Mohamed Harkat Left Me "Winceless"
Report of the CBC "One on One" interview with Mohamed Harkat

October 17, 2004

In my younger days when I still dreamed of romance, I hung out with a group of divorced women who traded stories of their disastrous marriages. How could we have been so stupid, so blind, we all asked. And finally we came to the conclusion that we knew in the very beginning the guy was Mr. Wrong. The clue was in how many times he had made us wince by something he did or said. But we glossed it over, we denied our own life preserving instincts, we made excuses for him, we blinded ourselves.

Several from the group found husbands later, and one of them told me after several years of contented marriage, "There hasn't been a single wince."

So that became my yardstick with men - watch out for the wince. I decided to apply it to the CBC broadcast of One on One where Peter Mansbridge interviewed Mohamed Harkat. Guess what. No winces.

You may think this is a frivolous way for me to approach such a serious situation. But thanks to a short, shallow little blog item I've just stumbled over, which misquoted the Harkat interview but did contain this link, I now know that Harkat's first lawyer said, after long and probing conversations with his client, that there was nothing about Harkat that "set him off". Clearly, I'm not the only one who operates on this kind of instinct.

If there is such a thing as Al Qaeda - and it's not just a convenient boogeyman to justify the Patriot Act and the Security Certificate, the better to intimidate unruly taxpayers into looking the other way while our governments meddle obscenely in other people's countries - and if they really do employ such people as Mohamed Harkat to be their sleeper agents, then they're not much to be afraid of. Harkat is a teddy bear, a bewildered Pooh, wondering who ate up all his hunny, and whatever for.

But wait. Maybe I wanted too much to believe what Harkat said. So I decided to watch the tape a few more times while applying the blink test - the theory that if somebody is lying, their eyes begin to blink more rapidly. A lot of behavioural psychologists swear by it, and it could be more objective than the wince method.

Harkat failed my blink test at only one point in the interview.

No, not when Peter Mansbridge asked him about Ahmed Khadr. Harkat may be wrongly fated, but so is everyone who has hitched a ride with the wrong sort of driver. Ahmed Khadr was assumed to have had "connections" with "the bin Laden network", but he may also have simply been driving to Toronto on the day that Harkat was casting about for a ride so that he could report back to immigration as he had been requested to do.

Ottawa's a small town, I've discovered from experience, and Ottawa's Muslim community is obviously smaller still. So meeting Khadr is not either the huge coincidence or indication of guilt that Mansbridge wanted to make it. Not to mention that people, even Muslims, travel between Ottawa and Toronto all the time.

But it definitely was bad luck.

Talk about luck; I'm still wondering why so many people are in jail under the Security Certificate who can only vaguely be connected to "the bin Laden network" and deny such a connection adamantly, while the Khadr family freely boasts of their association with it, yet walk about freely, making use of Canada's generous social and health services. But don't let me get started on that.

Harkat didn't blink too much when he explained why he didn't become involved in conversation with the other two occupants of the car. If I were Harkat, worried that I might be sent back to a country where I would be welcomed only long enough to be disappeared due to my having been involved with a political party that's since been outlawed by a military coup, my mind would have been solely on my own troubles too.

He blinked very little when asked why he thought Abu Zubaydah was said to have fingered Harkat as one of his Qaeda trainees. Zubaydah is reportedly #2 in the bin Laden hierarchy, but it seems every time they nab somebody lately, they claim he's #2.

Harkat replied quite reasonably that he can't be sure he didn't come across Zubaydah when he was working with Afghanistan refugees in Pakistan, any more than he can be sure he didn't meet him while working for Petro Canada, but he definitely never trained with.........and here's an interesting thing: Harkat had to mentally search for the word "Qaeda", which comes so easily to the lips of Mansbridge, and one would think ought to come even more easily to a Qaeda operative.

You might want to read this article about Abu Zubaydah to find out what happened to him, and why he might have been willing to say anything his interrogators wanted to hear.

Harkat didn't blink much when asked if he had ever visited Afghanistan while working in Pakistan. He uttered a straight out "no". CSIS merely assumed he visited Afghanistan because he worked only three or four hours from the border. Harkat made a good point when he said that if CSIS has evidence he was in Afghanistan, then why not show it?

Harkat especially did not blink too much as he answered Mansbridge in the negative when asked if he knew another Qaeda suspect - who I couldn't recall, but his name sounded like Ahmed Bassan or Bassam. Whoever this guy is, it seems almost irresponsible of Mansbridge to have tossed him in and to have dwelt on him at some length since, to my knowledge, there's been no prior suggestion that Harkat was in any way involved with him. Mansbridge should have made it clear that this was only to satisfy his own curiosity, and not part of the Security Certificate information.

There weren't too many blinks when Harkat was asked why he came to Canada. Why wouldn't he want to come to Canada? In his own words, "Everybody knows Canada." For all its good stuff - its decency, its fairness and its human rights record. It's a place that young men, raised in chaotic surroundings with no hope of a future, can dream of escaping to for nothing more than to find work, a girl, a home, a life.

For such a dream one might even go to some trouble to buy a fake passport.

And now we've reached the point where Harkat started to blink a bit more than usual. Not when he flatly admits he bought the passport, but when he's explaining the details of how it all came about. He appears not be telling everything, or has some feelings of guilt. Maybe he just doesn't want to get somebody else in trouble, so he glosses over some part of it?

That's some fancy Al Qaeda outfit he belongs to if he had to buy his own passport. He'd have done better snitching for the CIA or Mossad instead. They have agents who take care of fraudulent passports - which has been well documented in the courts, and is not just an assumption based on information gained by torturing people who are assumed to be connected with "the bin Laden network".

And why would they dump this particular operative so far from the action, when the alleged 9-11 operatives lawled freely around in Florida condos, right under the noses of the CIA?

All that aside, Harkat is certainly not the only person to fake his way into the land of opportunity. It happens every day. But if blinking is any indication, then some aspect of it bothers his conscience. Would a cold blooded terrorist be bothered by such a minor infraction of the law?

Harkat says he was careful to show both his real and fake passports to the immigration authorities once he landed in Canada, and explain to them why he had to use the fake passport to get here. And he used, and still uses his own, real name. He was allowed to remain in Canada, where he worked hard and lived happily for some years, committing no crimes, getting married and fathering a child, before suddenly being whisked out of all sense of reality on orders from CSIS.

Towards the end of the CBC interview, Mansbridge asked Harkat what he would like to say to Canadians. And Harkat began to answer quite calmly. But Mansbridge interrupted to go on at length about how Canadians believe their law enforcement agencies know what they're doing, and that they have good reason when they put people away.

For a guy who's been surviving on the faith that Canadians believe a person is innocent until proven guilty, this was a hard knock to take. By the time Mansbridge finished he had reduced Harkat to weeping. And then he wanted to know why Harkat had chosen this moment to be emotional after answering so many hard questions.

"Because I'm suffering," was the obvious answer.

Mansbridge then asked, a little more kindly, "Do you think people have an appreciation of what this experience has done to you?"

At this point, a truly self-pitying person might have vented a little. Might have expressed some anger. Might have begun to overstate their case. But Harkat only answered what he knew, and what surely has kept him sane. "Some people do care," he replied.

And his eyes lit up when Mansbridge mentioned his wife Sophie, who has been working tirelessly on his behalf. Sophie herself is another indication that Harkat is no fanatical, fundamentalist Muslim terrorist. She wears no head covering and she brazenly walks about in sleeveless shirts.

"She says she doesn't know a lot about your background except that you had a hard life," said Mansbridge.

Which fact may reveal Harkat's true motive for coming to Canada. He had put the pain of his life in Algeria behind him, so far behind him that he didn't even want to discuss it with his wife. A lot of men have returned from wars in such a state - those who never saw the glory in it. They don't want to talk about it because to do so is reliving it. All they want is to have a normal life.

Which is what Harkat was struggling to achieve from the time he entered Canada until the day he was arrested. As his lawyer said, "He worked 20 hours a day. When did he have the time to be involved in terrorism?"

I've campaigned against the Security Certificate, rather than for any one person, because I believe it's unCanadian. This country has always welcomed refugees with an open heart; this country purports to believe in innocence until guilt is proven, with all evidence disclosed in a court of law.

To deport someone to a country we wouldn't dare to live in ourselves, solely on the basis of what amounts to rumour and innuendo, is to abandon our moral compass, and will only create for us a tragedy in the long run worse than any vague threat of terrorism.

In spite of all my efforts in the abstract, however, I must say I'm very glad to have had a chance to meet Moe Harkat, thanks to the wonders of technology, and I'm happy to be a part of the movement that wants to see him reunited with his Canadian family.

NOTES: October 23, 2004

1. Sophie Lamarche has informed me she and Mohamed Harkat did not have a child together.

2. The person I thought was called "Bassam" by Mansbridge is actually Ahmed Ressam. Unlike Harkat, who worked at several jobs and never committed any crime, Ressam lived off Canadian welfare and was a petty criminal. Unlike Harkat, Ressam's refugee status was rejected by Canadian Immigration, but by that time he had another fake passport and had become "Benni Noris". He reportedly fingered Zubaydah (noted above) - but apparently not Harkat, although he claimed to have trained with a group of Algerians in Afghanistan - as a top bin Laden associate, who in turn allegedly fingered Harkat. But how reliable is Zubaydah's information considering he is a committed, high ranking "Al Qaeda" official?