Anti-torture caravan in Orillia

This is from OrilliaToday. Actually the Iacobucci Inquiry has finished its hearings as far as I know and is in the process of writing the report. The report was supposed to be done in January. There was little in the way of public sessions and even the lawyers for Almalki, Nureddin, and El Maati were not able to attend sessions in which intelligence officers were interviewed. The whole Inquiry has been a farce, so much so that one civil liberty's group from B.C. just left the inquiry.





Anti-torture caravan in Orillia

Members of an “anti-torture” caravan, en route to Ottawa, will hold a demonstration in downtown Orillia on Saturday. The group includes three men who were imprisoned and tortured by Syrian and Egyptian authorities. May 02, 2008


Years after his release, Abdullah Almalki still bears scars of the physical and mental torture that was inflicted on him over a prolonged period by Syrian authorities.


“I am not the same person as I was before, and I was told I would never be the same person,” the Ottawa man says in advance of a local appearance this week.


An electrical engineer and father of six, Almalki was arrested during a visit to Syria in May 2003 and violently interrogated for close to two years, yet was never charged with a crime.


His subterranean cell was “smaller than a grave,” and infested with cockroaches, lice and rats.


In the 22 months before his eventual release, the soles of his feet were mercilessly and repeatedly whipped with electrical cables.


He maintains that his captors’ questions were crafted by Canadian authorities, who had deemed him a security threat.


“They labeled me al-Qaeda with zero evidence to back it up,” he adds. “(During the interrogations) it was very clear the questions were coming from Canada.”


Now he is seeking answers.


Almalki is one of three torture survivors taking part in an anti-torture “caravan,” headed to Ottawa and scheduled to arrive in downtown Orillia on Saturday at 11:30 a.m. outside the opera house.


The traveling demonstration features hooded “detainees” in orange jumpsuits, a symbol, organizers say, of the rampant abuses suffered by innocents caught up in the war on terror.


Organizers charge that Canadian intelligence agencies provided questions to the Syrian and Egyptian interrogators at whose hands the three men suffered years of torture.


“We need to make our voices heard,” Almalki adds. “Our government has been operating in the shadows for too long.


Adds Matthew Behrens, coordinator of the caravan:


“We see increasingly that whenever the government wants to hide something, it’s not because of national security concerns, it’s because these things being revealed would prove politically embarrassing or inconvenient to the government.”


The group is calling for a public inquiry into the alleged role of the Canadian government in the torture of Almalki, Ahmad El Maati and Muayyed Nureddin.


The men and their lawyers have been excluded from attending a closed inquiry into their cases, an inquiry chaired by former Supreme Court justice Frank Iacobucci, Almalki says.


“Our three names are on that inquiry and we do not know a single word from a single document,” he adds.


The website for the Iacobucci Inquiry states that the investigation “is expected to deal with sensitive national security matters. While public hearings are possible, it is likely the inquiry will be carried out largely in private.”


A report on the results of the inquiry should be submitted by September.