RCMP Watch

Jack Aubry, CanWest News Service
The RCMP ignored strong warnings in an internal audit that examined the risks of working with the U.S. Coast Guard on joint patrols of waterways shared by Canada and the United States in the period leading up to Detroit’s 2006 Super Bowl game, CanWest News Service has learned.
The audit report, obtained [...]

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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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Colin Freeze, Globe and Mail
The RCMP is assuring Parliament that it has officially entered a post-Arar world.Senators asked a top Mountie this week whether dubious intelligence from Canada could ever again be used by the United States to deport a suspect to a third country to face torture.
It was precisely this scenario, in 2002, that [...]

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Jeff Sallot, Globe and Mail
The Air India bombing, the worst peacetime intelligence failure in Canadian history, might have been averted if police and intelligence agencies were sharing more of their secrets, a former senior Mountie believes.
Henry Jensen, who was the RCMP deputy commissioner in charge of criminal investigations, told the Air India inquiry yesterday that [...]

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Canadian PressThe head of the Air India inquiry is suggesting legislative reforms may be needed to promote better co-operation between Canada’s national police force and its civilian intelligence agency.
Former Supreme Court justice John Major pointed to the 1984 law that created the Canadian Security Intelligence Service as one area Parliament could look at, with a [...]

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The Hamilton Spectator
The following article is reprinted from The Economist, a British magazine of comment and news.
It was the worst act of aerial terrorism before the World Trade Center attacks in 2001. On June 23, 1985, an Air India flight from Toronto was blown up by Sikh extremists off southern Ireland, killing all 329 people [...]

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Kim Bolan, CanWest News Service
A former RCMP inspector told the Air India inquiry Monday he was never approached by Ontario Lt.-Gov. James Bartleman about a specific threat against Flight 182 in the days before it was blown out of the sky.
Lloyd Hickman was the ranking RCMP officer at a June 18, 1985 meeting to discuss [...]

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If nothing else, the testimony of the last two weeks at the Air India inquiry proves one thing - there’s always something new to learn, even after 22 years.
But some critics of the Canadian police and intelligence establishments are starting to wonder if those agencies will ever draw the appropriate lessons from their past mistakes, [...]

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A retired Quebec policeman testified yesterday he could have prevented the Air India disaster but the doomed plane was cleared to leave Canada before his bomb-sniffing dog could search it.
“I’ve always wondered why, if I was called to search an airplane and some luggage . . . why did they let the airplane go before [...]

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