RCMP Watch

Andrew Mayeda (Ottawa Citizen)
The federal government should not be liable for the detention and torture of Maher Arar because it was not clear that Canadian officials caused or could have foreseen his ordeal, the government argued only weeks before agreeing to pay Mr. Arar and his family $11.5 million in compensation.
The compensation package, which was [...]

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Bruce Fein, Slate
To borrow from Mark Twain, there are three types of lies: lies, damned lies, and national security claims.
Take the case of suspected terrorist Maher Arar, a Syrian-born Canadian citizen detained by the United States in 2002 while changing planes at Kennedy International Airport. Last week, a Canadian court ordered the release of previously [...]

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CTV.ca News Staff
The RCMP is brushing aside suggestions it was wrong to rely on questionable intelligence obtained from abroad to support search and wiretap warrant applications in the case of Maher Arar and another Canadian of Arab origin held in Syria.
A Sept. 2006 report by Justice Dennis O’Connor said the RCMP wrongly labelled Arar a [...]

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Colin Freeze and Campbell Clark
The civilian appointed to lead Canada’s national police into a new era of accountability revealed yesterday he was among the secret group of bureaucrats who had met to censor findings of the Maher Arar report.”I was certainly involved in the process leading to that decision, but that decision was a decision [...]

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Toronto Star Editorial
When Justice Dennis O’Connor released his massive report into the role Canadian officials played in Maher Arar’s arrest in the United States as an Al Qaeda terror suspect and his removal to Syria to be tortured, the Canadian government blacked out significant sections of the report. Ottawa argued publication would endanger national defence, [...]

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Colin Freeze, Globe and Mail
Misleading court testimony given by unnamed RCMP officers was kept secret on the grounds of national security, it emerged yesterday.Mr. Justice Dennis O’Connor found the Mounties had failed to properly disclose the full context of their case against a terrorist suspect when they attempted to obtain a telephone warrant that would [...]

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The Gazette
So the CIA had its dirty callused fingers all over the kidnapping of a Canadian citizen and his furtive export to Syria in October of 2002. So the “information” that led to this nightmare for Maher Arar was largely based on a “confession” elicited by torture in Syria. So the Royal Canadian Mounted Police [...]

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Canadian intelligence officials anticipated that the United States would ship Maher Arar, a Syrian-born Canadian who was detained in New York in 2002 on suspicion of terrorism, to a third country to be tortured, declassified information released on Thursday shows.
Mr. Arar was sent by American intelligence officials in October 2002 to Syria, where he was [...]

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Colin Freeze, Globe and Mail
Key questions surrounding the Maher Arar scandal could finally be answered Wednesday after a judge ordered the Attorney-General to stop blocking publication of material that the federal government’s lawyers have for years insisted must be kept secret for reasons of national security.About 1,500 words of the O’Connor commission of inquiry [...]

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CTV.ca
A Federal Court judge has ordered the government to release portions of the Maher Arar report that were censored to the public.
Justice Simon Noel ruled Tuesday that he will uncensor some — but not all — of the 1,500 words that had been blacked out, The Globe and Mail reports.
The passages are to be revealed [...]

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