Megan O’Toole (National Post) – Commissioner John Major has detailed a litany of high-level failures in the Air India disaster, both before Sikh terrorists bombed Flight 182 and in the tragedy’s aftermath. The Post’s Megan O’Toole details some of them:
LAX AIRPORT SECURITY
The behaviour of those who booked the tickets and checked the bags should have sounded alarm bells, the report found, but in accordance with the “customer service mentality” that governed at the time, airline staff were not instructed to watch for signs of harmful intent. An anti-sabotage measure called “passenger-baggage reconciliation,” which matches passengers with their bags to prevent unauthorized luggage from being place on board, was not used -though it could have prevented the tragedy. “Canadian airports were plagued by a lax security culture,” the report found, noting restricted areas were not adequately protected, personnel who screened luggage were not properly trained, and individuals with known associations to Sikh extremist groups had access to highly sensitive areas at the Vancouver International Airport. “Air India ought to have known that the security measures it was using were inadequate to prevent a bomb being placed on its aircraft,” the report noted.
POOR INFORMATION SHARING
The report concluded government agencies possessed significant pieces of information that, taken together, could have demonstrated the extreme risk to Flight 182. Yet the process of sharing information between government agencies, including CSIS and the RCMP, was “wholly deficient,” the report found. A CSIS surveillance team that watched Sikh extremists conduct a test explosion in Duncan, B.C., in June 1985, failed to include that information in a threat assessment provided to the RCMP and Transport Canada. The RCMP, in turn, “failed to identify, report and share threat information,” including a Telex message warning of the possibility of bombing with time-delayed devices that same month. “Excessive secrecy in information sharing prevented any one agency from obtaining all necessary information to assess the threat,” the report found.
ACCOUNTABILITY VOID
While Foreign Affairs officials made initial efforts to provide assistance to the affected families, the report noted, “immediately after the bombing, the government issued public statements denying any mistakes.” Initial inquiries in Ireland and India were instructed to avoid acknowledging the crash was triggered by a bomb. Families were not kept informed of the investigation by the government, often learning about new developments through the media, until the RCMP began to liaise with families directly after 1995. CSIS did not. Efforts were also made to limits spending on families’ concerns. “The civil suit they launched was settled early on by hard bargaining, before disclosure was made of much of the information now learned in this inquiry,” the report stated.
FAILURE ON LEADS AND SOURCES
The RCMP often discounted intelligence leads prematurely, the report found, if those leads failed to conform to the force’s primary theory of the case. One suspect, for example, was ruled out because observations of his hair two years after the bombing did not match an imprecise composite sketch of the suspect who had checked the luggage. The RCMP prematurely dismissed source information based on preliminary assessments of credibility, the report found. And by failing to appreciate the continuing threat of Sikh extremism or sources’ fear of co-operating with police, “the RCMP often alienated sources, including sources who had previously been willing to speak to CSIS, because of the manner in which it treated them.” The RCMP also failed to protect witnesses, the report found, including Tara Singh Hayer, whose name appeared on a “hit list” and who was ultimately murdered.
INADEQUATE PROTECTIVE MEASURES
Effective protective measures were not put in place to respond to the threat facing Flight 182, the report found, citing a general misunderstanding of the concept of a “specific threat.” While called-in bomb threats were deemed “specific” and triggered elaborate airport emergency protocol, such measures did not follow from intelligence received through other channels. “Today, the concept of specific threat has become an excuse to explain why more was not done to prevent the bombing on June 22, 1985,” the report stated. In addition, Transport Canada and the RCMP relied on anti-hijacking security measures, which failed to address the threat of bombing.
EVIDENCE MISHANDLING
CSIS frequently failed to disclose information relevant to the RCMP’s criminal investigation in a timely fashion, or when it did, critical details were missing. “CSIS was mesmerized by the mantra that ‘CSIS doesn’t collect evidence,’ and used it to justify the destruction of raw material and information,” the report stated. CSIS erased tapes of coded conversations that may have related to the bomb plot and destroyed notes from sources related to the Air India disaster, compromising the prosecution. On the RCMP side, police failed to make either a verbal or a written request to preserve the tapes until months into the investigation, when material was already removed. It cannot be determined what information was lost due to the tape erasures.
GOVERNMENT INTERFERENCE
At times, the RCMP inappropriately invoked concerns about its ongoing probe to limit information provided to families or external reviewers. “Government agencies consistently opposed external review and attempted, at times successfully, to avoid or delay such reviews,” the report found. During a review in the early 1990s, agencies coordinated their responses to “present a picture of greater cooperation than in fact existed.” When Judge Major’s inquiry was launched, the government “over-redacted” the documents initially provided for public release. The RCMP inappropriately relied on the fact of their ongoing probe to withhold key information, the report found, by failing to advise the commission that an individual with potentially relevant information had requested to speak.
PROBLEMS PERSIST
Many of the same security deficiencies leading to the Air India disaster persist today, the report found, citing a tendency to focus on “fighting the last war” rather than taking proactive measures. A holistic approach with “multiple, mutually reinforcing layers” of security is needed, the report stated. “There is no coordinated, system-wide risk management strategy among stakeholders in Canadian aviation security, which may allow significant risks in civil aviation to go unnoticed,” it said. The report also pointed to a lack of institutionalized co-ordination and direction in national security measures, with Canadian agencies operating in a culture of information management designed to protect their individual institutional interests. In addition, Canada’s current anti-terrorist financing model is poorly suited to capture terrorist financing transactions, the commission found.
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