Jeff Sallot, Globe and Mail
Former solicitor-general Wayne Easter says the Mounties never admitted to him they had fed the U.S. inaccurate intelligence reports about the Maher Arar security case.
In significant ways, Mr. Easter’s testimony before a House committee Tuesday differs with the version of events provided by RCMP Commissioner Giuliano Zaccardelli last month.
“I was not so informed,” Mr. Easter said. “I will state once again, I was not so informed.”
The public safety committee is going to recall Commissioner Zaccardelli. On Sept. 28, the top Mountie testified that the RCMP informed Mr. Easter that misleading intelligence had been given to the U.S.
In 2002, RCMP anti-terrorist investigators gave American counterparts incorrect and inflammatory intelligence reports describing Mr. Arar, a Canadian citizen, as an Islamic extremist with ties to al-Qaeda, a judicial commission of inquiry. Justice Dennis O’Connor, the judicial commissioner, also says American authorities very likely relied on this damaging misinformation in deciding to deport Mr. Arar to Syria, where he was tortured.
Mr. Easter told the public safety committee that he only learned about the error the police made from following the proceedings of the O’Connor inquiry after he left Cabinet.
As the solicitor-general in the previous government, Mr. Easter was the minister responsible for the RCMP. He said he or any other responsible minister would expect the RCMP to tell him the full story.
However, “there is no situation where the RCMP came to me, and basically said, ‘We screwed up. We provided improper information,’” Mr. Easter said.
Mr. Easter, a Liberal MP from Prince Edward Island, said the Arar case points to the need for a better system of RCMP oversight in national security matters.
Judge O’Connor is expected to make recommendations along this line in his next report later this year.
Mr. Easter also suggested that a parliamentary watchdog committee might be another oversight mechanism. He said he was frustrated that he couldn’t share still-classified ministerial papers with the public safety committee to buttress his testimony.
He said he had spent hours going through his papers, ministerial briefing notes, and other official documents in preparation for his committee appearance. He’s also spoken with his aides from that period. There is nothing he could find to suggest that Commissioner Zaccardelli or anyone else from the RCMP told him that they had given the Americans faulty intelligence.
“We asked for a full briefing. We asked the tough questions,” Mr. Easter said.
Then prime minister Jean Chrétien and his government were trying to get Mr. Arar released from a filthy, rat-infested Syrian prison at the time while trying to figure out why the American had sent the man to the Middle East instead of home to Canada.
In his testimony, Mr. Easter also called into question Commissioner Zaccardelli’s statement that RCMP investigators had tried to correct the false information that they had given American authorities.
Mr. Easter said that if this was the case he would have expected then U.S. attorney general John Ashcroft would have made this known during a meeting the two men had in the summer of 2003 to discuss the Arar deportation and other security issues.
“We did complain strenuously to Mr. Ashcroft” because the Canadian government believed what the Americans had done was a violation of international law, Mr. Easter said.
In a cards-on-the-table meeting like that he would have expected Mr. Ashcroft to come back at him with a retort about being given false information from Canada. “If I was giving Mr. Ashcroft hell I really believe he would have said, ‘but Wayne, you provided us with misinformation,’” Mr. Easter said. “And that never happened.”
When asked later by reporters whether he thought Commissioner Zaccardelli had mislead the committee, Mr. Easter said he wouldn’t speculate and the committee will have to try to sort it out when it recalls the senior Mountie.
