Kerry Pither

The Iacobucci Inquiry has revealed yet another way in which the actions of CSIS agents likely contributed to the torture of Canadian citizen Ahmad El Maati.

Inquiry Commissioner Justice Frank Iacobucci Inquiry had hoped to include today’s revelation in its public report released in October 2008, but was forced to fight government claims of national security confidentiality.

The newly released information says that in June 2002, CSIS agents sent a message to Egyptian authorities trying to confirm that El Maati was in detention there, and telling them, among other things not disclosed, that he was involved in a plan to commit a terrorist act in Canada.

Justice Iacobucci has already confirmed that that this allegation was not based on evidence, but on an alleged “confession” obtained earlier from Syrian authorities – a “confession” that Iacobucci says CSIS should have known was likely the product of torture.

Justice Iacobucci criticizes CSIS for failing to take into account the potential consequences of sharing this allegation with the Egyptian authorities for El Maati.

He says once they confirmed El Maati was indeed in Egyptian detention, CSIS continued to communicate with the Egyptians, and sought permission from then CSIS deputy director of operations, Jack Hooper, to travel to Egypt later that year.

Hooper approved the trip, and apparently told the Inquiry that while he did consider the possibility El Maati might be mistreated as a result of the trip, he didn’t think that was likely, and, besides, it was more important to find determine if there really was a threat to Canada.

A list of questions was prepared, “to which it [CSIS] wished to obtain answers,” and the trip went ahead in December 2002.

Justice Iacobucci concludes that the information shared in June 2002, the list of questions, and the trip all likely contributed to El Maati’s mistreatment.

And Justice Iacobucci has already documented how El Maati was subsequently tortured in Egypt – with electric shock to his hands, back and genitals, and sleep deprivation while being subjected to excruciatingly painful stress torture for days on end.

Justice Iacobucci takes CSIS to task for failing to include enquiries about how El Maati was being treated.

But then again, as he confirmed in his report, CSIS had already been informed as early as July 2002 that El Maati had been tortured in Egyptian detention.

What Justice Iacobucci doesn’t tell us is what CSIS did with the questions.

Did the agents hand them over to El Maati’s interrogators? Did the agents witness or participate in any of El Maati’s interrogations? Did they get answers back?

Were there any subsequent trips to Egypt?

Today’s revelations have renewed calls by human rights advocates, and the men whose cases were examined by the Iacobucci Inquiry, for decisive action to ensure that Canada is never again complicit in torture.

“This revelation is particularly disturbing given the expanding powers being awarded to CSIS to act overseas, and the government’s continued refusal to beef up oversight and review not just of CSIS but all agencies involved in national security investigations,” said Warren Allmand, former solicitor general and a spokesperson for the International Civil Liberties Monitoring Group.

“It has been more than three years since Justice Dennis O’Connor wrapped up the Arar Inquiry and recommended a new comprehensive model of review and oversight and it is long past time to implement that important proposal,” he added. “It is too late for Mr. El Maati, but it’s not too late for others.”

“At a time when Canadian officials should have been doing everything they could to extricate Mr. El Maati from the terrifying human rights violations, today we learn of another way that they were instead contributing to his suffering,” said Alex Neve, Secretary General of Amnesty International Canada.

“Combined with what we already knew about Canadian complicity in torture, it is outrageous that the government adamantly continues to refuse to apologize and offer redress to Mr. El Maati, along with Abdullah Almalki and Muayyed Nureddin,” Neve added. “The government must stop their callous fight against these three men in the courts and do the right thing: say sorry and provide compensation.”

In December last year, the Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security won majority support in a House of Commons vote for its recommendations that the government issue compensation and an apology to El Maati, Almalki and Nureddin, and implement the Arar Inquiry’s recommendation for a more robust system of checks and balances for agencies involved in national security investigations.

Since then, however, efforts at mediating a settlement for the men have collapsed because of a federal government position the men’s counsel say “eliminates any possibility of resolution.”

Today’s news adds to a long list of ways that Justice Iacobucci has already revealed that Canadian agencies contributed to Mr. El Maati’s detention and torture.

When his report was first released in October 2008, it revealed that Canadian officials had likely contributed to Mr. El Maati’s mistreatment and torture in Egypt in three other ways: CSIS sent a letter to Egyptian authorities labeling Mr. El Maati with unjustified allegations and expressing concern should he be released; the RCMP repeatedly requested the opportunity to interview Mr. El Maati in Egyptian custody; and the RCMP freely shared information with U.S. authorities that made its way into the hands of Egyptian interrogators.

The report also concluded that Canadian officials likely contributed to Mr. El Maati’s initial detention by Syrian authorities when they shared his travel itinerary with the FBI and CIA, and when, in communications with the Syrians, they labeled him as linked to terrorism without first ensuring the allegations were accurate or justified.

Justice Iacobucci has also already revealed that Canadian officials likely contributed to Mr. El Maati’s torture in Syria by supplying questions for his Syrian interrogators, and, when they received his “confession,” failing to advise consular affairs officials that they knew Mr. El Maati was in Syrian detention and had been interrogated.

The report also concluded that the actions of Canadian officials likely contributed to the detention and torture of Canadian citizen Muayyed Nureddin, and to the torture of Abdullah Almalki, both in Syria.

Click here for an overview of what we already knew from the Iacobucci Report.

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.

The International Commission of Jurists has just released a damning report on how seven years of abusive counter-terrorism measures in countries around the world have seriously compromised the integrity of the international human rights norms and law. The report, called “Assessing Damage, Urging Action” cites the Maher Arar case as “an example of how transnational intelligence should not be happening.” The report calls for the rejection of the “war on terror” paradigm and for a full repudiation of the policies grounded in it and emphasizes that criminal justice systems, not secret intelligence, should be at the heart of the legal response to terrorism.

Quill and Quire, “Canada’s magazine of book news and reviews,” says Dark Days is “an essential book for our morally ambiguous times,” and has chosen it as one of fifteen books (and one of four non-fiction books) to remember from 2008.

Here’s the full article from the December issue of Quill and Quire:

Anyone who believes that Canada is exempt from the human rights abuses of the so-called “global war on terror” needs to think again. In an essential book for our morally ambiguous times, human rights advocate Kerry Pither looks at the stories of four Canadian citizens — Maher Arar, Ahmad El Maati, Abdullah Almalki and Muayyed Nureddin — who were imprisoned in Egypt and Syria, held without charge or counsel, and tortured, all with the implicit sanction of our government. Those abuses made headlines this fall with the release of the Iacobucci report; Pither’s book is a resounding clarion call for Canadians concerned with due process and the presumption of innocence.