Four tortured Canadians cautionary tale of police power

Winnipeg Free Press Sunday, November 2, 2008
Page: D5
Section: Books
Byline: Reviewed by Doug Smith

Dark Days

The Story of Four Canadians

Tortured in the Name of Fighting Terror

By Kerry Pither

Viking Canada, 460 pages, $35

OPPONENTS of the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan in the weeks after the 9/ 11 attacks often make the case that the terrorist acts were crimes, not declarations of war, and the response should have been organized by police forces and intelligence agencies.

There is considerable merit to this argument: the global war on terror has unleashed war's furies throughout Asia and the Middle East, killing thousands, squandering resources and sowing instability.

Given that police forces and security services lack the firepower of a modern army it would be safe to say that, even if they had not succeeded in capturing the perpetrators of 9/11 and breaking up their networks of operation, the world would be a marginally safer place if we had only let slip the dogs of policing.

However, human-rights activist Kerry Pither's new book about four Canadian citizens of Middle Eastern origin who were detained and tortured in Syrian and Egyptian jails is a stern reminder of the dark, mysterious and, sadly, incompetent forces conjured up when one invokes the police and security services.

Canadians are likely to be most aware of the case of Maher Arar, the young Canadian engineer who was intercepted on a stopover in New York when travelling from Zurich to Montreal, and shipped to Syria, where he was held for a year without charges.

Less well known, but equally disturbing are the stories of Ahmad El Maati, Abdullah Almalki and Muayyed Nureddin.

Each man was a Canadian citizen, each ends up in a Syrian jail (El Maati had the bonus of also doing time in an Egyptian jail) and each was eventually released, shipped back to Canada without ever facing charges in either Syria or Canada.

On their eventual release each claimed to have been tortured, a claim that should not be surprising. Even President George Bush has said the Syrian government's legacy is "torture, oppression, misery and ruin."

An investigator with the judicial inquiry established to examine Arar's case concluded that Arar, along with El Maati and Almalki, was tortured. Similarly, a senior Canadian Consular Affairs employee who worked to bring Arar, El Maati and Almalki back to Canada is convinced that all three are innocent of any crimes. (Neither man commented on Nureddin's case because neither investigated it.)

Canadian police and security services became convinced on limited evidence, sometimes little more than the fact that a person knew someone who was deemed to be suspicious, that these men were connected with terrorist activities.

Pither mounts a strong case it was on the basis of Canadian suspicions that all four men were detained while travelling abroad and ended up in Syrian jails.

It appears that Canadian police and security agencies provided the Syrians with questions that it wished to see asked of the men -- which means that in essence the Canadians provided the scripts for the torture sessions.

This is a bipartisan scandal. The Liberals were in power during this period and failed to ensure that the rights of Canadian citizens were adequately protected. Stephen Harper and his supporters revealed themselves to be confirmed believers in the verdict first, then the trial, school of jurisprudence.

Our current lieutenant-governor, John Harvard, then a Liberal member of Parliament, acquitted himself with honour, taking his own government to task for its complicity in the Arar case. He was, however, one of the few.

Pither helped bring Maher Arar's case before the public, and her book should be read with all the caution that one brings to reading an advocate's brief.

It is, however, a valuable caution at a time when we have made it easier to convict people and provided our police and security services new powers, largely freed from public oversight.

Doug Smith is a Winnipeg writer and editor. His most recent book, Big Death: Funeral Planning in the Age of Corporate Deathcare, was published by Fernwood Publishing.