The road to Damascus
Our own security forces sold out these men. It could happen again.
Kerry Pither
Will anyone be held accountable for Canada's now well-documented pattern of systemic complicity in torture? More than four months have passed since the Iacobucci Inquiry's public report confirmed that Canadian agencies were complicit in the overseas torture of three Canadians: Ahmad El Maati, Abdullah Almalki, and Muayyed Nureddin. That report came two years after the Arar Inquiry determined that the actions of many of the same Canadian officials "very likely" contributed to Maher Arar's detention and torture. Has anyone been held accountable for what happened to these men? Are there checks and balances in place now to prevent these kinds of atrocities? Could what happened to them happen again?
No. No. And yes, unfortunately.
The Arar Inquiry cleared Maher Arar's name, confirmed he was tortured, and determined that the U.S. "very likely" relied on information provided by Canada when it decided to send him to be tortured in Syria. The findings by the Iacobucci Inquiry were much the same in the El Maati, Almalki, and Nureddin cases.
To begin with, former Supreme Court Justice Frank Iacobucci determined that, like Arar, El Maati, Almalki and Nureddin were tortured (a fact the Canadian government tried to cast doubt on, as it did with Arar).
El Maati was detained by Syrian military intelligence officers at the Damascus airport en route to his own wedding and taken to a dark underground three-by-six-foot cell. He was tortured until he "confessed" to a plot to launch a suicide attack within Canada; the Iacobucci Inquiry found that CSIS agents had supplied questions to his Syrian interrogators and that his confession was used in Canadian courts to justify search warrants. In all, El Maati spent more than 26 months in Syrian and Egyptian jails — at CSIS's request, Iacobucci found — before his release in January 2004.
Almalki received similar treatment: he was detained at the Damascus airport, tortured at a Syrian facility, interrogated with CSIS-supplied questions, and freed after nearly two years. Nureddin was taken in on his way back to Canada after visiting family in northern Iraq. He was detained by Syrian authorities at the Iraq-Syria border, received the same treatment, and was asked the same questions, but was released after a comparatively short — but no less brutal — 33 days.
All of these men had been under investigation by Canadian agencies before they were detained and tortured overseas. Their travel and associations appear to have sparked investigators' interest. Those investigators anonymously leaked allegations against the men to media, but never produced any evidence publicly. It now appears we know why.
Justice Iacobucci found that the RCMP was "deficient" when it described El Maati as an "imminent threat" in communications with foreign agencies — they hadn't bothered to ensure the claim was accurate. He found that CSIS had failed to clarify that they were sharing suspicions, not assertions of fact, when they labelled El Maati an associate of an "Osama Bin Laden aide."
The RCMP told foreign agencies that Almalki posed an "imminent threat" too, a description Justice Iacobucci says was "inflammatory, inaccurate, and lacking investigative foundation." When the RCMP used information from another source to describe Almalki as "linked through association to al Qaeda," it didn't mention that the description they used actually referred to someone else. In Nureddin's case, CSIS shared information with "several foreign agencies" describing him as a human courier for Ansar al Islam in northern Iraq, without first ensuring the allegation was either accurate or reliable.
El Maati, Almalki, and Nureddin and their families deserve a public apology from the Canadian government for its role in their horrific ordeals, as Arar received. Their lives and careers have been destroyed, and they, like Arar, deserve to be fairly compensated. But those aren't the only reasons these men opened their lives to public scrutiny and demanded answers. El Maati, Almalki, and Nureddin went public because they wanted to ensure that what happened to them wouldn't happen again. But to date, not a single Canadian official has faced consequences for their role in the unspeakable horrors that befell any of these men. And, remarkably, the Canadian government continues to block the men's efforts to sue Syrian and Egyptian officials for their part.
Nothing has changed when it comes to the lack of effective civilian oversight for national security investigations either. We need an oversight mechanism that is empowered to keep tabs on the multiple agencies engaged in these investigations and to follow their work overseas. The team at the Arar Inquiry put a lot of work into researching and recommending just such an oversight mechanism. To date, their recommendations have been all but ignored.
For years, Canadian officials have orchestrated an elaborate cover-up of what went wrong in these cases. First, attempting to divert attention by smearing the men's reputations through anonymous leaks to the media — often using information we now know was obtained under torture. Then, by working to block the men's release and return to Canada, fighting calls for public inquiries, and, once they lost that fight, by ensuring that as much as possible, those inquiries were held in secret.
But their secrecy has, for the most part, backfi red in the face of the courageous decisions by these men to stand up publicly and demand answers, and thanks to them, Canadians have access to at least some of the facts. It's now up to all of us to stand with these men as they work for apologies and compensation, and to ensure the system — our system — is fixed.
