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COMMENTARY
January 24, 2004
A raid
Let me start this by adding my voice in protest against the appalling and ludicrous RCMP raid on my colleague Juliet O'Neill's home and office Wednesday morning. It is clear enough from the search warrant what they wanted: the name of the person who told Ms O'Neill that the government had made a hash of its case against Maher Arar. I do not have an opinion even a private opinion on whether Mr. Arar in fact had links with Al Qaeda or any other terrorist organization. This is an important question and I don't think journalists are wise to take his self-portrayal at face value: that he is an entirely innocent victim of circumstances. His international movements (to Pakistan and possibly Afghanistan with indirect flight routes through Tunisia) were suspicious and he met under suspicious circumstances with Abdullah Almalki (a fellow computer expert being tracked as a supplier of hardware and software into Talibani Afghanistan and as a link to financing through a Pakistani "charity") as well as with others unnamed. Mr. Arar left Canada suddenly and his family cleared house and moved in both cases immediately after Canadian security searched or interviewed a colleague; then seemed to be returning to Canada only after the dust had settled. This anyway is what one gleans from intelligence sources both here and in the U.S. Mr. Arar's own published account of his treatment at JFK airport in New York did not entirely ring true. His account of his U.S. interrogation was over-the-top (they were unlikely to have been so heavy-handed in the presence of witnesses) and his protestations of innocence were theatrical and clich?d. The fact that the RCMP had six officers waiting to tail Mr. Arar at Montreal airport should the U.S. police let him through suggests they apprehended a danger or at least the possibility he would lead them to evidence. (Though note this was less than half the number the RCMP sent after Juliet O'Neill -- suggesting their highest priority of all is to cover their backsides.) Behind this case as behind so many others is an international investigative problem. From what I know only one Western intelligence agency has ever penetrated any jihadist cell except by the inadequate means of electronic surveillance. The exception is the Israeli Mossad -- but their information frequently proves unreliable. Such tips as other agencies occasionally receive are rarely if ever from within the terrorist networks. Investigators are reduced to tracking suspicious appearances but also prevented by law and culture from explicitly and openly profiling their targets. They have thus to the present day a huge intellectual obstacle to even trying to understand what the enemy is doing. And this situation is unlikely to change until there is another huge terrorist hit on the scale of 9/11/01. Our security forces have to pounce when they can given the potential consequences of missing an opportunity but they seldom have more than circumstantial evidence with which to proceed to criminal charges. In the case of Maher Arar I am almost certain there was no deep conspiracy to deprive this man of his legal and human rights. It was instead a Keystone Kops episode. What seems to have happened is this: the Canadian police eager to show their American counterparts that they were accomplishing something shopped Mr. Arar on the assumption that the Americans had a full file on him. The Americans thought the Canadians had the goods. In the course of discovering this confusion the Americans shipped Mr. Arar to Jordan for transhipment to Syria his original home -- not in order to have him more thoroughly interrogated under torture (for notwithstanding Seymour Hersh's reporting in the New Yorker the U.S. and Syria are not working together) but to wash their hands of what they imagined to be a potentially dangerous operative on whom they could pin no specific charge. As I strongly suspect the Americans didn't trust the Canadians not to lose Mr. Arar and the Canadians didn't really trust themselves either so were happy when the Americans sent him somewhere else. And the fact that Mr. Arar is now back in Canada after whatever happened in Syria (I am sceptical of everything) is the best evidence he is either 1. the innocent victim or an extraordinary series of coincidences or 2. confident the investigation of him was a complete balls-up. None of this looks good after the fact and it is entirely understandable why governments on both sides of the border would want to invoke official secrecy. Now here is what puzzles me. The way things work up here the RCMP would be unlikely to do a stunt like the raid on Ms. O'Neill's home and office without first checking with the Solicitor General. And the Solicitor General wouldn't dare risk such obvious political repercussions without checking with the Prime Minister's Office. The fact that the foreign ministry was made aware of earlier stages in the investigation of Mr. Arar tends to show the degree of political-bureaucratic synergy. Though it is just possible the RCMP were so utterly inept they didn't guess that raiding a journalist would have political ramifications and therefore didn't bother to warn anybody. One way or the other there is a rich field of questions to raise in the House of Commons. At the least we want to know how high did the stupidity rise? Who was the idiot who authorized the raid in defiance of every known convention protecting a free press? David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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