RCMP Watch

Kim Bolan (Vancouver Sun) - The overwhelming despair of Air India victims’ families was compounded by a sense that Canada treated them like second-class citizens, inquiry commissioner John Major said in an interim report released Tuesday.”A question that lingers among the families and other Canadians is: ‘If Air India Flight 182 had been an Air [...]

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Jim Brown, Ottawa (Canadian Press) - The head of the RCMP says mandatory disclosure of detailed police files to defence lawyers is complicating terrorist and other criminal prosecutions.
Commissioner William Elliott told the Air India inquiry Thursday it’s increasingly difficult for police to meet the requirements imposed by the country’s courts to divulge all the background [...]

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Ottawa (Canadian Press) - Canadians should be wary of giving police too free a rein in the name of fighting terrorism, says the former head of the country’s spy agency.
Reid Morden told the Air India inquiry today that he’s against any proposal to lower the legal threshold for police to obtain wiretaps or conduct searches [...]

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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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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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