This is an old article from the Star that was captured by my Google alert. I thought it worth republishing. I will post updated articles on the Iacobucci inquiry. The parts about Heafy's experience are interesting and reveal the sort of nonsense that sometimes occurs in investigation, nonsense that harms innocent people and for which the perpetrators are never punished or held responsible in any way.
Fans of civil liberties get a boost
TheStar.com - News - Fans of civil liberties get a boost
December 13, 2006
Thomas Walkom
OTTAWA—After giving the RCMP and other security agencies unprecedented authority to fight terrorism, maybe — just maybe — the government is starting to rein them back in.
True, the Conservative government is being typically cagey about proposed reforms to the RCMP and six other security agencies (some of which, like Transport Canada's intelligence branch, most people have never heard of).
True also, Canadian security services — and the RCMP in particular — have a history of successfully staring down those who would tame them.
Still, among those who like the idea of civil liberties, the mood in this cold and rainy capital is almost optimistic.
On one side of downtown Wellington St., Justice Dennis O'Connor releases part two of his report into national security, a detailed blueprint for reform designed to deter the RCMP and other security agencies from engaging in the kinds of excesses that resulted in the arrest and torture four years ago of Canadian computer engineer Maher Arar.
On the other side of Wellington St., in the basement of the Parliament Buildings, Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day announces a new inquiry into yet another case of Canadian Muslims who were arrested without charge, jailed and mistreated abroad.
This one, under retired Supreme Court Justice Frank Iacobucci, is to determine the role of Canadian security agencies and other government officials in these Arar-like travesties.
More specifically, the latest inquiry should, in the words of Amnesty International's Alex Neve, be able to determine whether the cases of Arar, Ahmed Elmaati, Abdullah Almalki and Muayyed Nureddin form a pattern — a kind of Canadian version of America's now notorious extraordinary rendition program, whereby Washington ships terror suspects abroad to be tortured by friendly dictatorships.
What Neve means is that the four have much in common. All are Muslim-Canadians; all were under investigation by either the RCMP or the Canadian Security Intelligence Service; all ended up in jail in Syria where, they say, they were interrogated by men who possessed information that could only have come from the Canadian government; all say they were tortured.
Exactly what will come of the Iacobucci inquiry won't be known for months. The government says it wants the inquiry to be held mostly in secret. But it says Iacobucci can hold as much in public as he wants — assuming that the government agrees.
This is in contrast to the Arar inquiry, which was supposed to be public but, thanks to government rules on national security, was often held in secret.
Nonetheless, Iacobucci can take hope in the fact that the O'Connor exercise was a singular success. In the first part of his report, released in September, O'Connor categorically cleared Arar, concluding that not a shred of evidence exists to suggest he is anything but a loyal Canadian caught up in circumstances not of his own making.
In part two, released yesterday, O'Connor outlines a series of proposed reforms for the RCMP and most other Canadian security agencies (with the significant and somewhat mysterious exception of military intelligence). His proposals are clear and doable. Best of all, they make sense.
He would set up a real review body to monitor the RCMP, one with the power to subpoena documents, compel witnesses to testify and otherwise get to the bottom of the kind of dubious police practices he found when looking into the Arar case.
He would give the body that already monitors CSIS more power so it could do the same thing. Other unmonitored civilian intelligence units (such as those in the transport and immigration departments) would be covered by one of these two review bodies.
And he would set up an overarching structure in order to ensure that those wronged by the country's security agencies don't get bogged down in a bureaucratic runaround.
The need for review — particularly in the case of the RCMP — is pressing. Yesterday, Shirley Heafey explained why.
Heafey, former chair of the RCMP's existing and toothless public complaints commission, has had her own well-publicized run-ins with the Mounties. As she noted in her annual reports, the RCMP regularly stonewalled her efforts to investigate even the most menial complaints.
But Heafey is also a veteran of the somewhat more potent Security Intelligence Review Committee that oversees CSIS. She worked as an investigator there for four years after the intelligence service was set up in 1984.
Yesterday, she described one case she encountered during her time there, that of a foreign-born journalist under surveillance — first by the Mounties, later by CSIS. The reason for this surveillance was that once, 25 years earlier, the man had written something for a Spanish-language journal that was later reprinted by a publication in communist Cuba.
This was enough to get him marked a subversive. For 25 years, his home, office and car were bugged. Yet as Heafey discovered, the listeners found nothing because there was nothing to find. He was, she eventually concluded, exactly what he claimed to be — a journalist.
This might have been funny, in a Kafkaesque way, except that by the time Heafey looked into the target's case, he was about to be deported. She made her report; the deportation was stopped and CSIS modified the way it dealt with surveillance targets.
"Of literally hundreds of cases I reviewed — involving deportation or security clearances — only a handful were justified," Heafey said.
"It was a real eye-opener."
So Shirley Heafey, who has some experience in these matters, applauds the O'Connor reforms. Security services have so much power to wreak havoc on innocent people that some kind of counterbalance is needed.
Maher Arar, who has experience of another kind, agrees.
"We are in a great country," he said yesterday. "We are a great people.
"We can't allow ourselves to become a police state."
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