One can only imagine what it must be like for an adult prisoner to endure US treatment at Guantanamo. But for Omar Khadr, who was sent to the facility when he was just fifteen years of age, his experience must have been all the more traumatic.

Today the Toronto Star released video footage of Kadr, then sixteen, being question by CSIS agents. In the video, which was secretly shot through an air vent, Khadr appears to be suffering from complete emotional detachment. When the agents leave the room, and he is left alone, his fear and extremely heightened state of anxiety remain visibly amplified, indicating that either, at the age of sixteen, he deserves an academy award because he knew he was being filmed, or that he was indeed so traumatically enveloped as to render him in such a state.

Legally, Khadr should never have been taken to Guantanamo. International law dictates that he should have been classified a child soldier and treated as such. Instead he was shipped off to the world’s foremost black hole and has been a prisoner there ever since, subjected to God knows what. If FBI documents released this year are any indication, entirely unethical interrogation practices were certainly on the menu.

Of course, your average ‘kill-em-all pundit’ thinks it all pathetic, that the video demonstrates that the CSIS agents that questioned Khadr displayed a semblance of compassion. But let’s remember one thing – they left him there. In fact, they, and the government of this country at the time, and currently, are just as complicit as those holding Khadr.

So what does that make us, exactly?

If you’re a Canadian that believes that this nation is not the sort of nation that stands shoulder to shoulder with those that have been responsible for holding individuals for years only to discover that many of them are innocent (see the McClatchy reports from June), despite the fact that they’ve been denied their rights under the law and international conventions while, at the same time, those holding them profess to be globally instilling the virtues of the rule of law, then you have cause for serious concern. Because that is not what my grandfather and two of my great uncles fought to defend sixty some odd years ago, and that is certainly not the nation in which I want to die.

I have traveled across this country almost seventy times, coast to coast, and seen more of it, and its people, than the majority of Canadians ever will. And I can honestly say, given my experiences, the acceptance, and even the participation, in such criminality is not what this country stands for.

If CSIS agents interviewed Khadr that means that our government has been complicit in condoning US detentions and all that they entail.

From the Toronto Star article…

“Documents released by Khadr’s lawyers last week raised questions about just what Canada knew concerning Khadr’s treatment. Canadian officials have always publicly stated that they have “sought and received assurances” from the U.S. that Khadr has been treated humanely. But a foreign affairs document released last week revealed that Gould had been told that Khadr was subjected to a sleep deprivation regime the U.S. military dubbed the “frequent flyer program.”

The practice is considered mental torture, according to international law and the U.S. Army Field Manual that governs military interrogators.

“It is shocking to learn that as far back as five years ago Canadian officials knew of the torture and ill-treatment Omar Khadr had experienced but did not intervene on his behalf,” Amnesty International Canada wrote to Harper after the information was revealed.”

While contacting the office of the Prime Minister is somewhat of a futile gesture given that complaints from actual citizens are routinely disregarded, the action itself, with regards to the belief that this nation’s government is still accountable to the people, is important. I therefore urge you to email the office of the Prime Minister about this affair. You can also contact his office by mail or fax at the address listed below…

Office of the Prime Minister
80 Wellington Street
Ottawa
K1A 0A2

Fax: 613-941-6900

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).

Racial profiling is something that we, as Canadians, like to believe hasn’t been on the rise in our country since September 11th. In fact, most of us like to believe that our institutions are now beyond such activities entirely. Unfortunately, that is not the case, as an article by Stefan Christoff in the Montreal Mirror recently pointed out.

According to Christoff’s piece, CSIS (the Canadian Security Intelligence Service) has been “conducting regular interviews and interrogations with hundreds of Arabs and Muslims across Canada at their work places, homes and in the vicinity of local mosques�?.

Because of the increase in CSIS activities regarding the interrogation of Canadian Muslims, the Canadian Council on American-Islamic Relations in Canada has shipped literally thousands of copies of a booklet to communities across the country detailing their Charter rights so that they are aware of them in the event that they are confronted by the authorities.

In the article, Christoff quotes a man from Montreal now working in Kuwait who told him during a telephone interview…

“I got a call from a CSIS agent a couple of months ago asking for a meeting at a café downtown on Peel street,�? says former Concordia student Mohammed over the phone from Kuwait, where he is currently working as a mechanical engineer. He asked that his last name not be used due to fears of possible repercussions. “I was asked numerous questions concerning my own involvement in the Muslim community [and] was asked by the CSIS agent to not bring a lawyer to the meeting. The agents acknowledged that they had no specific incriminating evidence against me but explained in a non-direct fashion that they simply wanted to gather information on our community, leading me to feel suspect in Canada simply because of my religion.�?

We live in a world in which Western society has largely held some 1.5 billion people responsible for the act of a handful of madmen. Given the recent tragedy at Virginia Tech, are we now to view Korean Canadians as possible mass murderers that, at any moment, might go on a shooting rampage? You will, of course, notice that after Oklahoma City there wasn’t a backlash against Caucasians, nor was CSIS interrogating those who use fertilizer on a daily basis or that commonly rent vans.

The enemy here is ignorance, nothing besides. And for non-Muslim Canadians to stand by and allow racial profiling to occur, racial profiling that is funded by their tax dollars, given CSIS’s budget of some $280 million dollars, is an absolute outrage.