Kerry Pither

After 30 years of authoritarian rule, the people of Egypt are “breaking through the fear barrier”. That’s how one Egyptian Canadian being interviewed on the CBC described the incredible courage being shown on the streets of Egypt these days. Well put.

I for one am haunted by what I know of Egypt’s security services, and what they do to those who dare to speak out. I can only imagine the horror of how Mubarak’s revenge is being meted out on those detained in the past few days. So I’m spending a little time thinking about them, and hoping that the very real possibility of change is somehow helping them endure.

Canadian citizen Ahmad El Maati endured the horror of Egypt’s Mukhabarat (intelligence services) and their detention centres. He was detained and tortured there because of unsubstantiated allegations made by Canada’s spy agency, CSIS, which also supplied the questions to his interrogators (I wonder how CSIS is feeling about potentially losing those thugs as allies?).

So, to help us all understand just what “breaking through the fear barrier” means in Egypt here’s an excerpt from my book about Ahmad’s experience in one of the Mukhabarat’s detention centres, the Mabahith Amn al-Dawla al-’Ulya (State Security Investigations services) headquarters, in the heart of Cairo.

I’ve received a number of inquiries about the Arar Commission web site — which used to be consistently available on the Library and Archives Canada site by clicking on the old URL — www.ararcommission.ca. Now, click on that, and you get some strange financial services company…

I contacted Library and Archives about this, and they are looking into what’s happened to their archived links and the URL. In the meantime, they were able to find the archived site, and all the Inquiry’s reports, recommendations, transcripts and other documents on the Privy Council Office web site here.

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.

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.

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 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.

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…

While the public waits for answers about Canadian complicity in the overseas detention and torture of El Maati, Almalki and Nureddin, startling evidence is emerging about Canadian complicity in the detention and torture of yet another Canadian, Abousfian Abdelrazik, in Sudan.

It should come as no surprise that the Canadian government is blocking his return to Canada.

According to just-released testimony by Sean Robertson, a senior foreign affairs official, the Harper government was presented with evidence that Abdelrazik was tortured in Sudanese prisons after being imprisoned there at Canada’s request.

Robertson testified that when Deepak Obhrai, Canada’s junior foreign minister, travelled to Khartoum to question Abdelrazik last March, Abdelrazik said he’d been whipped with cables and lifted his shirt to show the scars still evident more than two years later.  

Predictably, Obhrai isn’t taking calls from the Globe and Mail’s Paul Koring, who wanted to know what, if anything, Obhrai and other government officials, did about it.

In a story in Saturday’s Globe and Mail, Koring writes: