Chris
this is from a Canadian Progressive Journalist.... If our government manages to shift the blame for this to the US, the people involved will walk away scot free.
No one off hook in Arar debacle
Post-9/11, caution out the window
MPs unanimous in call for apology
Sep. 21, 2006. 05:58 AM
THOMAS WALKOM
NATIONAL AFFAIRS COLUMNIST
In the Arar affair, the worm has truly turned.
When the Canadian computer engineer was arrested by U.S. authorities during a stopover in New York four years ago and deported to Syria to be tortured, he had almost no champions here in Canada. Some MPs demanded to know why this dangerous man hadn't been arrested earlier.
In those days, there was nothing but praise for the RCMP and its efforts to battle terror. Flash forward four years. Today it's hard to find anyone in public life who doesn't laud Arar.
Yesterday, the Commons voted unanimously to apologize to him — although the government warned that this doesn't mean it is admitting any legal liability.
And now conventional wisdom holds that the Mounties acted like a bunch of dopes. There are calls for RCMP Commissioner Giuliano Zaccardelli to be fired. In the Commons, opposition MPs say the government should move quickly to discipline those RCMP officers responsible.
Still others question the idea of allowing the RCMP any role in national security cases. The implication, never explicitly stated, is that the Mounties are just big, dumb cops — too unsophisticated to deal with tricky issues of terrorism and security. But does this focus on the RCMP's role in the Arar affair let everyone else off the hook?
Certainly, the Mounties did behave egregiously. Justice Dennis O'Connor's just-released report recounts in chilling detail how the RCMP set the stage for Arar's deportation to Syria, how its bureaucratic intransigence stymied Canadian efforts to get him freed and how, after he was released, it misled the government on its role in the affair.
However, a more careful reading of the three-volume report of O'Connor's judicial inquiry provides a picture that, at one level, is friendlier to the RCMP than the past two days of headlines suggest and yet, at another, is more chilling. For what the critics forget is that in the months following the terror attacks on New York and Washington, RCMP officers were operating in a context that they had not created. It was not the Mounties who passed, in record time, a sweeping anti-terrorism bill that turned upside down some of Canada's traditional liberties. It was the Parliament of Canada.
By criminalizing as terrorism an entire range of often vaguely defined activities, this bill did two things. First, it brought the Mounties, as Canada's national police force, back foursquare into the national security game.
Equally important, the new anti-terror laws gave the RCMP a mandate to ferret out activities which, in more normal times, would not have been the subject of criminal investigations — such as associating with the wrong people or carrying out otherwise lawful activities that could be construed as aiding the wrong people. Having once done this the Mounties were somehow supposed to collect evidence capable of passing muster in a criminal trial.
Lurking in the background was an overwhelming climate of fear. As O'Connor recounts, the operating assumption within government throughout the immediate post 9/11 period was that another terror attack was not only possible but imminent.
Few were calling on police to be careful. Quite the reverse. The public wanted quick action and so did the politicians. Normally sensible media commentators were recommending that security services engage in so-called "black operations" even if that meant cutting a few civil-liberty corners.
Human rights advocates Alan Dershowitz and Michael Ignatieff were recommending the use of what most people would call torture (Ignatieff, now a Liberal leadership candidate, prefers the term "coercive interrogation.") Among security agencies, the watchword was co-operation. That was government's demand and that was the message passed to the troops. No more turf protection. No more need to obey bureaucratic rules. It was wartime and there was only one enemy.
This, as O'Connor notes, was certainly the message that Project A-O Canada, the Mounties investigating Arar, took from the RCMP brass (who, like shrewd bosses the world over, were clever enough not to put any of this in writing and now deny that they authorized anything improper).
A-O Canada investigators told the Americans everything they had on Arar, plus a number of things that they knew to be untrue — such as the allegation that he and his wife were Islamic extremists linked to Al Qaeda.
What the Mounties wanted from Arar, it seems, was information. But he would talk to them only under certain conditions, including having his lawyer present, and that they did not want.
So while RCMP officers, according to O'Connor, did not conspire to have Arar arrested and tortured, it seems clear from his report that they were not unhappy about this turn of events and hoped to see whatever information interrogators were able to extract.
Indeed, what is so depressing about O'Connor's summary of the evidence he heard is that for a lengthy period of time, just about everyone in government — with the exception of a few dedicated souls in the consular division of Foreign Affairs — were content to have Arar mouldering in a Syrian dungeon.
It wasn't that they actively conspired to keep him there. It was just that they didn't really try hard to get him out.
For the security agencies, including the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service, there was always the possibility that keeping Arar in captivity might provide them with useful information. Within the Liberal government, there were fears that efforts to free Arar might backfire politically — the so-called Khadr effect. (In 1996, then-prime minister Jean Chrétien intervened with Pakistani authorities to obtain the release of Ahmed Said Khadr, who was accused of terrorism at the time; it later turned out that Khadr was a pal of Osama bin Laden).
And not just government took a disturbingly casual approach. Prime Minister Stephen Harper and his Conservatives may be swooning over Arar today. But back in 2002, they had little sympathy for his plight. Then, it fell to the New Democrats and a few Liberal backbenchers to defend him.
Back then, Harper asked why the Liberal government was defending a suspected terrorist. Members of his caucus (then called the Canadian Alliance) were blunter. They wanted to know why Ottawa hadn't arrested this dangerous man earlier.
Even in the media, the U.S. decision to deport a Canadian to Syria was not — at first — considered big news. In the Star, the Arar story did not make the front page until October 2003, nearly a year after his arrest and torture.
O'Connor has made many useful suggestions, a key one being that RCMP officers should follow their own rules. And so they should. But to fixate on the Mounties is to miss the point. These were not rogue officers. At some level, they were doing what Canada's elected government — and a good chunk of the Canadian public — wanted them to do. That's what is really troubling |
