Don't ignore tortured Canadians.

This is from the student newspaper at Carleton University.
As I predicted the Iacobucci report has virtually dropped off the mainstream media radar. Nothing has been done and no one has been held accountable. Almalki was a former student at Carleton as this author mentions. I assume some action will still be taken in court but I have heard no news lately about this.


Don't ignore tortured Canadians
I have come to the conclusion that the Canadian Government is complicit in torturing Canadian citizens. To add insult to injury, one of those citizens was a Carleton student. For those of you who are skeptical, let there be no doubt in your mind: the Iacobucci report confirms that Canadian security and governmental officials had a direct role in the torture of Canadian citizen and Carleton student Abdullah Almalki.
by Clint Grant




Clint Grant is a first-year humanities student. He thinks that Canada should pay more attention towards tortured Canadian citizens rather than ignoring them

I have come to the conclusion that the Canadian Government is complicit in torturing Canadian citizens. To add insult to injury, one of those citizens was a Carleton student. For those of you who are skeptical, let there be no doubt in your mind: the Iacobucci report confirms that Canadian security and governmental officials had a direct role in the torture of Canadian citizen and Carleton student Abdullah Almalki. Let's not be fooled by semantics: when I say direct, I mean CSIS and the RCMP saw to it that Almalki was arrested on false charges and held in a Syrian torture prison for two years. Further, they requested that Almalki be interrogated despite the fact that Syrian Military Intelligence had previously warned them that this process would involve actions officially recognized as torture. Our government may have left the physical whipping to those outside the reach of Canadian human rights laws, but it is nonetheless complicit in breaching international anti-torture conventions.It's a bitter truth to swallow, but the truth is that our government failed, and continues to fail, to uphold the rights and dignity of the citizens it is charged with protecting. Our government's complicity in torture is not isolated to the Almalki case. There are many more Canadians being imprisoned and tortured at the behest of our own security agencies all over the world. Go online and search for yourselves. For one raised believing Canada stands for peace, dignity, freedom and justice, our involvement in blatant human rights abuse is a real letdown. The willingness of our government to take part in the torture and illegal imprisonment of Canadian citizens is an affront to the security of us all. Those that we entrust with the security of our nation are either incapable or unwilling to protect Canadian citizens when they are fully aware that grave injustice is taking place. Further, their unwillingness to take responsibility for their complicity is an absolute insult to every Canadian. How can we be safe from any real external threats if we aren't safe with the ones who are supposed to keep us safe?If our government wants to fight a war against terrorism, they had best be able to identify the true threat to our security: governmental unaccountability. We aren't even safe from ourselves if we allow our government to trounce around stripping us of our freedoms and dignity without an outstanding reason to do so. Simply, to stop terrorism, stop terrorizing. Our dignity and freedoms are the most important part of us; no government has the right to take that away from any one of us. If the government strips one of us of our rights, it strips all of us of our rights. Truly put, an injustice to one is an injustice to all. I believe I speak for all Canadians when I announce to those responsible for the torture of Canadian citizens: you failed us. You failed to apologize to those you committed wrong against, and you have failed to apologize to this nation for neglecting to respect the integral importance of our dignity and freedom. You have misrepresented our beliefs as a nation, and have spat in the face of an entire generation of Canadians dedicated to justice. The issue of torture is not the fault of one party. Canadians have been tortured at the behest of multiple administrations. Rather than take action to stop more abuse, you squabble amongst yourselves over some coalition government. You say the opposition parties have lost confidence in the leading party; what about the entire generation of youth who have lost confidence in you because you continually fail to address issues of basic human importance? It's time for you to re-evaluate your priorities. We didn't give you permission to do what you've done.

Time for Justice on Rights Abuses

There does not seem to be much publicity re any compensation for Almalki et al. There is even less publicity about any accountability or punishment for anyone involved in mislabeling either in the Arar case or the Almalki et al cases. In fact this is one of the few articles I have seen that even brings up the issue of accountability for staff who are indirectly responsible for the horrible torture and mistreatment that was inflicted on these Canadians. We have untouchables in our midst who go on with their jobs or are even promoted when they ought to receive some punishment for what they have done. The sign that we are giving to our intelligence operatives is that they can get away with reckless labeling with no proper grounds for their assessments and yet not suffer at all. This can only result in more human rights violations.

Time for justice on rights abuses

Nov 18, 2008 08:43 AM ALEX NEVE, KHALED MOUAMMAR, SAMEER ZUBERI, FAISAL KUTTY, NEHAL BHUTA AND WARREN ALLMAND
Ahmad Abou-Elmaati. Abdullah Almalki. Muayyed Nureddin. Maher Arar. These four Canadians of Arab and Muslim origin were locked up in the same Syrian jail cells and brutalized by the same torturers. What was the role of Canadian officials in their chilling tales? Did officials strive to protect their rights? Turn their back? Set them up?
For five years — since Maher Arar’s return to Canada — Canadians have grappled with these questions. Fundamental issues are at stake. Foremost is justice for the men themselves. But there are also wider concerns: the equality of all Canadians, respect for the rule of law, accountability, the effectiveness of our national security agencies, and the place of human rights in a post 9/11 world.
The effort to get to the bottom of these concerns has been unprecedented. Two inquiries have been convened, headed by highly respected jurists. Ontario Court of Appeal Justice Dennis O’Connor spent 2 6½7 years examining Maher Arar’s case, issuing two reports in 2006. Former Supreme Court of Canada Justice Frank Iacobucci spent close to two years probing the other three cases, and issued his report last month.
As a result, we now know a great deal about what went wrong in these cases. We know about the inflammatory labels that Canadian officials used to describe these men in exchanges with other governments, such as “Islamic extremists” and “imminent threats.” Both judges conclude that the labels were inaccurate and without foundation.
We know about the ways that Canadian action contributed to the imprisonment and torture of these four men. They sent information that led to their detention. They sent questions used in their interrogations under torture. We know also of the multiple failures to act to defend their rights. We know all of this and more.
So now what? The government responded, in part, to the Arar inquiry. Maher Arar rightfully received an official apology and compensation. Beyond that we know very little. Former public safety minister Stockwell Day said the Arar recommendations have been implemented, but there has been no public reporting to back up that claim. Justice O’Connor’s proposal for a comprehensive oversight mechanism for reviewing the national security activities of the RCMP, CSIS and other agencies has not been implemented. Day said there would be an announcement on that front soon.
Our organizations were involved in both of these inquiries. With Commissioner Iacobucci’s work now complete, it is clear to us that the government must act in five key areas.
There must be redress. As with Maher Arar, the government must officially apologize to Ahmad Abou-Elmaati, Abdullah Almalki, Muayyed Nureddin and their families. The government should also launch negotiations toward fair compensation.
There must be accountability. No Canadian official has faced consequences for the wrongdoing that led to the human rights violations endured by Maher Arar. Many have been promoted. That cannot stand; and it cannot be the response to the other three cases. An impartial body must determine appropriate accountability — disciplinary, criminal or other measures — for the abuses suffered by all four of these men. Other governments are implicated as well, including Syria, Egypt, and the United States. Individuals who carried out or ordered torture, authorized rendition and committed other human rights violations in those countries must be held to account. Charges can be laid under the Canadian Criminal Code. And the Canadian government must stop blocking the efforts of these men to launch lawsuits against Syria and Egypt in Canadian courts.
There must be reform. These four men all eloquently stress that they are not only seeking justice for themselves. They want to be sure that others do not suffer the same fate. That is why the Arar inquiry recommendations, bolstered now by Iacobucci’s findings, need action. We need more than blithe assertions that has happened. We need detailed public reporting on progress. We certainly cannot wait any longer for reform of national security oversight. O’Connor put a comprehensive proposal in front of the government two years ago. It is time for implementation.
There must be leadership. Canadian officials have been responsible for a series of vicious leaks about each of these men. Through two judicial inquiries they have now been subject to levels of scrutiny that few Canadians have ever faced. Yet they continue to face vilification in some quarters. The Prime Minister and responsible ministers must show leadership in discouraging hate and racism, and be clear that ongoing attempts by some commentators to smear these men is unacceptable.
Finally there must be global action. Two judges have documented the brutal torture of four Canadians in Syria and Egypt. This must become a catalyst for Canada to become a global champion of the struggle to end torture in those two countries and worldwide. That means action to end Canadian complicity in torture. That means forceful efforts to press other governments to end torture. That means principled leadership at the UN and other world bodies to strengthen global initiatives to eradicate torture.
Canadians are looking to their government to respond meaningfully to these very serious human rights concerns. The way forward is clear: redress, accountability, reform, leadership and global action. After the years of injustice, now is the time for justice.
Alex Neve is secretary general of Amnesty International Canada; Khaled Mouammar is president of the Canadian Arab Federation; Sameer Zuberi is human rights co-ordinator at the Canadian Council on American Islamic Relations; Faisal Kutty is general counsel for the Canadian Muslim Civil Liberties Association; Nehal Bhuta is special adviser on counterterrorism for Human Rights Watch; and Warren Allmand is counsel for the International Civil Liberties Monitoring Group.

Almalki at Windsor Conference on Unjustly Imprisoned

This is from the Windsor Star.
This is just a snippet from a longer article at the Star. The Iacobucci Inquiry is to release a report on Almalki and two other Canadians who were held in rather similar circumstances by October 20. It is probably fortunate for the government that it is coming out after the election.
However, the next government will have to deal with any fallout from the report. As the article mentions the investigation was carried out in secret. I expect even so that there will be considerable criticism of the intelligence and diplomatic services by Iacobucci. In spite of all my reservations I doubt that Iacobucci will come up with a complete whitewash. It will be a critical compromise whitewash. That's my guess!

Abdullah Almalki said his worst moment while being wrongly incarcerated came six weeks after he was arrested and then tortured day and night in a Syrian prison, including being whipped with cables until fainting. He'd been advised by his interrogators that they believed his innocence, but then word was passed on to Syrian officials by "faceless, nameless Canadian officials" that he remained a suspected terrorist. He was sent back to his tiny cell, dubbed "the grave," and a ramped-up torture regime continued for another 20 months.
Almalki, an Ottawa businessman and father of six, is one of the subjects of a mostly secret inquiry into extraterritorial detentions being conducted by retired Supreme Court Justice Frank Iacobucci, who is expected to report to government on Oct. 20. Almalki, who described in detail some of the physical torture he endured, said he was never visited by any Canadian consular official even though his plight was known.
Lockyer described Almalki's ordeal as "being held in a Kafkaesque nightmare," and said that, like Mullins-Johnson, it was for a crime that never happened. Almalki said he too is suing the government.
Even after being cleared in public, the panelists said their ordeals continue.
Almalki said people still wonder, if he was so innocent, why he would have been arrested in the first place and then held. Four years after his release, his wife and daughters still receive counselling

RCMP 'disruption'' led to Canadians torture, book charges.

This is from Canada.com.
This sounds like an interesting book. The strategy was hardly just disruption however. There was obviously an attempt at gathering intelligence by having Almalki, Arar, et al imprisoned and tortured in Syria. Obvious too I should think is co-operation with the U.S. even though CSIS seems to have covered this up for the most part and the Arar investigation did not show CSIS and RCMP co-operation with the U.S. except that they sent plenty of unscreened evidence without any caveats. That evidence is probably what got Arar classified as an Al Qaeda agent and shipped to Syria. It seems that Canadian authorities did not know that this was to happen but one wonders about the CSIS and RCMP. Canadian intelligence authorities did inform the Americans that Arar would not be charged if sent to Canada. Wink wink nod nod. So you better send him to Syria for processing! After all that is what we did with others in the group.


RCMP 'disruption' led to Canadians' torture, book charges
Unable to secure prosecutions, Mounties, CSIS worked to have men sent to Syria: author

Andrew Duffy
Canwest News Service
Tuesday, August 26, 2008
OTTAWA - A new book suggests Abdullah Almalki's imprisonment in Syria was the end product of a "disruption strategy" employed by the RCMP after prosecutors refused to launch a criminal case against the Ottawa engineer.
Almalki spent 22 months in Syria's prison system where, he alleges, he was tortured based on faulty intelligence supplied by Canada. At the time of his detention in May, 2002, Almalki was the focus of an RCMP national security probe that would also ensnare another Ottawa engineer, Maher Arar.
In her new book, Dark Days: The Story of Four Canadians Tortured in the Name of Fighting Terror, Ottawa author Kerry Pither says it was no accident the men suffered such similar ordeals.
It was, she argues, part of an orchestrated - and possibly illegal - campaign by Canadian security agencies to neutralize men they wrongly believed to be terrorist threats.
"The public for the most part, while they know and recognize Maher Arar's name, they don't know that there was something far more systematic going on," Pither said in a recent interview.
"I believe that you can't really understand what happened to Maher Arar without understanding what happened to the other men."
Four Canadian Muslims - Arar, Almalki, Ahmad El-Maati and Muayyed Nureddin - were detained and tortured in the same Damascus military prison in the three years that followed the 9-11 terror attacks. All were under investigation by the RCMP or CSIS at the time for alleged terrorist connections.
"You can't argue this was a series of coincidences or mistakes when you look at all of them together," charged Pither, an Ottawa human rights activist, who worked as a communications strategist for Arar and the other men who form the subject of her book.
"When you look at all of them together, it demands accountability; it demands a review of who knew what, when. It can't be explained away as just the Americans, as just coincidence, as just the Syrians, as just mistakes . . . It must be systematic."
Pither notes, in the book, the RCMP consulted with the Ontario Crown Attorney in the fall of 2001 to determine if charges could be laid against several terror suspects - believed to include El-Maati and Almalki - based on evidence gathered by the CSIS.
The Crown, however, said the evidence was too tainted and insufficient for criminal charges to be laid.
According to testimony offered by Jack Hooper, then CSIS deputy director of operations, and contained in a footnote in the Arar Report, "this resulted in the focus of the investigation moving from prosecution to more of a disruption exercise, whereby the police would assist CSIS in dismantling a group of alleged terrorists."
In her book, Pither points to a May, 26, 2006 Senate committee hearing as further evidence that the four men were victims of a systematic disruption strategy.
At that hearing, Hooper told legislators that the spy agency uses "other techniques" when it proves impossible to prosecute terror suspects in a court of law.
Then RCMP commissioner Giuliano Zaccardelli told the same committee that, "particularly since 9-11, we have had to accept going to a disruptive mode, because prevention is the most important thing."
Pither believes that, taken together, the four cases demonstrate the full meaning of disruption.
Almalki and El-Maati, she said, were harassed by national security agents in Canada, who followed them constantly and in plain sight. The intrusive surveillance, Almalki says in the book, "squeezed" him out of Canada.
Pither believes Almalki and the others were detained in Syria as part of the same disruption campaign.
"I believe so: everything we know points to that," Pither said. "Everything we know points to these cases being an example of circumventing the normal legal processes, the rule of law.
"The fact that they're held in the same detention centre as so many other war on terror suspects from other countries seems to me to point to Canada's role in a global diffuse and disrupt strategy. We now know the extent to which the U.S. and CIA were doing this. Does this point to the same strategy happening in Canada? Yes, these cases certainly do."
A federal inquiry has already established that the RCMP passed questions through Canadian diplomats to Almalki's Syrian interrogators.
Pither's book argues Canadian security officials were particularly keen to show results in their post 9-11 terror investigations because of the mistakes they had made in the Ahmed Ressam case.
An Algerian refugee who lived in Montreal, Ressam was arrested by U.S. border guards while crossing into Washington State on Dec. 14, 1999 with high explosives in the trunk of his car. He later admitted he was part of a plot to blow up the Los Angeles Airport.
CSIS had lost track of Ressam after he returned to Canada from an al-Qaida training camp on a false passport.
In her book, Pither calls Ressam "the poster boy for CSIS incompetence and lax passport controls."
The book hits the shelves Tuesday as a federal inquiry prepares its final report on the role Canadian officials played in the detention and mistreatment of Almalki, El-Maati and Nureddin.
Judge Frank Iacobucci has conducted the "internal inquiry" almost entirely behind closed doors.
Pither says she's concerned by the secrecy that surrounds the inquiry and hopes her book will add important context to the forthcoming report. "The inquiry is about the action of Canadian officials: it's not about how this unfolded for the men themselves and I think that's an important perspective for Canadians to understand."
Iacobucci is to deliver his report by Oct. 20.
The Canadian government has already apologized to Arar and awarded him $10 million in compensation; the other men have launched civil suits against Canadian officials seeking similar redress.
© Ottawa Citizen 2008

Travelling 'torture caravan' disturbing sign of the times.

This is from the Star.
Almalki, Nurredin, and El Maati deserve a lot of credit for mounting this publicity campaign. The campaign is bringing the issue to many people who would otherwise hardly know or think about the issues. There is nothing like face to face interaction for influencing people's thoughts and feelings. It is easy for people just to shrug off the rare reports that are heard in the mainstream media. Arar received plenty of publicity and became for a time a media star but these three are very much in the shadows. The Iacobucci inquiry has been carried on in almost total secrecy. The final report will not even be seen by the public, just a summary. In the name of national security reality will be kept from us and after a great deal of hand wringing and a flurry of media attention, some criticism of the intelligence services and a number of recommendations things will go on as before except Iacobucci will receive a hefty fee for his labours in the darkness. There will be no compensation for Almalki, Nurredin, and El Maati unless they somehow manage to mount an effective suit against the government. It is possible that Iacobucci might recommend some action on compensation but I think that is probably wishful thinking. It is not part of his mandate and so far he has been very careful to narrow the inquiry as much as possible.


Travelling 'torture caravan' disturbing sign of the times TheStar.com - comment - Travelling 'torture caravan' disturbing sign of the times


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While inquiry meets in private, tortured trio bring tales of terror to small-town Ontario
June 09, 2008 Heba Aly
It is a bizarre feeling – eating, walking, laughing with men who have been hung from their wrists and beaten with electric cables. To see them behave so normally despite their experiences is a bit destabilizing.
But for five days, that is what I did, as three men – Abdullah Almalki, Muayyed Nureddin and Ahmad El Maati – travelled from small town to small town, telling Canadians their stories and pushing for a public inquiry into what happened to them.
All three men – Canadian citizens, but also Arab and Muslim – were detained and tortured in a Syrian prison on unproven suspicions of terrorism. They accuse the Canadian government of complicity in their torture. None has ever been charged with a crime.
Toronto-based Nureddin, for example, had fled his homeland of Iraq in 1991. As as a Turkman, he was discriminated against under Saddam Hussein's regime. When the regime was toppled in 2003, Nureddin decided to go back to visit family he had not seen in nine years. On his way back to Canada, he was stopped on the Iraq-Syria border and thrown into jail. During questioning, he was asked the same questions by his Syrian torturers that he had been asked months before by a Canadian security intelligence official – a sign, he says, that the questions must have originated from Canada.
The stories of these men echo that of Canadian citizen Maher Arar, who was detained and tortured in the same infamous prison in Syria. He has since received an official apology from the Canadian government and $10 million in compensation after a public inquiry established that his torture was due in part to information the RCMP shared internationally, falsely identifying him as a terrorist.
The report that emerged from that inquiry found that the RCMP sent questions about one of the other men, Ottawa engineer Almalki, to Syrian interrogators knowing that questioning could result in torture.
A second inquiry is now looking into the role Canadian officials played in these three cases, but it is being conducted in almost-total secrecy. The men themselves, their lawyers, the public and the media are not allowed to attend. They have seen no documents and cross-examined no witnesses.
This has caused endless frustration for Almalki, Nureddin and El Maati, who are still trying to recover from the emotional and psychological scars of their torture abroad – only to face a new struggle upon returning to Canada.
"For me, this inquiry is another form of torture because I don't know what's going on," El Maati said. "My life is on the line; my reputation is on the line."
And so one rainy day in May, these men, along with about 30 other regular Canadians, set off on a week-long caravan to try to do something about it. Organized by a group called Stop Canadian Involvement in Torture, the caravan travelled from Toronto to Ottawa to raise awareness about these cases and build momentum for a public inquiry. It was an interesting bunch of people, to say the least.
There was Dick, the retired engineer and former Roman Catholic priest who had just turned 82. There was Tracy, the civil rights junkie who pulled her 13-year-old daughter out of school for a week to join the caravan, because, "What's better than a civil rights march?" And there were Vidya, Frank and their 10-month-old baby; the couple saw a random email about the caravan and decided it was too important an issue not to participate.
Reactions were varied when people saw the group sporting bright orange jumpsuits kneeling on the pavement, their bowed heads covered in black hoods, their hands behind their backs – now a worldwide symbol of torture.
Some wanted no part of it. "I'm the torturer!" one Correctional Services Canada staff screamed mockingly as she drove past the group's silent vigil outside a maximum-security prison in Bath, Ont.
Others were eager to hear more. In many of the mostly white, middle-class towns we travelled through, passersby had no idea that this alleged "Canadian torture" even existed. They had never heard of Maher Arar, let alone any of the others who have undergone similar ordeals.
Still, support was surprisingly high. At Trenton, home to a Canadian Forces Base, one soldier signed the petition asking the Prime Minister to make the inquiry public. In Cobourg, three high-school classes gave the men a standing ovation after hearing their stories.
"Ahmad. Muayyed," one high-school teacher repeated to himself as he walked down the hallways of his school. "I'm practising the names," he said with a chuckle.
And just as it was destabilizing for me to watch these men connect with the public on such a personal level, it was destabilizing for them, too. After so many months in isolation, seeing how much people cared was a bit overwhelming.
"Part of the healing process as a torture victim is to be recognized," Nureddin told me after lunch one day as we sat in the basement of a church hosting us in Napanee. "The public has recognized us. That recognition means they trust in (my) story." That was a first for Nureddin, who until then had shied away from sharing his experience publicly.
In September, retired Supreme Court justice Frank Iacobucci, who is overseeing the latest inquiry, will release his findings. Only a summary of the report will be public. The government argues more disclosure would pose a risk to national security.
But for Almalki, getting answers is essential – not just for him, but for all Canadians.
"It's extremely important that we get to know the full truth of what happened to all of us. That is because ... it looks like it is a pattern. It's not just one case or two cases or three cases," he told a crowd gathered at Kingston's Public Library.
"This doesn't just affect me and my family or Muslims. It affects all of us. It defines who we are as a country."
It seems their call for some answers is being met with a sympathetic ear from Canadians. Consider these thoughts from some of the people we met along the way:
"I think you're doing us all a favour," Kevin Doyle said at a public lecture in Ottawa. "What happened to you is a change in North American society that is detrimental to all of us. Many of us who were born here are afraid of what's ahead. You give us the courage to do more to counteract this."
"For the first time in my life, I'm ashamed to be Canadian," high-school teacher Gary O'Dwyer told his students in Cobourg.
"I'm so disturbed," one lady said after hearing Almalki speak in Kingston. "I don't even want to think about it."
But that's just it. She has to. We all do. And the government certainly should.
Heba Aly is an Ottawa-based freelance journalist.

Caravan demands public inquiry into case of three Muslim Canadians

This is from ">communitypress.
It is certainly a good idea to keep this case in the public eye but I doubt that the call for another inquiry has much chance of success with the Iacobucci Inquiry still going on.

Caravan demands public inquiry into cases of three Muslim Canadians tortured abroad
Posted 1 day ago
Belleville – Three Canadian Muslim men who suffered torture in Syria and Egypt were in Belleville May 6 to talk about their experience and their move to initiate a public inquiry into their torture.
A small crowd gathered at Christ Church on Everett Street May 6 to listen to the stories of three men who are travelling from Toronto to Ottawa raising awareness and support for the Caravan Against Canadian Involvement in Torture.
Matthew Behrens of Homes not Bombs said that when you are walking through communities dressed in orange jumpsuits and black hoods, as the caravan has been, “it hits people.”
Using documentation from the widely publicized 2006 Arar Commission Report into the deportation, detention and torture of Canadian Maher Arar, Abdullah Almalki shared the story of his own torture in Syria over a period of 22 months and seven days.
Almalki, a father of six with an engineering degree from the University of Ottawa, is a Canadian citizen who was arrested in Syria on the way to visit his ailing grandmother. He has never been charged with any crime in Canada or had an arrest warrant issued against him, nor has any evidence of criminal behaviour ever been produced.
He said following 9/11 he and his family were harassed by the RCMP, including having every package sent to his business opened by customs, unmarked cars following him and his wife, and a camera installed across the street from their home. Family and friends were also questioned.
The harassment became “too much” when he and his wife took a trip to Malaysia to visit her family in 2001, and he was detained and questioned in Malaysia for several hours before being cleared of any wrongdoing.
When he was detained in Syria in 2002, Almalki's family was told it was based on “information from abroad.”
Almalki described the “inhumane” conditions he endured for most of his time in Syria and explained some of the torture methods he was subjected to, which included being whipped with electrical cable for hours at a time. The majority of his time was spent in a cell smaller than a grave.
“They want you to give them something, but if you don't give them something they keep torturing you,” Almalki said, adding a Syrian official later told him, “we beat you until we got convinced you had nothing.”
It was two months before he was taken outside for the first time, a day that Almalki said he “found for the first time in life how beautiful the sky was.”
Almalki said he never had a single consular visit during the 22 months he was detained and said the RCMP was subjecting him to “interrogation by proxy” knowing full well torture was being used to obtain information.
“I was deprived from hugging any one of my children for two years,” Almalki said.
He said CSIS and the RCMP smeared him, destroyed his business and his life and left him with physical and emotional trauma.
“Many of my most fundamental human rights have been blatantly violated,” Almalki said.
Although he is well-spoken, Almalki said the ordeal left his brain “dead” as he got through the time by trying not to think about anything outside the cell he was in as a method of preserving his sanity. He also said he has been told it will be at least a few years before his brain is functioning at the level it was before his detention and torture.
“I will not claim that I kept my sanity the whole time,” he said in response to an audience question.
Muayyed Nureddin, a Toronto-area geologist, was detained in 2004 as he crossed into Syria to fly home from visiting family in Iraq. He said he was unable to travel under the dictatorship in Iraq before coming to Canada in 1994 and after his detention for a month and being submitted to torture, he is too scared to travel again.
“I want to be able to travel again, and I want to believe in this democracy again,” said Nureddin.
Nureddin, Almalki and Ahmad El Maati, who was also detained and tortured in both Syria and Egypt, are appealing to the prime minister to open a public inquiry into their cases.
An internal inquiry, led by retired Supreme Court of Canada Justice Frank Iacobucci was established in 2006 to investigate the three cases, but questions have been raised its secrecy, which has given rise to doubts about the inquiry's ability to provide justice for the three men and to instill public confidence.
Neither the trio nor their lawyers are privy to proceedings or seeing any evidence in the inquiry.
Almalki said the secrecy has forced him to be away from his family in Ottawa once again, “telling personal things” in order to raise awareness.
Behrens said the inquiry has 35,000 documents and has interviewed 40 witnesses and the Caravan Against Canadian Involvement in Torture is working to stop Canadian complicity in torture.
More information about the campaign is available at www.homesnotbombs.ca. More information about Almalki and his case is available at www.abdullahalmalki.com.
Copyright © 2008 Community Press

Anti-terror caravan to stop in Kingston area..

This is from thewhig. I am surprised that the caravan is pressing for an Arar type inquiry for Almalki et al. There is not a snowball's chance in hell of this happening since the government has already set up the Iacobucci Inquiry that is examining the cases of the three men. The government will avoid another Arar type inquiry like the plague. The Arar Inquiry not only revealed the ineptitude of our intelligence services but it cost the government millions to Arar and for the inquiry and much dirty linen was glimpsed in public hearings. However, no one was ever disciplined or punished. Some involved have since been promoted.
The standard from now on will be set by the Iacobucci inquiry. Few public hearings and all meetings with security officials in secret with not even lawyers present.

Anti-torture caravan to stop in area
Posted By Ian Elliot
Posted 2 days ago
Kingston and surrounding communities will be included in the travels of an anti-torture caravan that is making its way from Toronto to Ottawa.

The Caravan To End Canadian Involvement in Torture, part of a campaign to pressure the federal government to end its use of secret security certificates and its practice of deporting citizens to countries that are known to practice torture, will stop in this area next week.

The caravan, which will feature hooded activists dressed in orange jumpsuits and shackles, will hold several marches, vigils and public events in Napanee, Kingston and Gananoque, said organizer Matthew Behrans of Toronto.

One of the protests will be held in front of Millhaven Institution, where the federal government erected a special facility to hold people being detained on security certificates, and which still houses one inmate.

"That's obviously somewhere we wanted to include," said Behrans, a longtime social-justice activist.

The caravan will arrive in Napanee on Tuesday, where its members will have lunch with members of the Amnesty International chapter there.

They will hold their vigil outside Millhaven around 2:30 p.m. and arrive in Kingston later that afternoon, where they will hold a public talk at the downtown branch of the public library at 7 p.m.

The featured guests will be three Canadians who were tortured in Syria and Egypt on information organizers say was supplied by the Canadian government - Abdullah Almaki, Ahmed El Maati and Muayyed Nureddin.

One of the purposes of the caravan is to press the Canadian government to hold a public inquiry into the cases of the three men, similar to what it is now doing for Maher Arar.

ielliot@thewhig.com

No official(Canadian) came near detainee (in Syria)

I assume that Kafieh is referring to Almalki but the article does not make this clear. Perhaps the article is shortened. ! I assume he was testifying a while back at the Iacobucci inquiry.
There is not much news about the inquiry. Even this article is old. The Inquiry is almost all behind closed doors part of the new transparency and accountability of the Harper government.
There seems very little possibility that the Almalki et al will ever see justice or compensation for their ordeals or that anyone involved on the Intelligence or diplomatic side will be punished for wrongdoing.


No official came near detainee.

Andrew Duffy
CanWest News Service
Thursday, January 10, 2008
OTTAWA -- A lawyer for the Canadian Arab Federation invited inquiry commissioner Frank Iacobucci to imagine himself in a foreign "dungeon" as the retired Supreme Court of Canada judge considers how to assess the conduct of Canadian officials in the cases of three men imprisoned and allegedly tortured in Syria.
James Kafieh told an inquiry that diplomats must work for the release of Canadians detained without charge in countries, such as Syria and Egypt, with dubious human-rights records.
"Put yourself in that dungeon," Kafieh told Iacobucci. "That one-metre by two-metre cell. Certainly you would want to have the government doing everything it could to ensure you have the full benefit of international law."
Iacobucci heads the inquiry into Canadian actions that may have led to the detention and mistreatment of Abdullah Almalki, Ahmad El-Maati and Muayyed Nureddin.
All three Arab-Canadians say they were tortured in Syria based on information that could only have come from Canadian security agencies.
Almalki, an Ottawa engineer, spent 22 months in Syrian custody during which he received not a single visit from any Canadian official.
© The Vancouver Province 2008

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

New book next year on Arar and three other detainees

Since the book is not scheduled to be released until Fall of 2008 it may be able to comment on the results of the Iacobucci Inquiry due in January of 2008. One thing is certain the Iacobucci Inquiry will do absolutely nothing to help the three clear their name unlike the Arar inquiry. Virtually everything is being done in secrecy. The web page for the inquiry gives no information about what is happening. The last entry about what was new was published last April. About half the inquiry so far has taken place without the public knowing anything about what is going on: no summary, no news releases, nada.

New book will outline plight of Arar, three other detainees
Paul Gessell, The Ottawa Citizen
Published: Friday, September 14, 2007
There's been a play, an art show and a soon-to-released movie to tell the story, or one just like it, of Ottawa engineer Maher Arar. Next up is a book by family friend and social activist Kerry Pither.

Arar is not just a diplomatic incident or a political controversy. He has become an enduring figure in popular culture, a man with a story suitable for all media.

The wrongfully convicted grab our imagination like few others, with Steven Truscott, David Milgaard and Wilbert Coffin being other examples of Canadian men whose stories refuse to disappear from books, movies and theatres.


The tale of Ottawa engineer Maher Arar will be part of a book being penned by Kerry Pither.
Wayne Cuddington, The Ottawa Citizen



The latest version of the Arar story is to surface in The Lucky Ones: Canadians Betrayed in the Name of Fighting Terror, which is to be published by Penguin, probably in the fall of 2008, the company announced yesterday.

That non-fiction book will examine the case of Arar and three other Muslim Canadian men -- Ahmad El Maati, Abdulla Almalki and Muayyed Nureddin -- who were all imprisoned and tortured in the same Syrian jail and eventually freed without any charges being laid against them anywhere.

After Arar's release, a federal inquiry exonerated him and recommended millions of dollars in compensation. Another inquiry, known as the Iacobucci Commission, is investigating the facts around the imprisonment of the other three Canadian men.

During Arar's detention, Pither worked closely with the man's wife, Monia Mazigh, Amnesty International and the Council on American Islamic Relations to free him and to push for a public inquiry. Frequently, Pither served as a spokeswoman for the Arar family.

"Once the Arar Inquiry was set up, Pither co-ordinated the work of 18 national and international human rights, labour, civil liberties and Muslim and Arab organizations with intervenor status, analysing documents, listening to testimony and proposing questions for witnesses," says a Penguin news release on the book.

Pither is now engaged in similar activities at the inquiry examining the events involving the other three men.

"Since the attacks of 9/11, much has been written about the 'terror suspects' through the eyes of investigating agencies," says Diane Turbide,

editorial director at Penguin Group (Canada). "Very little has been written about these investigations through the eyes of their targets.

"Kerry Pither will do this by telling the personal stories of these four men -- from their first encounters with CSIS and the RCMP, to their overseas

incarceration, torture and interrogation, to their eventual

release and the long wait for answers about the role of Canadian officials."

News of the forthcoming book has surfaced just as movie screens across North America prepare for the release of Rendition, a feature film about an Egyptian-American man jailed and tortured because of suspected terrorist links. Rendition is not based exclusively on, but is influenced by, the Arar story.

Arar was the subject of an exhibition of abstract art this summer at the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia in Halifax. The exhibition by Garry Neill Kennedy was called The Colours of Citizen Arar and was inspired by horrifying anecdotes from his Syrian detention posted on Arar's personal website.

Two years ago, GCTC staged a play, Relative Good, that was inspired by Arar's case and echoed the events of his imprisonment.




© The Ottawa Citizen 2007

Almalki, Nurredin, and El-Maati have little access to Iacobucci Inquiry

Unlike the Arar Inquiry there will be no attempt at all to clear the three Canadians' names. This inquiry is a farce with a big name cast and no doubt a high price tag.
As well as the national security dodge, we now have the workability dodge, and the time dodge, and the non-trial dodge. However what is clear in spite of all the dodges is that the three will not see the evidence against them or be able to cross examine any of those interviewed--although they can ask questions indirectly. It is not clear what if any information they will receive about the answers or if they can ask further questions. There is really nothing in the mandate that involves assessing the case against the three. It will be interesting to see if the lawyers for the three even think it worth while to continue as part of the inquiry. Politicians should be demanding that the inquiry be expanded and allowed more time. Iacobucci is right, that the inquiry has to work fast to meet the deadline next January.
Even if Iacobucci does in the end come up with a report critical of intelligence services, it is unlikely anything will change or anyone will be held responsible. No one will be held accountable. Even in the Arar case Zaccardelli resigned only due to his own incapacity to absorb his coaching lessons on how to lie successfully.

Three Canadians blocked from hearings into ordeal
COLIN FREEZE

Globe and Mail Update

May 31, 2007 at 12:18 PM EDT

Three Canadian Arabs detained in Syria after Sept. 11, 2001, will be effectively shut out of largely secret hearings meant to determine the level of Canadian involvement in their ordeal, according to a ruling released this morning.

Mr. Justice Frank Iacobucci, who is heading a commission into the mistreatment of Abdullah Almalki, Ahmad Abou Elmaati and Muayyed Nureddin, largely accepts the federal government's pleadings for national-security confidentiality in his new 32-page ruling on how is commission shall proceed.

The commission, which launched this year after the related inquiry into the Maher Arar affair, had been weighing arguments from the former detainees and their lawyers that they be granted access to hearings. Unlike the Arar commission, which was intended to be a publicly inquiry, the new commission was given an explicit mandate to proceed mostly in private.

While Judge Iacobucci entertained arguments for greater transparency, he largely rejected them, ruling that the need for ”workability” of the commission trumped the principle of open courts in this instance.

”The formal hearings conducted as part of this inquiry will be conducted in private, a term that I interpret to mean, in this context, in camera and ex parte,” Judge Iacobucci ruled.

Given the amount of sensitive information involved, he said that ”I do not find it workable or in many ways practical for the counsel for the individuals or the individuals themselves to receive security clearance or be present at all of the inquiries that my counsel or I will be making.

”This would unnecessarily prolong the inquiry and make it unworkable.”

Judge Iacobucci said he will try to build in some ”flexibility” for portions of the proceedings to be public, ”as circumstances may warrant.” He did not say, however, what those circumstances might be.

The judge suggested that the detainees and their lawyers could work with commission lawyer to frame the questions that are ultimately to be asked behind closed doors.

The decision left Barb Jackman, lawyer for Mr. Elmaati, disappointed.

”It looks to me they are doing a secret inquiry. It's not clear that any of it will be public,” she said in an interview. "I don't think it looks like a fair process. My first impression is that it is unfair.” A series of Canadians Arabs whom police believed to be associated with one another fell under investigation after the terrorist attacks against the United States killed 3,000 people on Sept. 11, 2001.

No charges were ever laid in Canada, but many of the targets were jailed for lengthy periods in Syria, as much information flowed between Canada, the United States, Syria and Egypt. Ultimately, everyone was let go, and the detainees returned to Canada to allege that they have been wrongly smeared by Canadian officials who orchestrated their arrests overseas when they failed to turn up proof of any crimes in Canada.

Mr. Elmaati was the first suspect to be jailed, and he spent the longest period – more than two years – in custody overseas. During the 1990s Afghan civil war, he and his brother had been involved with mujahedeen fighters there. While Mr. Elmaati returned to Canada to become a long-haul truck driver, his brother, Amer, lingered in Afghanistan and allegedly got involved with al-Qaeda.

By the fall of 2001, Mr. Elmaati was complaining to friends that police in Toronto were driving him crazy with constant surveillance, and he flew to Syria for a wedding.

Jailed upon arriving in Damascus, he was later sent to Cairo for more interrogation. He says he was tortured into making a series of false admissions, including one about a hatching a bomb plot in Ottawa with his brother that may have influenced the investigation back in Canada.

Six months after the initial Syrian arrest, another target of the Canadian investigation was jailed upon arriving there. Ottawa businessman Abdullah Almalki, who during the 1990s had once worked for an Afghan charity and who later exported hundreds of thousands of dollars in communications equipment to the Pakistani military, was under scrutiny in Canada for his export business.

Mr. Almalki also says he was tortured during the initial phases of his two years of detention in Syria. Records now show that the RCMP faxed questions to Syrian military intelligence to be put to the suspect, over the objections of Canadian Foreign Affairs officials who urged the Mounties not to send over the questions.

It is not clear, however, what impact the RCMP questions may have had on Mr. Almalki, who appears to have already suffered his worst mistreatment by the time the document was sent.

Six months after Mr. Almalki was arrested in Syria, border guards in a New York airport arrested Ottawa-based telecommunications engineer Maher Arar, whose case would emerge as an international cause-célèbre. U.S. investigators told Mr. Arar that they had information indicating he was an associate of Mr. Almalki and Mr. Elmaati. For this, he was sent to Syria in shackles on a U.S. government jet and spent nearly a year in custody there.

Geologist Muyyed Nurredin's arrest took place in 2003 and has no known links to the other suspects. He had been a principal at an Islamic school in Scarborough before he travelled to Iraq to visit family in 2003. He was held for a month after crossing into Damascus and was then let go.

In contemplating these cases, Judge Iacobucci will have to contemplate a treasure trove of secret intelligence files, some of which may now be more than a decade old, and which may have been influenced by information from foreign intelligence agencies whose secrets the Canadian government has vowed to guard.

The previous inquiry, in which Mr. Justice Dennis O'Connor probed the Maher Arar case, spent two years and millions of dollars probing Canadian involvement. Nominally a public inquiry, it was frequently forced to meet in private because of the government's assertion that it needed to protect its information, to shield both ongoing investigations and foreign sources of information.

Ultimately, Judge O'Connor concluded that inaccurate and misleading information from Canada most likely led the Americans to act as they did against Mr. Arar – who was found to have never represented any risk to Canadian national security. His lawsuit has recently been settled for $10-million in damages.

Judge O'Connor concluded that Mr. Arar's case was intertwined with the others, a finding that led to the new inquiry. He also appointed an academic fact-finder to interview the four Syrian detainees, and concluded that each had been a victim of torture there.

The Attorney-General of Canada and police agencies had been attempting to keep the torture findings out of the new inquiry into the three detainees, arguing that it the report was ”rife with frailties.”

But Judge Iacobucci said he will consider the report's findings with some follow-up investigation.

”It is important to ascertain whether these individuals suffered torture,” the decision released on Thursday said.

Judge Iacobucci said that considering questions behind closed doors should allow for his inquiry move along more speedily than otherwise.

”I am not elevating the workability principle to an unjustifiable degree, but simply recognizing that, for example, to encourage arguments over material that would be presented and whether it could be cleared for release or for redaction proposes and the like, would, as experience in the Arar Inquiry demonstrated, cause significant delay and complexity.”

Iacobucci Inquiry

If I were the lawyers for the three I would seriously consider not participating in the inquiry at all. There is no chance for them to question or even see most of the evidence that will be brought forth by the intelligence agencies. As Iacobucci notes in his rulings, he sees the inquiry as primarily inquisitorial not one where lawyers are in a combatorial role. There are no sides apparently but just the GRAND INQUISITOR Iacobucci from Torys LLP and TorStar impartially uncovering the TRUTH.
The whole of Iacobucci's decision is available in PDF format at the inquiry website.

Torture probe lawyers barred from hearings
May 31, 2007 08:12 PM
Jim Bronskill
canadian press

OTTAWA – Lawyers for three Canadians accused of terrorist ties will not be privy to closed-door hearings into their clients' arrest and imprisonment abroad.

The idea of giving special security clearances to counsel was rejected Thursday by former Supreme Court judge Frank Iacobucci, who has been appointed to examine the cases of Abdullah Almalki, Ahmad El Maati and Muayyed Nureddin.

The three men claim flawed intelligence from the RCMP and CSIS led to their torture in Syria and Egypt as terrorism suspects.

In a key ruling on how the inquiry will unfold, Iacobucci said he could not see how providing the lawyers with security-cleared access would be helpful to their clients or the inquiry.

He concluded that given the extraordinary sensitivity of the matters under discussion, the lawyers would effectively be forbidden from discussing anything about the hearings with the three men.

"Even something as innocuous as a request for a document or for clarification of a fact could trigger questions from colleagues and clients that might result in disclosure of information subject to national security confidentiality," Iacobucci said in his decision.

The government argued at an April hearing that nearly all future proceedings should be held behind closed doors – not just to protect national security but also to speed up the investigation.

An earlier inquiry into the case of Maher Arar, an Ottawa engineer tortured in a Syrian prison, repeatedly became bogged down in squabbling over how much information could be made public.

In his ruling Thursday, Iacobucci said he will be "continually sensitive to having public hearings when they can be held."

However, he clearly indicated most of the inquiry will be held behind closed doors, believing that to be consistent with both the original terms of reference for the probe outlined by the government and the federal Inquiries Act.

"In my view, there is nothing in the Act to prevent a public inquiry being held in part or all in private."

Jasminka Kalajdzic, a lawyer for Almalki, expressed disappointment.

"We don't believe that the terms of reference absolutely required that the bulk of the work of the inquiry be conducted in secret," she said.

"We do have concerns about the extent to which the public can have confidence in the secret process, especially when the issue is torture – one which we think all Canadians have an interest in being dealt with openly and publicly."

Kalajdzic said counsel for the men would weigh Iacobucci's ruling before deciding how to proceed: "We're discussing our options with our clients, and we'll have to make a decision very soon about that."

Ottawa awarded Arar $10.5 million in compensation after an inquiry concluded faulty information passed by the RCMP to American officials likely led to his deportation to Syria.

In light of similarities to Arar's ordeal, advocates for Almalki, El Maati and Nureddin want to know whether Ottawa orchestrated their overseas interrogations in co-operation with foreign allies.

El Maati, a Toronto truck driver, was arrested in Syria on a visit in 2001, then sent to Egypt in early 2002. He was imprisoned there for almost two years.

Almalki, an Ottawa electronics engineer, was detained in Syria in 2002 and held for 22 months.

Nureddin, a Toronto geologist, was held for 34 days in Syria in late 2003 and early 2004.

Iacobucci said the inquiry would take a broad look at how the men were treated to determine the role played by Canadian officials. That will include further inquiry into claims the men were tortured, building on an independent fact-finding report carried out for the Arar inquiry.

Iacobucci said he has asked inquiry counsel to consult with lawyers for the three "concerning the most appropriate means of inquiring into the allegations of torture."

Next month the inquiry plans to begin interviewing current and former officials from the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, the RCMP and Foreign Affairs.

The Almalki story

The irony of the early part of the investigation was that Almalki co-operated completely with the authorities but it certainly earned him no brownie points. If he had something to hide you would think authorities would wonder at his openness not even requiring lawyers. The whoe story is disgusting as are those of the other two involved in the Iacobucci inquiry. The lawyer's scepticism about the inquiry I share, especially since the Justice dept. claims the three will be unable to clear their names. Even if the inquiry does find that authorities did wrong the inquiry has no power to rectify the situation just to make loud noises and recommendations that the govt. will probably applaud and then leave in limbo. No one will be accountable as no one has been held accountable in the Arar case. The media should be hammering this home. If no one is punished and some are in effect rewarded why should the public expect positive change?

'In Syria, interrogation and torture go hand-in-hand'
Written by Simon Kupi
Friday, 13 April 2007
First, cars followed his family around town. Then customs tape wound its way around his business shipments. Old credit card statements he never asked for showed up in his mail. When he traveled, there were random luggage checks.


But when Abdullah Almalki left Ottawa to visit his sick grandmother in Syria in May 2002, being detained there was the last thing he expected.


Syrian officials imprisoned the Syrian-born Canadian, blindfolded and interrogated him for hours about his alleged links to al-Qaeda.


When he denied those claims, he was lashed hundreds of times with a thick, twisted wire cable, folded into a tire and brutally beaten. He was held in a dirty, closet-sized cell, and spent the next two years thousands of miles from his family in Canada.


And Almalki, who received his engineering degree at Carleton University, says the Canadian government knew all about his conditions.


More than that, he says, they continued to supply his torturers with facts to interrogate with. And those facts, he says, could have only been gathered through CSIS, which he says had been spying on him and his family in Canada.


“Having a camera installed on the street in front of our house. Someone going to check what kind of groceries that we were buying. If we were going to a bank, they would follow us,” he says.


“You see these things in movies. You never think they actually do happen.”


* * *


Almalki’s story is an unfamiliar one to most Canadians.


He was acquainted with and later imprisoned with Maher Arar, another Canadian who was accused of being linked to al-Qaeda.


The Arar commission mentioned Almalki as the target of the RCMP’s Project A-O Canada, an anti-terrorism investigation.


Yet Almalki chose to remain publicly silent about his experiences in the year following his 2004 release.


Then, he says, he began to speak out, partly from a desire to learn what role, if any, the government had in his detention.


During the Arar commission’s inquiry, the head of the A-O Canada investigation, Michel Cabana, said the RCMP never asked Syrian officials to keep Almalki incarcerated.


Cabana also testified he had “no direct knowledge” of human rights abuses by Syrian investigators, but was aware that “Syrian authorities might not follow the same procedures, and treat their incarcerated individuals the same way as we do here in Canada.”


An inquiry into Almalki’s case is currently underway.


Almalki says he also chose to speak out to teach others about torture.


He has talked publicly of his experiences in forums across Ontario and in places as far as London, England, and Norway.


“I think it’s important for people to know what torture is,” he says.


“The Canadian government, the American government, CSIS, the RCMP, internal affairs, the issue of torture came up many times in their meetings. Apparently they are all complicit in my torture, but do they really understand what torture is?”


Almalki says learning to speak about what happened was a difficult process. He says he still phrases his torture in general rather than specific terms.


“I’d have to bring my mind back to that place and bring back the details,” he says. “And it was very hard for me to do that.”


* * *


In March 2006, Almalki launched a lawsuit against the 13 government officials he believed responsible for his treatment. Along with Ahmed Elmaati and Muayyed Nurredin — Canadians also tortured in Syria — he called for an inquiry.


That inquiry, while resisted by the previous government, was opened by former Supreme Court Justice Frank Iacobucci March 21 this year.


Yet Almalki is critical of what the government has called an “internal inquiry,” and fears its conclusions will be hid from the public.


“I have not spoken with a single lawyer who has heard this term before,” he says.


“The government says it wants the inquiry to inspire public confidence in Canadian agencies. If it’s a secret inquiry, I don’t think it will do that.”


Almalki says there is little chance the government was not aware of what was going on in the prison.


“It’s very well documented that in Syria, interrogation and torture go hand-in-hand,” he says.


And Almalki says he also doubts that the government had been operating with entirely good intentions.


Almalki was acquitted from all charges by Syrian courts after two years of detainment in 2004.


But Syrian officials then threatened Almalki with more time for violating his compulsory military service, he says.


He had waived that duty before through legal means, but had been unable to defer it while he was in jail.


To prevent being detained again, he sought shelter in the Canadian embassy. They turned him down, forcing Almalki to flee the country alone.


“Don’t we need to know that these people, who are entrusted with our security, are held accountable?” Almalki says.


He also says the questions Syrian officials asked during his interrogations were often the same as those that CSIS agents asked in interviews dating back to 1998. He says that led him to believe the two countries must have been communicating about his interrogation.


“The questions were the same and they were put to the same person, who was me,” he says. “The only difference is the one who is asking the questions and what he is holding in his hand.”


* * *


Almalki says he does not know why the government would act as he says they did.


But the harsh methods used to draw information from him would never have been available to Canadian intelligence, he says.


“So the question is, why is the RCMP, CSIS and we don’t know who else sub-contracting interrogation and torture to other countries?” he says.


While the inquiry has required Almalki and his lawyers to sift through what he says are thousands of documents pertaining to the case, Almalki says he is continuing to recover physically and mentally from his torture.


He says he went through five psychiatrists and psychologists before seeing improvement.


“For the first year after I came back, all the scheduling on my calendar was just doctors’ appointments,” he says.


“I went from one doctor to another. It took a long time for things to get back to normal, and some of the problems I still have.”


One of those problems is a displaced jaw, which Almalki says leaves him terrified at the thought of going to the dentist.


And he says it would be especially difficult for him to return to his former profession as a businessman and engineer for an export company.


He says he has found himself unable to count numbers in his head or remember names as well as he could before.


Most importantly, he says, he lost his reputation because of his investigation — an investigation that he says is continuing.


He says it makes him especially afraid to travel, and he brings a lawyer when he does.


Yet regardless of the investigation, he says, he and others deserve an apology.


“Had it been that any of the three of us were charged with anything, does that justify the RCMP being complicit in torture?” he asks.


Almalki says he hopes the inquiry will clear his name and that an apology will give him and his family the closure they need.


And, he says, he hopes it will restore accountability to intelligence agencies and end state-sponsored torture.


“I’m speaking out not because I hate this country, but because I love it,” he says.


“I love this country and I want my kids to have a better future than what I went through.”

Iacobucci Inquiry: The Right to View Evidence

Full story is here.
Fairness is contextual. This means I presume that in the context of his inquiry fairness might not involve access to the evidence against the three! Way to go Frank!
If the lawyers cannot be at these hearings it makes sense for them to simply walk out. Perhaps there is some compromise possible in that some of the evidence might be available. The Tory LLP people in negotiation with the govt. could perhaps work out something. Otherwise the whole process has zilch credibility.


The terms do allow Iacobucci to conduct some public hearings if he considers them "essential" to his work, and he signalled Monday that he will take advantage of the opportunity.

"I intend to take that provision most seriously," he declared.

But commission counsel John Laskin said it's premature to speculate on exactly how much of the evidence will be available to the media and the general public. He also dodged the question of whether the three complainants and their lawyers will have access to closed-door sessions.

The issue is reminiscent of the debate over federal security certificates, the legal vehicles used by Ottawa to deport non-citizens suspected of terrorist activity.

In a landmark ruling last month, the Supreme Court struck down the system because it relied on judges hearing key evidence in private, with neither the defendants nor their lawyers present.

Laskin suggested, however, that the procedural rules deemed essential for a court case may not apply at a commission of inquiry.

"The Supreme Court has said many, many, many times fairness is contextual," he told reporters. "And the context here is a different context."

The matter won't be resolved until another hearing is held in mid-April.

Jasminka Kalajdzic, one of the lawyers for Almalki, said security-cleared counsel for the complainants must have access to closed-door proceedings.

Almalki seconded that opinion during a break in the hearing Monday, saying he needs to know the evidence against him to clear his name.

He added that he's looking to the inquiry to finally get to the truth of what happened to him - and to hold those responsible accountable.

"I don't think we can afford (to have) people in our government who are complicit in torture stay in their positions."

Nureddin, who attended the hearing, declined to speak about his case.

El Maati was absent because he's just undergone back surgery - the latest of seven operations to repair injuries suffered at the hands of his foreign jailers.

El Maati, a Toronto truck driver, was arrested in Syria on a visit in 2001, then transferred to Egypt in early 2002 for further interrogation.

Almalki, an Ottawa electronics engineer, was detained in Syria in 2002 and held for 22 months, while Nureddin, a Toronto geologist, was held for 34 days in Syria.

Their stories bear striking similarities to that of Maher Arar, who was arrested by U.S. authorities in 2002 and deported to face torture in Syria. Arar's name was cleared by another inquiry that concluded he was the victim of misinformation supplied by the RCMP.

Iacobucci Inquiry: The Process

If the lawyers for the three complainants cannot view the evidence what is the point in their even being there? This is what worries me about an inquiry that involves evidence that will be routinely be classified and as not in the public interest to reveal. How could one hope to have confidence in this process even if Iacobucci does find failings in the intelligence services? There still has been not a single person held responsible for the Arar case. In fact several people involved were promoted. Zaccardelli had to resign because of his perjury not because of the RCMP wrongdoings or errors as in officalspeak.


Inquiry into torture of three Canadians to be mostly private: judge Canadian Press
Published: Wednesday, March 21, 2007 Article tools



OTTAWA (CP) - Former Supreme Court justice Frank Iacobucci is promising to get to the bottom of the role played by the RCMP and CSIS in the arrest and torture abroad of three Canadians accused of terrorist ties - but the public may never see most of the evidence.

In an opening statement Monday, Iacobucci acknowledged that the bulk of his work will be carried out behind closed doors for national security reasons. He expressed hope, however, that the secrecy won't undermine public confidence in the proceedings.

"Having been a judge for some 17 years, I have a profound respect for the principles of independence and acting in the public interest," he said.

He went on to offer an assurance that he will be "as vigilant as I can to ensure that the inquiry is as independent, thorough and fair as it can possibly be under the circumstances."

Iacobucci also noted the terms of reference handed to him by the Conservative government do allow for some public hearings if he considers them "essential" to carry out his mandate.

"I intend to take that provision most seriously," he said.

Commission counsel John Laskin said it's premature to speculate about how much of the evidence will be available to the media and the general public.

He also declined to offer an opinion on whether security-cleared lawyers for the three complainants will be allowed to sit in on closed-door sessions dealing with sensitive documents and testimony. That issue will likely be hashed out at another hearing scheduled for mid-April

Iacobucci was appointed last December to investigate the ordeals of Abdullah Almalki, Ahmad El Maati and Muayyed Nureddin, all of whom deny allegations of terrorist links.

They say their detention and torture in Syria and Egypt resulted from misleading information supplied to foreign officials by Canadian police and security officers.

© The Canadian Press 2007

Project A O Canada

So this truck driver, suspected terrorist, chooses not to have a lawyer and voluntarily co-operates with his interrogators and he is still locked up in maximum security. It really sounds as if the FBI and AO Canada have blown up circumstantial evidence to spin their own web of fancies about a sleeper Al Qaeda cell in Canada. No one so far has been able to test these fancies in court except indirectly through the Arar inquiry which showed that the A O Canada investigators had zilch in the way of training for their job and sent unsifted libelous raw comments about Arar to the US with no caveats. But of course absolutely nothing has happened to punish these worthies and no doubt if Almalki is cleared no one will be punished either except the Canadian taxpayer who will pay a bundle for the Iacobucci inquiry-- but at least Almalki and the other may be cleared.
This is from the Globe and MailTorture, radios and why the U.S. won't let go
A complex web of relationships runs from the Maher Arar case to a truck driver awaiting trial in a maximum-security Minnesota prison. The immediate subject: radios. The real fear: An al-Qaeda sleeper agent setting up in Canada
COLIN FREEZE

On a chilly Minnesota night in 2004, FBI agents invited an immigrant truck driver to step out of the April air and warm up in a waiting car. They proceeded to bring him in for questioning, telling him they knew he'd served as a mujahedeen sniper in Afghanistan.

"How much trouble am I in?" was his reply, court records say.

The agents told the man, a U.S. resident by way of Lebanon, there would be no trouble -- if he answered their queries truthfully. The conversation lasted all night as they inquired about his life in 1990s Afghan training camps.

Then the interrogators switched gears: They wanted to know about a Canadian-run export enterprise. They suggested he worked for the business in 1996, sending walkie-talkies out of New York to Islamic radicals lurking in Afghanistan's remote refuges.


Since 1997 -- and with heightened zeal since the 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington -- counterterrorism investigators have been trying to connect a Canadian two-way-radio export enterprise with al-Qaeda.

The probe, ultimately dubbed Project A-O Canada, led to the arrest and torture of Maher Arar, the telecommunications engineer wrongly smeared as a terrorist. It has left a Canadian exporter, Abdullah Almalki, trying to clear his name, and it has spawned the prosecution of the Minnesota trucker, held since 2004 in a maximum-security U.S. prison awaiting trial.

The charge? Lying about those ubiquitous radios.

The real fear: An al-Qaeda sleeper agent setting up shop in Canada.

The Globe and Mail has spent months investigating Project A-O Canada and its tangled aftermath -- the complex web of personal and police interactions that have remained an unsettling mystery.

In 2001, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, which has no powers of arrest, passed its probe on to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. For the Canadians, the investigation led to no criminal charges north of the border. It led instead to Mr. Arar, who has received $10-million in damages and an apology from Ottawa.

For the Americans, the probe seems never-ending. Mr. Arar, 36, remains on the U.S. watch list, for reasons never publicly explained. And in Minnesota, the government is pressing its case against the trucker, Mohammed Kamal Elzahabi, 43 -- even bugging his prison cell.

In the U.S. view, the Elzahabi case is about radios the way the 1930s prosecution of gangster Al Capone was about tax evasion. Minnesota court records show that, in 2004, agents rushed to arrest Mr. Elzahabi because they knew him as an Afghan-trained sniper and had heard he was moving north.

"There was concern that he, like others in his specialty, in his trade, might use Canada as a base to attack the United States," FBI agent Harry Samit testified in Minneapolis last year.

A U.S. counterterrorism official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said in an interview: "If we have any individuals whom we have the slightest inclination of potentially being a threat, we will use anything at our disposal." He added: "By the time I can prove the criminality, it's probably too late."

The American way of counterterrorism is in stark contrast to the Canadian model, where investigators are far more constrained by civil-liberties protections. "Their job is exponentially much more difficult," the U.S. official allowed.

Yet the terrorist threat remains, he said. "The only thing that has decreased since Sept. 11 is people's appreciation of the severity of the situation. Particularly," he added pointedly, "in countries that have not been victimized."

The substance of the Elzahabi case is not contentious.

In that post-9/11 world, the Mounties hoped to unearth a supposed al-Qaeda support cell that was allegedly shipping goods, including walkie-talkies, to Afghanistan. The prime target of Project A-O Canada was Mr. Almalki, now 35, an Ottawa-based exporter originally from Syria. He turned out to be a dangerous man to know.

The RCMP were tracking Mr. Almalki's every move, watching his associations, while financially savvy detectives were probing complex transactions of his export business.

In the mid-1990s, Mr. Almalki had prevailed on the Elzahabis -- Lebanese friends from Montreal, including Mohammed Kamal Elzahabi -- to help him out. Mr. Elzahabi's brother, Abdelrahman, had just opened a mechanic's business in New York. The brothers at Drive Axle Rebuilders, or DAR, developed a sideline -- they would help the Ottawa exporter buy cheap electronic equipment in the United States, consolidate the packages in New York and ship them to Pakistan.

The enterprise would spell trouble for everyone involved.

In January of 2002, the RCMP raided Mr. Almalki's Ottawa house. Montreal residences associated with his friend and business partner, Abdelrahman Elzahabi -- who split time between New York and Montreal -- were also searched, The Globe has learned.

On the same day, the RCMP showed up on Mr. Arar's Ottawa doorstep. They didn't have a search warrant -- and he wasn't home -- but they wanted to ask him about the radio business. They had once spotted him talking to Mr. Almalki.

All this would prove controversial after the fruits of the RCMP searches were handed over to the FBI. "The documents detail purchases and shipments of radios and other electronics worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, all shipped to DAR in New York," reads an FBI affidavit in the Minnesota case.

"Among the items shipped to Elzahabi's New York business were large quantities of portable field radios or 'walkie talkies,' " the affidavit says. ". . . Field radios of the same make and models as was shipped to DAR in New York have been recovered in Afghanistan by U.S. military forces during military actions following the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001."

The U.S. government provides no proof. Nor does it suggest the exports themselves were a crime. But lying to federal agents is illegal.

The FBI says the truck driver told them he didn't know much about the business. Yet agents say they recovered a 1996 fax addressed to a "Mr. Elzahabi" that proves he was intimately aware of the walkie-talkies. "Mohammed Kamal Elzahabi did knowingly and willfully make a false material statement," the indictment says.

But the crux of the matter may lie elsewhere: fears that Mr. Elzahabi was an al-Qaeda agent bent on using Canada as a base. FBI agents told him it was in his interest to talk -- which he did, for 17 days, in a hotel room rented for the occasion.

They had him forgo his right to a lawyer and sign a waiver saying he was not being mistreated. "I have met with the FBI and voluntarily detailed my background and associations," he wrote. ". . . I have been staying in a nice hotel room in downtown Minneapolis."

According to court documents, portions of which have been made public, Mr. Elzahabi told his FBI hosts a remarkable story.

In the 1980s, he attended an Islamic conference in the United States. It radicalized him. Like many young Arabs, he decided to join Afghans fighting the Soviets.

He joined a missionary group to facilitate his entry to the Afghan camps. Mr. Elzahabi lingered there long after the Soviets left. He took the name Abu Kamal al-Lubnani and became a sniper instructor, giving other Arabs small-arms training at the Khalden camp, a base for would-be mujahedeen fighters that years later would be taken over by al-Qaeda.

In the early 1990s, he met men who would go on to become notorious terrorists, even the eventual mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. But later, when Mr. Elzahabi was asked whether he was part of al-Qaeda, "he would frequently tell us that he was not a member," Agent Samit testified.

Court documents say Mr. Elzahabi was shot in the gut during the Afghan civil war, forcing a return to the United States for treatment.

While on the mend, he worked in the mechanic's business, DAR, run by his brother in New York. After that, he drove a cab in Boston. Three other former mujahedeen worked at the same company. One ended up jailed for an al-Qaeda bomb plot in Jordan. Another was killed trying to lead a Sunni insurrection in Lebanon. The other is jailed in Syria.

FBI Boston started investigating Mr. Elzahabi in 1999 but never came up with any evidence he was a terrorist. Agents lost track of him -- he went to fight the Russians in Chechnya -- before an FBI public-record search found him driving 18-wheelers out of Minnesota.

While the charges against him are relatively minor, he is being held in a maximum-security prison. And the government admitted this year to bugging and videotaping his cell.

"The presumption of innocence means nothing in this case," his lawyer, Paul Engh, said. His client's prison time, the lawyer added, is already "well past" any sentence he would get if convicted of lying about walkie-talkies.

The men mentioned in connection with the radio business have had a mixed fate.

Take the trucker's brother, Abdelrahman Elzahabi, now 36 and living in Montreal. Properties associated with him were raided in Quebec; police have not said what they took. But according to bankruptcy records obtained by The Globe, he told creditors that his wife had thrown out all his personal files and even his pilot's licence. He had been forced to sell his 1985 Nissan and also a Cessna aircraft. Police, too, tried to ground him: It wasn't in his interests to board any commercial international flights, a source says he was told.

But the mechanic fared better than the other targets of the probe.

On Sept. 27, 2002, FBI agents stopped Mr. Arar at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York. "During the interview, Arar admitted his association with Abdullah Almalki . . .," reads a U.S. deportation document. ". . . Arar also advised the FBI that Almalki exports radios and one of his customers is the Pakistani military."

Mr. Arar was declared an "al-Qaeda member" who was "unequivocally inadmissible" to the United States. He was flown in shackles aboard a CIA Gulfstream jet and sent to a Syrian prison -- where he again met Mr. Almalki.

Six months earlier, the exporter had been arrested flying into his homeland voluntarily. Mr. Almalki said he was stuffed into a tire, his head, feet and genitals beaten. Mr. Arar said he was kept in a grave-like cell and beaten with electrical cables. Both men were eventually released back to Canada.

Mr. Almalki said there is no riddle of the radios.

"To any logical person it would mean all these years of investigation, all those years of torture -- it was either there was no investigation all these years, it was just fake everything, or there was just nothing," he said in an interview.

He doesn't hide the fact that he exported walkie-talkies and related circuitry. But he said he always did so legally, and he can prove his goods were shipped to Pakistan. "I don't know about Afghanistan because I never sold or dealt with Afghanistan related to any type of equipment," he said.

He retains a 1995 invoice from one of his biggest clients, the Pakistani army. The paper shows the army's "Director General of Military Procurement" agreed to buy nearly $300,000 worth of equipment.

Some Pakistani generals were known to support radical Muslims in Afghanistan, but Mr. Almalki said he has no idea whether his wares were shipped across any border.

"What I sold to the Pakistani government, my responsibility or any responsibility on the face of the earth, would end by the time the shipment gets sent off to the customer," he said.

The Globe contacted the state-owned outfit in Lahore that bought the goods. A representative said the 1995 shipment was too old to verify, but confirmed his company imported walkie-talkies in that period. He expressed surprise this could still be an issue for anyone.

"We have never been questioned by any local or foreign intelligence agency about the imports in question . . ." said MicroElectronics International marketing manager Munawar Ali, a retired air-force officer. "You are the first one who has asked for such information."

For his part, Mr. Almalki said: "I've never had contact with al-Qaeda, never known anyone from al-Qaeda . . ."

He has never faced a criminal charge in Canada. But police say they are still pursuing him. Meanwhile, a new judicial inquiry, led by former Supreme Court justice Frank Iacobucci, is delving into the investigation and torture of Mr. Almalki. It will start taking submissions next week.

Last year, Mr. Engh, the defence lawyer in the Minnesota case, asked the judge to let him seek statements from the known targets of Project A-O Canada. The idea is to prove that Mr. Elzahabi never lied to the FBI -- that he really didn't know much about the radios.

Judge John Tunheim cleared the lawyer to go to Canada to get a statement. In an interview, Mr. Almalki said he'd be happy to help debunk the FBI case, particularly the 1996 fax to a "Mr. Elzahabi" taken from his home in the RCMP raids.

"That fax was for his brother [Abdelrahman], not him," Mr. Almalki said. "I'm not sure he [Mohammed Kamal] knows anything about electronics."

Judge Tunheim turned down the defence request for a statement from Mr. Arar, who was deemed irrelevant to the case.

Still, the FBI may feel otherwise. Court documents filed in Minnesota show that the truck driver was asked questions about Mr. Arar during his interrogation. A defence motion suggests that the FBI is trying to tie Mr. Arar to the New York garage that reshipped the radios.

The Globe asked Mr. Arar and his lawyer, Lorne Waldman, whether they knew why.

"We have no idea why the FBI says this - Maher has never heard of a DAR in New York," Mr. Waldman said in an e-mail to The Globe. Asked whether he knew Mohammed Kamal Elzahabi, the lawyer said only: "Maher says he had his car fixed at [Abdelrahman's] garage a few times when he lived in Montreal."

Later, Mr. Waldman said his client doesn't recall ever meeting the other brother, Mohammed. It is not clear when the trucker's case will come to trial, adding another chapter to the recurring saga of the radios.

Who's whoMaher Arar, Canadian engineer: The Syrian-born engineer has been cleared of links to terrorism. A Canadian judge has found it very likely that U.S. border guards used incorrect Canadian information in declaring him an "al-Qaeda" member, to deport him to Syria, where he was held for a year.

Abdullah Almalki, Canadian exporter: This Syrian exporter once worked for an Afghan charity but says he never sent any goods there. He was held twice as long as Mr. Arar in a Syrian jail. A new judicial commission is probing his allegations of Canadian government complicity in his torture.

Abdelrahman Elzahabi, Canadian mechanic: He once worked with Mr. Almalki to ship walkie-talkies overseas. Police raided Montreal properties associated with him on the day they visited the other two men. Though never charged with a crime, police told him not to board any commercial flights out of Canada.

Mohammed Kamal Elzahabi, Minnesota truck driver: The brother of the mechanic is an acknowledged mujahedeen fighter but denies being in al-Qaeda. He has been jailed for three years and awaits trial on charges of lying to the FBI about shipping radios.

Almalki gives speech at Carleton University

As can be seen it is Al Malki's association with Khadr that is one of the main reasons that the RCMP connects him with Al Qaeda. Mahar in turn was guilty because he associated with Almalki albeit briefly. No one wonder Muslims tend to shun contact with any person ever accused of terrorism. You immediately become a person of interest if not a suspect yourself.
I doubt that Almalki will have much luck making hearings public. The other side will insist that for reasons of national security most of the hearings will be in camera. No doubt there will be one or two show public hearings to give the appearance of openness. Given that the report is to be in by the end of next January things will need to move along quickly.


Thursday » March 15 » 2007

'I have nothing to hide'
Victim of Syrian torture Almalki tells Carleton crowd federal government 'crushed' his rights

Andrew Duffy
The Ottawa Citizen


Thursday, March 15, 2007



CREDIT: Bruno Schlumberger, The Ottawa Citizen
Abdullah Almalki, 36, a Carleton University graduate, was the target of an RCMP national security probe that ensnared Maher Arar and ultimately led to his deportation to Syria. Mr. Almalki maintains that he has never been involved in terrorism.

Ottawa's Abdullah Almalki says he fears the "internal inquiry" into his arrest and torture will not afford the Canadian public the full story behind his ordeal.

Mr. Almalki, 36, a Carleton University engineering graduate, returned to his alma mater last night to recount the circumstances that put him at the centre of one of the most intense -- and controversial -- national security investigations in Canadian history.

He gave an audience of human rights students a detailed account of his 22 months of detention and torture in Syrian jails, and presented evidence as to why he believes Canadian officials were complicit in that mistreatment.

"My most basic fundamental human rights were abused," he told students at Minto Centre theatre. "Being protected from torture, the right to a fair trial, being protected from arbitrary arrest, these are rights that we should expect our own government to protect. In my case, my own government is the one who crushed them."

Mr. Almalki's allegations -- that Canadian officials were responsible for his arrest and furthered his torture -- will this year be the subject of a judicial inquiry by retired Supreme Court Judge Frank Iacobucci.

That probe is being billed as an "internal" inquiry and most of its proceedings are expected to be held in-camera.

Mr. Almalki, however, hopes his lawyers can convince Judge Iacobucci to make the hearings public. The hearings are expected to begin next week as the judge decides who should have standing at the inquiry.

"We have the right as the Canadian public to know what the government is doing in our name," Mr. Almalki said last night. "As people living in a democratic society, don't we have the right to know what our government is doing? How else do we make decisions? It's our basic right."

Mr. Almalki said he is willing to meet all of the allegations that have been made against him in a public courtroom.

The Canadian Security Intelligence Service and the RCMP believed Mr. Almalki was connected to al-Qaeda. But Mr. Almalki has always maintained that he has never been involved in terrorism.

"I am open. I have nothing to hide," Mr. Almalki said in an interview after his speech.

"It looks like the government is the one who has everything to hide. It is the government that is trying to keep things from the public. Ask yourself, what do they have to hide?"

The Iacobucci inquiry will examine Mr. Almalki's case and those of two other Arab-Canadian men, Ahmad El-Maati and Muayyed Nureddin, who were also arrested and tortured in Syria while under investigation by security agencies in Canada.

Mr. Almalki, who immigrated to Canada from Syria when he was 16-years-old, was the principal target of Project A-O Canada, an RCMP special investigative unit created one month after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

The unit's mandate was to investigate the activities of Mr. Almalki while working to prevent a terrorist attack on Canadian soil.

As Project A-O Canada's leader, Insp. Michel Cabana, later testified: "It was a race against the clock to ensure that nothing else happened."

Few of the 20 officers who would work on Project A-O Canada had previous experience in national security investigations.

The principal focus of their work was Mr. Almalki, then an Ottawa businessman and father of four. He had first attracted the attention of Canadian intelligence agents in the late 1990s because of his export business, which sent communications components to Pakistan.

He had also worked in the early 1990s with Human Concern International, an Ottawa-based charity that performed development work in the Muslim world. His boss at the time was Ahmed Said Khadr, an Egyptian-born Canadian who later proved to be a member of Osama bin Laden's inner circle.

Mr. Almalki worked for HCI in Pakistan and Afghanistan for almost two years, but quit in April 1994 because of what he described as a clash with Mr. Khadr.

Mr. Khadr would be arrested the following year and accused of diverting money from HCI to finance a November 1995 bombing of the Egyptian embassy in Islamabad, an explosion that killed 15 people. He was released shortly after then-prime minister Jean Chretien intervened in the case.

Mr. Khadr, was killed in an October, 2003, shootout with Pakistani forces near the Afghanistan border.

After Sept. 11, 2001, CSIS and the RCMP also became suspicious of Mr. Almalki's ties to other Arab-Canadian men, including Mr. El-Maati, Maher Arar and a Montreal Muslim who held a pilot's licence and owned a Cessna.

Mr. Almalki was arrested by the Syrians when he went to visit his ailing grandmother in May 2002 based on what he believes was information that came from Canada. He was repeatedly interrogated and tortured into giving answers, he said, about his contacts with Canadian Muslims and his business dealings.

According to the Arar commission report, the Canadian ambassador in Syria arranged to have RCMP questions for Mr. Almalki passed to Syrian military intelligence. Mr. Almalki said he was then tortured again to give answers to those questions.

He was eventually released by the Syrians and cleared by their courts of any connection to terrorism.

Mr. Almalki said reputation and business have been destroyed by the Canadian government. He wants those in government who were complicit in his torture held responsible for what he called "an international crime."

"What moral boundaries do they have when they operate?" he asked his Carleton audience. "Clearly, when they don't have media scrutiny, or public scrutiny, there are international crimes. Torture is an international crime."

© The Ottawa Citizen 2007