RCMP Watch

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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Security for the 2010 Olympic Games could be compromised because the cost to police the event has been underestimated, according to RCMP documents obtained by CBC News.
The RCMP, which is co-ordinating the national effort to police the Winter Olympics in Vancouver, is acknowledging for the first time that it will cost more than the original [...]

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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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Globe and Mail
Inquest into the death of Ian Bush
• Houston, B.C., RCMP Constable Paul Koester shot Mr. Bush in the back of the head on Oct. 29, 2005, after he had been in police custody for just over 20 minutes. Mr. Bush had been arrested for obstruction.
Pension fund scandal
• Government-appointed investigator David Brown concluded that [...]

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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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Jim Brown, Canadian press
The 1985 Air India bombing represented an intelligence failure of massive proportions and could have been averted by better investigative work, says the man who was second-in-command at the time for the RCMP.
But Henry Jensen, the former deputy commissioner of operations for the Mounties, shouldered little of the blame in testimony Monday [...]

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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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