Kerry Pither

Here’s the news release from today’s event in Ottawa. You can check out video of the installation on Canada AM’s web site here.

Ottawa — Three Canadian torture survivors were at a news conference in Ottawa today to unveil an art installation depicting some of the suffering they endured in a Syrian military intelligence detention centre.

Created by Ottawa artist Jenn Farr and builder Erik Windfeld, “El Abbar” (the grave) is a life-size replica of one of the underground, tiny, dark cells at the now infamous Far’ Falastin (Palestine Branch) Syrian detention centre. Ahmad El Maati was locked into one of these cells for two and a half months before being sent to Egypt. Abdullah Almalki survived one year, three months and twenty-five days in the tiny space. Beside him, Maher Arar was locked up for ten months and ten days. Muayyed Nureddin was locked into an over-crowded “common” cell down the hall.

El Maati, Almalki and Nureddin said they hope the installation will help Canadians, and the government, better understand the horrors of torture.

“I think it is very difficult for anyone to truly comprehend the conditions I was kept in – the loss of control over every aspect of my life, the filth, the smell, the constant sounds of people being tortured, the constant fear that I would be next and the feeling of being buried alive,” said Almalki. “I hope this will at least get people thinking, and better understanding, the horrors of torture.”

More than a year ago the Iacobucci Inquiry concluded that Canadian agencies likely contributed to the torture of El Maati, Almalki and Nureddin by, for example, sending information and questions used in their interrogations in Syria, and in the case of El Maati, Egypt too. The Inquiry also found that allegations about the men shared with foreign agencies were variously inaccurate, inflammatory and without investigatory foundation.

Last week on December 3, all opposition parties voted in the House of Commons to support a Commons Public Safety Committee report calling on the government to compensate and formally apologize to El Maati, Almalki and Nureddin. Since then, however, news has emerged that 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.”

“Over the past few weeks at the hearings into Afghan detainees, we’ve witnessed what can only be read as the government’s callous disregard for the human consequences of torture, and outright contempt for those seeking answers or justice,” said Alex Neve, Secretary General for Amnesty International.

“Now we’re outraged to learn that the government is refusing to accept responsibility for the role played by Canadian agencies in what happened to these men, and forcing them into the courts to fight for the apology and compensation that would help them rebuild their shattered lives,” he added.

The art installation was commissioned by Kerry Pither, the author of Dark Days, a book chronicling the men’s experiences and the Canadian investigations that targeted them.

“I’ve learned through these stories that it is almost impossible for anyone who hasn’t survived torture to fully comprehend how barbaric it is,” said Pither. “I hope that by just spending a few seconds standing inside this replica of the cell, people will be better able to imagine the horrors of spending months in a place like this.”

Pither used the proceeds from the Ottawa Book Award to pay for supplies, and Farr and Windfeld donated their labour. The modular installation will be made available to galleries across Canada in the new year.

The men were also joined at the news conference by NDP MP Don Davies, Liberal MP Mark Holland, and Bloc MP Serge Menard, who sat together on the Public Safety Committee that recommended the government compensate and apologize to the men, in addition to implementing a new system of checks and balances for security agencies that would help ensure that what happened to these men never happens again.

Despite an attempt by government to shut down debate, the majority of the House of Commons has just voted in favour of compensation and a formal apology for Ahmad El Maati, Abdullah Almalki and Muayyed Nureddin. The vote was on a concurrence motion, moved by NDP MP Don Davies, and supported by all opposition parties, calling on the government to implement recommendations contained in a report by the parliamentary Public Safety Committee.

You can watch the debate on line here (December 3, 2009, HoC Sitting # 123, beginning at 10:00 a.m.).

The report, tabled on June 18, 2009 and debated in the House of Commons today, came out of a study of findings by the Iacobucci Inquiry and findings and recommendations of the Arar Inquiry. (The Iacobucci Inquiry determined that the actions of Canadian officials, such as providing questions and information to Syrian and Egyptian interrogators, likely contributed to the torture of El Maati, Almalki and Nureddin.)

In addition to an apology and compensation, the committee report calls on the government to correct misinformation shared about the men with foreign agencies – information containing allegations which retired Supreme Court Justice Frank Iacobucci determined were variously inaccurate, inflammatory, and without evidentiary basis.

Just yesterday one of the men, Abdullah Almalki, was told he would not be permitted to board a flight from Toronto to Windsor. Another of the men, Muayyed Nureddin, whose family is in Iraq, cannot travel to see them without risk of being detained and tortured again.

The report also calls on the government to urgently implement a recommendation made by the Arar Commission on December 12, 2006, calling for a new system of checks and balances for the agencies tasked with national security investigations.

The vote on concurrence with the report took place after almost three hours of debate in the House of Commons today, a debate that the government tried, but failed, when put to a vote, to have adjourned.

It’s been almost three years since the Arar inquiry released its report calling for a new watchdog for the agencies involved in national security investigations, and the government is still saying it needs more time, and wants to wait for the outcome of yet another inquiry — Justice John Major’s Air India Inquiry. The excuse came again in the government’s response to the Commons Public Safety Committee report, which called for implementation of all of the Arar Inquiry’s recommendations without delay.

The government’s response was tabled last week on the one-year anniversary of the release of former Supreme Court Justice Frank Iacobucci’s report, which determined that Canadian agencies had contributed to the torture of Ahmad El Maati Abdullah Almalki and Muayyed Nureddin by sharing unsubstantiated allegations about them with Syrian, Egyptian, U.S. and other agencies. The government says it can’t act now to correct the record because of ongoing litigation — another excuse that has no credibility. Read more in my op-ed in the Ottawa Citizen today.

Special to the Ottawa Citizen, June 26, 2009

It’s official. As long as the U.S. doesn’t interfere, Abousfian Abdelrazik will finally return home on Saturday, the fifth Canadian to come home with questions about Canadian complicity in his torture.

Has anything changed since the four with stories so similar to his – Maher Arar, Ahmad El Maati, Abdullah Almalki and Muayyed Nureddin – came home and demanded answers about Canada’s role in their torture?

For starters, we aren’t as easily convinced when fellow citizens are labeled as terror suspects. An overwhelming number of Canadians from all walks of life – apparently more skeptical of the security apparatus and the government than Abdelrazik – were willing to risk criminal charges by contributing to his airline ticket home.

That’s encouraging, and not surprising, given all we’ve learned from the Arar and Iacobucci Inquiries about the lack of evidence behind the allegations leveled against the others.

The media is more skeptical too. Even before Arar, El Maati and Almalki were released, the onus was on them to somehow disprove allegations being hurled at them in the media by nameless, faceless officials hoping to distract attention from their own shameful behaviour. Thanks to findings at the Arar Inquiry, and the benefit of hindsight, very few journalists are still willing to publish terrorism allegations from officials insisting on anonymity. That’s encouraging too.

We’ve also seen a shift in the courts, aptly demonstrated by the Federal Court ruling forcing Canada to bring Abdelrazik home.

But have the Canadian government and its agencies changed?

There, the news isn’t as good.

By waiting until a Federal Court forced it to bring Abdelrazik home, the government demonstrated it has learned precious little. And CSIS and the RCMP have yet to express any remorse for their now well-documented contribution the torture of El Maati, Almalki and Nureddin. So despite evidence that CSIS requested Abdelrazik’s detention, it’s unlikely he’ll be getting an apology any time soon.

So where can he turn for answers and accountability?

When Arar returned home almost six years ago, Shirley Heafey, then chair of the RCMP’s Public Complaints Commission, had publicly revealed that the force was refusing to cooperate with her investigations. Even if she had won new powers, her investigation would have been restricted to the RCMP, and Arar would have had to ask for separate investigations into the roles of CSIS, the CBSA, DFAIT and other agencies.

That’s why he called for a public inquiry – one that could subpoena witnesses and evidence from all the Canadian agencies implicated in his case.

Arar won that inquiry, and through it we all won many answers and important recommendations. Recognizing there was nowhere for El Maati, Almalki and Nureddin to turn for answers either, the Arar Inquiry made a recommendation leading to the creation of a second inquiry to examine their cases. And to address the long term, the Arar Inquiry called for the creation of a review mechanism with powers much like its own.

That recommendation, made more than two and a half years ago, has been fiercely resisted by CSIS and the RCMP, and dutifully ignored by the government.

Not that things have changed. Just weeks ago, the current chair of the RCMP Public Complaints Commission announced that he still lacks the power to investigate the force’s national security work. And SIRC has emphasized that its investigation into Abdelrazik’s case will be limited to CSIS involvement, not other agencies involved.

The government, apparently lacking the courage to stand up to CSIS and the RCMP, says that before it can implement that robust, independent and integrated review mechanism, we need to wait until the Air India Inquiry releases its report.

So Abdelrazik comes home to the same dilemma Arar faced six years ago. How will he, and we, get to the bottom of who did what in his case? Must he fight for an inquiry too? If he somehow manages to win one, will that be used as another excuse to stall implementation of a long term solution? And in the meantime, how are we to have any confidence in the agencies that are supposed to make us feel safer?

If the government won’t stand up to CSIS and the RCMP, we must. Canadians must insist on implementation of the long term, efficient and effective checks and balances so essential to delivering the accountability our democracy demands.

The government is blocking Abousfian Abdelrazik’s return to Canada for a very simple reason: to shield Canadian officials and agencies for their complicity in his detention and torture. I’ve written an op-ed on how recent history is repeating itself in the case of Abousfian Abdelrazik, and about the startling parallels between his case and those of Ahmad El Maati, Abdullah Almalki, Maher Arar and Muayyed Nureddin. Check it out below.

Why Canada doesn’t want Abousfian Abdelrazik to come home
By Kerry Pither
Ottawa Citizen, May 13, 2009

Why won’t the Harper government let Abousfian Abdelrazik come home?

Recent history shows it is likely about shielding Canadian agencies from accountability for their role in his detention and torture.

Indeed, there’s frighteningly very little that is unprecedented about the federal government’s handling of Mr. Abdelrazik’s case now, or in the past.

Two federal commissions of inquiry—the Arar Inquiry and the Iacobucci Inquiry—have documented Canada’s role in the overseas detention and torture of four other Canadian Muslim men.

Maher Arar was the first to come home and talk about how he was detained in the US because of erroneous allegations from Canada, then shipped to Syria where he was tortured and held in deplorable conditions for a year.

And while the Inquiry into his case was ongoing, we learned of three other cases.

Ahmad El Maati was detained in November 2001 when he traveled to Syria to celebrate his wedding. Canada had shared erroneous allegations about him with the Syrian Military Intelligence – allegations that would be the subject of brutal interrogations under torture for two months in Syria, then two years in Egypt. In Syria, El Maati was whipped with cables. In Egypt, he was subjected to electric shock.

Abdullah Almalki was detained in May 2002 when he travelled to Syria to visit his ailing grandmother. Canadian officials sent questions for interrogators to ask Almalki too – along with a cover letter promising more information “depending on his willingness to answer.” Of course that shouldn’t have been in question given the reputation of interrogators there. Mr. Almalki was whipped repeatedly on the soles of his feet and held in a three by six by seven foot dark, underground cell for seventeen months before being moved then released after 22 months in detention.

Muayyed Nureddin was detained by the Syrians in December 2003 after visiting his family in Iraq—again, because of Canadian allegations that would be the subject of interrogations under torture. He was released after 33 days in detention.

Just as inquiries into those other cases determined that allegations against them were variously erroneous, inaccurate, unqualified, inflammatory, or without evidentiary basis, Mr. Abdelrazik has been cleared of terrorist ties by CSIS and the RCMP.

And just as Canada was implicated in the detention of the others, government documents say Sudanese officials detained Mr. Abdelrazik at Canada’s request.

In the other cases, CSIS was unsuccessful in repeated bids to interrogate them in overseas detention centres. The agency was successful in Mr. Abdelrazik’s case – they interrogated him in Sudanese custody, and just like in the other cases, didn’t inform his family, or Canada’s consular officials, of his whereabouts.

El Maati, Almalki, Arar and Nureddin were all eventually cleared by their overseas jailers and released. Similarly, Mr. Abdelrazik was released after a total of 19 months in detention because Sudanese officials said they could no longer hold an innocent at another country’s behest.
But the parallels don’t stop there.

Despite the well-documented records of torture in Syria and Egypt, the federal government tried to cast doubt on Arar, El Maati, Almalki and Nureddin’s claims of torture, and was proven wrong at the inquiries.
Mr. Abdelrazik says he was tortured in detention, and has the scars to prove it, but astonishingly, federal government lawyers have tried to assert that his wounds were self-inflicted.

And just as is happening now to Mr. Abdelrazik, Arar, El Maati, Almalki and their families had to fight repeated attempts by Canadian agencies to block their release and return home.

In October 2003, just ten days after Maher Arar’s release and return to Canada, a CSIS official speculated in a memo that it was “unlikely that, should Abdelrazik’s detention in Sudan become public knowledge, there would be the same sort of outcry that surrounded Maher Arar’s arrest and deportation from the USA.” 

He was right, at least in the short term. But here’s where history repeats itself yet again – the more the Harper government does to block Abdelrazik’s return, the more the media, and the public, are paying attention.

And the more inevitable it becomes that Mr. Abdelrazik will come home, and will, eventually, get answers.

The Commons Committee on Public Safety is supposed to begin hearings this week on the findings of the Iacobucci Inquiry, and the recommendations of the Arar Inquiry. These hearings are crucial. We’ve heard nothing from the government since the report’s release in October last year: The report confirmed that Canadian agencies did contribute to the detention of Ahmad El Maati and Muayyed Nureddin, and to their torture and the torture of Abdullah Almalki (by, for example, supplying the questions to those interrogating and torturing them). No-one in government has apologized to the men. There’s no sign that any Canadian official has been held accountable for their actions. And the Conservative government is still ignoring the Arar Inquiry’s recommendation, made more than two years ago, for effective and integrated civilian oversight of the agencies that carry out national security investigations. And without that oversight mechanism in place, it isn’t clear how Canadians can be confident that many of the Arar Inquiry’s other recommendations have been implemented.

It isn’t yet clear who will be appearing before the Public Safety Committee, or when they might be appearing. The committee was supposed to hear testimony from the RCMP, CSIS and the Canadian Border Services Agency on Tuesday — but that’s been cancelled or postponed. The Public Safety Minister was invited to appear this week but wasn’t available. So now it’s anticipated that witnesses from DFAIT, the Commission for Public Complaints against the RCMP (CPC) and the Security Intelligence Review Committee (SIRC) will appear on Thursday.

Just eight days after the release of the Arar Inquiry’s report on September 18, 2006, former RCMP Commissioner Zaccardelli appeared as a witness at the Public Safety committee hearings. On that first day of hearings, he used the opportunity to apologize to Maher Arar and his family, but then went on to provide testimony for which he would later be forced to resign. The Public Safety committee’s study of the Arar case continued through to January 2007. Evidence for these meetings is available here.

The Public Safety Committee later tabled a report calling on the Canadian government to issue a formal apology to Mr. Arar, negotiate compensation for him and his family, register formal protest with the US for its rendition of Mr. Arar, register formal protests with Syria for torturing Mr. Arar, and implement all the findings of the Arar Commission.

I hope the Public Safety Committee will work towards a similar report this time, calling on the Canadian government to apologize to Messrs. El Maati, Almalki and Nureddin, to move swiftly into mediating compensation for the men so they can rebuild their shattered lives, to register formal protests against the governments of Syria and Egypt for brutally torturing these Canadians, to provide a full, detailed accounting of how the Arar Inquiry’s factual report’s recommendations have been implemented, and to immediately implement the Arar Inquiry’s recommended oversight mechanism for the agencies that conduct national security investigations.

For those who are interested, the Arar Inquiry’s reports and recommendations are available on its web site, which has been archived here.

Stay tuned…

The Harper government is doing all it can to downplay the shocking findings in the Iacobucci Inquiry’s report, but don’t fall for the spin. Despite having been a one-sided, unfair and needlessly over-secretive process, it has produced a damning report, cataloging the many, many ways that our government agencies, CSIS and the RCMP were complicit in the detention and torture of Canadian citizens. Read my op-ed in the Ottawa Citizen today.