by Unsigned Editorial
Source: The Toronto Star
URL: [link]
Date: June 21, 2009


Is there a lesson to be gleaned from the bungled Canadian "terror" cases that have made news recently? Yes indeed. And more than one.

Last Thursday, a majority of Parliament's public safety committee (with Conservatives dissenting) urged Prime Minister Stephen Harper to issue an apology and compensation to three Canadians – Abdullah Almalki, Ahmad El Maati and Muayyed Nureddin – who were jailed and tortured in Syria. Chillingly, the committee also felt compelled to demand that the government issue a "clear ministerial directive" against swapping information with regimes that use torture.

And on the same day, the government announced it would finally comply with a federal court order to bring home Abousfian Abdelrazik from Sudan, where he has been stranded for six years.

In all these cases, Canadian security officials and police had grounds to wonder whether the men might be involved in terrorist activities. Their past associations or activities raised red flags. But none has been charged. That makes them innocent in the eyes of the law.

Yet even so, a Canadian document reportedly says Sudan jailed Abdelrazik "at our request," while the United States put him on a no-fly list and Ottawa trotted out excuse after excuse for not bringing him home. In the case of the three detained in Syria, Canadian officials fed foreign agencies unverified, inaccurate and inflammatory information that led to their torture or abuse.

In these cases, plus that of Maher Arar who also was detained in Syria and tortured, Canadian officials displayed alarming tendencies. They failed to give Muslim citizens the benefit of the doubt, they were too deferential to the Americans, they worked hand-in-glove with foreign actors known to abuse prisoners, they trafficked in shoddy information that exposed the detainees to danger, and they contracted out the dirty work of squeezing detainees for information.

Then there is Omar Khadr, abandoned by Ottawa to face trial for murder at the discredited Guantanamo Bay military tribunals, despite a federal court order that the government try to repatriate him after seven years in custody.

These cases began on the Liberals' watch, but the Harper government is reaping the inevitable political embarrassment that comes from hastily fingering Canadians as terrorists on flimsy grounds, from trafficking in bad information and from abandoning citizens abroad to their fate. Ottawa can do better. Parliament's public safety committee and federal court are right to demand a higher standard.

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