REPORT BACK FROM CSI: OTTAWA, ENDING CANADIAN INVOLVEMENT IN TORTURE

(apologies for the belated nature of this report; the issues, however, remain urgent, so see at the bottom what you can do to help)


REPORT BACK FROM CSI: OTTAWA, ENDING CANADIAN INVOLVEMENT IN TORTURE

In the early morning hours of October 26, an Ottawa communiqué was produced by the RCMP’s home-grown Crisis Management Cell (Al Qaeda is not the only disreputable and shady organization that organizes itself with cell structures). The communiqué warned of an impending evolving situation at the Prime Minister’s Office and called on Special Operations as well as Ottawa Police to attend to the scene.

The cause of the crisis, apparently, had to do with “anti-torture” protesters who were set to gather that morning at 9:30 am. While the special bulletin did not explain the whys and wherefores, it would have been obvious to anyone who had been in the city for the previous three days, during which copious amounts of crime scene tape had appeared, accompanied by evidence flags and hooded “detainees,” at a variety of Canadian government agencies and private corporations complicit in torture.

Members of the Crisis Management Cell were also concerned, no doubt, with the banner headline of that morning’s Ottawa Citizen, which revealed that just-released internal RCMP documents indicated that the Mounties knew that the alleged case against Ottawa engineer Abdullah Almalki was completely unfounded. Yet the Mounties nonetheless made up dangerously inflammatory allegations about him that resulted in 22 months of torture in a Syrian dungeon. No one in the institution has been held to account. (for more on those memos see http://rabble.ca/columnists/2011/11/taking-liberties-three-years-after-finding-canadian-complicity-torture-silence-li )

Indeed, October marked three years since the release of a report based on the highly secretive and biased Iacobucci Inquiry, which, despite its major structural faults (the three men at the inquiry’s focus were not allowed to attend the completely secret process), nonetheless found that Canada was complicit in the men’s torture. Despite a subsequent Parliamentary committee’s recommendations, and a vote by the majority of the House of Commons calling for an apology, compensation, and accountability, Prime Minister Harper, as well as the complicit institutions and individuals, have failed to comply with that vote and simply do the right thing.

Hence, public pressure to jump-start a process of accountability to mark that anniversary sprang into action, and for three days, members of Crime Scene Investigation: Ottawa (CSI Ottawa), a fully realized subsidiary of Stop Canadian Involvement in Torture, had been showing up at dozens of locations, reading aloud damning documents from federal inquiries, court decisions, and independent research that focused both on the cases of three Canadians targeted for torture – Abdullah Almalki, Ahmad El Maati, and Muayyed Nereddin – as well as the larger pattern of complicity in torture that has ruined the lives of countless Canadian citizens, permanent residents, and refugees.

DAY ONE: CHURCH RENTS TO RCMP
And so individuals dressed in orange jumpsuits and black hoods, accompanied by others in CSI jackets and one booming sound system, set out to mark the city’s numerous shameful connections to torture. The first day began during the bitterly cold and damp morning rush hour on Monday, October 24 in the city’s east end where, after the group members parked their vehicles in the massive St. Laurent shopping centre parking lot, they headed out on the torture trail leading to the RCMP.

Canada’s Secret Trial Cases Built on Torture

(this story originally appeared at rabble.ca)

By Matthew Behrens

Four years after the Supreme Court of Canada unanimously found them unconstitutional, secret hearing “security certificates” are still in use, with a number of Muslim men fighting unseen allegations while under threat of deportation to torture.

Security certificates have long been used by Canada’s scandal-plagued spy agency CSIS (the Canadian Security Intelligence Service) to tar refugees and permanent residents as national security threats without having to explain their alleged case. Those detained under the process are never charged, and subjected to lower standards than those applying to any citizen facing similar accusations. Indeed, the law governing the procedure allows for the introduction of any piece of information “even if it is inadmissible in a court of law.”

For the past decade, five Muslim men – dubbed the Secret Trial Five – have endured this Kafkaesque process both behind bars and under humiliating house arrest. Last month, the release of two formerly classified documents indicates that the national security secrecy claims that form the bedrock of these cases have in fact served as a cover for illegal and unethical acts by CSIS.

Indeed, the documents reveal the secret trial regime relies almost entirely on information gleaned from torture. A 2008 letter written by Jim Judd, then head of CSIS, bemoans legislative changes then being proposed that, in raising the bar on the admissibility of information possibly extracted under torture, “could render unsustainable the current security certificate proceedings.”

The CSIS memo does not comment on the ethics or legality of using information gleaned from torture; rather, it speaks to whether or not that information can somehow be corroborated. Judd claims that CSIS must maintain relations with countries that have poor human rights records as part of its so-called counter-terrorism efforts, and he shudders that with a proposed amendment on torture, “a Court could require CSIS to certify that all intelligence gathered in support of Certificates was done without resort to torture. This would almost certainly result in the Security Certificates regime falling into disuse as a consequence of its unworkability.”

Judd adds that a Court could render inadmissible “any and all information provided by agencies in countries whose human rights records are in question – of which there are many.” This scenario could arise, the memo continues, because “much” of the information put forward by CSIS in these cases “corroborates, or is corroborated, by [words blacked out, but clearly implying derived from torture], which under this interpretation of the amendment may no longer be admissible.”

RCMP's Own Docs Reveal Case Against Almalki Racist, Unfounded

Three Years After Finding of Canadian Complicity in Torture, Silence Lingers in Ottawa.

By Matthew Behrens

(this story originally appeared at rabble.ca)

Three years after a secretive federal inquiry found that numerous agencies of the Canadian government were complicit in his torture, Ottawa’s Abdullah Almalki held a press conference on Parliament Hill October 25, where he released shocking documents to prove the alleged case against him was completely unfounded and based on racism.

Almalki, who was detained, interrogated, and tortured for 22 months in a Syrian dungeon, has sought answers to many questions since his return to Canada. Why was he targeted? How could agencies of his own government fabricate a case against him and then send questions to his Syrian torturers? He had hoped to participate in the Iacobucci Inquiry struck in 2007 to investigate both his case and those of Ahmad El Maati and Muayyed Nureddin, also tortured with Canadian complicity, but all three were completely shut out of the process, along with their lawyers, the public, and the media.

The Iacobucci report, released in October 2008, found, among other conclusions, that “several of the Canadian officials involved in the decision to send questions for Mr. Almalki were aware that doing so created a serious risk that Mr. Almalki would be tortured.” It also found “Some of the RCMP members involved in the decision to send questions for Mr. Almalki displayed a dismissive attitude towards the issue of human rights and the possibility of torture.”

The report cleared the three men of the serious allegations that had been created about them by CSIS and the RCMP, noting that in the case of Mr. Almalki, a description of him as an “imminent threat” to national security was not only “inflammatory, inaccurate, and lacking investigative foundation,” it was in fact meant to describe someone else.

But the damning findings of the Iacobucci inquiry did not provide a sufficient enough explanation both for what happened and why it occurred, and certainly failed to lay proper blame and seek accountability.

Since that time, Almalki has sifted through many pages of documents he received under freedom of access to information, and was shocked to discover what he found.

“Ten years ago, I never thought that one day I would be standing and speaking publicly about racism,” Almalki says. “I think I had the grace of not experiencing racism in my life before.”

The occasion for his comments was the October 25 release of RCMP internal documents from 2001. About three weeks after the attacks of September 11, 2001, the RCMP sent a dangerous, inflammatory memo to Syria and the intelligence agencies of numerous other countries suggesting Almalki was an “imminent threat” to the public safety and security of Canada. Yet that same day, the RCMP’s own assessment showed he was not a threat at all. “O Div. task force are presently finding it difficult to establish anything on him other than the fact that he is an arab running around,” the document reads.

“It is not only heartbreaking and extremely disappointing to see that the biggest police force in Canada is racist,” Almalki says. “It is rather disgusting and outrageous when you see that this would lead to making up and fabricating accusations about a person that resulted in torture and illegal detention.

“Racism blinds people, impairs their judgment, shrinks their cognitive abilities, and diminishes moral values. Racism stinks and stings.”

Taking Liberties: The Ever-Changing Imperatives of "National Security"

(This is the first in a series of columns at rabble.ca on “national security” and civil liberties in Canada and abroad that seeks to focus on specific cases as well as the overall framework in which serious human rights abuses have been justified in the name of security.)

By Matthew Behrens

Just after Thanksgiving, Montreal’s Westin Hotel played host to a gathering of high-powered Federal Court judges, NGO heads, lawyers, academics, and members of Canada’s torture-complicit spy service, CSIS. Coming together under the predictably dry title “Terrorism, Law and Democracy: 10 years after 9/11,” the conference sought to determine “whether Canadian law has successfully preserved fundamental rights and values of substantive and procedural justice while at the same time contributing to anti-terrorism.”

This collegial-sounding gathering – entrance to which was restricted to those who could shell out the $895 entrance fee – appears to have been one of those periodic gabfests where elite representatives determine the responsible manner in which the rest of us will perceive terms like “terrorism” and “national security”. Importantly, attendees were safely insulated from the most compelling voices of the past ten years: those who have been victimized by numerous conference participants. The latter included judges who have presided over secret hearings, spies whose organization falsely labels individuals security threats, and academics who produce papers defending arbitrary detention.

Indeed, Canadians Abdullah Almalki, Ahmad El Maati, and Muayyed Nureddin, who three years ago this month were found by a secretive federal inquiry to have been tortured with the complicity of Canadian government agencies, including CSIS, were not on any of the panels. Nor were Abousfian Abdelrazik and Omar Khadr, both tortured with CSIS complicity. Benamar Benatta, an Algerian refugee rendered to torture by Canadian hands on September 12, 2001, wasn’t there to talk about how his Charter rights had been violated either, nor were Adil Charkaoui and Hassan Almrei, whose bogus secret trial security certificates were finally quashed after a decade-long struggle. Mohammad Mahjoub, Mahmoud Jaballah, and Mohamed Harkat, who are still facing deportation to torture without being able to see the secret “case” against them, were similarly absent.

Each of those individuals was more than capable of delivering an eloquent assessment of the conference theme – indeed, the names and stories of those who have suffered a fundamental denial of rights at the hands of Canadian authorities in the past decade could fill volumes. But conference organizers instead brought in CSIS Assistant Director of Intelligence Raymond Boisvert, and former CSIS Director Jim Judd (who in one Wikileaks-released document laments Canadians’ “paroxysms of moral outrage” over the human rights abuses committed by his organization).

It must have been an odd sight to witness those CSIS veterans sharing a polite panel discussion with critics of human rights abuses such as of Amnesty International Canada’s Alex Neve, and the Canadian Civil Liberties Association’s Nathalie des Rosiers. One wonders if either of them directly challenged the CSIS men, perhaps asking why there has been no apology, no compensation, and no systemic changes in CSIS to prevent the kind of torture suffered not only by the abovementioned men, but by numerous others. Equally important, did conference organizers and participants consider the manner in which the scandal-plagued CSIS is accorded a significant degree of legitimization and acceptance by having its heavyweights appearing at such a gathering? Or that those who have been targeted, such as Maher Arar or Adil Charkoui, suffer an equal degree of de-legitimization by not inviting them onto the agenda?

As with any important political issue, who sits at the table of such conferences generally determines the scope of the discussion. In this instance, the absence of key voices raises significant issues about how the never-defined term “national security” is framed, filtered, and ultimately understood in this country. Such a closed, circular world logically produces a Canadian military that names First Nations advocates threats to national security and explains why the Canadian financial intelligence unit FINTRAC was found recently to have tarred environmentalists and animal rights activists as terrorists in their online tutorials.

In a similar vein, it will come as no surprise to rabble readers that most mainstream media outlets buy into such narrow narratives. Most reporters assigned to the national security beat are not physically embedded within the RCMP and CSIS in the way those covering the occupation of Afghanistan seem to become stenographers for the Canadian military. But they tend to write as if they were, buying the assumptions created and sustained by those who benefit most from them while generally ignoring the fact that these agencies have a historical profile that reads “pathological liar”.

Suncor/PetroCanada Must Stop Fueling Syrian Repression

"Some of the dead, who include children, were also mutilated either before or after death in particularly grotesque ways apparently intended to strike terror into the families to whom their corpses were returned." – Amnesty International, August 30, 2011

Although the Canadian government has instituted sanctions against the Syrian regime, the oil and gas sector, which earns the regime about $3 billion per year, remains untouched by Canadian sanctions.

Take Action, Contact both Suncor/PetroCanada executives and your MPs and demand that Suncor/PetroCanada leave Syria immediately

BACKGROUND
The atrocities no longer garner media attention, but over 3,000 Syrian people have been murdered by the Assad regime since peaceful demonstrations began earlier this year. Over 12,000 have been imprisoned, with untold numbers tortured to death (including children). Although Canadian oil giant Suncor/PetroCanada left Libya soon after the crackdown on protests there, the oil giant has refused to leave Syria, even though its operations financially support the Syrian regime. According to Human Rights Watch, "Under Syrian law the government is the major shareholder in the oil and gas sector through its ownership of the Syrian National Gas and Syrian National Oil companies [now replaced by the General Petroleum Corporation (GPC)]. These two companies have a 50 percent share in every oil and gas project in Syria."

In March 2010, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) estimated that the Syrian government earns around €2.1 billion (about CND$3 billion) from oil and gas per year.

Given that 50% of all profits from oil and gas operations in Syria are shared with the Syrian regime, Suncor/PetroCanada's continued presence there is a major vote of confidence in brutality, torture, and mass murder.

Amnesty International reported earlier this month that "The sharp rise in the number of reported deaths in custody has been one of the most shocking features of the government’s bloody crackdown on the protests. No less than 88 such deaths have been reported to Amnesty International as occurring during the period from 1 April and 15 August 2011, a figure for four and a half months which is already many times higher than the yearly average over recent years. In at least 52 of these cases, there is evidence that torture caused or contributed to the deaths, a concern exacerbated by reports of widespread torture in detention centres in recent months. Some of the dead, who include children, were also mutilated either before or after death in particularly grotesque ways apparently intended to strike terror into the families to whom their corpses were returned."

Asked about the role that Suncor is playing in the brutal repression in Syria, Suncor/PetroCanada CEO Richard L. George told The Current (CBC Radio) on August 19th, "We're actually not connected to the Assad regime in any way. ... We operate with a partner in Syria, the General Petroleum Corporation, which is a state corporation." (www.cbc.ca/news/world/story/2011/08/19/suncor-syria.html)

But being partners with the state-owned General Petroleum Corporation (GPC) does tie Suncor/PetroCanada to the regime. The state corporation reports directly to the Syrian Minister of Petroleum and Mineral Resources, Sufian Allaw. In any case, there is no effective distance between state, regime and government in Syria. Suncor/PetroCanada works in alliance with the Syrian regime.

CSI Ottawa: Ending Canadian Involvement in Torture

CSI Ottawa: Ending Canadian Involvement in Torture
October 24-26, 2011

Join us for three days of public witness, vigils, speakouts, and walks throughout Ottawa as we shine a spotlight on Canadian institutions, public and private, that are complicit in the torture of human beings. Details of getting involved are at the bottom of this email.


WHY A CSI-STYLE FORENSIC INVESTIGATION OF TORTURE IN OTTAWA?
Quite simply, because the Government of Canada condones torture, and there are crime scenes throughout the city where evidence of this complicity has been found by courts, judicial inquiries, and other venues. Examples of such institutions include the RCMP, CSIS, the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, the Dept. of Justice, and the War Department. Secrecy has repeatedly been invoked to prevent further evidence of such complicity from entering the public sphere, and those who have made criminal decisions leading to torture have not been charged and held to account.

Clearly, yellow crime scene tape needs to go up all over the city.


WHY NOW?
October 21 will mark three years since a secretive federal inquiry found the government of Canada complicit in the torture of Canadians Abdullah Almalki, Ahmad El Maati and Muayyed Nureddin. Yet the government refuses to accept the findings of its own inquiry, an inquiry in which only its side of the complicity in torture was heard, an inquiry in which none of those who were tortured, nor their lawyers, nor the public, nor the media were allowed to attend. And even with the cards stacked so much in favour of the government, the government was found to be complicit. Now that these three men seek an apology, compensation, and accountability, the government questions the fact that they have been tortured.

October will also mark 28 months since a report from the Standing Committee on Public Safety and National Security of the House of Commons called for an immediate apology for all thee men, along with compensation "for the suffering they endured and the difficulties they encountered." The committee released a report that also called on the federal government to "do everything necessary to correct misinformation that may exist in records administered by national security agencies in Canada or abroad with respect to" the three men and their family members.
(full report: http://www2.parl.gc.ca/HousePublications/Publication.aspx?DocId=4004074&Language=E&Mode=1&Parl=40&Ses=2 )

CLEAR DIRECTION NEEDED ON TORTURE
Importantly, the Committee called on "the Government of Canada [to] issue a clear ministerial directive against torture and the use of information obtained from torture for all departments and agencies responsible for national security. The ministerial directive must clearly state that the exchange of information with countries is prohibited when there is a credible risk that it could lead, or contribute, to the use of torture."

On December 3, 2009, that report and its recommendations were endorsed by the majority of the House of Commons. The Harper government refused to act on the will of the majority of the House of Commons.

The rationale behind CSI Ottawa: Ending Canadian Involvement in Torture is to place renewed focus on federal institutions in Ottawa that are complicit in the torture of Canadian citizens, refugees, and immigrants, as well as citizens of countries occupied by Canadian forces. While Canada’s broader complicity in torture will provide an educational backdrop for the week’s events, the specific demands will be:

the federal government's acknowledgement of and implementation of the Standing Committee’s recommendations;
that the Harper government act immediately on the December, 2009 majority vote of the House of Commons endorsing that report;
the full release of all documents related to these cases to the men and their lawyers;
acts of accountability to ensure such actions never again occur.

Support the Return to Canada of Two Canadian Citizen Children and their Libyan Refugee Parents and Siblings Who Were Deported in 2008 and Whose Father

The Benhmuda family fled to Canada from Libya in July 2000 to seek safety from the Gaddafi regime. They built a life here, worked hard and went to school and contributed to the community. Two more children were born to the family, Omar and Adam. However, after 8 years here they were ordered to return and, despite the risk of persecution and torture under the Gaddafi regime, were sent back to Libya in 2008. The three years that have followed have been an intensely difficult journey of jail and torture for the father, as well as hellish living conditions in Tripoli and in a Maltese refugee camp for the whole family.

In February, 2011, The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNCHR) produced a detailed report that called on Canada to resettle the Benhmuda family in the country they call their own: Canada. UNHCR said they are at risk in Libya and do not have adequate security and integration prospects in Malta.

Since that time, no action has been taken by the Canadian government to bring the Benhmuda family home.

The Benhmuda family need your support to come home to Canada. More detailed information on their case is below, including a link to an interview with the family on CBC’s The Current, along with suggestions on what you can do to help, including letter writing, financial support, and more.

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“If we receive an application from that family I can assure the House that it will be given every humanitarian consideration, and indeed dealt with on an accelerated basis." Immigration Minister Jason Kenney, June 23, 2011, House of Commons, in response to a question about whether he will take immediate steps to resettle the Benhmuda family in Canada.

Minister Kenney needs to hear from the voices of people across the country who will encourage him to do the right thing and return this family to Canada.

We are calling on the Canadian government to immediately bring the family to Canada, where they have well-developed roots, and so the children can resume their schooling without further disruption to their already traumatized lives.