This is from Kerry Pither's blog. Pither wrote a book on the Almalki et al. I don't understand the distinction that Pither says Iacobucci makes between direct and indirect. Even if someone else were involved you could be directly involved and even if someone else were involved you could be still indirectly involved. I thought indirect meant as she mentions in the next sentence that the Canadians did not directly do the torturing (or even order it or the imprisonment). The full text of the report is in the links highlighted in her article. It is in PDF format. The Adobe reader came with my new computer and Vista operating system. However, when I use it I am warned that there are known compatibility problems. Nevertheless it seems to work after a fashion.
It was convenient that the report came out after the election. However, any blaming of government surely applies to the Liberal govt. as much as the Conservatives, although the latter are responsible for the restrictive terms of reference that Iacobucci seems to have interpreted narrowly as well.
October 22, 2008
No wonder they wanted the inquiry kept secret
The Iacobucci Inquiry’s report is very good news for Ahmad El Maati, Abdullah Almalki, and Muayyed Nureddin, and very bad news for the government, CSIS and the RCMP. It details how Canadian agencies’ allegations against the men were were ”inaccurate,” “inflammatory,” and “without investigative foundation,” and the many ways in which these agencies were complicit in their torture.
While former Supreme Court Justice Frank Iacobucci uses the term “indirect” to describe Canadian officials’ responsibility for detention and torture in his report, he explains that by indirect, he means that he cannot rule out the possibility that someone else was involved. So Canadian officials were “indirectly” responsible for the men’s torture in Syria (ie., by supplying questions) they weren’t actually wielding the whips and cables used to torture them. To say they were “directly” complicit, or responsible, he says, he would have had to rule out any possibility that anyone else was involved.
The government did its best to minimize the damage yesterday, waiting until late Monday night to tell journalists, and the men and their counsel, when the report would be released, and giving everyone one hour to read it before responding. Then Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day toured every media studio in town, trying to revive allegations against the men by pointing to claims made by the Attorney General in closing submissions to the Inquiry. He neglected to mention that Justice Iacobucci did not accept those arguments.
Read the report, not the submissions, Minister Day, then issue a formal apology to these men.
More to come soon.
Showing posts with label Kerry Pither. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Kerry Pither. Show all posts
Thursday, October 23, 2008
Friday, October 3, 2008
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.
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.
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
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
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
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