The book
Dark Days is the story of Canadian national security investigations gone terribly wrong, told through the experiences of four of its targets: Ahmad El Maati, Abdullah Almalki, Maher Arar and Muayyed Nureddin.
After discovering they were of interest to Canadian investigators, these Canadian Muslim men were detained overseas and subjected to brutal torture. They were all interrogated using questions from Canadian agencies — all were accused of links to terrorism but no evidence has been produced to back these accusations. All were eventually released without charge and returned to Canada. All want to clear their names and rebuild their lives, and to do so, they need to know who did this to them, and more importantly, why.
Since the attacks of 9/11, much has been written about “terror suspects” through the eyes of investigating agencies. Very little has been written about these agencies through the eyes of the people and communities they have targeted. Dark Days does this by documenting the human stories of these men – from their first encounters with CSIS and the RCMP, to their overseas incarceration, torture and interrogation, to their eventual release and the long wait for answers.
Alongside these men’s day-to-day experiences, Dark Days charts the evolution and activities of the investigations, drawing on testimony by Canadian officials, documentary evidence and the reports from the public Inquiry into Maher Arar’s case. It traces the investigation’s origins in CSIS and the handover to the RCMP after 9/11, and how partnering with agencies in the United States, Syria and Egypt led to the detention, interrogation and torture of these men. It shows how Canadian agencies hyped these men as security threats, first, to show Canada was “with” the United States in its so-called war on terror, then to impede efforts to win the men’s release, and then to cover up their own wrongdoing. It also documents how these agencies fiercely resisted a public inquiry into the Arar case because it could expose the broader, systemic pattern of complicity in torture, and describes how once the inquiries were set up, these agencies continued the cover-up with claims of national security confidentiality.
Together, these stories reveal how Canadian security, law enforcement and government agencies set out to appease the United States after 9/11, and, in doing so, undermined basic human rights, civil liberties, and the very democracy they are supposed to protect and uphold. Many Canadians take pride in the principles that distinguish us from the United States – this book challenges us to consider how fragile those differences really are.
