RCMP Watch

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 are blacked out, with Ottawa arguing information from foreign intelligence partners should remain redacted.

Commission officials say the material to be released as early as Wednesday pertains to information about “human rights and torture issues.”

The main portion that observers are keen to read relate to searches undertaken by the RCMP four months after 9/11.

“On Jan. 22, 2002, Canadian agencies conducted simultaneous searches, pursuant to a number of locations in Ottawa, Toronto, and other Canadian cities,” the report reads. Then, government-imposed asterisks begin to blot out the remarks of the inquiry commissioner, Mr. Justice Dennis O’Connor:

“[Censored]… The reliability of such information is always in question … If the information cannot be substantiated or corroborated, it is given little weight … [Censored]”

Six small asterisks shield the substance of the section. But if lifted, they could speak to some much bigger issues.

After the al-Qaeda suicide attacks in the U.S., Canadian agencies zeroed in on several Arabs believed to have spent time in Afghanistan.

None of the targets was ever charged with a crime in Canada, but several were arrested during their international travels. It was in this period that Mr. Arar came to be wrongly defined by his connections to others.

One month after 9/11, he was spotted talking to a major target of the investigation, Abdullah Almalki. The fallout has been well chronicled by Judge O’Connor, who said police wrongly flagged Mr. Arar as an “Islamic extremist” in an international lookout database.

Observers will be looking at this week’s release of information for a greater insight into intelligence exchanges between Canadian officials and possibly Syria, a country with a poor human-rights record.

Even for Judge O’Connor, the precise information flow seems murky. His inquiry was narrowly focused on Mr. Arar and he had no access to U.S. papers or officials after Washington refused to help Canada get to the bottom of the Arar debacle.

In November, 2001, a suspect named Ahmad El-Maati, a former mujahedeen fighter in Afghanistan who worked as a Toronto truck driver, was arrested flying into Damascus.

The truck driver has publicly alleged he was tortured into falsely confessing to a Canadian bomb plot during the two years he was held in the Middle East.

Mr. El-Maati has also released a chronology that has received less attention, asserting he falsely placed Mr. Arar in Afghanistan – a year before the latter was forced into making a similar confession while jailed in Syria.

Within a few weeks, the RCMP was searching residences and trying to arrange interviews. Mountains of documents were sifted through, but no charges were ever laid in Canada.

And Mr. Arar, who was only sought as a possible witness to testify against others, was in Tunisia the day of the searches.

After the RCMP contacted him, he consented to an interview – but only under terms stipulated by his lawyer.In the fall of 2002, the telecommunications engineer was arrested in the United States. Citing his connections to Mr. El-Maati and Mr. Almalki, U.S. officials sent him to Syria where he was held for nearly a year. Mr. Arar was awarded $10-million in a settlement with the Canadian government earlier this year. The related cases are now under review.