It is hardly news that CSIS or RCMP intelligence ignored human rights. What would be news is if anyone were ever held responsible for it. Arar was paid millions by Canadian taxpayers for the wrongs done to him but no one in the intelligence agencies were punished. The US still considers him a member of Al Qaeda or at least that is the grounds upon which they rendered him to Syria for interrogation and torture. Arar has not even been able to get a court case off the ground in the U.S. for reasons of national security. Even Stockwell Day and Stephen Harper who are hardly left wing wackos thought the secret evidence the US revealed to them was no ground for changing their own opinions. Yet nothing happens.
Again Abdelrazik was on a no fly list at the request of the U.S. No evidence that can be revealed no evidence that could bring a charge so he just suffered in the Sudan and until Harper was forced by a court decision to allow him back to Canada.
CSIS ignored Khadr's human rights: report
CBC News
CSIS ignored human-rights concerns and did not take Omar Khadr's age into account in deciding to interview him at the U.S. military's Guantanamo Bay prison, says a report from the independent committee that oversees the spy agency.
The Toronto-born Khadr, now 22, is being held at the U.S. detention centre in Cuba for allegedly throwing a grenade in Afghanistan when he was 15, killing an American soldier. He is the only Western citizen still detained at Guantanamo.
A report from the security intelligence review committee (SIRC), released Wednesday in Ottawa, said documents also show Khadr's U.S. captors threatened him with rape, kept him alone and would not let him sleep. Canadian Security Intelligence Service officers questioned Khadr at Guantanamo Bay in 2003 and shared the results of their interrogations with the Americans.
However, the report did not find that CSIS was complicit in Khadr's alleged torture at the hands of U.S. interrogators.
The committee recommended that CSIS take human-rights issues into consideration in future probes and also establish a policy framework to guide its dealings with young people.
"As part of this, the service should ensure that such interactions are guided by the same principles that are entrenched in Canadian and international law," the SIRC report said.
Showing posts with label Arar. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Arar. Show all posts
Thursday, July 16, 2009
Sunday, September 16, 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
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
Wednesday, May 2, 2007
Fear is no excuse for torture.
There is also the case of Benamar Benatta who was surrendered to US authorities and claims torture or certainly mistreatment during years of being jailed there. The case of Khadr is interesting in its contrast to Celil the Chinese Uighr who belongs to a terrorist group according to the Chinese and had an international warrant for his arrest. The issue has been brought up at the highest level by MacKay. However, absolutely nothing has been done about Khadr who was in fact a juvenile when apprehended. The same silence on US torture is evident in every article about torture in Afghanistan. The torture is all by Afghan authorities. Bagram prison is not even mentioned.
Fear is no excuse for torture
LORNE WALDMAN
Special to Globe and Mail Update
May 1, 2007 at 1:00 AM EDT
Outcry over the treatment of the about 40 Afghans detained by the Canadian Forces since 2002 has spawned a public debate that goes to the heart of our democratic values. Given the absolute prohibition against torture, most Canadians are horrified to think our government is complicit in the practice.
The fact it has occurred thousands of miles away is irrelevant. Anyone who aids and abets in torture can be prosecuted. Indeed, so abhorrent is torture to our legal system, it is one of the few offences in our Criminal Code where a person who has committed the torture outside Canada can be prosecuted here. The prohibition against torture is universal and applies everywhere on the planet.
Given this, how are we to understand our government's conduct over the question of the Afghan detainees? When confronted with the question of how to deal with enemy fighters detained during military operations in Afghanistan, our military failed to provide for a system with sufficient safeguards to protect against torture.
It's no surprise that many of those detained by the Canadian Forces have now revealed that once they were handed over to the Afghan military or police, they were tortured. This makes Canada complicit in their torture. One can only assume that those who drafted the agreement thought Canadians would not care about a few Taliban detained in Afghanistan.
The situation of the Afghan detainees is not, however, the only time in the recent past where the conduct of Canadian officials has made them complicit in torture. Take the case of Maher Arar. In the fall of 2001, Mr. Arar, as a result of a chance meeting, became "a person of interest" in a national security investigation. RCMP flagged him as an "Islamic extremist" on an international lookout list.
As Mr. Justice Dennis O'Connor concluded in his report, this inflammatory and erroneous information contributed to the American decision to deport Mr. Arar to Syria. This careless use of national security information made Canada complicit in his torture.
At the same time as Maher Arar was languishing in a Syrian prison, so was Abdullah Almalki. Mr. Almalki has alleged in a lawsuit that the RCMP sent the Syrian military a series of questions in January of 2003, as a result of which he was brought up for further interrogation and torture sessions.
This conduct points to Canada as being complicit in his torture as well.
One final example of our complicity is the case of Omar Khadr, the Canadian citizen held at Guantanamo Bay. Detained in Afghanistan as a 15-year-old, Mr. Khadr was apparently subjected to torture at the hands of U.S. officials. He now faces a trial before the kangaroo courts set up by the Bush administration to try enemy combatants. The Bush administration has steadfastly ignored the fact that Mr. Khadr was a child when he was detained and that, as a result, he ought to be treated as a child soldier.
Instead of charging Mr. Khadr with offences, his rehabilitation should be the chief concern.
In the face of this injustice, our government remains silent. There is no doubt that the Khadr case is difficult. His family is notorious, as are the family's connections to al-Qaeda. Despite this, our government still has a duty to protect a young Canadian citizen who was detained as a child, has been tortured, and is now being tried in sham proceedings. Our silence is tantamount to acquiescence.
Each of these scenarios raises difficult questions. No doubt, the world has changed as a result of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11. We are much more aware of a serious threat posed by extremist groups.
We cannot, however, let our fear become a justification to allow expediency to take over. We must ensure our fear of terrorism does not undermine our fundamental democratic values. Afghan detainees are entitled to humane treatment, even if they are Taliban. Persons who are suspected of being connected to an al-Qaeda cell are entitled to expect that our national security apparatus will send accurate and reliable information to foreign agencies. They are also entitled to expect that we will not seek the assistance of a regime notorious for human-rights violations when such assistance might lead to torture. Finally, Canadian citizens have a right to expect our government will intervene to protect them from torture and injustice, regardless of their background.
Lorne Waldman represented Maher Arar at the commission of inquiry by Mr. Justice Dennis O'Connor.
Fear is no excuse for torture
LORNE WALDMAN
Special to Globe and Mail Update
May 1, 2007 at 1:00 AM EDT
Outcry over the treatment of the about 40 Afghans detained by the Canadian Forces since 2002 has spawned a public debate that goes to the heart of our democratic values. Given the absolute prohibition against torture, most Canadians are horrified to think our government is complicit in the practice.
The fact it has occurred thousands of miles away is irrelevant. Anyone who aids and abets in torture can be prosecuted. Indeed, so abhorrent is torture to our legal system, it is one of the few offences in our Criminal Code where a person who has committed the torture outside Canada can be prosecuted here. The prohibition against torture is universal and applies everywhere on the planet.
Given this, how are we to understand our government's conduct over the question of the Afghan detainees? When confronted with the question of how to deal with enemy fighters detained during military operations in Afghanistan, our military failed to provide for a system with sufficient safeguards to protect against torture.
It's no surprise that many of those detained by the Canadian Forces have now revealed that once they were handed over to the Afghan military or police, they were tortured. This makes Canada complicit in their torture. One can only assume that those who drafted the agreement thought Canadians would not care about a few Taliban detained in Afghanistan.
The situation of the Afghan detainees is not, however, the only time in the recent past where the conduct of Canadian officials has made them complicit in torture. Take the case of Maher Arar. In the fall of 2001, Mr. Arar, as a result of a chance meeting, became "a person of interest" in a national security investigation. RCMP flagged him as an "Islamic extremist" on an international lookout list.
As Mr. Justice Dennis O'Connor concluded in his report, this inflammatory and erroneous information contributed to the American decision to deport Mr. Arar to Syria. This careless use of national security information made Canada complicit in his torture.
At the same time as Maher Arar was languishing in a Syrian prison, so was Abdullah Almalki. Mr. Almalki has alleged in a lawsuit that the RCMP sent the Syrian military a series of questions in January of 2003, as a result of which he was brought up for further interrogation and torture sessions.
This conduct points to Canada as being complicit in his torture as well.
One final example of our complicity is the case of Omar Khadr, the Canadian citizen held at Guantanamo Bay. Detained in Afghanistan as a 15-year-old, Mr. Khadr was apparently subjected to torture at the hands of U.S. officials. He now faces a trial before the kangaroo courts set up by the Bush administration to try enemy combatants. The Bush administration has steadfastly ignored the fact that Mr. Khadr was a child when he was detained and that, as a result, he ought to be treated as a child soldier.
Instead of charging Mr. Khadr with offences, his rehabilitation should be the chief concern.
In the face of this injustice, our government remains silent. There is no doubt that the Khadr case is difficult. His family is notorious, as are the family's connections to al-Qaeda. Despite this, our government still has a duty to protect a young Canadian citizen who was detained as a child, has been tortured, and is now being tried in sham proceedings. Our silence is tantamount to acquiescence.
Each of these scenarios raises difficult questions. No doubt, the world has changed as a result of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11. We are much more aware of a serious threat posed by extremist groups.
We cannot, however, let our fear become a justification to allow expediency to take over. We must ensure our fear of terrorism does not undermine our fundamental democratic values. Afghan detainees are entitled to humane treatment, even if they are Taliban. Persons who are suspected of being connected to an al-Qaeda cell are entitled to expect that our national security apparatus will send accurate and reliable information to foreign agencies. They are also entitled to expect that we will not seek the assistance of a regime notorious for human-rights violations when such assistance might lead to torture. Finally, Canadian citizens have a right to expect our government will intervene to protect them from torture and injustice, regardless of their background.
Lorne Waldman represented Maher Arar at the commission of inquiry by Mr. Justice Dennis O'Connor.
Wednesday, April 25, 2007
Canada should not risk torture of Afghan prisoners
Not a word about US prisons in Afghanistan! Of course Canadians too have been accused of mistreating prisoners. There is no mention of the Iacobucci Inquiry as a positive step in dealing with issues of torture.
Canada shouldn’t risk torture of Afghan prisoners, panel hears
Maria Babbage, The Canadian Press
Published: Tuesday, April 24, 2007
TORONTO — Canadian soldiers shouldn’t hand over prisoners to Afghan authorities if there are reasonable grounds to believe they may be tortured, an international panel of jurists heard Tuesday.
Instead, the Canadian military should consider building its own detention facilities to ensure prisoners are treated humanely, University of Toronto law professor Kent Roach said, echoing the suggestion of other human rights experts in the wake of the Afghanistan torture allegations.
“Under the (Charter of Rights), it is clear that a Canadian police officer who goes abroad is subject to the Charter, so I would argue the Canadian Forces are really no different,” he told the panel, which is examining the impact of anti-terror policies on human rights around the globe.
It may be expensive, but it may be the price of complying with the Charter.”
Media reports suggest detainees have been kicked in the head, whipped with cables, or electrocuted by Afghan authorities after being turned over. The Conservative government dismissed the allegations Tuesday as the unsubstantiated ramblings of Taliban killers.
Roach was among a number of experts appearing at the first of two public hearings in Canada before an independent panel appointed by the International Commission of Jurists. The second session will be held in Ottawa on Wednesday.
The panel’s representatives for the Canadian hearings include Arthur Chaskalson and Robert Goldman.
Chaskalson is a former chief justice of South Africa and leading human rights lawyer who acted as counsel in the 1960s during the Rivonia trial, when Nelson Mandela and several members of the African National Congress were sentenced to life imprisonment.
Robert Goldman is an American professor and former UN expert on counter-terrorism and human rights.
They are expected to meet with Margaret Bloodworth, Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s national security adviser, and other government officials Thursday before delivering some of their preliminary conclusions Friday.
Tuesday’s hearing took on a broad range of issues, from the country’s legal stance on torture to the use of special lawyers in the top-secret trials of terror suspects.
The panel also heard that while Canada has made “significant” mistakes trying to root out terrorism, recent steps by the government and courts have helped to restore some faith in the system.
The federal government’s apology and settlement with Maher Arar — who was deported to Syria and tortured but later cleared in a public inquiry — was a “huge psychological step forward,” said Ziyaad Mia of the Canadian Muslim Lawyers Association.
The Arar case, and other court decisions striking down legal provisions that allow terror suspects to be detained and deported, shows that Canada has acknowledged some of the errors it has made in trying stop terrorism, he said.
“The tide seems to be turning,” Mia said. “I think there’s a sense that we’ve made some mistakes in haste.”
One of those encouraging signs came in February, when the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that federal security certificates — which allowed the federal government to deport non-citizens suspected of terrorist activity — were unconstitutional and gave Parliament a year to bring the law in line with the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
Mia also noted that two provisions of the Anti-Terrorism Act — which gave police the ability to make preventative arrests without warrant and gave judges the power to compel witnesses to testify in terrorism cases — were allowed to expire in March.
“I would say the pendulum is shifting back from the extreme reaction of 9-11,” he said. “But there’s still a ways to go.”
© The Canadian Press 2007
Canada shouldn’t risk torture of Afghan prisoners, panel hears
Maria Babbage, The Canadian Press
Published: Tuesday, April 24, 2007
TORONTO — Canadian soldiers shouldn’t hand over prisoners to Afghan authorities if there are reasonable grounds to believe they may be tortured, an international panel of jurists heard Tuesday.
Instead, the Canadian military should consider building its own detention facilities to ensure prisoners are treated humanely, University of Toronto law professor Kent Roach said, echoing the suggestion of other human rights experts in the wake of the Afghanistan torture allegations.
“Under the (Charter of Rights), it is clear that a Canadian police officer who goes abroad is subject to the Charter, so I would argue the Canadian Forces are really no different,” he told the panel, which is examining the impact of anti-terror policies on human rights around the globe.
It may be expensive, but it may be the price of complying with the Charter.”
Media reports suggest detainees have been kicked in the head, whipped with cables, or electrocuted by Afghan authorities after being turned over. The Conservative government dismissed the allegations Tuesday as the unsubstantiated ramblings of Taliban killers.
Roach was among a number of experts appearing at the first of two public hearings in Canada before an independent panel appointed by the International Commission of Jurists. The second session will be held in Ottawa on Wednesday.
The panel’s representatives for the Canadian hearings include Arthur Chaskalson and Robert Goldman.
Chaskalson is a former chief justice of South Africa and leading human rights lawyer who acted as counsel in the 1960s during the Rivonia trial, when Nelson Mandela and several members of the African National Congress were sentenced to life imprisonment.
Robert Goldman is an American professor and former UN expert on counter-terrorism and human rights.
They are expected to meet with Margaret Bloodworth, Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s national security adviser, and other government officials Thursday before delivering some of their preliminary conclusions Friday.
Tuesday’s hearing took on a broad range of issues, from the country’s legal stance on torture to the use of special lawyers in the top-secret trials of terror suspects.
The panel also heard that while Canada has made “significant” mistakes trying to root out terrorism, recent steps by the government and courts have helped to restore some faith in the system.
The federal government’s apology and settlement with Maher Arar — who was deported to Syria and tortured but later cleared in a public inquiry — was a “huge psychological step forward,” said Ziyaad Mia of the Canadian Muslim Lawyers Association.
The Arar case, and other court decisions striking down legal provisions that allow terror suspects to be detained and deported, shows that Canada has acknowledged some of the errors it has made in trying stop terrorism, he said.
“The tide seems to be turning,” Mia said. “I think there’s a sense that we’ve made some mistakes in haste.”
One of those encouraging signs came in February, when the Supreme Court of Canada ruled that federal security certificates — which allowed the federal government to deport non-citizens suspected of terrorist activity — were unconstitutional and gave Parliament a year to bring the law in line with the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
Mia also noted that two provisions of the Anti-Terrorism Act — which gave police the ability to make preventative arrests without warrant and gave judges the power to compel witnesses to testify in terrorism cases — were allowed to expire in March.
“I would say the pendulum is shifting back from the extreme reaction of 9-11,” he said. “But there’s still a ways to go.”
© The Canadian Press 2007
Sunday, March 18, 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.
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.
Wednesday, March 14, 2007
A Radical Proposal
Imagine. Newspapers will suggest any wild idea just to sell newspapers!
Just tell the truth
Times Colonist
Published: Wednesday, March 14, 2007
Mockery might be the first response to news that the RCMP paid a consultant $25,000 to coach commissioner Giulano Zaccardelli for two appearances before a parliamentary committee.
Taxpayers should get a refund. Despite 60 hours of preparation, Zaccardelli bombed. He first told the committee he knew as soon as Maher Arar was sent to Syria by U.S. authorities that the detention was based on false information provided by the RCMP.
Less than three months later, he said he hadn't found about the RCMP's role in Arar's imprisonment and torture until years later. His explanations were baffling.
**But the case raises broader questions. How many senior government employees are spending huge amounts of time and money on such coaching? What happened to the idea of simply telling the truth?
It's perfectly reasonable for Zaccardelli and others to get basic communications training. But $25,000 worth of preparation for two meetings isn't just a waste of money. It shows an unwillingness to be straight with Canadians and their representatives.
© Times Colonist (Victoria) 2007
Just tell the truth
Times Colonist
Published: Wednesday, March 14, 2007
Mockery might be the first response to news that the RCMP paid a consultant $25,000 to coach commissioner Giulano Zaccardelli for two appearances before a parliamentary committee.
Taxpayers should get a refund. Despite 60 hours of preparation, Zaccardelli bombed. He first told the committee he knew as soon as Maher Arar was sent to Syria by U.S. authorities that the detention was based on false information provided by the RCMP.
Less than three months later, he said he hadn't found about the RCMP's role in Arar's imprisonment and torture until years later. His explanations were baffling.
**But the case raises broader questions. How many senior government employees are spending huge amounts of time and money on such coaching? What happened to the idea of simply telling the truth?
It's perfectly reasonable for Zaccardelli and others to get basic communications training. But $25,000 worth of preparation for two meetings isn't just a waste of money. It shows an unwillingness to be straight with Canadians and their representatives.
© Times Colonist (Victoria) 2007
Tuesday, February 20, 2007
UN panel queries Canada over racial profiling in Arar case
This topic is probably beneath the radar of mainstream press. No one who was responsible for the profiling in the erroneous info shared with the US was ever punished. In fact some involved have been promoted. The whole matter seems forgotten.
Feb. 19, 2007 18:51
UN panel queries Canada over racial profiling
By ASSOCIATED PRESS
A United Nations anti-racism panel wants to know if Canada can ensure that it will avoid repeating the mistakes that led to the US deportation of a Syrian-born Canadian to Damascus, where he was tortured and imprisoned for nearly a year.
Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper apologized last month for Ottawa's role in the ordeal of Maher Arar - one of the best-known cases of so-called "extraordinary rendition" in which the US transfers foreign terror suspects without court approval to third countries for interrogation.
But the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination has asked what steps Canada has taken since on new guidelines for information sharing and monitoring of security probes, so that forces "have clear policies and more training on issues of racial, religious and ethnic profiling."
The committee - a panel of 18 independent experts overseeing compliance with the United Nations' 38-year-old anti-racism treaty - will hear Wednesday from Canadian officials as part of its quadrennial review.
Feb. 19, 2007 18:51
UN panel queries Canada over racial profiling
By ASSOCIATED PRESS
A United Nations anti-racism panel wants to know if Canada can ensure that it will avoid repeating the mistakes that led to the US deportation of a Syrian-born Canadian to Damascus, where he was tortured and imprisoned for nearly a year.
Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper apologized last month for Ottawa's role in the ordeal of Maher Arar - one of the best-known cases of so-called "extraordinary rendition" in which the US transfers foreign terror suspects without court approval to third countries for interrogation.
But the UN Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination has asked what steps Canada has taken since on new guidelines for information sharing and monitoring of security probes, so that forces "have clear policies and more training on issues of racial, religious and ethnic profiling."
The committee - a panel of 18 independent experts overseeing compliance with the United Nations' 38-year-old anti-racism treaty - will hear Wednesday from Canadian officials as part of its quadrennial review.
Thursday, February 15, 2007
Much of Arar report censored
This is an old report but worth repeating. I believe O'Connor is still working on getting more released. The whole article is at tyee.
But buried deep, in most stories at least, is what the public isn't seeing. Sprinkled throughout the public version of the report are more than 50 sets of three asterisks. Each set represents an omission -- a decision by the government that the hidden words could damage Canada's national security or foreign relations.
And those are only the visible cuts. O'Connor had already stripped the public report of any material he thought represented a threat to national security. That material was bundled together with the public report to create a second, private-eyes only, document.
But the government demanded O'Connor go further. Before the public document was released, officials made 53 additional cuts.
Challenge in court?
"There are really now three reports," Lorne Waldman, one of Arar's lawyers, said Thursday. "We have no idea what was held out."
The commission can appeal the government omissions to the Federal Court. And the chief council has hinted in the press that they might. But, according to one legal expert, their odds of success are poor at best.
The Commission of Inquiry was governed by section 38 of the Canada Evidence Act, Jason Gratl, the president of the B.C. Civil Liberties Association, told The Tyee. The act gives the government broad leeway to declare classified material it thinks could harm Canada's national security or international relations, an area where the Federal Court tends to be sympathetic to government claims.
"The Federal Court has proven itself very prepared to show extreme deference to the government on matters of national security," Gratl said.
If the commission lost at the federal level, it could appeal to the Supreme Court. But even a victory there would not ensure the material goes public. Because of changes made to the act after Sept. 11, the government would still have the last word on whether to release the material.
Shirley Heafey, a former RCMP complaints commissioner, has been involved in the Arar case almost from the beginning. As commissioner, she lodged a complaint about the case before the O'Connor's inquiry was struck. She also made extensive submissions to the investigators once the their work began.
After her term as commissioner ended in October 2005, Heafey stayed involved as a board member of the B.C. Civil Liberties Association. The BCCLA have intervener status in the case. And when the report was released Monday, Heafey was in the media lockdown representing the group.
Heafey was not surprised by how much the government held back. "Anytime you're working in national security it has to be analyzed to death," Heafey told The Tyee from her home in Ottawa. "A lot of people working in that field become convinced that everything is national security."
'Unacceptable in a democracy'
But while Heafey said she was not surprised that parts of the public report were redacted, she did find the way it was done disturbing. In most cases, when a document is censored, the offensive phrases are blacked out. But in the Arar report, they was removed entirely and replaced by asterisks.
That means no one, outside the government censors and the commissioners themselves, knows how much is missing.
One legal expert compared the practice unfavourably to censorship in South Africa. In an e-mail to The Tyee, the expert wrote that at least there, newspapers could print blank pages showing how much was missing.
An official with the department of public safety said the asterisks insure no one could determine what was deleted by figuring out the exact length of missing words.
But Shirley Heafey isn't buying it. "People should be allowed to know [how much was removed]," she said. "This is unacceptable in a democracy."
Of course, even if Canada's government did, in the end, hold out some material, at least they were there. When asked what was missing from the Arar report, Jason Gratl from the BCCLA immediately pointed to those who would not attend.
"Syria didn't participate," he said. "The United States didn't participate. We're missing lots of documents."
Richard Warnica is a senior editor at The Tyee.
Related Tyee stories:
But buried deep, in most stories at least, is what the public isn't seeing. Sprinkled throughout the public version of the report are more than 50 sets of three asterisks. Each set represents an omission -- a decision by the government that the hidden words could damage Canada's national security or foreign relations.
And those are only the visible cuts. O'Connor had already stripped the public report of any material he thought represented a threat to national security. That material was bundled together with the public report to create a second, private-eyes only, document.
But the government demanded O'Connor go further. Before the public document was released, officials made 53 additional cuts.
Challenge in court?
"There are really now three reports," Lorne Waldman, one of Arar's lawyers, said Thursday. "We have no idea what was held out."
The commission can appeal the government omissions to the Federal Court. And the chief council has hinted in the press that they might. But, according to one legal expert, their odds of success are poor at best.
The Commission of Inquiry was governed by section 38 of the Canada Evidence Act, Jason Gratl, the president of the B.C. Civil Liberties Association, told The Tyee. The act gives the government broad leeway to declare classified material it thinks could harm Canada's national security or international relations, an area where the Federal Court tends to be sympathetic to government claims.
"The Federal Court has proven itself very prepared to show extreme deference to the government on matters of national security," Gratl said.
If the commission lost at the federal level, it could appeal to the Supreme Court. But even a victory there would not ensure the material goes public. Because of changes made to the act after Sept. 11, the government would still have the last word on whether to release the material.
Shirley Heafey, a former RCMP complaints commissioner, has been involved in the Arar case almost from the beginning. As commissioner, she lodged a complaint about the case before the O'Connor's inquiry was struck. She also made extensive submissions to the investigators once the their work began.
After her term as commissioner ended in October 2005, Heafey stayed involved as a board member of the B.C. Civil Liberties Association. The BCCLA have intervener status in the case. And when the report was released Monday, Heafey was in the media lockdown representing the group.
Heafey was not surprised by how much the government held back. "Anytime you're working in national security it has to be analyzed to death," Heafey told The Tyee from her home in Ottawa. "A lot of people working in that field become convinced that everything is national security."
'Unacceptable in a democracy'
But while Heafey said she was not surprised that parts of the public report were redacted, she did find the way it was done disturbing. In most cases, when a document is censored, the offensive phrases are blacked out. But in the Arar report, they was removed entirely and replaced by asterisks.
That means no one, outside the government censors and the commissioners themselves, knows how much is missing.
One legal expert compared the practice unfavourably to censorship in South Africa. In an e-mail to The Tyee, the expert wrote that at least there, newspapers could print blank pages showing how much was missing.
An official with the department of public safety said the asterisks insure no one could determine what was deleted by figuring out the exact length of missing words.
But Shirley Heafey isn't buying it. "People should be allowed to know [how much was removed]," she said. "This is unacceptable in a democracy."
Of course, even if Canada's government did, in the end, hold out some material, at least they were there. When asked what was missing from the Arar report, Jason Gratl from the BCCLA immediately pointed to those who would not attend.
"Syria didn't participate," he said. "The United States didn't participate. We're missing lots of documents."
Richard Warnica is a senior editor at The Tyee.
Related Tyee stories:
Monday, February 12, 2007
US opinion piece on Arar case etc.
This is from the Huffington Post. Zaccardelli didn't strictly resign because of the results of the inquiry but as a result of his contradictory (perjured!) testimony before committees. Some of the comments on this article at the site are wild.
U.S. Handling of Arar Case Shows How far We've Fallen (14 comments )
Late last month Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper issued a formal apology "on behalf of the government of Canada" to one of its citizens, Maher Arar, and his family. Moreover, the Canadian government agreed to pay Arar more than $10 million to settle his case.
On September 26, 2002, U.S. authorities detained Arar, the Syria-born Canadian citizen, during a stopover in New York en route from Tunisia to Canada.
He was subsequently sent to Syria for torture under the controversial American practice of "extraordinary rendition." After a year of torture and pressure by the Canadian government, Arar was released and returned to Canada.
According to the official inquiry conducted by the Canadian government, U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service agents acted on false and misleading information supplied by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. The inquiry findings led to the prime minister's formal apology to Arar on behalf of the Canadian government and the $10 million settlement. In addition, RCMP Commissioner Giuliano Zaccardelli resigned as a result of the Arar controversy.
Meanwhile, Arar still appears on the U.S. watch list -- American authorities are refusing Canada's request to purge his name. His inclusion on U.S. lists effectively excludes Arar from at least one-third of the world's nations, according to his attorneys.
The Arar case has all the familiarity of the administration's misguided "if you knew what we knew" play book that has effectively led us into the current quagmire. More concerning, the Arar case is reflective of what we have become.
The U.S. government's unwillingness to remove Arar's name, let alone apologize, demonstrates how far astray we have become from our own democratic sensibilities. As chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Patrick Leahy noted that instead of sending Arar a "couple of hundred miles to Canada and (have him) turned over to the Canadian authorities ... he was sent thousands of miles away to Syria."
The absurdity is mind-boggling, with each passing day we come closer to an Orwellian nightmare.
Just this week, representatives from 57 countries signed a treaty that prohibits governments from holding people in secret detention. Regretfully, but not surprising given the current climate, the United States was not among the countries that endorsed the treaty, suggesting that the text did not meet U.S. expectations.
When one begins to connect the dots, linking Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, secret prisons, the selective application of habeas corpus, the Arar case, along with our unwillingness to sign a treaty that prohibits secret detention, it becomes quite clear that rather than a few bad apples or isolated incidents, the aforementioned reveal a systematic approach in the use of torture while ignoring the rule of law.
Where is the outrage? Such malfeasance should create the unlikely coalition of liberals, conservatives, Greens, libertarians, fundamentalists and atheists taking to the streets in mass protest.
We become further entrenched in the abyss because what is now required goes against one of America's less flattering values.
Historically, official apologies from the government have been rare. I recall when President Clinton went to Africa. He came as close to an official apology for the atrocities of slavery as anyone. The next day Republicans took to the floor outraged.
If there cannot be an official apology for the institution of slavery, which almost divided the nation over 200 years ago, it seems rather hopeless that we could show humility for infractions no more than four years removed.
The gravity of mistakes made in the invasion and occupation of Iraq make the need for contrition essential. Not only does Arar deserve an apology -- and to have his name removed from the U.S. watch list -- but this government must humble itself before the world community. The seldom-used art of apology could be a crucial first step in paving the way for whatever bad choice in Iraq we ultimately settle on.
Since it appears unlikely that such impulses are part of the DNA of the present administration, I suggest the myriad candidates running for president in 2008 put together a contrition speech in case he or she wins. It might come in handy.
Byron Williams is an Oakland pastor and syndicated columnist. E-mail him at byron
@byronspeaks.com or leave a message at (510) 208-6417.
Send to a friendPost a CommentPrint PostRead all posts by Byron Williams
U.S. Handling of Arar Case Shows How far We've Fallen (14 comments )
Late last month Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper issued a formal apology "on behalf of the government of Canada" to one of its citizens, Maher Arar, and his family. Moreover, the Canadian government agreed to pay Arar more than $10 million to settle his case.
On September 26, 2002, U.S. authorities detained Arar, the Syria-born Canadian citizen, during a stopover in New York en route from Tunisia to Canada.
He was subsequently sent to Syria for torture under the controversial American practice of "extraordinary rendition." After a year of torture and pressure by the Canadian government, Arar was released and returned to Canada.
According to the official inquiry conducted by the Canadian government, U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service agents acted on false and misleading information supplied by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. The inquiry findings led to the prime minister's formal apology to Arar on behalf of the Canadian government and the $10 million settlement. In addition, RCMP Commissioner Giuliano Zaccardelli resigned as a result of the Arar controversy.
Meanwhile, Arar still appears on the U.S. watch list -- American authorities are refusing Canada's request to purge his name. His inclusion on U.S. lists effectively excludes Arar from at least one-third of the world's nations, according to his attorneys.
The Arar case has all the familiarity of the administration's misguided "if you knew what we knew" play book that has effectively led us into the current quagmire. More concerning, the Arar case is reflective of what we have become.
The U.S. government's unwillingness to remove Arar's name, let alone apologize, demonstrates how far astray we have become from our own democratic sensibilities. As chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Patrick Leahy noted that instead of sending Arar a "couple of hundred miles to Canada and (have him) turned over to the Canadian authorities ... he was sent thousands of miles away to Syria."
The absurdity is mind-boggling, with each passing day we come closer to an Orwellian nightmare.
Just this week, representatives from 57 countries signed a treaty that prohibits governments from holding people in secret detention. Regretfully, but not surprising given the current climate, the United States was not among the countries that endorsed the treaty, suggesting that the text did not meet U.S. expectations.
When one begins to connect the dots, linking Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, secret prisons, the selective application of habeas corpus, the Arar case, along with our unwillingness to sign a treaty that prohibits secret detention, it becomes quite clear that rather than a few bad apples or isolated incidents, the aforementioned reveal a systematic approach in the use of torture while ignoring the rule of law.
Where is the outrage? Such malfeasance should create the unlikely coalition of liberals, conservatives, Greens, libertarians, fundamentalists and atheists taking to the streets in mass protest.
We become further entrenched in the abyss because what is now required goes against one of America's less flattering values.
Historically, official apologies from the government have been rare. I recall when President Clinton went to Africa. He came as close to an official apology for the atrocities of slavery as anyone. The next day Republicans took to the floor outraged.
If there cannot be an official apology for the institution of slavery, which almost divided the nation over 200 years ago, it seems rather hopeless that we could show humility for infractions no more than four years removed.
The gravity of mistakes made in the invasion and occupation of Iraq make the need for contrition essential. Not only does Arar deserve an apology -- and to have his name removed from the U.S. watch list -- but this government must humble itself before the world community. The seldom-used art of apology could be a crucial first step in paving the way for whatever bad choice in Iraq we ultimately settle on.
Since it appears unlikely that such impulses are part of the DNA of the present administration, I suggest the myriad candidates running for president in 2008 put together a contrition speech in case he or she wins. It might come in handy.
Byron Williams is an Oakland pastor and syndicated columnist. E-mail him at byron
@byronspeaks.com or leave a message at (510) 208-6417.
Send to a friendPost a CommentPrint PostRead all posts by Byron Williams
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