20Dec03-CSIS, RCMP alerted U.S. about Arar, Powell says
By PAUL KORING
From Saturday's Globe and Mail
Washington — Both the RCMP and CSIS fingered Maher Arar to U.S. anti-terrorist agencies, Foreign Minister Bill Graham says he was told by U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell.
Mr. Graham, who asked for and has now received an accounting of Canadian involvement from Mr. Powell, also said his U.S. counterpart had confirmed there was no Canadian involvement in the White House decision to deport Mr. Arar secretly to Syria, where he was tortured during 10 months in captivity before being released in October.
Wayne Easter, then Canadian solicitor-general, admitted last month that Canada was among the countries that provided information to the United States on Mr. Arar, but he did not say who provided the intelligence.
The Canadian Security Intelligence Service had previously said it had nothing to do with the arrest of Mr. Arar. CSIS director Ward Elcock told the Security Intelligence Review Committee the service was not involved in the Ottawa man's arrest or removal to his country of birth on suspicion of terrorism, a spokeswoman for the committee said.
Mr. Powell telephoned Mr. Graham on Dec. 2 to provide the account.
Mr. Graham had asked Mr. Powell in early November to furnish a full accounting of Canadian involvement.
"Both [CSIS and the RCMP] provided information to the U.S.," Mr. Graham said. But no Canadians were informed or consulted about the decision to deport Mr. Arar to Syria.
"They made the decision to do that entirely on their own," he said, adding that he has accepted Mr. Powell's assurances that the deportation decision was made by U.S. officials alone. The two also agreed to work out a set of protocols to avoid a repeat of the Arar case, which caused widespread outrage in Canada, Mr. Graham said.
The role, if any, of the RCMP and CSIS during Mr. Arar's 10 days of interrogation by U.S. anti-terrorist and immigration agents remains murky.
Mr. Arar, a Canadian citizen who was born in Syria, was arrested at New York 's Kennedy Airport on Sept. 26, 2002. He was travelling to Canada on a Canadian passport.
Canadian diplomats at first were unaware that he had been detained.
An RCMP officer eventually informed Foreign Affairs officials in Ottawa of Mr. Arar's detention, Mr. Graham said earlier this week in a telephone interview.
During his detention in New York, Mr. Arar says, he was confronted with a lease he signed in 1997 in Ottawa. It was apparently given to U.S. police or intelligence agencies by their Canadian counterparts.
The five-year-old lease documents were witnessed by Abdullah Almalki, a man the United States regards as an al-Qaeda suspect. Mr. Arar says he was friends with Mr. Almalki's brother and that Mr. Almalki had signed as a witness on the lease because the brother was busy.
No account has been given of how, or when, the lease got into the possession of the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation or of immigration agents who were interrogating Mr. Arar.
Mr. Graham said officials are working on a protocol to prevent recurrences.
At least one preliminary meeting has been held, but hammering out a deal may be difficult. For instance, although Mr. Arar was entitled to — and received — consular visits by Canadian diplomats, Canadians held at Guantanamo Bay fall outside all normal international legal protections.
Nor is it clear that the White House is willing to give Ottawa any ironclad guarantees that there will not be similar secret deportations of dual nationals.
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