Conservative government allows use and sharing of information gained through torture

After earlier allowing spy agencies to use and share information obtained by torture, the Canada government has now extended the same powers to the national police force(RCMP) and federal border agents.

The Conservative government has been quietly without any notice to the public been changing the rules with respect to information that may have been tainted by torture. The Canadian Press managed to obtain documents from Sept. 9 2011 through the Access to Information Act. The documents are directives to the RCMP and the Border Services Agency. Up until now the documents have remained classified even though this is an important change in policy and one would think should have been discussed in parliament.

CBC asked the officer of the Public Safety Minister's Office about the story from the Canadian Press. CBC asked if the government would use information obtained by torture. A spokesperson for Vic Toews the minister said:. "The minister's directive is clear, the primary responsibility of Canadian security agencies is to protect Canadian life and property..At all times we abide by Canadian law." This is typical evasion but to protect Canadian life and property information which could have been obtained by torture could be used.

These new directives are almost identical to directives issued in the summer of 2011 to apply to the CSIS(Canadian Security Intelligence Service). At the time those directives were criticized by human rights advocates and also opposition MP's as a violation of Canada's obligation to prevent torture internationally.

The U.S. is well known for its former rendition policy that sent terror suspects to countries such as Syria for interrogation and where they were often tortured. The Maher Arar case is a famous instance although the U.S. claims it was not a rendition but a deportation since Arar was a dual citizen of Syria and Canada. Later when supporters of Arar were trying to have him returned to Canada classified material was leaked to a reporter.

Arar's case reached new heights of controversy after reporter Juliet O'Neill wrote an article in the Ottawa Citizen on November 8, 2003, containing information leaked to her from an unknown security source, possibly within the RCMP. The secret documents provided by her source suggested Arar was a trained member of an al-Qaeda terrorist cell.

Someone obviously knows how to use information obtained by torture. An extensive government inquiry found Arar had no links to terrorism. Arar reached a settlement with the government for over ten million dollars. Arar was deported to Syria partly on the basis of raw intelligence data much of it erroneous which the U.S concluded showed he was probably an Al Qaeda operative. One of the recommendations of the Arar Inquiry was that information never be provided to a foreign country where there is a risk that the person might be tortured. However, the U.S. already shared the same view when it deported Arar to Syria. Alberto Gonzales the U.S. attorney general at the time of the Arar deportation noted that Syria had given assurances that Arar would not be tortured. Assad was in power in Syria at that time.

Some of the information used against Arar had been obtained through torture of another terror suspect again in Syria. Canada used what I call opportunistic rendition. Instead of using the U.S. technique Canada waited until a suspect visited a country such as Syria or Egypt and then the person would be arrested. Three Canadian citizens were subject to this practice and ended up in jails in Syria and Egypt. There was a much less extensive and very restrictive inquiry into these cases by Judge Frank Iacobucci. Much of the inquiry was not open even to the lawyers for the three. The inquiry concluded:

Canadian officials had a hand in the torture of Abdullah Almalki, Ahmad El Maati and Muayyed Nureddin in Syria through the sharing of information with foreign intelligence and police agencies.

Canadian officials even helped out by providing questions to Syrian military intelligence. False confessions by El Maati were used to obtain warrants in Canada. This is the way that Canada used information obtained by torture. The three have so far not been able to receive any compensation for their ordeal.

Now the same intelligence agencies and police are given explicit permission to use such information if it is thought necessary for the security of Canadians. The UN Committee on Torture has been critical of the Canadian record. Alex Neve the general secretary of Amnesty International has summed up the main problems as follows:

..

.Canada risks complicity in torture by allowing deportation to torture, denying fair process in security-certificate cases, giving the nod to prisoner transfers in war zones when there is an obvious risk of torture and, under proposed legislation currently before Parliament, restricting appeal rights for refugee claimants who fear torture in their home countries. There is clearly complicity in the ministerial direction to CSIS allowing intelligence information to be shared with other countries even when that might cause torture, and in authorizing the use of intelligence information that was likely obtained through torture in other countries.

UN reports chastizes Canada for not acting on rendition of three Muslim Canadians

A recent report by the UN Committee Against Torture takes the Canadian government to task for what they call not taking seriously their complicity in renditions of Canadian citizens to countries such as Syria and Egypt.

Strictly speaking the only case that was actually a rendition was of Maher Arar. They did take that seriously. The rendition was not by Canada but the U.S. Maher was arrested when he is was in the U.S. simply transferring planes on a trip back to Canada. The U.S. authorities declared that Arar was an Al Qaeda operative and shipped him back to Syria where he was interrogated and tortured. The Maher Inquiry was extensive and found that Arar had no terrorist connections. The Canadian government negotiated a settlement with Arar for about ten million dollars in compensation. The U.S. refused to cooperate with the Arar inquiry and the U.S. still has Arar on a no fly list and presumably considers him an Al Qaeda operative.

The Canadian government wanted to make sure nothing more than a tongue lashing would come from the Iacobucci Inquiry that was very narrowly focused. The Inquiry was almost all done behind closed doors with not even lawyers for the three men who had been jailed in Syria and Egypt being allowed in to sessions where intelligence officers were questioned. Some groups withdrew from participation in disgust.

The three Canadian Muslims were not directly rendered. I call it rendering light or opportunistic rendering. Intelligence operatives waited until the men involved visited Syria for different reasons and then had them arrested so they could be interrogated on matters of terrorism. None of the three have had any compensation as yet. In neither inquiry was there ever any punishment of officials for wrongdoing. Of course the U.S. which was involved in direct rendition has never punished anyone. In fact Obama has not even abolished rendition.

The report also urged the government to repatriate Omar Khadr held in U.S. custody at Guantanamo from the age of 16. He signed a plea deal in which he plead guilty to charges that was supposed to see him transferred to Canada but the Canadian government has never followed through. For more see this article.

Arar in Canada when 'seen' by Khadr in Afghanistan

This is from the CBC.

The FBI and also Canadian Intelligence use the same strategy. Having jumped to conclusions they then by hook or crook manage to create evidence that support those conclusions and they stick to their stories no matter what the contrary evidence. Nothing ever happens to them because of what they do. There were leaked confessions to Canadian papers in which Arar confessed to being in Afghanistan but he did this under torture. No doubt Khadr too decided to recognise Arar because this was what was required to stop torture or harsh interrogation.
It seems to make no difference that agents are exposed as virtual idiots. Revelations are like water off a ducks back. Inquiries such as that of Iacobucci do absolutely nothing. Cases in which people are labelled terrorists on the flimsiest evidence and actions that cause people to be tortured are honest mistakes according to Iacobucci. Of course Iacobucci's inquiry was carried out mostly in secret and after a short flurry of publicity on its release has been already consigned to the dustbin of history. No doubt Iacobucci and his co-workers have collected fat fees for their work.



Arar in Canada when 'seen' by Khadr, hearing told TheStar.com - World - Arar in Canada when 'seen' by Khadr, hearing told
January 20, 2009 Michelle Shephardin Guantanamo
Tonda MacCharlesin Ottawa
An FBI agent’s claim that Omar Khadr had seen Maher Arar at terrorist “safe houses” in Afghanistan was severely undermined today when a military court was told that Arar was in North America during the time in question.
FBI Special Agent Robert Fuller testified Monday that Khadr said he recognized a photo of Arar during an October 2002 interrogation.
Under questioning Tuesday, Fuller said Khadr saw Arar in Afghanistan during late September or October 2001.
A Canadian judicial inquiry determined in 2006 that Arar was working in San Diego on a business trip on the day of the 9/11 terror attacks — and back in Canada in October. In fact, Arar first drew the interest of the RCMP when he met another man they were watching in an Ottawa cafe Oct. 12, 2001.
The FBI claim has drawn ire in Canada and in Ottawa Tuesday Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon said the government has not been shaken from its belief that Arar is an innocent man.
Arar has denied ever being in Afghanistan.
Fuller’s evidence was further undercut by revelations that the FBI notes taken during the interrogation stated Khadr was shown a photograph of Arar and at first said he “looked familiar.” The notes recorded that “in time” Khadr stated “he felt he had seen” Arar.
Tuesday’s pre-trial hearing was cut short after only two hours so Guantanamo’s military personnel could watch the televised swearing in of their new commander-in-chief. Photos of former president George W. Bush on the U.S. naval base were replaced with framed pictures of Barack Obama shortly after his inauguration.
That’s not all that’s expected to change.
Obama has vowed to shut Guantanamo’s prison and there’s speculation he will halt the military trials where Khadr is charged with killing a U.S. soldier and four war crimes.
Khadr’s lawyers had tried repeatedly to have this week’s hearing delayed so as not to end on the government’s evidence if Obama stops the trial.
Cannon stood by the results of the Canadian inquiry in which Justice Dennis O’Connor concluded Arar was a wronged man.
“Justice O’Connor did a fulsome report ... (and) the government acknowledged and accepted its recommendations,” Cannon told the Star.
Arar was awarded $10.5 million in compensation and an apology from Prime Minister Stephen Harper following the federal inquiry that revealed the RCMP had passed erroneous information connecting Arar to terrorism to their U.S. counterparts.
NDP critic Joe Comartin said the security and intelligence agencies involved in the Arar and Khadr cases continually “try and cover themselves even when the evidence is overwhelmingly the other way. If you told a story once, you have to keep telling it.”
Arar himself declined requests Tuesday for comment.
Kerry Pither, Arar’s former spokesperson, and the author of Dark Days about the arrest and torture of Arar and three other Canadians in Syria, condemned the FBI for “gratuitously smearing” Arar in the final days of the Bush administration.
“Who benefits from this? The people and the officials who benefit are those who are implicated in Maher Arar’s rendition and torture in Syria, and that includes the FBI, the CIA, CSIS and the RCMP.”
Paul Cavalluzzo, the commission counsel to Justice O’Connor, noted that the report concluded there was no evidence Arar was engaged in terrorist activity.
Cavalluzzo said that “given what’s happening at Guantanamo Bay, it wouldn’t surprise me if it was a product of torture, which means that it’s meaningless and useless information.”
Navy Lt.-Cmdr. Billl Kuebler, Khadr’s Pentagon-appointed lawyer said Tuesday outside court that Khadr, who was 15 and gravely injured when he arrived at the U.S. base in Bagram, would have “confessed to seeing the Pope,” to make his interrogations stop.
Military interrogators questioned Khadr more than 40 times at Bagram before FBI agent Fuller questioned him. Some of those Bagram interrogators were later convicted for the death of an innocent Afghan taxi driver.
The timing of Khadr’s interrogation with Fuller is also revealing.
Arar was arrested at JFK airport in late September 2002 en route back to Canada from a family holiday and held for two weeks before being rendered to Syria Oct. 8 - one day after Khadr’s interrogation began.
Khadr, now 22, was scheduled to go on trial Monday but Army Col. Patrick Parrish, the military judge presiding over the case, said he would set a new date because pre-trial hearings would not be completed by Friday.
Parrish said the case resumes Wednesday morning unless he is “otherwise ordered.”
With files from Richard Brennan

Iacobucci Report to be released to public today

This is from the CBC.
I expect government officials and intelligence operatives will be in for some reasonably harsh criticism but otherwise this report will do absolutely nothing to clear the names of the people held and tortured. In fact the whole idea was to make their task more difficult by keeping any evidence that might help them under wraps. Iacobucci has earned his fat fees. Nobody was held accountable in the Arar case and likely no one will in this case either. Zaccardelli caused his own downfall by his own testimony. The BC Human Rights Commission pulled out of the hearings because of the secrecy lack of public input and lack of involvement by intervenors.

Federal inquiry findings on 3 Arab-Canadians to be released Tuesday
Last Updated: Monday, October 20, 2008 10:36 PM ET A federal inquiry is getting ready to go public with its findings on the ordeal of three Arab-Canadians who say they were tortured abroad with the connivance of authorities in Ottawa.
The report by former Supreme Court of Canada Justice Frank Iacobucci was given to the Conservative government on Monday, some 22 months after the probe began.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper has signed an order for its release and it should be ready for public distribution sometime Tuesday, a senior federal official said.
"The government is happy the report will be out," said the official who spoke on condition of anonymity.
"The consideration is to get it out as soon as is practical, in a manner that pays respect to the good work the commission and Justice Iacobucci have done."
Inquiry staff and federal officials had spent days in back-and-forth talks on the best way to make the report public, with sources close to the commission saying they found it unusually difficult to finalize arrangements.
One of the sticking points appeared to be whether journalists would get an advance look at the report in a locked room before putting questions to Iacobucci and his counsel at a news conference.
Inquiry staff signalled last week that they strongly favoured such a lockup to help the media, lobby groups and other interested parties digest the findings. By late Monday, however, there was still no word on whether that part of the plan would go ahead.
Judge probes 3 cases behind closed doors
Iacobucci was appointed in December 2006 to investigated the cases of Abdullah Almalki, Ahmad El Maati and Muayyed Nureddin, all of whom say they were wrongly labelled as terrorists by the RCMP and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service.
They were subsequently arrested on visits to Syria, imprisoned and tortured, only to be released in the end without charge.
They deny any terrorist links and contend that Ottawa tipped the Syrians to their travel plans, either directly or through an allied country like the United States.
The three also say Canadian authorities disregarded the risk of torture and provided lists of questions or other background information for use by their Syrian captors during interrogation.
The claims are strikingly similar to those made by Maher Arar, an Ottawa computer engineer who was arrested by U.S. authorities in 2002 and deported to Syria, where he was tortured into false confessions of links to al-Qaeda.
Arar's name was cleared by an earlier inquiry under Justice Dennis O'Connor, who found the RCMP had provided faulty information on his background to U.S. officials. Arar has since received more than $10 million in compensation from the government.
Unlike the O'Connor inquiry, nearly all of Iacobucci's work was carried out behind closed doors under a restrictive mandate drawn up by the government to safeguard national security.
The three complainants, their lawyers and human rights groups have repeatedly warned that the veil of secrecy could undermine public confidence in the findings.
Almalki, an Ottawa communications engineer, was detained in Syria in 2002 and held for 22 months before being released and allowed to return to Canada.
El Maati, a Toronto truck driver, was arrested in Syria in 2001 and later transferred to Egypt, spending a total of 26 months in prison.
So-called confessions extracted from him under torture were later used to justify a telephone wiretap in related investigations in Canada.
Nureddin, a Toronto geologist, was detained by Syrian officials in December 2003 as he crossed the border from Iraq. He was held for 34 days before being released.
Almalki and El Maati were both under investigation by the RCMP as part of the same anti-terrorist operations that brought Arar to their attention.
All three men had been questioned by CSIS.
© The Canadian Press,

Inside Canada's secret inquiry

This is from the Ottawa Citizen.
The Iacobbuci Inquiry into the cases of three Canadian Muslims tortured in Syria is to report to the government on Monday but it may be a few days before the report is released to the public. I think it is significant that it was not released before the election. The subsequent furor could have influenced the outcome perhaps. In spite of the secrecy of the report I expect that there will be some criticism of Canadian officials. As in the Arar report there will be no action taken against anyone. Perhaps as in the Arar affair some of them may even be promoted. There will be no help for the three in whose name the inquiry was undertaken in clearing their name. In fact the three involved had little role in the inquiry and were given no clue as to what the evidence was against them and they probably never will be. The government is not about to face another inquiry of the sort that Arar had. Revealing the incompetence of intelligence operatives and having to pay compensation for bad treatment is not something the government wishes to continually face!
After this report there will be a flurry of publicity but then Iacobucci can collect his fat fee and everything will go back to the way it was and Almalki, El-Maati, and Nurredin will have to continue to fight to try to clear their names and get any compensation from the government.



Inside Canada's 'secret' inquiry
The Ottawa Citizen
Saturday, October 18, 2008
CREDIT: Bruno Schlumberger, the Ottawa Citizen
'I think secrecy is the enemy of democracy,' says Abdullah Almalki, 37, an Ottawa father of six and a Carleton University engineering grad who endured 22 months in Syrian jails.
On Monday, the report into the treatment of three Arab-Canadian men who were detained and tortured in a Syrian jail is expected to be handed into the government.
The commission was conducted behind closed doors, and as Andrew Duffy reports, that is leaving a bitter taste in the mouths of the men at the centre of this review.
During Justice Dennis O'Connor's inquiry into the Maher Arar case, he heard startling evidence about three other Arab-Canadians who were similarly detained and tortured in Syria.
In his report, Judge O'Connor concluded that what happened to Abdullah Almalki, Ahmad El-Maati and Muayyed Nureddin raised troubling questions when considered alongside Mr. Arar's experience.
The four Canadian citizens had all been detained and tortured in the same Damascus military prison. All four were under investigation by the RCMP or CSIS at the time for alleged terrorist connections.
Judge O'Connor said that while it was "most unlikely" that Canadian officials had a policy of using foreign agencies to further national security probes at home, the cases nonetheless displayed a "pattern of investigative practices" that pointed to systemic problems.
Those problems, he said, went beyond Mr. Arar's case and needed to be addressed.
"I have heard enough evidence about the cases of Messrs. Almalki, El-Maati and Nureddin to observe that these cases should be reviewed," the judge wrote in September, 2006. He called for a second inquiry to fully investigate.
More than two years later, the federal inquiry that the Arar commission inspired is about to report its findings. Retired Supreme Court justice Frank Iacobucci will deliver his report to the federal government on Monday; it is expected to be made public later in the week.
But human rights groups -- and the three men themselves -- yesterday denounced the secretive process employed by Mr. Iacobucci and called for it never to be used again.
"The secrecy was not limited to national security concerns: it extended to everything," said Alex Neve, secretary general of Amnesty International Canada. "That is virtually unprecedented in Canada and undermined fairness and the public interest from the very outset."
The Iacobucci inquiry has been marked by controversy.
One intervenor, the B.C. Civil Liberties Association, withdrew from the inquiry in December 2007 to protest what it said was a "dangerous precedent for closed-door, secret inquiries."
The inquiry interviewed 40 witnesses in-camera and collected 40,000 documents. None of the documents were released to the public and none of the witnesses were cross-examined by lawyers for the three men. Even the witness list remains confidential.
The three men testified about their experiences with torture, but they were not allowed to read the final submissions delivered by their own lawyers -- in case Mr. Iacobucci decided to recall them as witnesses.
The men say they've been treated as outcasts by an inquiry that is supposed to discover the extent of the Canadian complicity in their torture.
"It is a strange and alarming process," said Mr. Almalki, 37, an Ottawa father of six and a Carleton University engineering graduate who endured 22 months in Syrian jails.
Mr. Almalki was repeatedly interrogated and tortured, he said, based on information that could only have originated with Canadian security agencies.
The Arar report has confirmed that the RCMP sent questions to the Syrians to be put to Mr. Almalki. But he contends that Canadian officials continued to pass information to the Syrians even after Mr. Arar warned the federal government that the Syrians were torturing detainees.
Mr. Almalki said the inquiry's secrecy has frustrated his ability to test the truth of what government officials have said about him, his alleged terrorist connections and what happened to him in Syria.
"I think secrecy is the enemy of democracy," said Mr. Almalki, who has repeatedly denied any connection to al-Qaeda.
Mr. El-Maati, a Toronto truck driver who was held in Syria and Egypt for more than two years, told reporters yesterday that the process has inspired no confidence: "How can we trust the findings of an inquiry that has only heard one side of the story?"
Mr. Iacobucci has defended the secretive process as necessary to fulfil his mandate. His terms of reference emphasized "the internal or private nature" of the inquiry, Mr. Iacobucci has said, and the need to protect national security information.
Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day created the inquiry in December 2006 to examine the actions of Canadian officials that may have led to the detention and mistreatment of the three men.
The internal inquiry was in keeping with Mr. O'Connor's opinion that public inquiries into national security cases can be "time-consuming and expensive" exercises. The Arar inquiry included protracted legal argument about what information had to be shielded for the sake of national security.
But Mr. Almalki's lawyer, Jasminka Kalajdzic, said Mr. Iacobucci's mandate did not require complete secrecy. That approach, she said, was ultimately for the sake of expediency, not national security.
"In the more than 400 inquiries convened in our country since Confederation," she said, "this is the only one where the public has been excluded for reasons other than national security confidentiality."
Mr. Neve said the inquiry went "terribly wrong" from the start with a mandate that made it chiefly about Canadian officials. It meant, he said, that the inquiry functioned as if it was not about the men named in its title and so afforded them few legal rights.
In her new book, Dark Days, Ottawa human rights activist Kerry Pither contends that the three men were imprisoned in Syria because of an orchestrated campaign by Canadian security agencies to neutralize people they wrongly believed to be terrorist threats. To be credible, she said, the Iacobucci inquiry must tell Canadians why the men were labelled Islamic extremists.
"Because how they were labelled in communications with the media and with foreign governments would most certainly have had an impact on the decision to detain in Syria, the length of their detention and how they were treated," she said. "It would also have an impact on Canadian officials and how hard they worked for their release."
For his part, Mr. Almalki has a list of 30 questions he wants answered by the inquiry. Among them: Who sent information about him to the Syrians and why? Why did Canadian diplomats and security agents meet with Syrian military intelligence, the organization responsible for his torture? Why did no Canadian Embassy officials visit him while he was in Sryian custody?
Mr. Almalki said there remains, too, a basic question about the role of Canadian officials: "Is it that they didn't care I would be tortured or did they want me to be tortured?"
© The Ottawa Citizen 2008

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

Dark Days: The Story of Four Canadians Tortured in the name of Fighting Terror.

This sounds as if it would be an interesting book. There has not been all that much media attention to it but I have included a review from the Ottawa Citizen. The Iacobucci Inquiry is investigating the cases of three of the Canadians. The report was supposed to be finished last January but now is due on or before October 20 this year. The inquiry was mostly behind closed doors and very secretive. The report will do nothing to clear the names of the three and in fact seems designed to ensure that their lawyers will get no helpful information. There is an official website for the commission that has quite a few documents.

Dear friends,
I am writing to ask you to help me spread the word about my book, Dark Days: The Story of Four Canadians Tortured in the Name of Fighting Terror.
Dark Days exposes what the government, CSIS and the RCMP has worked so hard to cover up: that Maher Arar’s case was not an isolated one. That not one, but four Canadian citizens, while under investigation by Canadian agencies, were detained by the Syrian Military Intelligence, held in the same underground detention centre, tortured by the same interrogation team, and asked questions that could only have originated in Canada.
Dark Days chronicles the human stories of all four of these men – Ahmad El Maati, Abdullah Almalki, Maher Arar and Muayyed Nureddin – 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.The government, CSIS and the RCMP have worked hard to keep the whole story a secret. One way to counter that secrecy is to put this book into more peoples’ hands.
I am donating any profits from book sales to Amnesty International Canada, which has been at the forefront of the struggle for answers and accountability in these cases.
Please consider picking up a copy and using your email lists, web sites, and blogs to help spread the word about Dark Days. My publisher, Penguin, is printing promotional bookmarks — if you’d like to order some to distribute, please let me know. If you’d like to arrange to have me come and speak about the book, please let me know. If you have read the book, consider posting a review on on-line booksellers’ web sites, or on your blogs or web sites. Consider sending a review in to your community and local newspapers.
Canwest’s Andrew Duffy wrote a review of the book which ran in the Ottawa Citizen and the Vancouver Sun – I’ve included that below.
Thanks for your support,
Kerry Pitheremail: kerrypither@gmail.comweb: http://www.kerrypither.com/
======
Exposé ties cases of torture to Canada’s anti-terror strategyby Andrew DuffyThe Ottawa CitizenAugust 31, 2008
On the morning of May 29, 2006, two senior members of Canada’s security services appeared before the Senate committee on national security and defence. Jack Hooper, then deputy director of operations for the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, sat beside RCMP Commissioner Giuliano Zaccardelli at the witness table.
Senator Hugh Segal had a question for them: Given the “legislative difficulties” they faced, how did the agencies balance the need to prevent violent attacks with their desire to prosecute terrorists?
Hooper, in response, described the creation of an RCMP-led task force that investigated Toronto’s Ahmed El-Maati and a number of other terror suspects in the months after 9/11.
“The Crown advised there was not sufficient evidence to proceed with charges,” he explained, “and the law enforcement community moved quickly into a diffuse-and-disrupt mode designed to prevent acts of violence from taking place.”
Security agencies now use “other techniques” when it proves impossible to take a terror suspect to court, he said, adding: “This has represented something of a sea change for law enforcement agencies.”
Zaccardelli readily agreed, saying CSIS and the RCMP approach security threats “with a much more extensive menu of options” than in the past. “Particularly since 9/11,” he told the committee, “we have had to accept going to a disruptive mode because prevention is the most important thing.”
In her compelling new book, Dark Days: The Story of Four Canadians Tortured in the Name of Fighting Terror, Ottawa author Kerry Pither contends the agencies’ disruption campaign is at the heart of a national security scandal that goes well beyond Maher Arar.
Dark Days argues that what happened to Arar, Abdullah Almalki, Ahmed El-Maati and Muayyed Nureddin cannot be dismissed as coincidence or explained by the isolated errors of security agents. Rather, Pither contends, their Syrian ordeals were in keeping with the little known disruption policy introduced after 9/11.
All four men were detained and tortured in Syria while under investigation by the RCMP or CSIS for suspected links to terrorism. Despite exhaustive investigations, none has ever been charged with a crime in Canada.
Arar has been cleared of any connection to terrorism by a federal inquiry and awarded $10 million in compensation. The other men have launched lawsuits for the same kind of redress.
“The whole goal of the book,” says Pither, an Ottawa human rights activist, “is to inform as many people as possible about what happened to all of these men and where Canada went wrong in the war on terror.”
Pither has been consumed by the four cases ever since Maher Arar’s wife, Monia Mazigh, walked into her office in May, 2003, to ask for help in securing the release of her husband.
Pither later worked as a communications strategist for Arar — he writes a foreword to the book — and for the three other Canadian Muslims tortured in Syria. She regards Dark Days as the next logical step in her five-year quest to inform Canadians about what was done in the name of national security. (Pither is donating proceeds from her book to Amnesty International.)
“The narrative the public was left with after the Arar Report was that an innocent man (Arar), was vindicated, that it was an isolated case, and it was mostly the Americans’ fault,” she says. “For me, that was really troubling because I knew it wasn’t an isolated case.”
Dark Days knits the four cases back together in a chronological narrative that takes the reader through their intertwined odysseys. The case of Ottawa’s Abdullah Almalki is in many ways the most horrific.
Almalki was 16 years old when his family — his father was a lawyer, his mother a teacher — came to Ottawa from Syria in 1987. Abdullah graduated from Lisgar Collegiate, then obtained an electrical engineering degree from Carleton University. He married a fellow student, economics major Khuzaiman Kalifah, and they had five children (now six) while Abdullah launched a successful export business.
Almalki’s first contact with CSIS came in the summer of 1998 when an agent phoned to arrange a meeting: she said some of his communications equipment had been found in the hands of the Taliban. He would meet with agents several times to explain that he shipped store-bought equipment to a Pakistani firm, Microelectronics, which held contracts with that country’s military.
After the Sept. 11 terror attacks, Almalki came under renewed scrutiny. He was the central focus of an RCMP joint forces team, Project A-O Canada, that investigated a number of terror suspects supplied by CSIS.
His background raised legitimate questions. In the early 1990s, Almalki had worked in Pakistan and Afghanistan for Human Concern International, an Ottawa-based charity that performed development work in the Muslim world. The man who would ultimately be identified as the highest-ranking Canadian member of al-Qaeda, Ahmed Said Khadr, was his boss at H.C.I.
Almalki also had a business relationship with Mohamed Elzahabi, a U.S.-based Lebanese national who once trained sharpshooters at an al-Qaeda camp in Afghanistan.
Almalki has always insisted there was nothing more to the relationships than that: they were not part of a terrorist conspiracy.
But in the supercharged atmosphere that followed Sept. 11, security agencies often read sinister meaning into simple circumstance.
Pither’s contention is that the RCMP, unable to gather evidence to prosecute Almalki as a terrorist, then engaged in a “disruption” strategy. He was followed constantly and in plain sight. A camera was mounted across the street from his Ottawa house.
Almalki left the country on Nov. 27, 2001 with his family to escape what he considered harassment. They travelled to Malaysia to stay with his wife’s relatives.
On May 3, 2002, Almalki flew to Syria to visit relatives but was detained before he could leave the airport. It’s an open question as to why he was he detained: whether at the request of Canadian officials or because of faulty intelligence provided by this country.
Pither’s book describes in graphic detail the 22 months he subsequently spent in Syrian custody and the torture sessions Almalki endured in Far’ Falastin prison. He was beaten with fists, cables and belts.
More often than not, the questions he faced related to events and people in Canada. The Arar Commission has established that the RCMP sent questions for Almalki to the Syrians through Canadian diplomats.
What happened to Almalki, El-Maati and Nureddin, says Pither, amounts to a kind of “opportunistic rendition,” in which Canadian officials took advantage of suspects traveling abroad in a country known for its human rights abuses. “I think Canadians pride themselves on being better than the U.S. on human rights issues,” she says. “I think these cases show we weren’t.”
The security services are not the only ones whose image suffers in Dark Days: the media’s role in serving the interests of power also comes under critical scrutiny.
Pither analyses the unfolding media coverage from the first damaging story leaked about Arar in November, 2002 through to those that cast doubts on Almalki and El-Maati.
Those leaks, Pither says, appear to have been been part of an orchestrated media strategy on the part of government officials. “Do I believe they attempted to detract from their own shortcomings by smearing the men? Yes. Is that a coverup? Yes, I think so,” Pither charges.
Journalists are routinely asked to discover the basis on which government officials cast decisions. National security reporting poses a particular challenge since it is an offence for government officials to reveal classified information, which means journalists must afford anonymity to sources who do so.
But what if those sources have a self-interested, dishonest agenda?
Carleton University journalism professor Jeff Sallot, a former Globe and Mail reporter who distinguished himself in his coverage of the four cases, says the media have yet to come to terms with their role in them.
“There’s a real soul searching that still need to go on about how we (the media) were badly abused in the Arar case, and I think in the Almalki case and in the El Maati cases as well,” he tells Pither. “The big lesson is to always question your sources — not just because they may have an agenda but because they may have imperfect knowledge.”
Pither’s narrative stretches to 403 pages; it is followed by 34 pages of footnotes and a seven-page cast of characters.
In places, the detail is excessive (”The guards led him along the wider hallway past the common cells and then turned right down the narrow hallway, stopping at the second tiny door on the right: cell number two.”) More often, though, Dark Days is a gripping exposé in the finest journalistic tradition: it is a crisp and disturbing book.
Pither’s depiction of the government’s side of the story relies, almost entirely, upon the three-volume report of the Arar Commission, which she has mined for telling facts.
A longtime human rights advocate, Pither is careful in her book to separate fact from conjecture. She relies on others to make arguments, almost to a fault. “I don’t consider myself an advocate for the men,” she says. “I consider myself an advocate for the issues: their right to ask questions; our right to gain answers.”
Dark Days poses many such questions: What role did CSIS and the RCMP play in the detention and torture of the men? What did Canadian agencies do with the fruit of that torture? And in what way did Canada’s political leadership, including Prime Minister Jean Chrétien and cabinet ministers John Manley and Anne McLellan, set the tone for the agencies’ actions?
Ultimately, Pither hopes the book will help lift the lid on the secrecy that still surrounds the cases. A second federal commission, the Iacobucci Inquiry, will report later this year on the government’s involvement in the cases of Almalki, El-Maati and Nureddin. All of the evidence in that inquiry has been heard behind closed doors.
Says Pither: “I believe that the secrecy is not about national security; I believe that the government secrecy is more about shielding itself from accountability and embarrassment.”
Citizen senior writer Andrew Duffy has covered the Almalki case since first interviewing him in October, 2005.
© 2005 - 2008 Canwest Digital Media, a division of Canwest Publishing Inc.. All rights reserved.

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

Omar Khadr Lawyers sue PM

The Harper government will continue on its present course of never offending the U.S. or criticising rendition or the judicial process at Guantanamo even though many Canadian and International legal groups have been vociferous in their criticism of the military tribunals. The Conservatives probably think that the Canadian public cares little for the rights of anyone accused of terrorism. The Arar case was an anomaly and one that the government is bound and determined will never be repeated. The Iacobucci inquiry is a case in point. Almost the whole inquiry has been in secret and there are not even progress reports on the official website. Iacobucci has made it clear that there will be no attempt to clear the names of the three in whose names the inquiry was called. Even should Iacobucci in his report find shortcomings in conduct of officials, no one will be punished or held responsible. Indeed after the Arar inquiry some of those criticised were promoted. So much for accountability. The war on terror is in effect a licence for official wrongdoing with no recourse or accountability for the most part.

Omar Khadr lawyers sue PM
Guantanamo detainee's defence team asks court to force Harper to bring him back to Canada
Aug 09, 2008 04:30 AM
Noor Javed Staff Reporter
Lawyers for Guantanamo Bay detainee Omar Khadr filed a lawsuit yesterday to force Prime Minister Stephen Harper to intervene and repatriate the 21-year-old before he faces trial by a U.S. military tribunal in October.
"It is time for Prime Minister Harper to stand up for the rights of a Canadian citizen," said his Canadian lawyers, Dennis Edney and Nate Whitling, in a release.
A Harper spokesperson said the suit would have no bearing on current government policy. Harper has long insisted he won't get involved in the case because a legal process against Khadr is underway.
The suit's legal premise is based on Canada's obligations under international law to co-operate in the social integration and rehabilitation of children in armed conflicts.
Khadr was 15 when he was captured in 2002 after a firefight in Afghanistan. The Pentagon alleges he threw a grenade that killed an American soldier.
Khadr's lawyers had hoped that public pressure after the release of an interrogation video last month, showing the youth crying for his mother, would prompt the Canadian government to intervene.
"This is predictable," said Kory Teneycke, Harper's director of communications, of the lawsuit. "It's another attempt by Mr. Khadr's lawyers to avoid a trial, on the charges of attempted murder in violation of the laws of war, conspiracy, providing material support for terrorism, and spying."
"We have no intention of deviating from the course that we're on ...," he said. "Our position is the same as the previous Liberal government's position, that Mr. Khadr should face these charges through a judicial process, not a political one and certainly not a media one."
Whitling said taking the government to court is the only option left.
"We're getting down to the point where Omar has been in Guantanamo for upwards of six years and we think it's high time this proceeding was brought," he said.
"We were hoping it wouldn't be necessary."
In May, the Supreme Court of Canada concluded that Khadr's detention violated basic human rights norms. More recently a Canadian judge deemed Khadr's treatment by U.S authorities – including sleep deprivation – violates international prohibitions against torture.
The suit, filed in Federal Court, is modelled on ones in Australia and Great Britain. Those countries eventually repatriated their citizens from Guantanamo.
It's now Canada's turn to "do what every other Western democracy has done with respect to its own citizens," said Whitling.
Khadr is the last citizen of a Western country held at Guantanamo.
With files from The Canadian Press

Lawyers dispute Harper's comments on Omar Khadr

This is from CTV.
Harper surely is not so stupid as not to know that he has alternatives or if he is we are really in trouble. What Harper knows is that Khadr is not popular and that many Canadians have absolutely no sympathy for him. Many comments in the blogosphere and on this article bear this out. Many of the comments exhibit blissful ignorance and complete contempt for issues of human rights. All one has to do is categorise someone as a terror suspect and this causes the mental faculties of many people to close right down.
Canada is obviously complicit in human rights violations by the United States and it is not just in the case of Khadr but it would seem in the Arar case indirectly if not directly and also in the cases being investigated by Iacobucci. It remains to be seen what Iacobucci will have to say. With the secrecy with which the investigation is being carried out and the lack of input from lawyers what has happened so far is not at all promising.
As Khadr's lawyer maintains if Harper actually requested that Khadr be returned to Canada even the Bush administration might agree. The Bush administration is actually looking for places to send Guantanamo detainees.

Lawyers dispute Harper's comments on Omar Khadr



CTV.ca News Staff Updated: Thu. Jul. 10 2008 3:23 PM ET
Prime Minister Stephen Harper says that his government has "no real alternative" to the U.S. legal system in the Omar Khadr case, but the accused terrorist suspect's lawyers and opposition critics strongly disagree.
"This is a disingenuous comment from the prime minister," Khadr's Canadian lawyer Dennis Edney told The Canadian Press.
"The prime minister, through his cabinet members, particularly Mr. (Peter) MacKay, have long said that they have been assured that Omar Khadr was being well treated, when in fact the Canadian government well knew that was not the case," he said.
The prime minister's comments come a day after explosive new documents suggest Canada was aware of the harsh treatment that Khadr was being subjected to in Guantanamo Bay at the hands of U.S. military interrogators.
But Harper, speaking Thursday in Tokyo, Japan following this week's G8 meetings, said Canada had little say in the situation and has no intention of interfering.
The Foreign Affairs documents released by Khadr's defence team this week show Khadr was visited in 2004 by Canadian officials. They found the then 17-year-old had been deprived of sleep for weeks in an attempt to make him more pliable for interrogation by U.S. agents.
Harper distanced his government from the documents. He said former prime minister Paul Martin's government was aware of how Khadr was being treated, but there was little that could have been done.
"The previous government took a whole range, all of the information into account when they made the decision on how to proceed with the Khadr case several years ago,'' he said.
Harper added that Canada: "frankly, has no real alternative'' to the U.S. legal process.
Harper criticized
Liberal foreign affairs critic Bob Rae, who was not part of the Paul Martin government, said on CTV Newsnet that "things got caught up" in the post-9/11 scramble to take direct action against terror suspects by governments.
But he says that time has passed and "it's extremely important for Canadians to take full responsibility for one of our own citizens and insist that he be brought home."
"Other countries have done the same and I can't, quite frankly, explain why Canada didn't do the same, but I think we should, and it's not too late to do that now," he added.
"I think it's time for Mr. Khadr to face justice in Canada."
Edney asked why Harper would criticize China's human rights record but ignore the situation in Guantanamo.
"It boggles my mind that this prime minister is prepared to criticize China over human rights and is prepared to lambaste Mexico for the way its criminal justice system is applied to a Canadian," he said.
"But when you have a young Canadian who is in Guantanamo Bay whom Canadian courts have said has been abused and tortured, our government remains silent."
Khadr's U.S, military lawyer, Lt.-Cmdr. William Kuebler, put the blame squarely on Harper's shoulders. He said the U.S. would probably have complied with a request from Harper to have Khadr transferred into Canadian custody -- but the request hasn't been made.
As a result, Kuebler said, any harsh treatment endured by Khadr is Canada's responsibility.
"This really shows the assurances the U.S. government has been providing to the Canadian government for all these years have been false, and at least since 2004 the Canadian government knew it was false."
The Toronto-born terror suspect is accused of throwing a grenade in 2002 in Afghanistan that killed a U.S. special forces soldier.
Khadr, 15 at the time, was captured and eventually sent to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where he has remained ever since.
The son of an alleged al Qaeda financier -- and the only Canadian being held in Gitmo -- Khadr is set to go to trial in October.
According to the reports released by Khadr's defence team, Canadian official Jim Ghould visited Khadr in 2004 and was briefed by U.S. military officials on Khadr's case.
One report says Khadr was moved every three hours for 21 days -- a technique known as the 'frequent flyer program' -- in an attempt to deprive him of sleep and weaken his ability to withstand interrogation.
And a U.S. Air Force report from February 2003 says Khadr wasn't allowed to receive mail from his family in Canada.
When he was finally given a letter from his grandmother, agents watched secretly as the young man broke down in tears.
The same report says Khadr was picked on by other inmates following his interview sessions with officials.
CTV's legal analyst Steven Skurka called the new revelations a "bombshell."
"We've been told repeatedly by the Canadian government he's been treated humanely and now it appears in the face of those statements the Canadian government knew otherwise," Skurka told Canada AM.
He added that the treatment described in the documents "could be called torture, it's certainly inhumane, it's certainly a story that really has to make Canadians wake up and shudder."
With files from The Canadian Press
© 2008 All Rights Reserved.

Judge: Treatment of Khadr described by US official violated human rights

So Canada is complicit in U.S. violation of human rights. This is hardly surprising news. Canada does this routinely as part of the joint "war on terror". Canada surely was involved in a type of rendition lite in the three cases the Iacobucci inquiry is investigating. By the way there is not a peep out of that inquiry. Their website is virtually a deadsite. The final report is now due in September I understand. Most of the inquiry is in secret and behind closed doors. Even so there will probably be some criticism by Iacobucci I imagine but little to help the three in whose name the inquiry was called.


Treatment of Khadr described by U.S. official violated human rights: judge
Last Updated: Wednesday, June 25, 2008 11:35 PM ET
CBC News
The treatment a U.S. official said Omar Khadr received at Guantanamo Bay to prepare him for an interview by a member of foreign affairs was a violation of international human rights, a Canadian federal court judge ruled on Wednesday.
Judge Richard Mosley ruled that a government document relating to the possible mistreatment of Khadr at Guantanamo Bay is part of the material that must be disclosed to his defence team lawyers. Khadr is at the U.S. naval base in Cuba awaiting trial before a military commission on charges that he murdered a U.S. army sergeant in Afghanistan in 2002, when he was 15.
Mosley said a paragraph in one of the documents, which had been blacked out by the federal government, contains information from a member of the U.S. military regarding "steps taken by Guantanamo authorities to prepare" Khadr for an interview with a Canadian foreign affairs official in March 2004.
"The practice described to the Canadian official in March 2004, was, in my view, a breach of international human rights law respecting the treatment of detainees," Mosley said.
Canada "became implicated" in violating international human rights when the foreign affairs official learned about Khadr's treatment but decided to interview him anyway, the judge said.
Mosley referred to a recent report in the U.S. describing harsh interrogation techniques used on Guantanamo detainees that would not have been permissible under American law and that are prohibited by the U.S. military.
"Canada cannot now object to the disclosure of this information. The information is relevant to the applicant's complaints of mistreatment while in detention," Mosley wrote.
Mosley's ruling follows a Supreme Court decision in May that Khadr has a constitutional right to see certain videos and documents held by Foreign Affairs, the RCMP and CSIS. The items relate to interviews Canadian officials conducted with Khadr during his detention at the U.S. naval base in Cuba in 2003 and 2004.
The Supreme Court ordered Ottawa to grant limited access to the material and gave a federal court judge the task of assessing what parts of the documents should be passed to Khadr's lawyers by determining whether they "fall within the scope of disclosure obligations."
Government lawyers said information was classified
Lawyers for the Canadian government had argued that releasing the files could jeopardize international relations and reveal classified information. They said that Canada isn't obligated to hand over the files.
Mosley said an edited version of the tapes should be handed over to Khadr's defence team. Sensitive information and the identities of officials who attended the 2003 interview must be edited out, he said.
He also ordered that five pages of the 186 pages of interview notes and witness statements that had originally been withheld be disclosed to the defence team.
Mosley left it up to Khadr's defence team to decide what material they will release to the public.
"Mr. Khadr and his counsel will be free to use the information as they see fit for the purposes of his defence, including release to the media for publication," he ruled.
Media, including the CBC, intervened at the federal court, asking for the release of the videotaped interviews by CSIS and foreign affairs officials. Lawyers argued the footage should be released in order for the public to assess how CSIS helped

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

Anti-torture caravan in Orillia

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





Anti-torture caravan in Orillia

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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


Now he is seeking answers.


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


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


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


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


Adds Matthew Behrens, coordinator of the caravan:


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


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


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


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


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


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

The Abdelarazik (Sudan) case and the Iacobucci Inquiry

There have been a number of articles about the case of a Canadian citizen in Sudan who was imprisoned in the Sudan at the request of Canadian authorities it seems and whose return to Canada is being sabotaged by his own government. Here is a snippet from a recent Globe and Mail article:

" Officially, Mr. Abdelrazik has been told by Canadian diplomats he's welcome to go home. But his efforts to return have been stymied at every step by Canada's refusal to issue him a passport, the claim that they can do nothing about his "no-fly" status, and perhaps most startlingly, by thwarting offers by Sudan to fly him back to Canada.



The document trail obtained by The Globe ends in early 2006, but Mr. Abdelrazik's limbo continues. He remains under police surveillance in Khartoum. He makes frequent visits to the Canadian embassy, which has been doling him out $100 a month from a special fund for distressed citizens. He's being allowed to telephone his family in Montreal, but the embassy hasn't issued him a passport or travel documents, which could hold the key to his return.



At the same time, he is a Canadian citizen facing no charges, and in a world of unsubstantiated security targeting, a suspected terrorist believed to be so dangerous that he must be kept out of North America.



The trove of documents makes clear that the "highest levels" of both the past Liberal and the current Conservative governments were kept fully informed of Mr. Abdelrazik's case and concurred in its handling. More recently, Mr. Abdelrazik's lawyers sent letters to Prime Minister Stephen Harper demanding his intervention. Last month, officials from Foreign Minister Maxime Bernier's office met with Mr. Abdelrazik in Khartoum.



Late last week, The Globe and Mail sent the Harper government written questions concerning Mr. Abdelrazik's case, including asking why the government had decided to deny a Canadian citizen a passport and had failed to repatriate him. No replies have been received from Mr. Bernier's office.



Documents make it clear one of Ottawa's biggest concerns was the potential political furor if the case became public. Briefing notes, cleared by CSIS and the intelligence sections of Foreign Affairs, were prepared to carefully coach ministers. They include carefully worded replies to questions about whether Canadian authorities shared intelligence about Mr. Abdelrazik with the Sudanese or U.S. governments, whether Canada was the originator of information that resulted in on him being placed on "no-fly" lists and how to respond if asked about parallels to Maher Arar's case, in which another Canadian originally fingered by CSIS ended up being tortured in a Syrian prison."

The same putrid policy has been consistently followed by both Liberal and Conservative governments. The Arar case showed how clueless and uncareful the CSIS and RCMP(in particular were). Parallels are drawn between the two cases. However, there are even more similarities with the three cases being investigated by the Iacobucci Inquiry. So secretive and out of the media limelight is the Inquiry that so far I have not even seen mention of this parallel. Here is the preamble to the terms of reference of the Iacobucci Inquiry:
"whether the detention of Abdullah Almalki, Ahmad Abou-Elmaati and Muayyed Nureddin in Syria or Egypt resulted, directly or indirectly, from actions of Canadian officials, particularly in relation to the sharing of information with foreign countries and, if so, whether those actions were deficient in the circumstances,

whether there were deficiencies in the actions taken by Canadian officials to provide consular services to Abdullah Almalki, Ahmad Abou-Elmaati and Muayyed Nureddin while they were detained in Syria or Egypt, and

whether any mistreatment of Abdullah Almalki, Ahmad Abou-Elmaati and Muayyed Nureddin in Syria or Egypt resulted, directly or indirectly, from actions of Canadian officials, particularly in relation to the sharing of information with foreign countries and, if so, whether those actions were deficient in the circumstances;"


All of these three were imprisoned in Syria or in one case Egypt seemingly on information provided by Canadian authorities and all seem to have been interrogated using questions supplied by Canadian intelligence. Iacobucci should be investigating this case as well but he won't since his mandate is too narrow. Iacobucci is to report in September after an extension of time from January.

Ottawa reviews case of Canadian stuck in Sudan

This is from the Star. This is another case Iacobucci should be looking at. Of course no one will. The Iacobucci inquiry is virtually invisible these days and the mandate is so narrow that there is no way Iacobucci would look at the case even though the situation is in some ways identical to what happened to Almalki et al.
This article does not even mention the no fly issue for some reason. The Canadian government obviously tipped off the Sudanese government and Abdelrazak was subsequently imprisoned and interrogated. As with the U.S. intelligence services our intelligence services think nothing of turning suspects over to be imprisoned in places we know practice torture. I just wonder what Iacobucci will conclude not that it will matter much. His inquiry has no concern at all with clearing Almalki, et al of any wrongdoing as the Arar inquiry did. Of course no one has paid for the "mistakes" made by intelligence services in the Arar case. Some involved have since been promoted.


Ottawa reviews case of Canadian stuck in Sudan
TheStar.com - Canada - Ottawa reviews case of Canadian stuck in Sudan

April 29, 2008
Alexander Panetta
THE CANADIAN PRESS

OTTAWA–A man stranded in Sudan took refuge in the Canadian embassy in Khartoum while seeking a resolution today to his five-year ordeal.

A lawyer for Sudanese-Canadian Abousfian Abdelrazik says his client has been allowed to stay at the embassy and plans to remain there until he gets answers from Ottawa.

Lawyer Yavar Hameed is accusing the federal government of duplicity and disinformation, with a mounting trail of evidence suggesting it has been blocking efforts to bring his client home.

Abdelrazik went to visit his ailing mother in 2003 and was caught in legal limbo after accusations he has terrorist ties; no criminal charges have been filed against the former Montrealer.

He suffers from asthma, heart problems, and an ulcer, and is living on a $100 monthly loan from the Canadian government.

Abdelrazik's ex-wife has demanded that Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Foreign Affairs Minister Maxime Bernier deal with his case.

"He is not a terrorist. He is a Muslim. He is a practising Muslim but a peaceful Muslim," said Myriam St-Hilaire.

"He is a Canadian citizen and he has rights and I'm just asking the government to take in consideration this fact."

She said their son is only 5 years old and doesn't understand what has happened to his father – whom he can't even remember.

"I'm asking Mr. Bernier: What am I supposed to answer him when he grows up and he tells me, `Why wasn't my dad able to be next to me when I was a child?"' St-Hilaire said.

"Mr. Bernier, what am I supposed to answer him?"

Hameed said his client's only contact with Bernier's office has seemed more like an inquisition than consular assistance.

He said Bernier's chief of staff and Conservative MP Deepak Obhrai peppered him with questions about his views on the 9-11 attacks, and on the state of Israel.

He said the Canadian government has done nothing to renew his client's passport or get his name off a no-fly list so that he can take a commercial flight home. He said Ottawa has also rejected an offer from the Sudanese government to fly him to Canada.

Bernier's office said it was reviewing the case, but added that Abdelrazik remains a terrorism suspect. After avoiding comment for two days, the foreign minister's office issued a statement:

"We continue to provide Mr. Abdelrazik with consular assistance. Services include medical and financial assistance, facilitating communications with family and lawyers, as well as providing 'temporary safe haven' at our embassy in Khartoum," the statement said.

"Mr. Abdelrazik is unable to return to Canada of his own accord because he is currently on the United Nations list of terrorism suspects alleged to be affiliated with Al Qaeda, the Taliban or Osama bin Laden."

During Abdelrazik's visit to see his mother, he was arrested by Sudanese officials on a tip from the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, said his lawyer.

He was released when investigators found no evidence to support criminal charges.

Ottawa clears way for lawyers to act as advocates

No doubt Copeland and Norris will be good advocates but it is unfortunate that the clients they represented before the Iacobucci Inquiry are left without their help. However given the degree of secrecy within the Iacobucci Inquiry it is difficult to see that legal counsel could do much anyway except complain from time to time about the secrecy.

Ottawa clears way for lawyers to act as advocates
The Canadian Press

April 15, 2008 at 4:50 AM EDT

OTTAWA — Legal obstacles have been cleared for two lawyers to become the first special advocates appointed in Canada to protect the rights of accused terrorists.

The federal government dropped its objections to the appointment of Paul Copeland and John Norris after the two lawyers agreed to end their involvement in other national security cases that might have put them in a conflict of interest.

It will be up to the judge designated to hear each case to choose a special advocate for each accused. However, the fact that the government has dropped its objections likely clears the way for Mr. Copeland to act as special advocate for Hassan Almrei and Mohamed Harkat, and for Mr. Norris to represent Mahmoud Jaballah and Mohamed Zeki Mahjoub, all accused of terrorist acts.

All four were initially detained under Canada's secretive security certificate process, under which the government was able to present evidence behind closed doors, without lawyers representing the men.

Last year, the Supreme Court of Canada struck down security certificates as unconstitutional. In response, the government rewrote the law to allow security-cleared lawyers, known as special advocates, to attend the closed hearings, challenge government evidence and protect the rights of the accused.

The agreement struck between the federal government and Mr. Copeland and Mr. Norris was summarized in a Federal Court order yesterday.

The government was concerned that the two lawyers, as special advocates, would be privy to secret information.

In particular, the government insisted neither lawyer be involved in future with the Iacobucci inquiry, which is investigating the claims of three men who say they were tortured in Syria as suspected terrorists.