Shorter former Supreme Court Justice Frank Iacobucci : After two years of reviewing the cases of three Canadian citizens detained in Syria during which time the RCMP are alledged to have faxed Syria the questions to be put to them under torture, and after interviewing only the Canadian officials involved, I am ready to conclude that :
"The inquiry did find that the three men were tortured in foreign prisons and that the mistreatment may have "resulted indirectly from several actions of Canadian officials."but that :
"I found no evidence that any of these of these officials were seeking to do anything other than carry out conscientiously the duties and responsibilities of the institutions of which they were part."See, that's exactly what worries us, Frank.
That last bit right there.
Does 'conscientiously carrying out their duties and responsibilites' include outsourcing torture-by-proxy and rendition-lite to third party countries?
Rendition-lite : No, we don't bag em here; we wait till they're attending a wedding or visiting their dying Mom in Egypt and then put the word out. Or we just go along with the US doing it.
Torture-by-proxy : Hey, if you're gonna beat the crap out of our citizens anyway, I got a coupla questions you could put to them for us.
Because without testimony from those US and Syrian and Egyptian officials, who have been more than willing to finger Canadian complicity in these deals in the past when our own officials were denying it, what's the point of your secret inquiry?
Justice Dennis O'Connor's previous inquiry into our government's treatment of Maher Arar uncovered evidence of Canadian rendition-lite and torture-by-proxy.
He recommended a further inquiry to nail this down.
That's where your inquiry came in, Frank.
A mandate so narrow in its scope - not your fault, I know - does nothing to restore confidence in the ability of CSIS and the RCMP to act in our interests without sending us off to foreign countries to be tortured in the process.
And wasn't that the whole point?
Instead, with the release of this report, we now officially don't know any more than we did before.
Stockwell Day issues some pap on it :
"Our Government is moving forward on comprehensive and robust security and intelligence review measures.
Our Government is unwavering in its commitment to give law enforcement the tools they need to safeguard our national security and to ensure review mechanisms are in place to protect Canadians."
Fuck you, Doris. Not everyone else is quite so sanguine :
Reuters : Canada actions likely led to Syrian torture: report
AFP : Canada had role in torture of its nationals: probe
Kady live-blogs Iacobucci's press conference
Speaking of which, how's our other rendition-lite case, Abousfian Abdelrazik, doing?
Is he still living in the lobby at the Canadian embassy in Sudan?
Sudan is begging us to take him back as they consider him to be innocent and why should they look the bad guys in this? But DFAIT continues to obstruct his repatriation so as not to upset the Americans, while frantically attempting to appear not to do so.
Iacobucci's inquiry only considered Ahmad Abou El Maati, Abdullah Almalki, and Muayyed Nureddin.
How many more are there? Who didn't make it home? How many more?
Cross-posted at Creekside
No comments:
Post a Comment