You can bet that this same struggle to reveal information will be even worse in the Iacobucci inquiry since the subjects are still being investigated apparently.
From the Toronto StarIs it security – or convenience?
Government agencies' claims don't sound sincere
Feb 20, 2007 04:30 AM
Thomas Walkom
We have heard this story before. A public inquiry into a matter of national importance is called. The government vows its fullest co-operation. And then, claiming the requirements of national security, that same government tries to withhold from the public any piece of information that might embarrass it, its officials or its security agencies.
Justice John Major's Air India inquiry is the latest victim of this classic Ottawa two-step. After announcing the inquiry with much fanfare last year, Prime Minister Stephen Harper's government is now shackling it with so many claims of so-called national security confidentiality that it may collapse.
Major has threatened to shut his inquiry down in two weeks unless the government relents and allows him to make public literally thousands of censored documents related to the 1985 terror bombings that killed 331 people.
Let's be clear about this. The former Supreme Court judge is not insisting that the RCMP and Canadian Security Intelligence Service reveal all of their dark secrets publicly. He is happy to keep real state secrets secret.
But after perusing these documents in private, he's simply pointing out that most of the things the government wants to keep out of the public eye don't need that kind of protection.
At another point in history, Canada's government might have been accorded the benefit of the doubt on this. Nations do have security needs. Sometimes security agencies have a better sense of these needs than judges.
But the Air India probe follows in the footsteps of another public inquiry that involved national security. And Justice Dennis O'Connor's investigation into the case of Maher Arar – the Canadian who was arrested in New York and deported to Syria to be tortured – demonstrates chapter and verse the bogus nature of so many of Ottawa's national security claims.
Like the Air India inquiry, the Arar investigation featured a government determined to keep as much out of the public record as possible.
In 2004, when O'Connor attempted to release a sanitized summary of the evidence he had heard in private, the government insisted on censoring entire sections.
In one particularly bizarre instance, it blacked out portions of a newspaper article that O'Connor had cited.
For Arar's lawyers – and for the commission itself – the public hearings were like pulling teeth. Memos with entire paragraphs blacked out would be submitted into evidence so that lawyers could bargain, word by word, over what exactly could be allowed into the public domain.
Usually, after these battles, it turned out that the contested bits didn't involve national security at all. The aim of the censorship, rather, seemed more malevolent.
In one memo, for instance, Canada's consul in Damascus quoted Arar as saying that his Syrian jailers were treating him well. But the next sentence, blacked out by Ottawa, quoted the consul as saying that all of Arar's statements during that interview were dictated by Syrian guards.
The uncensored second sentence came to light only by accident after Arar's lawyers obtained the entire memo through a freedom-of-information request.
Another memo, in which a Canadian official reported that Arar told him he was tortured, was also kept out of the public domain until late in the hearings. The reasons the government gave for its censorship that time were "privacy concerns."
Two of the most damning bits of evidence – that the RCMP had told the Americans (without evidence) that Arar and his wife were Islamic extremists, and that Mounties had provided questions to Syrian military intelligence officers torturing another Canadian jailed in Damascus – were made public only at the inquiry's very end, thereby forestalling any cross-examination.
In the Air India case, the government would have us believe that utmost secrecy is needed to protect Canada from villainy. To reveal more, government lawyers say, would be to provide a roadmap to terrorists.
Given that the Air India bombings were part of a Sikh terror campaign that no longer exists, this explanation is hard to take seriously. Given also that the attacks succeeded, a fulsome investigation of what Canadian security agencies did and did not do 22 years ago should not provide a roadmap for anybody. Let us hope that CSIS and the RCMP are doing things differently today.
But a full, public investigation does have the capacity to embarrass. The 2005 trial of two Air India suspects (both of whom were acquitted) raised numerous questions about the lead-up to the bombings: Did CSIS have a mole among the terrorists? Why did the spy agency famously erase all of its surveillance tapes of the alleged plotters rather than hand them over to the Mounties to help in any criminal prosecution? Other than (to use trial judge Ian Josephson's words) "unacceptable negligence" on the part of CSIS, what else was going on?
It was supposed to be Major's job to determine this, in as public a manner as possible. The government and its security agencies are, in their usual manner, doing their utmost to make sure this doesn't happen.
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