbeats of the horse of history.”
August 9th, 2007 at 2:26 pm
So this whole thing happened under Chrétien’s government? Wow, I’m afraid to know what would have happened to him if it had been Harper. I’ve always assumed that things like that could only happen in the States. What a wake up call.
August 9th, 2007 at 4:12 pm
Yep, Canada, and LIBERAL Canada, is the same as the Bush States.
Why are we so boastful again?
August 9th, 2007 at 4:36 pm
[quote comment="22651"]Yep, Canada, and LIBERAL Canada, is the same as the Bush States.
Why are we so boastful again?[/quote]
Because we demanded that the blacked-out parts of the information be revealed.
I’m not saying we’re any better than anyone else. The whole thing makes me sick, but we didn’t take that shit sitting down.
Somebody knew something was up, and in the end, a sliver of the truth came through. If this was enough to make me sick, I can only imagine what the rest of the “confidential” material says.
August 9th, 2007 at 4:37 pm
Because this is still the exception, not the rule. And thank god for that. Let’s not piss on our flag quite yet, beating ourselves about the head and wringing our hands in shame. We should be ashamed. Of ourselves, and our neighbors to the south.
But we have the chance to change that. So we’re still in good shape. And lets be honest, as with any major nation in the world, there are secrets the government keeps that people can disappear into. We need to prevent that. We are not the only ones, but here is a moment when we can define ourselves differently.
Personally, i think Arar should get a statue just for pointing this bullshit out to us. And what a small pittance of cash we paid him for it, for what he endured.
August 9th, 2007 at 7:13 pm
I was listening to CBC Radio today and they were talking about some memo’s that were sent by Canadian officials who knew Maher Arar was going to be tortured, hearing what was written in those memo’s stunned me, I can’t believe that this would happen in Canada or that there are people that cruel in positions of power.
August 9th, 2007 at 7:46 pm
[quote comment="22660"]
Personally, i think Arar should get a statue just for pointing this bullshit out to us. And what a small pittance of cash we paid him for it, for what he endured.[/quote]
And he turned around and donated it to charity, to boot.
August 9th, 2007 at 7:50 pm
[quote comment="22629"]Im sorry, its the end of the day and my brain isn’t working correctly
I see the RCMP informing the CIA that Arar is associated with this El Maati guy (who confessed to an act of terrorism while under the duress of tortue)
I see that the CSIS knew that Arar would be heading to a torture camp
What am I missing here?[/quote]
Well, what your comment didn’t touch on is that knowingly turning a prisoner over to a second party that is known to use torture, or to a second party who is going to turn said prisoner over to a third party (buzzword of the moment: rendition) that uses torture is a violation of Canadian law. To do so, and then try to hide it after the fact….
August 9th, 2007 at 9:01 pm
Somebody’s embarrassing himself trying to play devil’s advocate again.
August 9th, 2007 at 10:59 pm
Sigh. Let’s all take hints from the CIA, because even though their rendition practices are mighty shady, they sure managed to prevent that major terrorist attack on US soil! Oh wait…
And really, I trust none of the major political parties at the federal level, or their leaders. Maybe Green, I don’t know their platform as well as the Tory/Libs/NDP. If I could (and didn’t mind the whole separatist thing) I’d gladly vote for Gilles Duceppe; he seems to be the only leader with his head screwed on right.
August 10th, 2007 at 6:55 am
[quote]Um, no, the CIA told us that Arar had been named by Maati, that’s why the article states…[/quote]
Yeah Im not getting it. What did the RCMP have to do with this then?
Didn’t we (our Canadian agencies) already know the CIA used torture? I dont understand how this is new, or news worthy to such scale that it is.
I guess the part of “CSIS visited Syria once Mr. Arar was in custody” is my major concern. We should have removed him and brought him to home soil, by force if necessary.
[quote]Somebody’s embarrassing himself trying to play devil’s advocate again.[/quote]
Not this time… if you choose to make fun of someone (me) who is ignorant, yet asking questions to remove this ignorance, your just rude. Until you have something substansive to add to the conversation, or questions to ask, just shut your yap.
August 10th, 2007 at 12:44 pm
[quote comment="22714"]
Yeah Im not getting it. What did the RCMP have to do with this then?
[/quote]
The picture I’ve gotten from this is that the RCMP were the ones investigating Arar, and they collaborated with the CIA in providing information on Arar, such as what he does for a living and when and where he’d be going for vacation. The CIA are known to be pushy, and the RCMP likely ended up providing info that really had no right to be in the hands of a foreign intelligence agency.
All the CIA had to do was keep telling the mounties that they had a “reliable” contact that had named Arar as a potential terrorist. Fast forward to the present day.
I’m betting when word came across that Arar had been arrested and rendered on his way home from a vacation, there was the sound - not unlike a jackhammer - of several RCMP investigators banging their heads on walls.
Frankly, the CIA should have done their job in tracking down bin Laden, instead of tracking down innocent Canadians to ship overseas for torture sessions. Not only is it wrong on moral, ethical, and operational grounds, but it’s also a f*cking waste of taxpayer money - money that could be much better used in just about any other capacity.
August 10th, 2007 at 3:48 pm
this shocked me when i took a look at the headlines in the globe and mail today. sigh.
August 10th, 2007 at 7:17 pm
I sometimes fear we’re talking about an ugly Canuck tradition of sorts here. Anyone catch that news item a couple weeks back about the Mounties corresponding with the FBI back in 1969.
Security concern back then?
John & Yoko’s plans for the Mosport Peace Festival in Toronto.