I’m betting O’Brian had it right
The head of CSIS, Jim Judd, says that veteran CSIS advisor Geoffrey O’Brian was wrong when he told the commons committee on public safety on Tuesday that CSIS will use information obtained under torture. Testifying today before the same committee, Judd said O’Brian would be recanting his statement in a letter.
I think O’Brian, who has been with CSIS since the eighties and helped draft the CSIS Act, was chosen to represent the agency and provide two hours of testimony on these issues on Tuesday precisely because he knows what he is talking about.
The Iacobucci Inquiry found that CSIS repeatedly used information that the agency knew, or ought to have known was likely the product of torture – that CSIS (and the RCMP) received a “confession” extracted under torture from Ahmad El Maati in November 2001, then crafted a new set of questions to send back to El Maati’s Syrian interrogators in an attempt to “corroborate” the confession. The confession itself was then used by the RCMP to justify search warrants and telephone taps here in Canada. Information obtained through the searches was used to write up new questions for overseas interrogators to ask not just El Maati, but Abdullah Almalki too.
Judd, the RCMP witness and Public Safety Minister Van Loan also repeatedly refused to use the opportunity of appearing before the committee today to apologize for their agencies’ complicity in the torture of El Maati, Almalki and Nureddin, citing outstanding litigation by the men. This is a sorry excuse – parliamentary privilege is extended to anyone appearing before committee – nothing said there can be used in any legal proceeding.
That Judd is refusing to show even the slightest sign of remorse about CSIS’ role in what happened to these men demonstrates that Judd, and his agency, don’t think there’s anything to be sorry about — that there’s anything wrong with contributing to torture, or using its product.
Tags: CSIS, Iacobucci, Jim Judd, torture
