Robert Fisk on accountability for complicity in torture
The Independent’s Robert Fisk was in Ottawa a few weeks ago and spoke with Canadian torture survivor Abdullah Almalki, one of the men whose stories I tell in my book. Fisk writes about Almalki’s case in his column, published today, and raises the all-important issue of accountability. “I want to know why those complicit in Almalki’s torture – the letter writers, the composers of questions – cannot be tried in court,” he writes. “They are, at the least, accomplices to human rights abuses.” Good point. Especially since they aren’t just not being held accountable — they’re being promoted. Just this week we learned that the RCMP’s Michel Cabana, the man who was in charge of the RCMP investigation that targeted Ahmad El Maati, Almalki, Maher Arar and Muayyed Nureddin, has been promoted to an Assistant Commissioner of the RCMP (Federal and International Operations, Border Integrity Section).
Cabana was in charge of the RCMP’s Project A-O Canada when El Maati, Almalki and Arar were detained in Syria and tortured into providing false confessions. He was also in charge when those so-called confessions made their way back to Canada. The first, of course, was pried out of Ahmad El Maati within the first few days of his incommunicado detention at the now infamous Syrian house of torture, the Palestine Branch, or Far Falastin, of the Syrian Military Intelligence. After being whipped with cables for days on end, being burned with cigarettes by men threatening his eyes were next, then being shoved into darkness in a dank, rat and insect-infested underground cell barely his size, El Maati agreed to confess to a plot proposed by his interrogators (armed with information from Canada) — that he had planned to blow up Ottawa’s parliament buildings.
That “confession” was used by Cabana’s team to justify search warrants against El Maati’s family, Abdullah Almalki, and other Canadians. When they applied for the search warrants, the RCMP didn’t tell the presiding judge that the confession was likely the product of torture, and therefore entirely unreliable. Nor did they let on that El Maati had ended up in the Syrian gulag because of information provided by the RCMP and CSIS. According to the report of the Iacobucci Inquiry, Cabana said that “while the group realized that the statement was likely not taken pursuant to Canadian standards, Project A-O Canada had no evidence at that time that torture had been used to obtain the statement” (Iacobucci Report, page 139).
His boss, then Superintendent Garry Clement (now Chief of Police in Cobourg, Ontario), said that investigators “had no information that Mr. El Maati had been tortured” when they applied for the search warrants, and that “it would have been wrong to cast aspersions against a country without fist having the facts straight” (page 139).
Justice Iacobucci would, of course, conclude that they knew, or should have known, that torture was likely taking place (page 363).
Cabana was also in charge when the fruits of the searches — detailed business records and a lot of other private, but apparently not incriminating, information obtained while ransacking the men’s families’ homes — were handed over to the Americans, and used by Canadians to write up a new round of questions for El Maati’s Syrian interrogators, and later, a round of questions for Abdullah Almalki.
Cabana also most assuredly knows who in the RCMP has been party to the smear campaign conducted against El Maati, Almalki and Arar in the media— an orchestrated attempt to convince the Canadian public and decision-makers that these men were terrorists. Putting the men on trial in the court of public opinion rather than in a court of law was their only option, of course, because as the Iacobucci Report points out, they simply didn’t have the evidence to back up the allegations and bring charges (to this day none of the men have been charged in Canada). The smear campaign was also, of course, about stopping us from focussing on their crime of complicity in torture — on how Canadian law makers and security officials were thwarting the rule of law by playing an active role in the torture of Canadian citizens.
Fisk is right. The Canadian officials who contributed to the torture of all four of these men must be held accountable in some way. As a first step, Canadians have a right to know where these people are now. Have they all been promoted? Are they still in charge of our public safety? Do any of them feel any remorse whatsoever?
CSIS and the RCMP are due to testify before the Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security on March 31. I hope Canadians are paying close attention to that hearing, and that the agencies will be asked to account for the whereabouts of those officials whose complicity in the torture of Canadians has now been well documented by not one, but two judicial inquiries.
Committee meetings can be watched in person or on line here.
You can read Fisk’s full column here.
Tags: Abdullah Almalki, Accountability, Ahmad El Maati, Iacobucci, impunity, Maher Arar, Muayyed Nureddin, Robert Fisk
