Dear Frank

Good letter from Fern to Frank over at Dammit Janet :

My Letter to the Hon. Frank Iacobucci

Dear Sir,
I am writing to you as one private citizen of Canada to another.

As a former Supreme Court Justice and upholder of the Constitution, you must recognize that the government's move to employ you to examine the documents relevant to the Afghan detainee ruckus is, at least, not very popular among some knowledgeable commenters.

To many, me included, it is a mockery of the concept of Parliamentary supremacy.

It is, further, merely the latest in a long series of anti-democratic initiatives by this Conservative government.

No one questions your ability or your reputation. The issue is whether Parliament is to be allowed to do its job.

Please. Reject the assignment.

Yours truly,
fern hill

Phone: (direct) 416.865.8217 Fax: 416.865.7380
Email: fiacobucci (at) torys.com
Mail: 79 Wellington Street West, Suite 3000Box 270, TD CentreToronto, Ontario, M5K 1N2 Canada

I'm guessing Fern wouldn't mind if you copy and pasted that puppy with your own name under it.


Here's my letter :

Dear Frank :

In your last go round with whitewashing government complicity in torture, it took you 16 months to determine that even though :

1)CSIS and the RCMP "mistakenly" advised Egyptian and Syrian authorities that Canadian citizens Ahmad El Maati and Abdullah Almalki were "associated with Al Qaeda" and an "imminent threat to public security" and a "confessed terrorist" and that El Maati was "involved in a plan to commit a terrorist act in Canada", resulting in

2)El Maati being subjected to "electric shock to his hands, back and genitals, and sleep deprivation while being subjected to excruciatingly painful stress torture for days on end", and that subsequently

3)CSIS fired off a handy list of questions to be put to them,

you ultimately determined in your report 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."

and

"It seems inevitable, in the struggle against terrorism that mistakes of various kinds will be made."

After which the government redacted "about 20% of your findings from the public document for national security reasons."

So, really, Frank, who gives a fuck what you think?

Yours truly,
Alison

Strongly advise sending Fern's letter instead.

Canada, Sudan, and Abdelrazik : a mighty stench of hypocrisy

Two headlines on Canada and Sudan today, just hours apart ...

Canada urges Sudan to cooperate with the International Criminal Court
after the bench issued an arrest warrant for President Omar al-Beshir for war crimes in Darfur.
Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon :

"Canada strongly supports the work of the ICC, including its work in Sudan," he said, calling for "ongoing international scrutiny of Sudan's commitments to human rights."

Sure. Unless, of course, Canada is making use of Sudan's crappy human rights record to detain and torture a Canadian citizen, Abousfian Abdelrazik. Then we're not so keen on either the "scrutiny" or those "commitments to human rights" :

CSIS asked Sudan to arrest Canadian, files reveal
Abdelrazik is 'first case of Canadian rendition,' MP says

"Canadian security operatives asked Sudan - a country with a notorious record of torture and abuse in its prisons - to arrest and detain Canadian citizen Abousfian Abdelrazik, according to heavily redacted Canadian documents, marked "secret."

The newly obtained documents provide the strongest evidence to date that Canadian Security Intelligence agents engaged in the Bush-era U.S. practice of getting other countries to imprison those it considered security risks aboard rather than charge them with any crime."

Abdelrazik fled to Canada in 1990 after being imprisoned in Sudan for his political beliefs following a coup by the same President Omar al-Beshir the ICC is after today.
Abdelrazik was granted refugee status and in 1995 he became a Canadian citizen.
While he was visiting his ailing mother in Khartoum in 2003, Canada had him arrested and interrogated there. Despite his being declared innocent of terrorist ties and released from prison by Sudan - even despite Sudan's offer to fly him home to Canada - Canada refused to return or reissue his expired passport and his name subsequently went on the U.S. no-fly list.

G&M :

"When faced with interrogation by Sudanese and FBI agents, Mr. Abdelrazik feared he would again be imprisoned and tortured in Sudan's notorious jails and pleaded for a Canadian diplomat to accompany him to the interrogation."

On April 3, 2007, Foreign Affairs point man on the case, Sean Robertson, sent a response to the Canadian embassy in Khartoum :

"Mission staff should not accompany Abdelrazik to his interview with the FBI."

A month later a Canadian embassy official in Khartoum told Ottawa that Mr. Abdelrazik had been told by the FBI that he would never see Canada again unless he implicated others as al-Qaeda operatives.

I do believe we've been here before.

Let Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon know you're watching - Cannon.L@parl.gc.ca. -and support Abdelrazik's return to Canada on Facebook.

See previous Creekside posts on Abdelrazik or Dr. Dawg's superior coverage

Cross-posted at Creekside

Iacobucci greywash into Canadian torture-by-proxy and rendition-lite

Apparently "mistakes were made". That's all we get.

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

Abdelrazik : another Arar

"The similarities with Mr. Arar's case are compelling. In both instances, a Canadian citizen is fingered by CSIS as a terrorist suspect. In both cases, no charges are laid in Canada. In both, the person is arrested and imprisoned abroad. In both, Canadian officials say there is little that they can do because the person is in the country of their other citizenship."

The above quote is from the Globe&Mail in their front page story in April about Abousfian Abdelrazik, a Canadian/Sudanese imprisoned and allegedly tortured in Sudan for two years at Canada's request. Frequently visited by CSIS officials, he was eventually cleared by Sudan of all allegations that he was a terrorist or a member of al-Qaeda and released. Sudan offered to fly him home to Montreal in a private jet but Canada obstructed the deal.

Since then he has been "sheltering" and living on handouts at the Canadian embassy in Khartoum, except for that five months when he was reincarcerated after threatening to make his case to Prime Minister Martin on the PM's visit to Sudan. Canada has refused to renew his passport or to transport him back to Canada on any of the subsequent government flights between Canada and Sudan.

The G&M returned to Abdelrazik's plight today (bold:mine) :

"In a telephone interview Monday, Mr. Abdelrazik said he told a Canadian diplomat he was being repeatedly beaten by Sudanese interrogators in 2004 or 2005. "He didn't care," Mr. Abdelrazik said.
Mr. Abdelrazik, who was to submit a sworn affidavit about his torture in Sudan to Federal Court in Ottawa Monday, confirmed all of the details in the draft document, including that he was interrogated by CSIS agents while in a Sudanese jail. However, the document remained unsigned because Canadian diplomats refused to deliver the faxed draft to Mr. Abdelrazik to sign."

What?! He's living right there in your embassy.

"Canadian government documents, which came to light in April, revealed he had been imprisoned in Sudan "at our request," meaning at the request of Canadian agents.

In its response, delivered Monday, the Justice Department opted not to dispute the assertion that Mr. Abdelrazik had been imprisoned at Canada's request, in effect conceding the fact before the court.

The documents presented in court, coupled with Mr. Abdelrazik's accounts of torture, suggest Canada secretly arranged for Sudan to arrest and imprison him, then sent Canadian Security Intelligence Service agents to interrogate him in a Sudanese prison while diplomats knew that he was being tortured but ignored that fact.

Canadian diplomats in Khartoum refused Monday, for the second day in a row, to permit Mr. Abdelrazik to sign the affidavit; his signature would have made it a sworn affidavit.

"The matter is under litigation and we cannot comment," said Anne Howland, spokeswoman for current Foreign Minister David Emerson. Other senior officials said the file is actually being handled in the Prime Minister's Office."

I'll just fucking bet it is. To read the anguished but impotent and self-serving hand-wringing by Foreign Affairs officials, go here:

"I wish I had a magic wand and make this case go away ... I find it unethical to hold him like this in limbo with no future, no hope and all because ... Obviously I cannot address the issue of the no-fly list ..."
"Mr. Abdelrazik "has reached the end of his rope, he has no money, no future, very little freedom and no hope. Should this case break wide open in the media, we may have a lot to explaining to do."

Well, it's broken open now so deal. Just send a fucking plane already.
If you can do it for Brenda Martin, you can do it for Abousfian Abdelrazik.

Cross-posted at Creekside

Write a letter, make a call, send a fax to :

David Emerson, Foreign Affairs :
Telephone: (613) 943-0267
Fax: (613) 943-0219
EMail: Emerson.D@parl.gc.ca

2148 Kingsway
Vancouver, British Columbia
V5N 2T5
Telephone: (604) 775-6263
Fax: (604) 775-6284

Stephen Harper : E-mail : pm@pm.gc.ca Fax: 613-941-6900

h/t to Roger in Comments for the reminder to post this access info.

Bees, honey, vinegar, no crayon - you know the drill.

Canada and torture : Getting around our own principles

From "A History of Hypocrisy" by Regan Boychuk, in the Literary Review of Canada :

"To judge by the statements of government officials, Canada is—as it should be—staunchly opposed to torture. Just over two decades ago, Canada became one of the first countries to ratify the United Nations Convention against Torture, adopting an absolute ban on “any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person.”

In the 1980s, Canada was instrumental in creating and supporting the UN Working Group on Involuntary Disappearances, and in 2007 the Canadian delegate to the UN Human Rights Council reaffirmed that those responsible for enforced disappearances should not go unpunished. Nonetheless, as Human Rights Watch reported in 2006, Canada also worked aggressively to dilute key provisions of an international treaty on forced disappearances:

"To their disgrace, the United States and Russia strongly opposed the [treaty] effort, not least because each had begun using forced disappearances itself …Canada contributed to this shameful opposition, not because it is known to forcibly "disappear" people, but apparently because Prime Minister Martin, eager to improve relations with the United States that had been strained under his predecessor, decided to run interference for one of his neighbor’s unsavory practices."

Despite the efforts of the U.S. and Canada, the text of the International Convention for the Protection of All Persons from Enforced Disappearance—modelled after the UN Convention against Torture—was approved by the General Assembly in December 2006. Seventy-two countries have since signed it, neither the U.S. nor Canada among them. "

Mr. Boychuk then cites the 74 CIA flights made through Canada since 9/11 and Foreign Affairs department spokesman Rodney Moore's 2006 statement that "whether any particular rendition is lawful would depend on the facts of each individual case".

A depressingly familiar Canadian refrain, this public purporting to support progressive principles on the international stage while working secretly behind the scenes to prop up regressive American interests conflated with our own.
More recent examples include our non-commitment commitment to Kyoto and our backroom watering down of the provisions against the use and manufacture of clusterbombs.


Professor Barry Cooper, friend to PM Harper, Senior Fellow at The Fraser Institute, and creator of a slush fund at the University of Calgary which accepted monies from Alberta oil and gas companies to help finance Tim Ball and his anti-Kyoto Friends of Science group, doesn't much care for Mr. Boychuk's essay on Canadian complicity in the history of torture.
After dismissing it as "smug, and wholly predictable, anti-Americanism", Prof. Cooper complains,

"In contrast, one might consider the [ancient] Greeks"

- no, I'm not kidding! that's what he said! - and complains that :

"Mr. Boychuk accepts the sentimental definition of the United Nations, namely inflicting severe pain or suffering."

Yes, do let's look at something else entirely, Prof. Cooper.
Asshat.
If we cannot accept that we have been both complicit and blind to that complicity, we will never learn how to stand on our principles.

Cross-posted at Creekside

Another form of extraordinary rendition

Canada's secret spy days are over : CSIS chief, said at a "recent and closed CIA-sponsored Global Futures Forum conference of international security services in Vancouver"

"Public terrorism trials are changing the way government spies operate, says Canada's spymaster, Jim Judd.
As a consequence of the fight against global Islamic terrorism, an increasing number of open-court criminal prosecutions in Canada, the U.S. and Europe have, at their genesis, information collected by shadowy secret agents rather than police officers.

Prior to 9/11 and in several cases since, most of those detained for suspected terrorist links in Canada were immigrants or refugees and the government conveniently relied on immigration laws and security certificates to quietly deport them to their countries of origin or hold them in custody.

But the alleged terrorist activities of Ottawa's Momin Khawaja and the "Toronto 11" -- all Canadian citizens awaiting trial in the first of Canada's post-9/11 terror prosecutions -- must be heard in open courts, where the prosecution's evidence is subject to the rigours of defence counsel scrutiny and the rules of evidence."

"The rigours of defence counsel scrutiny and the rules of evidence."
Judd refers to this as the "judicialization" of what has "traditionally been considered covert government information".

OK, hold that thought a moment - I'm coming back to it.

Yesterday, in The Lesson of the Arar inquiry : Keep it under wraps, Pogge wrote about Mr. Abdelrazik, a Canadian citizen fingered by CSIS and arrested "at our request" in Sudan five years ago, where he alleges he was beaten while in custody, and frequently visited by CSIS.

In 2004, Sudan cleared him of all allegations that he was a terrorist or a member of al-Qaeda and released him. They further offered to fly him home but Canada obstructed the deal. !!!
A few months later, Mr. Abdelrazik was then bundled off back to prison for another five months after suggesting he wanted to make his case to the prime minister.
Now released a second time, he remains trapped in Khartoum, his health failing, his family back here in Montreal.

And here's the perfect Catch 22 : He can't fly home because he's on a no-fly list and he can't go by land or sea because Canada continues to refuse him a passport.

From the G&M, who, to their eternal credit, put this on their front page yesterday :

"[Abdelrazik's lawyer] says the similarities with Mr. Arar's case are compelling. In both instances, a Canadian citizen is fingered by CSIS as a terrorist suspect. In both cases, no charges are laid in Canada. In both, the person is arrested and imprisoned abroad. In both, Canadian officials say there is little that they can do because the person is in the country of their other citizenship."

In both, he might have added, there were allegations of torture and examples of extraordinary callousness on the part of government officials. His lawyer calls it "another form of extraordinary rendition".
The G&M article does a fine job detailing the blatant ass-covering, Lib and Con, that appears to have formed the bulk of Foreign Affairs' concerns regarding Mr. Abdelrazik over the past five years. Just like with Arar, CSIS didn't want him to come back to Canada to embarrass them.
As CSIS chief, Jim Judd oversaw both cases.

POGGE asks for the second time now : How many more of them are there out there?

May 16, 2007, Day seeks security powers

"Anti-terror measures would restore `preventive arrests’ and help CSIS spies overseas
The federal government plans to try to revive the extraordinary anti-terror police powers of "investigative hearings" and "preventive arrest" as part of a series of major security initiatives."

"Preventative arrest" allows police to arrest without charge and judges to penalize without trial, people who the authorities fear might commit future terrorist offences.

"The government also says it will expand the ability of Canada's spy agency – the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) – to do covert foreign intelligence gathering abroad.
The two police powers slated for revival were killed by the opposition parties in a parliamentary vote in February.
In an appearance yesterday before the House of Commons public safety committee, Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day indicated he has drafted a bill to reinstate those powers."

The bill is still pending, and as noted here, now also enjoys the support of the Liberals.

So when CSIS chief Jim Judd laments for the CIA the late great days of publicly unacknowleged extaordinary renditions, those pre-'judicialized' days unsullied by the "rigours of defence council scrutiny and rules of evidence", just remember it's because they're planning on bringing those days back.

Cross-posted at Creekside