Part one of a series on Canadian complicity in arbitrary detention and the false labeling used to justify it.
By Matthew Behrens
Like far too many people targeted in the “Global War on Terror” (GWOT), Canadian citizen Jack Letts is a victim of monstering. It’s a demonization process by which he’s been personified as irredeemably evil, not deserving of human rights, and left to rot in one of the prisons and detention camps in NE Syria described as “Guantanamo on the Euphrates.”
As a result of this monstering, media, politicians, and bureaucrats in Canada and the UK view Letts as un-human and un-worthy, his suffering buried beneath Islamophobic labels and degrading language he cannot counter. A discredited British tabloid writer’s baseless 2016 creation of the “Jihadi Jack” myth has eliminated any nuance, context, and humanity from discussions of his case, and made his name almost interchangeable with a now dead ISIS executioner dubbed “Jihadi John.”
Letts has been stripped of the British half of his dual citizenship, and has been publicly condemned by former Conservative leader Andrew Scheer, former Liberal Public Safety minister Ralph Goodale, and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. He has been abandoned by Ottawa for five years in a NE Syrian prison, held without charge under conditions described in a March, 2022 United Nations report as meeting the “threshold for torture, cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment under international law.”
His story reveals an idealistic, compassionate young man of 18 whose 2014 decision to go to Syria to help end the suffering of its people made him an easy target for the Global War On Terror (GWOT) propaganda machine that accuses without evidence, detains without charge, assigns inaccurate and damaging labels, tortures with impunity, condemns by association, and relies on broad definitions of alleged threats to get away with crimes that violate the most basic human rights guaranteed by the so-called “rules-based international order.”
But in an impoverished political milieu fueled by Islamophobia and 24/7 poll monitoring, it is next to impossible to have a discussion about the nuances of conflicts anywhere on the globe. Indeed, the dichotomous world view presented by George W. Bush (“You’re either with us or you’re with the terrorists”) is not limited to the White House. It has always marked the policies and practices of regimes, intelligence agencies, media outlets, and the “terrorism industrial academic complex” who rely on a constant diet of monster creation to remain relevant and well-funded. That self-anointed certainty of the truth has contributed to the bulldozing of legal rights and responsibilities and been marked by assassination via drone strikes, the maintenance of “black site” torture centres, and the theft of $6 trillion by the US government for the war on terror since 2001. As the International Commission of Jurists concluded in 2009, “certain governments want to reserve for themselves the power to designate a class of people who are not entitled to the same rights as other human beings.”
The Distorted Lens
It is within that landscape that Jack Letts’ story serves as a striking illustration of the distorted lens through which “western” society judges individual choices. Letts’ biggest mistake, it would appear, was his itinerary. In 2014, there were two places where Russian military brutality would become notorious for its sheer inhumanity: Crimea and Syria. The international volunteers (including Canadians) who went to Crimea were not monstered or prevented from coming home, despite Amnesty International finding that war crimes were committed by both sides during the conflict. But those who went to Syria would all be tarred with the terrorist brush, whether they travelled to fight against Assad’s brutal regime – just as young Canadians are flocking to Ukraine today - or were lured by the false promise that they would help create a new, utopian, Muslim society. Others went simply for humanitarian reasons. Jack was a committed Muslim who wanted to use his language skills to help the people of Syria.
Portraying Letts as a monster has also served as a convenient smokescreen to cover up the Global Affairs Canada (GAC) failure to act for five years on information that Letts had been tortured by proxy, likely at the behest of UK officials. GAC has dithered and generated endless excuses for refusing to liberate Letts and four dozen other Canadians – some of them very young children – from what Human Rights Watch describes as arbitrary detention “in filthy and often inhuman and life-threatening conditions.” To add insult to injury, GAC has invested significant resources to fight these detainees and their families in a Federal Court case to be heard later this spring.
Family members hope that the Federal Court will order Ottawa to bring all Canadian detainees home immediately, a right to return guaranteed by Section 6 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. As the Federal Court concluded in a 2009 repatriation case, “Charter rights are not dependent on the wisdom of the choices Canadians make, nor their moral character or political beliefs. Foolish persons have no lesser rights under the Charter than those who have made wise choices or are considered to be morally and politically upstanding.”
Forcing GAC to bring these Canadians home would be consistent with a growing international movement to repatriate everyone held in the camps and prisons controlled by the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (Rojava), Canada’s Kurdish ally in the war against ISIS. Failure to repatriate its citizens, as Human Rights Watch has observed, means the Canadian government “is flouting its international human rights obligations toward Canadians who are arbitrarily detained in northeast Syria and by providing inadequate support to family members seeking to provide their loved ones with essentials such as food and medicine, and to bring them home. The obligations that Canada has breached include taking necessary and reasonable steps to assist nationals abroad facing serious abuses including risks to life, torture, and inhuman and degrading treatment.”
Repatriating All Detainees
In late January, the International Committee of the Red Cross declared: “States must repatriate their own citizens. Not just children. Children, women and men.” At the same time, Abdulkarim Omar, co-chair of the Kurdish administration’s foreign office, reiterated what the Kurds have been saying for years: “Every country should take its citizens back.” On January 31, 2022, the US State Department called on its partners to “urgently repatriate their nationals and other detainees remaining in northeast Syria.” Two weeks later, the Biden administration declared it was “bemused and infuriated” with the UK’s refusal to repatriate, and warned British officials that the “trust of the UK’s suitability as a security partner has been eroded considerably due to lacklustre policy” with respect to the detainees.
Canada’s House of Commons Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development also recommended repatriation in June 2021. Fionnuala D. Ní Aoláin, the United Nations special rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism, told this committee that Canada had earned an unenviable spot on a list of 57 nations “that no state should want to be on” for failure to repatriate its citizens. “There’s a really clear and compelling positive obligation on Canada to prevent serious harm to its nationals, which it is in a position to prevent,” she told MPs, adding that it was lack of political will, and not diminished capacity, that prevented their return. She pointed out that Kazakhstan, a much smaller and less-resourced nation, had been able to bring its citizens home and noted: “There are a lot of countries doing it and doing it well. There isn’t a deficit of examples out there.”
Ironically, the Canadian government now finds itself in a bind of its own making, one best illustrated by an “extremism expert” shared with the International Crisis Group: “The problem is that we’ve expended all this effort promoting [what has become] the Western counter-terrorism paradigm and dehumanizing these people to mobilise against the ISIS threat. Now we have to humanize the population to convince countries that they can and should get them home.”
The Gitmo Lie
One need look no further than the U.S.-run concentration camp at Guantanamo Bay to recognize this conundrum. In the words of the former U.S. War Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Gitmo was supposed to house “high-value” detainees, the “worst of the worst,” even though a declassified 2003 internal memo revealed the Pentagon knew that the prison contained “low-value” detainees who posed no threat to anyone. Of the 780 originally detained without proper charge, 38 remain, 12 of them charged under the widely condemned kangaroo court military commission system that relies on confessions obtained under torture. A 2011 report, Rumsfeld Knew: DoD's 'Worst of the Worst' and Recidivism Claims Refuted by Recently Declassified Memo, says the memo “calls into question the Government’s assertions that the released detainees are dangerous men who have and likely will reengage” in dangerous activities. As a result, hundreds of innocent men have languished for years in one the world’s most notorious torture camps, condemned by a constant stream of sensational media stories about alleged “sleeper cells” and “extremist travelers” intent on destroying “Western” society.
Sloppy media coverage of the NE Syrian prisons and camps has also distorted public perceptions, especially with catch-all descriptions of them as holding grounds for “ISIS fighters”. In fact, when the armed remnants of the ISIS state finally fell in March 2019, tens of thousands of civilians in the area were rounded up along with ISIS fighters. This included humanitarian volunteers, anti-ISIS partisans, and women and men who had been lured by the false propaganda of a paradise built on utopian Muslim values (but who could not escape once they fell under the control of the so-called Caliphate). It also includes thousands of children, many born during the height of the war. These camps and prisons are filled with a volatile mix of pro- and anti-ISIS individuals, and within them the war continues: human rights groups regularly document killings of ISIS opponents.
In 2019, former UK Foreign Secretary David Miliband, now head of the International Rescue Committee, acknowledged the far more complex detainee demographic when he told The Independent: “The only thing we know for sure about them is that they lived under the control of Isis. The IRC knows from our experiences helping people who fled Mosul and Raqqa that it’s incredibly dangerous to escape Isis territory. People either have to risk crossing an active frontline as a battle rages around them or they have to pay an exorbitantly high price to be smuggled long distances.”
Acquiescence to Torture
In order to stop public and government acquiescence to the torture of their fellow citizens in Northeast Syria, Canadians must confront the bedrock racism and monstering that drives Canada’s foreign policies, security service mandates, and political discourse. As with the tragic lie of Guantanamo Bay, many Canadians have convinced themselves that Muslims and racialized “others” are mostly guilty, dangerous, deceptive, disposable and deceitful. There is a lengthy string of cases of Muslims who have been detained overseas and at home, all pilloried as the worst of the worst and dire threats to Canadian security who should never be freed or brought home. And yet when they have been repatriated or walked out of Canadian prisons, the sky has not fallen, because there was nothing to the accusations to begin with. Court cases, judicial inquiries, and the public record point to a despicable record of prejudicial prejudgment by government officials, headline writers, and Islamophobic columnists who have conjured up a frightening, fictional world of Muslim monsters.
Jack Letts is one of the latest of these fictions. There are questions that need to be answered regarding his case (addressed below), but these do not suggest he is a threat to Canadian security. Rather, they point to a typical teenager who made mistakes, embraced a new faith, and perhaps most universally, was upset by the pain and suffering of the Syrian people and was moved to actually do something about it.
The fact that Letts wound up in a politically complex war zone is a quirk of history, and not a reflection of his character. Were this 1982, he likely would have earned a security service file for traveling to Sandinista Nicaragua to pick coffee, help build schools and medical clinics, and raise funds for humanitarian supplies in a country defending itself from a US-funded mercenary army. Were this the 1930s, he may have found himself alongside Ernest Hemingway and George Orwell defending the Spanish people against the terror bombings of Hitler’s Luftwaffe and Franco’s fascists.
Despite the fearmongering, hundreds of young people who went to Syria have gone home with no issue. Even the right wing Home Secretary Sajid Javid conceded to the UK House of Commons in 2019 that 40% of the 900 British citizens who traveled to the region had returned, been investigated, and “assessed to pose no or a low security risk.” Human Rights Watch notes that just over two dozen countries have repatriated some of their citizens, while others remain detained “often with the explicit or implicit consent of their countries of nationality.”
Those inside the camps and prisons have learned, through rare letters passed on by the Red Cross, that they are not welcome back home. Jack Letts wrote to his father in 2019: “After two years here I realize that I’m no longer considered human and have become a new, more despicable creature, with far less rights, in the eyes of the supposedly civilised world. I’ve become a piece of wheat in a hurricane whilst everyone explains that the only problem at the moment is that I didn’t die in Deir ar Zour or Raqqa. You said Canadians don’t give up but the Canadians haven’t even lifted a finger. There’s Canadian women and children in Syria and Canada doesn’t even respond to the requests to take them. What I don’t understand is why no-one told me that the idea of a second chance is just a Hollywood concept.”
In 2017, Letts wrote in a note to his parents: “If the Prime Minister of Canada was saying ‘Let him out’, they would as this lot absolutely worship the West.”
Jack’s parents have not heard from him since.
How Jack Was Monstered
Jack’s parents, Sally and John, recall their son developed while growing up a strong sense of fairness and compassion and hated bullying. He was popular at school and protected vulnerable classmates. He loved to debate, and came by his interest in global politics honestly. John was an environmental activist, and was involved in East Timor and West Papua solidarity movements. Sally worked in international development, and served at Oxfam’s West Africa desk for 8 years.
At the age of 16, Jack converted to Islam. He taught himself Arabic in order to read the Koran in its original language, and was, as Sally recalls, “determined to be the best Muslim he could be.” He initially travelled to Jordan in May 2014 and then on to Kuwait, where he took courses in Arabic and Islamic studies. To his parents’ horror, he called them in September, 2014, to let them know that he was in Syria. A few weeks later he was in Fallujah (Iraq) where he worked in a hospital and a school and improved his language skills.
Between December 2015 and early 2017, Jack remained in regular contact with his parents in the UK. In May 2015, he was injured in an air strike on his home and was sent for medical treatment to Raqqa in Syria, which was the only functioning hospital that could treat his injuries. This is where he first encountered ISIS, and he quickly fell afoul of their rules and teachings. He soon made it very clear to his parents that he wanted to escape ISIS territories because his life was in danger, as he had publicly opposed ISIS’ teachings and had been put on trial and imprisoned by IS several times for his views.
Fearing for their son’s life, his parents asked the UK counter-terrorism police for approval to help him escape what appeared to be certain death. They agreed, and records show, the police told them they could wire him £1,000 to pay a people smuggler to escape ISIS “in order to save their son’s life.” The payment was blocked, and they were instead charged with “funding terrorism” and prosecuted over a period of 3 years at a cost to the UK taxpayer of over £6 million (approximately $10 million in Canadian funds).
In their 2019 trial at the Old Bailey in London, they were eventually found not guilty of the two main charges of “funding terrorism,” as the jury accepted Jack’s life was in danger from ISIS. However, the police had added a third charge to their sheet claiming a payment of £223 sent to a refugee family in Lebanon (which the police had initially discounted as a crime) could also (theoretically) have been used for terrorism. The fact that the refugees on the receiving end were Shia, and so clearly not aligned with ISIS, was ignored.
The trial also showed that in hundreds of messages to his parents over 4 years, Jack never once espoused allegiance to ISIS or any other armed group. In fact, he condemned ISIS for their distortion of Islam and their cruelty. In his summing up, the judge accepted that there was no evidence that this £223 was used to fund terrorism, but guilt under the UK’s Terrorism Act relies on the opinion of the police, not evidence. Hence, Jack’s parents were found guilty under Section 17 of the act, and are both now on the UK terrorism register. This prevents them from maintaining bank accounts, travelling by air, and receiving psychological support for their trauma, as the climate of fear ensures UK therapists share the results of therapy sessions with the police.
Of the several inflammatory (and sometimes unintelligible) things that had appeared on Jack’s Facebook page, his mother, Sally, has said, “I could tell that it appeared his account had been hacked…I later learned that Jack, still a very young man at the age of 18, had foolishly shared his Facebook password and others had used it, something he himself said was a stupid thing to do. Unfortunately, it is difficult to correct the misperceptions generated by blaring headlines.”
Indeed, once someone is monstered, only negative inferences can be drawn from any action, no matter how innocent. A widely shared 2015 photo of a smiling lad at Syria’s Tabqa dam – dressed in a camouflage-style T-shirt and combat-style trousers while pointing one finger skyward – has been treated a proof positive that Jack was an ISIS adherent. In fact, Jack’s father bought these pants for him at a UK sports clothing shop before he left Britain. The finger pointing to the sky is the universal Muslim sign of ‘tawhid’, or oneness of God, which is made on a daily basis by Muslims at prayer (in the same way that the sign of the cross is made by Christians). It also could just be a Jack habit: his mother has a photo of Jack giving the same gesture aged ten on a family holiday, long before he became a Muslim.
A Tabloid Betrayal
It was in January 2016 that Jack became an international monster. A sensationalist Sunday Times piece by a discredited writer of Islamophobic pieces, Richard Kerbaj, had a devastating impact. Much like the New York Times writer Judith Miller, who parroted the Bush administrations lies about non-existent weapons of mass destruction that fuelled support for the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Kerbaj’s sloppy, unverified journalism also ruined lives. It was Kerbaj’s monstering approach that kicked off the Trojan Horse Affair (a fictitious Muslim plot to infiltrate Birmingham schools based on an anonymous letter). As the New York Times described in a podcast on the scandal, “The story soon explodes in the news and kicks off a national panic. By the time it all dies down, the government has launched multiple investigations, beefed up the country’s counterterrorism policy, revamped schools and banned people from education for the rest of their lives.” According to the Times, the whole affair was an "Islamophobic hoax" similar to the historical anti-Semitic hoax The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
Sally recalls that Kerbaj had been introduced to the family by a so-called “deradicalisation” outfit, the Active Change Foundation, which had promised to help get Jack out of Syria. She says that they had an agreement to keep Jack’s identity secret given the risks to his life from ISIS, and to support efforts to help other families in their shoes. But that agreement was violated the morning of January 24, 2016, when “Jihadi Jack first white boy to join ISIS” appeared in the Sunday Times headlines with a half page picture of Jack in his fashionable, British teenager camouflage. Kerbaj’s claim that Jack had told his parents he had joined ISIS was a lie (and John and Sally note that Kerbaj has never released the tape-recorded conversation to support his allegation).
“Thanks to him, the nickname ‘Jihadi Jack’ is now burned into the minds of millions of people around the world,” Sally says. “And despite the lack of any supporting evidence, and as a result of a journalist’s lie, Jack himself is believed by millions to be a monster who chops off heads. Anything John and I said to the contrary – based on our own evidence – was dismissed as the feeble protestations of parents in denial.”
The most damning line, Sally says, and the one which she believes led to their eventual terrorism charges, read: “Letts, a keen footballer and highly regarded student, admitted to his parents that he was with ISIS in Syria in September 2014.” But as Sally says, “Jack never said he was with ISIS; he only ever said he was in IS territory. In our court case, included within the notes to the jury was an explanation of the difference between being in IS territory and being a member of ISIS.”
Jack’s whiteness and conversion to Islam no doubt furthered the anger against him, implying he was a “race traitor”. His tender age was also a trigger for a culture that regularly engages in moral panics about young people. That panic also branded his parents, John recalls, “as incompetent, neglectful, overly-liberal and dim-witted not to have stopped his alleged ‘radicalisation’ (which never occurred) and not to have prevented him from going to Syria.” Reports in the UK press also had a class dimension, giving open season to condemnation of “white, middle class, Oxford” parents who had allegedly abandoned their child and failed to give him “direction” and “meaning’”. Not uncommonly in the media, the facts interfered with a good story. This moral panic about a relatively small group of young people heading overseas also swept Canada, even though Canadian spy agency CSIS was implicated in assisting young girls to cross the border into Syria (including 15-year-old Shamima Begum, who is also still detained in NE Syria).
Later in a 2016 interview with The Independent, Jack Letts said, “I believe we should follow Islam how the first Muslims did.” He denied being a member of ISIS, though added “I’ve never seen Isis kill Muslim kids. I have, however, seen the coalition do so…The Muslims in Syria are burned alive, raped, abused, imprisoned and much more. I also think that some of Muslims I met here are living like walking mountains. Full of honour.” He noted that the Assad regime, along with its Russian military supporters, were responsible for much of the violence, though he would soon be imprisoned himself as he grew repulsed by violence committed by ISIS. “I’ve seen Muslims burned alive as a result of what the US calls 'hellfire missiles',” he said. “Isis has made huge mistakes, I don’t deny that, but the coalition has made far worse mistakes.”
Jack’s first-hand observations are consistent with reports by groups like Airwars.com, which have documented the damage caused by all armed parties to the war in Syria.
Torture by Proxy
It was while recovering in Raqqa from the mysterious airstrike on his Falluja home in 2015 that Jack became aware of ISIS’ true nature. He told the BBC journalist, Daniel Sandford, “I realised how many people Isis had killed, including their former members who had turned against them.” He challenged ISIS members in the streets, leading to a life on the run from ISIS police who eventually jailed him three times. He escaped twice, and was warned that he would be executed if he escaped again. He fled ISIS territory without his parents’ help in 2017, and was picked up by the Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF). At the start they treated him very well – “like a hero,” according to Jack – as they were aware of his anti-ISIS stand (indeed, the internal resistance against ISIS has been under-estimated and ignored by Western media). Within a few weeks, however, coinciding with a visit from a UK government representative, Jack revealed to his parents that things took a sharp turn for the worse, and the monstering escalated.
The tabloid media recycled untruths that Jack had been a front-line fighter, which not only assassinated his reputation but also contributed to the criminalisation of his parents. Jack told his parents that he was told by the Kurds who tortured him that they had a “dossier” made up of tabloid newspaper articles about him.
In June 2019, the BBC published an incendiary piece, “Jack Letts, Islamic State recruit: 'I was enemy of UK’.” What was not explained were the highly problematic circumstances of the interview, one conducted after torture – and with the threat of future torture – along with armed guards out of camera range.
In a witness statement, Clive Stafford-Smith (the renowned civil rights lawyer who has represented over 80 detainees at Guantanamo Bay) says Jack told him during a subsequent prison visit that the BBC interviewer’s questions were an exact match to questions he’d been asked while being tortured – and that the answers they expected were clear. He knew he would be tortured if he didn’t give the BBC the answers his jailers wanted – as the BBC must also have realised, having arranged for an interview with someone who was arbitrarily detained without charge under brutal conditions, without access to a lawyer or family. According to Stafford Smith, Jack told him: “I was lying as I had been forced to lie when I was tortured because I knew what I was expected to say.”
Jack told Stafford Smith that when he was first in Kurdish custody, “there was no real interrogation to begin with. At the time I was only casually questioned. Then later it became serious. ‘You did this, this and this.’ This is when it was clear to me that the British were behind it. It was clear that the British were asking them to ask the questions.’
Jack went on to say “the first part of the interrogation they focused on Britain: Who taught you the radical ideology? Give us the names of people in the UK, including anyone who had anything to do with me becoming a Muslim. They asked about where my parents and I live in the UK. It was clear that they knew things, and that those things had come from the British.”
Stafford Smith noted that “Jack has had no visits by British Intelligence in person. Indeed, no one from the British Authorities has come to see him at all, though there is no reason why they could not (from what I learned from others, they have free access to the detention centres). But Jack felt sure the questions were from the British and they were not relevant to the SDF. Jack did say that he did not hold it against the SDF as they were in a bad position and he felt that they were being coerced by the British”.
It seems clear that Jack Letts has been the victim of torture by proxy, a common war on terror practice that has been used by Canadian intelligence agencies (against Maher Arar, Abdullah Almalki, Muayyed Nureddin, Abousfian Abdelrazik, Ahmad El Maati and others). Questions are delivered to the torture chamber from overseas interrogators who await answers in their comfortable offices in Ottawa and London.
Two separate judicial inquiries found CSIS, the RCMP, and other Canadian agencies complicit in this practice. Given Canada’s membership in the Five Eyes intelligence sharing alliance, this raises a significant question: have the fruits of Jack’s torture been shared by the UK, and are they now being used as a secret rationale under the cover of the much-abused claim of “national security confidentiality” to keep Jack from coming home?
Next: Part 2 Explores the insidious manner in which Canada’s Global Affairs bureaucracy went from an apparent interest in helping Jack to creating an insurmountable barrier designed to keep him in arbitrary detention in Syria.
To sign the petition calling for the repatriation of Jack Letts and all other Canadians detained in Northeast Syria, visit: https://www.change.org/p/i-forgot-what-the-sun-looks-like-free-jack-letts-and-all-canadian-detainees-in-ne-syria
