by Ian Macleod
Source: The Ottawa Citizen
URL: [link]
Date: April 8,2012


Information from the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency used by Canada to link accused Ottawa terrorist Mohamed Harkat to “al-Qaeda’s banker” was untrue, according to a former senior CIA case officer.

The man thought to be Osama bin Laden’s main financial fixer “wasn’t the senior member of al-Qaeda that we had assessed. He wasn’t even a member of al-Qaeda,” retired U.S. spy Glenn Carle, who interrogated the man at secret CIA black site prisons in 2002, told an Ottawa gathering to promote his blistering memoir about the case, The Interrogator: An Education.

Yet as recently as 2010, Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) evidence and testimony before the Federal Court of Canada continued to point to Harkat’s relationship with Haji Pacha Wazir as evidence of Harkat’s ties to the bin Laden terror network.

It is the second time the veracity of key prosecution evidence against Harkat has been questioned in the government’s decade-long campaign to have him declared a national security threat and deported to his native Algeria.

Another supposed high-level al-Qaeda player named Abu Zubaydah, whom federal prosecutors also linked to Harkat, has since been exposed by some U.S. al-Qaeda hunters as a small-time operative who was found to be “certifiably insane” after his 2002 capture.

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