On May 16, a warrant was issued for the arrest of Adil Charkaoui, a Montreal man originally from Morocco. Charkaoui is a Montreal PhD Art student who is married with one young child. Mrs. Charkaoui is currently pregnant. The warrant was approved by Solicitor General Wayne Easter and Minister of Citizenship and Immigration Denis Coderre.

This was done in the name of the Security Certificate, issued under the Orwellian "Immigration and Refugee Protection Act." When detained under this certificate,. there is no chance of bail, detention can be indefinite, and neither the person detained nor a defence lawyer is allowed access to the heart of the "evidence" on grounds of "national security." It's the basis of a secret trial, the ultimate result of which could be deportation.

TIMING OF ARREST IS VERY SUSPICIOUS

Broadcast News reports that CSIS and the RCMP had Charkaoui under surveillance for at least 10 days.

The timing of the arrest is suspicious, coming as it does 6 full days after the warrant was issued. If CSIS and the RCMP had been monitoring him for at least 10 days, and he was a "threat" to security, why did they wait until something in the news could be "associated" with the arrest of Charkaoui, thereby pinning guilt-by-association allegations through the usual scare stories in a hyperactive media?

Sure enough, the raising of the "terror alert" in the U.S. and the bombing in Casablanca provided the perfect backdrop for this stage-managed arrest, and offered another opportunity for Canada to show the U.S. that we are "serious" about cracking down in the "war on terror," more aptly a war on democracy.

SIMILAR STAGED ARREST LAST DECEMBER

In a similar "coincidence," on December 10, 2002, an Ottawa man, Mohamed Harkat, originally from Algeria, was also arrested on a security certificate, so that headlines reading "Canadian tied to al-Qaeda arrested" were everywhere as Solicitor General Wayne Easter went to Washington the next day to tell the Americans how much Canada was doing to stop alleged "terrorists." Harkat, whose hearing comes up in July, has been in solitary confinement in an Ottawa detention centre ever since.

CHARKAOUI DENIES THE ALLEGATIONS

According to media reports, Charkaoui, on his way back from Morocco, was stopped by government agents at Dorval airport in 2001, told he was "suspected of knowing certain people" and told to spy on members of Montreal's Muslim community. In a jailhouse interview yesterday, Charkaoui said, "I have no links to Al-Qaeda. This is a new form of McCarthyism, a new witch hunt. There's no proof, only suspicions. If they have proof they should show it."

This follows a classic CSIS pattern. Others who have been arrested on the security certificate report a similar pattern: demands from CSIS to spy on members of specific communities are made, and if not accepted, the security certificate comes down as punishment.

REGULAR THREATS AGAINST MUSLIM COMMUNITY

CSIS and the RCMP are actively harassing members of Canada's Muslim communities, focusing specifically on individuals of Middle Eastern and Arabic heritage. In a little-publicized report released last week by the International Civil Liberties Monitoring Group (ICLMG), it was reported that in "hundreds" of instances, people in Canada "are being visited for interviews by security forces without warrants, and taken away for interrogation. Although the full extent of Bill C-36 [so-called anti-terror legislation hurriedly passed by Parliament in 2001] was not implemented in these cases, it has been used as a threat to 'encourage' voluntary interviews by citing the risk of preventative detention allowed under the Act. Victims of such police conduct have been afraid to come forward publicly for fear of further retaliation." (The ICLMG is composed of many groups including the Council of Canadians, Canadian Arab Federation, Greenpeace, David Suzuki Foundation, United Steelworkers of America, and many others).

The Canadian Islamic Congress reports that hate crimes against Muslims have increased 1600% since Sept. 11, 2001.

The media has fanned the flames of intolerance as well. Even a report on Canadian census figures featured bizarre scare headlines, such as the Globe's May 15 shocker that "Muslims Outnumber Jews in Canada." Well, Christians still outnumber Jews and Muslims and Buddhists, but THAT doesn't make the news.

Anti-Islam bias in Canadian media is rampant. The Canadian Islamic Congress identifies what it calls "image distortion disorder," a condition that arises from the constant repetition of key phrases in the media, from "Islamic-inspired terrorist attacks" and "Islamic militant" to "Muslim militant" and "Islamic fundamentalist." This distortion of Islam's adherents "inevitably leads to discrimination, hate-mongering, acts of vandalism, and false accusation by authorities. Young Muslim Canadians of dark complexion, especially women with hijabs (traditional head coverings), or males with full beards, are particularly vulnerable to anxiety, fear and discrimination because of society's perception that their religion is violent, backward, restrictive, fundamentalist, and intolerant of opposing or alternative viewpoints." (For the full report visit http://www.canadianislamiccongress.com)

WHO IS CSIS AND WHAT IS A SECURITY CERTIFICATE?

Imagine that you have been arrested, held without charge, told you are a threat to Canada's national security, and neither you nor your lawyer is allowed to know why. You face deportation back to your country of birth, where you face possible arrest, detention, torture and execution. This is done in the name of defending "democracy."

Imagine as well that the spy agency which puts together the document labelling you a threat is a scandal-ridden group that has, according to a recent expose on CSIS (Covert Entry by Andrew Mitrovica), "routinely broken the law, treating the rights and liberties of Canadians as no more than a nuisance...[it is] riddled by waste, extravagance, laziness, nepotism, incompetence, corruption and law-breaking." There is a culture of impunity at CSIS, whose agents often refer to a Ways and Means Act: "if you have a way to get things done, the means -- legal or not -- are justified."

CSIS, RACIAL PROFILING, AND THE DEATH OF DEMOCRACY

The "Security Certificate"

But such abuses of democratic process, especially when they relate to people who do not enjoy the privileges of white skin, are logical outcomes of a system which engages in the medieval-style "security certificate" process, begun in 1992 with the help of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, or CSIS. (CSIS is a Canadian secret police agency, what one journalist calls a Canadian combination of CIA and FBI. It was founded in 1984 after the disbanding of the RCMP Security Service, an organization riddled with massive corruption, criminal scandals, and a long record of civil rights violations. Billed as a "civilian" spy agency, CSIS essentially recruited many of the members of the discredited RCMP Security Service. Some even kept their old desks...