Almalki hopes secretive inquiry will clear name

I can't understand why Amalki would hope this. The inquiry is really not about the three Canadian muslims at all but only about the actions of officials in relationship to them. One Arar commission was enough. The government will not do anything to help clear their name. They will do everything to protect themselves and their intelligence operatives and everything will be done in the name of national security. The SIRC has recently shown that CSIS has violated rights of a Canadian but nothing will be done to anyone in the service. Perhaps there will be more promotions as in the Arar case! Only the bigwig Zaccardelli so incompetent as to blatantly contradict himself even after expensive coaching at taxpayer expense
was a casualty of the Arar inquiry and it was his own doing.
As I have opined before the Iacobucci Inquiry is an expensive farce. There needs to be some way that the three named in the inquiry can see the evidence against them or some of it and clear their names as Arar was able to do. However, the Arar inquiry was the first and last open inquiry. Even that inquiry was hampered at every move by government censorship and stonewalling. It looks as if the Iacobucci inquiry is so sure that the government will not put pressure on them to open up that they will not even have the fig leaf of another public meeting to show some semblance of openness.


Almalki hopes secretive inquiry will clear name
'I want to start my life again,' says Ottawa engineer

Andrew Duffy
The Ottawa Citizen


Monday, November 05, 2007


Ottawa's Abdullah Almalki wants Canadians to presume, as the law demands, that he's innocent.

Because only then, he says, can they understand his immense frustration, his anger -- and his determination to clear his name at a secretive federal inquiry.

"I want to start my life again," says the 38-year-old engineer and father of six, who maintains he was jailed and tortured in Syria because of faulty information supplied by the RCMP and Canadian Security Intelligence Service.

To that end, he wants the ongoing inquiry headed by retired Justice Frank Iacobucci to assess the accuracy of information shared by Canadian security agencies with other countries, including the U.S. and Syria.

It is his only chance, he believes, to remove the stain of Islamic extremism from his reputation.

"Without a clear statement saying that the information the government shared is not accurate and not true, how can I start my business again, which is built on my reputation?" asks Mr. Almalki, who used to operate an electronics firm in Ottawa.

"How could I work anywhere? How will anyone hire me if there's still a question mark beside my name?"

The Iacobucci inquiry has already interviewed 40 witnesses and reviewed more than 35,000 pages of evidence in connection with the overseas detention and mistreatment of Mr. Almalki and two other Arab-Canadian men.

All of that evidence, however, has been delivered in private and remains secret.

Mr. Almalki has been deeply frustrated by that process, in part because it means he has no idea whether the commission will address the competence of the RCMP investigation -- and the resulting damage to his reputation.

In an interview, commission counsel John Laskin said he cannot "prejudge" whether Judge Iacobucci will address the issue in his final report.

He noted, however, that Judge Iacobucci has made it clear that the primary focus of the inquiry is not the three individuals, but the conduct of Canadian officials. The commission has been instructed by the federal government to inquire into the actions of Canadian officials that may have led to the detention and mistreatment of the three men.

The inquiry has examined RCMP and CSIS files in the three cases, Mr. Laskin said, and will assess whether there were "deficiencies" in how that information was shared with foreign countries.

Mr. Almalki's lawyer said it's impossible to know what the commission is doing when the process is conducted entirely in secret. Paul Copeland said it's his understanding that the inquiry will not look at the deficiencies of the CSIS and RCMP investigations of his client.

"I have grave concerns about the competence of investigators that took place and this is the only forum that can look at their competence," he said.

Mr. Copeland has urged the inquiry to examine the nine-year investigation of Mr. Almalki, but he has been told that will not happen.

Mr. Almalki has never been charged with a crime in Canada.

The Syrian-born Mr. Almalki, who emigrated to Canada as a teenager with his family, first came under scrutiny by CSIS in the summer of 1988, when an agent demanded to know if he had ever sold equipment to the Taliban.

In October 2001, Mr. Almalki became the central focus of one of the most intense -- and ultimately notorious -- RCMP investigations in Canadian history, Project A-O Canada.

That investigation made Mr. Almalki's friend, Maher Arar, a "person of interest." According to the Arar commission report, information passed by the RCMP to U.S. officials likely contributed to their decision to remove Mr. Arar to Syria, where he was imprisoned for 10 months and tortured.

Mr. Almalki was arrested in Syria in May 2002 on a trip to visit his grandmother. He spent 22 months in detention and, according to a factfinder's report in the Arar inquiry, Mr. Almalki was "especially badly treated and for an extended period."

The Arar inquiry has already established that the RCMP passed questions they wanted Mr. Almalki to answer through Canadian diplomats to Syrian military intelligence. Those questions, Mr. Almalki says, were put to him under torture.

The Arar inquiry has also reported that members of Project A-O Canada travelled to Washington to make a presentation to their FBI counterparts in May 2002. The RCMP wanted the FBI to launch a simultaneous criminal investigation of Mr. Almalki.

But Project A-O Canada was not successful in convincing the FBI to institute a criminal investigation of Mr. Almalki, according to a recently released addendum to the Arar commission report.

Mr. Almalki has always denied any connection to terrorism and he contends that any competent investigation would have concluded he was not an Islamic extremist.

© The Ottawa Citizen 2007