RCMP Watch

Kerry Pither (Ottawa Citizen) - It’s no wonder CSIS, the RCMP and the government wanted to keep the Iacobucci inquiry so secret. Despite all the faults with the process, the inquiry’s report offers up a startling and shameful record of Canadian complicity in torture. It effectively clears the names of men that the government has tried to portray as terrorists. And it backs up everything these men have said about what happened to them. In short, the report is bad news for the government, CSIS and the RCMP, and good news for Ahmad Abou-ElMaati, Abdullah Almalki and Muayyed Nureddin.

For years, these men have been saying they were tortured while they were in Syrian, and in the case of Mr. El-Maati, Egyptian detention as well. They’ve described in gut-wrenching detail how, among other unspeakable atrocities, they were whipped with cables, and, in the case of Mr. El-Maati, subjected to electric shock.

Mr. Almalki has described what it was like to be stuffed into a car tire and whipped. He has described what it was like to survive daily life, for 17 months, in a dark, underground cell the size of a grave.

Mr. El-Maati has described what it was like to spend most of the two years and two months that he was detained in solitary confinement, in wretched conditions. He has described how at times, with his hands locked behind his back, he was forced to eat, “like an animal” off the floor.

Mr. Nureddin has described how his Syrian interrogators would periodically stop whipping his feet to douse them with cold water, to ensure the blood kept circulating and the pain returned.

And despite the consistencies between their accounts of the physical and psychological torture they endured and the well-documented records of torture in Syria and Egypt, our government, CSIS and the RCMP, have repeatedly tried to cast doubt on their claims. But in his report, former Supreme Court justice Frank Iacobucci agrees with the men. He finds that all three suffered “treatment amounting to torture as that term is defined in the United Nations Convention Against Torture.”

For years these men have been saying that the questions they were asked, under torture, could only have come from Canada. Once again, Justice Iacobucci agrees. In all three cases, he finds that the information did come from Canada. In Mr. El-Maati’s case, it was CSIS that sent the questions to his interrogators. In Mr. Nureddin’s case, the information came from CSIS. In Mr. Almalki’s case, it was the RCMP that sent the questions.

For years these men have been asking how Canadian agencies used their so-called “confessions” — the statements they were forced to make under torture — back in Canada. Justice Iacobucci’s report confirms that it was Mr. El-Maati’s “confession” that was used to justify search warrants back in Canada (the Arar Inquiry had already determined that the RCMP didn’t bother to mention to the presiding judge that the information being presented to justify those warrants was likely the product of torture). The search warrants were used against Mr. Almalki’s family home, and Mr. El-Maati’s father’s apartment.

What’s worse is that CSIS then used information obtained in the searches to send more questions to Syria to be posed to Mr. El-Maati. In Justice Iacobucci’s words, this could have been seen by Syrian interrogators as a “green light” to continue their interrogations, not a “red light” to stop them. And so the sorry and vicious circle of these agencies’ complicity in torture continued.

Finally, for years these men have asked why, if the RCMP or CSIS had any evidence to substantiate their allegations of terrorist ties, they have refused to produce it publicly or in a court of law. It appears we have that answer now too.

Justice Iacobucci finds that the RCMP was “deficient” when it described Mr. El-Maati as someone who posed an “imminent threat” in communications with foreign agencies, as they did so without bothering to ensure that the claim was accurate. He found the same for CSIS, which failed to clarify that it was sharing suspicions, not assertions of fact, when it labelled Mr. El-Maati an associate of an “Osama bin Laden aide.”

Ditto for Mr. Almalki. The RCMP told foreign agencies that he too posed an “imminent threat,” a description Justice Iacobucci found to be “inflammatory, inaccurate and without investigatory foundation.” Indeed, the report shows that when the RCMP used information from another source to describe Mr. Almalki as “linked through association to al-Qaeda,” it didn’t bother to mention that the description they were using was actually about someone else.

And we see the same again in Mr. Nureddin’s case. CSIS shared information with “several foreign agencies” describing him as a courier for Ansar al Islam in northern Iraq, without first ensuring the allegation was either accurate, or reliable.

Neither the RCMP, nor CSIS, considered the implications for the men when they labelled them in this way. It seems they didn’t care much about the possibility that they’d be whipped or subjected to electric shock.

And we, the Canadian public? Canadian officials — the ones who are supposed to make us feel more secure — did the opposite. Hiding behind a cloak of anonymity, they told us, through the media, that we should be afraid of these men, that there had been an “al-Qaeda cell” lurking in our midst, plotting attacks.

In the end, Mr. El-Maati, the first to be detained, spent two years, two months and two days in Syrian and Egyptian detention. For Mr. Almalki, it was 22 months in Syrian detention. For Mr. Nureddin, it was 33 days.

These men, and all of us, have been kept in the dark for far too long. Now we have the answers, the government needs to come clean, take responsibility for what went terribly, tragically wrong in these cases, and apologize.

First, to the men. And then, to the rest of us.