Maher Arar Bits & Pieces

29/09/06, John Ibbitson, What lesson will Arar teach RCMP?, (Source).
29/09/06, Editorial, How Zaccardelli failed RCMP, Arar and Canada, (Source).
29/09/06, Jeff Sallot, "Mr. Arar, I wish to take this opportunity ...", (Source).
26/09/06, Jeff Sallot, RCMP chief free to testify, Ottawa says, (Source).
26/09/06, Editorial, The Mounties should get off their high horse, (Source).
23/09/06, Edward Greenspon, A point of pride, but some regrets, (Source).
23/09/06, Jeff Sallot & Colin Freeze & Tim Appleby, View from the top of the Mounties, (Source).
21/09/06, Jeff Sallot & Colin Freeze, House apologizes for Arar's treatment, (Source).
21/09/06, Margaret Wente, Arar's blackened name, (Source).
20/09/06, Editorial, Feigned innocence and the torture of Arar, (Source).
19/09/06, Editorial, How Canada failed to protect Maher Arar, (Source).
19/09/06, John Ibbitson, The Arar Report, (Source).
19/09/06, Brian Laghi, O'Connor troubled by need for probe, (Source).
19/09/06, Colin Freeze, Mounties shoulder brunt of blame for missteps, (Source).
19/09/06, Jeff Sallot, How Canada failed citizen Maher Arar, (Source).
19/09/06, 10 Key Players, (Source).
08/11/03, Juliet O'Neill, Canada's Dossier on Maher Arar, (Source).


19/09/06, Editorial, How Canada failed to protect Maher Arar, (Back).

Second-rate police work in the age of terror can result in the deaths of 3,000 people. It can also land an innocent man in a nightmare of torture and degradation. The RCMP's inexcusably shoddy performance on the Maher Arar file set in motion the inexorable chain of events that led Mr. Arar to 10 months and 10 days of imprisonment and torture in a grave-like Syrian jail cell.

Canada's hands are dirty. Not as dirty as they might have been -- Mr. Justice Dennis O'Connor has seen all the evidence and has concluded that neither the RCMP nor any other government agency sought to have Mr. Arar deported to Syria. But dirty all the same, from sloppiness, indifference, butt-covering and defamation.

The Arar tragedy has much to teach Canada, and indeed all Western democracies. This is that rare story deserving of the overused label "Kafkaesque," a story that viscerally reminds us why a civilized justice system always insists on due process, even -- especially -- in times of stress. The reason is to protect and preserve human dignity. And human dignity has a most eloquent spokesman in Maher Arar, now living quietly with his wife and two small children in Kamloops, B.C., a community that has taken him to its heart, on behalf (we wish to think) of all Canadians.

Syria bears the main responsibility for torturing Mr. Arar; the United States bears the secondary responsibility for shipping a Canadian citizen to a known torture state without giving him a chance to make his case before an impartial judge. (Mr. Arar had been changing planes in New York on his way home to Canada from Europe when he was apprehended.) No one should forget that the United States, with no greater regard for law than some backwoods sheriff, flew him out of the country in the middle of the night, after a Sunday hearing that sealed his fate -- a hearing in which he went unrepresented by a lawyer. The U.S. government has never apologized to Mr. Arar or to Canada.

But without the RCMP, the Kafkaesque tale would not have been written. It sent weak, unreliable information to U.S. authorities. Back when the memory of the al-Qaeda attacks of 9/11 was fresh, the RCMP confidently directed the attention of the United States to a man about whom it knew little, other than that he once took a walk in the rain with a man being investigated on suspicion of terror links. It was guilt by association at several removes -- guilt that was presumably confirmed because it was raining. If the sky had been clear, Mr. Arar's Syrian nightmare might have been avoided.

Vigilance against terrorism is crucial; but a high level of professionalism is expected. We must also as a society be vigilant about fear and prejudice in this multicultural land. The social context cannot be shoved aside. Mr. Arar would not have been victimized by the state if he had not been a Muslim man living after Sept. 11, 2001.

Most pressingly, the Arar story, as revealed by Judge O'Connor, tells us we have a deep problem in the RCMP. Sadly, that comes as no surprise. With its interference in the last election campaign, its showy investigation of Ontario cabinet minister Greg Sorbara, its resistance to transparency in the matter of the Ian Bush shooting in British Columbia, its refusal to publicly detail what went wrong in Mayerthorpe, Alta., where four officers were murdered, the RCMP has stumbled from ineptitude to ineptitude.

When Mr. Arar was made to disappear from the world of civilized legal norms, Canada was not innocent -- thanks to the amateurishness of its trusted national police. Canada was complicit when its ambassador to Syria exploited Mr. Arar's imprisonment for supposed security-related information; it made things worse still when unnamed government officials provided leaks to the media aimed at destroying Mr. Arar's name.

Canada's saving grace is that the government of the day called a public, independent inquiry, admirably carried out by Judge O'Connor. Having failed its citizens utterly, this country has tried, at least, to own up to its failings.

The RCMP needs to own up, too. Commissioner Giuliano Zaccardelli should resign -- or be fired.


19/09/06, John Ibbitson, The Arar Report, (Back).

No one, today, should have any confidence in the ability or integrity of the national police force.

Mr. Justice Dennis O'Connor's report on Canadian involvement in Maher Arar's year in hell is a litany of RCMP incompetence and culpability. Consider just one example, buried deep inside the report: After detaining Mr. Arar, based on faulty intelligence provided by the RCMP, U.S. officials asked the Mounties for a list of questions to ask him. At this very moment, an innocent man's entire future hung in the balance.

Within an hour, the RCMP had faxed off a list, along with some facts for the Americans to consider. For example, perhaps they would like to know that on the day of the Sept. 11 attacks, this Syrian-Canadian al-Qaeda suspect had been in Washington. Any investigator would take note of that suspicious fact. Twelve days later, the Americans dispatched Mr. Arar to the tender mercies of Syrian military intelligence.

Except Mr. Arar wasn't in Washington on Sept. 11. He was in San Diego.

The Commission of Inquiry into the Actions of Canadian Officials in Relation to Maher Arar will not satisfy conspiracy theorists who believe our security services actively colluded to have a Canadian citizen sent to Syria to be tortured. The RCMP, Judge O'Conner concludes, is not corrupt. It was, however, in this case astonishingly irresponsible, and when the horrible consequences of the irresponsibility became clear, the police hid their misdeeds from the government and the public. For this, RCMP Commissioner Giuliano Zaccardelli should resign.

The O'Connor report makes for grim reading. Because Mr. Arar had been seen in the company of men who were under suspicion, the RCMP decided he was part of a group of Ottawa-based Islamic extremists with links to al-Qaeda. They even included him in a flow chart, entitled Bin Laden's Associates: The al-Qaeda Organization in Ottawa. But, as the commission has emphatically concluded, Mr. Arar was innocent of the suspicions the Mounties harboured against him.

No judge would have given the police a search warrant or a wiretap based on the wisps of evidence that investigators managed to accumulate implicating Mr. Arar. But it didn't stop them from shipping everything they knew, or thought they knew, to U.S. intelligence, without caveats, qualifications or simple warnings that the enclosed contained nothing more than mere speculation. Not only was this a clear violation of established procedures, much of what the police sent was plain wrong -- especially the false claim that Mr. Arar had decamped "suddenly" to Tunisia to avoid police questioning. It was on the basis of this garbage intelligence, Judge O'Connor concluded, that the Americans decided to deport Mr. Arar.

Although Judge O'Connor said the RCMP had no idea the Americans planned to send Mr. Arar to Syria, they did nothing to correct the false impression they had created once he was there. The Mounties, along with CSIS, refused to co-operate with Foreign Affairs in sending a letter to the Syrians saying there was no evidence Mr. Arar belonged to al-Qaeda.

And when, after more than 10 months of imprisonment in conditions that would reduce most of us to raving insanity, Mr. Arar was finally released and the Liberal government asked for an explanation of events from the RCMP, the force didn't reveal that it had dumped huge amounts of false information into the Americans' laps, which had led them to deport a Canadian citizen to one of the crueller places on Earth.

Judge O'Connor makes many sensible recommendations to improve RCMP procedures and accountability. But in the end, this travesty occurred because procedures were not followed, training was inadequate, and accountability was replaced with passing the buck.

For this, the commissioner, whatever his personal knowledge of the events, must accept responsibility. The RCMP has lost our trust. It all happened on his watch. He is not the man to restore it.

jibbitson@globeandmail.com


19/09/06, Brian Laghi, O'Connor troubled by need for probe, (Back).

The judge who absolved Maher Arar of any suspicion of terrorist activity says he's troubled that a public inquiry had to be called to demonstrate that Mr. Arar suffered torture.

"The disturbing part of all of this is that it took a public inquiry to set the record straight," Mr. Justice Dennis O'Connor said.

"Getting it right in the first place should not have been difficult and it should not have been a problem to keep the record accurate."

In his report, Judge O'Connor argued it's likely that many government officials believed Mr. Arar had not been tortured while in Syria and had voluntarily admitted links to terrorist activities.

"It is instructive and disturbing to trace how this misunderstanding grew," he said, noting that then-foreign-affairs minister Bill Graham was among those who, at one point, reported that Mr. Arar had confirmed he had not been tortured. The judge noted that Mr. Graham had been improperly briefed.

Even after Mr. Arar was released, and spoke publicly of being hit with cables and interrogated to the point of exhaustion, unnamed government sources continued to leak stories that Mr. Arar was not a "virgin" and that he had admitted to having terrorist links. In one instance, Mr. Arar told a Canadian consular official that he had been beaten, something that the consular official later forgot.

For his part, Mr. Arar said yesterday that Canadians need to know more about the prison where he was tortured and where three other Canadian Muslim men had experienced the same treatment.

"I was tortured in that prison," Mr. Arar said in his response yesterday to the report. "And this is now part of the Canadian experience."

Judge O'Connor spent a full chapter of his report chronicling the physical, psychological and economic trauma Mr. Arar experienced because of the torture. For example, Mr. Arar experienced hip pain likely connected with sleeping in a cramped cell for more than 10 months and complained of pain around his face and head, shoulders and neck. "Bad dreams continue to disrupt Mr. Arar's sleep, and he suffers from stress and headaches," Judge O'Connor wrote.

The atrocious conditions in which Mr. Arar was detained included vermin and little light. After several days of interrogation, which included beatings with a cable and threats with electric shock, Mr. Arar was in so much pain that he eventually agreed with accusers to having trained in Afghanistan.


19/09/06, Colin Freeze, Mounties shoulder brunt of blame for missteps, (Back).

Judge decries sloppy information sharing, but rejects allegations of racial profiling.

OTTAWA -- The RCMP must bear the brunt of blame for the Maher Arar affair.

A judicial commission ruled yesterday that even though the Mounties may never have intended for an innocent man to be jailed and tortured, loose lips and sloppy information-sharing practices of rookie counterterrorism investigators were crucial in the U.S. decision to send Mr. Arar to Syria.

"The RCMP provided American authorities with information about Mr. Arar that was inaccurate, portrayed him in a negative fashion and overstated his importance in the RCMP investigation," Mr. Justice Dennis O'Connor says in his 822-page report. He says that when RCMP officers gave information to the United States, it increased "the risk that the information would be used for the purposes of which the RCMP would not approve, such as sending Mr. Arar to Syria."

Mr. Arar suffered that fate after being arrested in the United States in 2002. The reasons are complex and the commission did not suggest there was a single official at fault for the Syrian-Canadian's yearlong detention in the Middle East. But what probably ruined his reputation was a 2001 request by the Mounties that the U.S. place Mr. Arar on a terrorist lookout list.

"The RCMP described Mr. Arar and [his wife Dr. Monia Mazigh] as 'Islamic extremist individuals suspected of being linked to the al-Qaeda terrorist movement.' There was no basis for this description," Judge O'Connor says in his report. He notes the RCMP included Mr. Arar in a diagram titled Bin Laden's Associates: The al-Qaeda Organization in Ottawa that they presented to U.S. authorities, just months before his arrest in New York.

RCMP officials were not commenting on the report yesterday.

Finding that Mr. Arar was never a member of al-Qaeda or a terrorist threat to Canada, Judge O'Connor says that the Syrian-born engineer was the victim of snowballing suspicion from misinformation being passed from agency to agency.

This is consistent with the Mr. Arar's long-standing allegations of Canadian complicity in his ordeal.

Judge O'Connor rejected Mr. Arar's allegations of racial profiling and of a wide-ranging Canadian-government conspiracy to send him to Syria. The judge says many security agencies involved acted, at least initially, in "good faith."

The probe traced back to 1990s-era investigations of figures known as "Arab Afghans" -- naturalized Canadians who had spent time in Afghanistan, and who were feared to sympathize with al-Qaeda.

The Canadian Security Intelligence Service -- which was not found to have any role in Mr. Arar's arrest -- had been quietly gathering information on some of these suspects for years. But after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, CSIS was overwhelmed, and passed much of its information to the RCMP.

Judge O'Connor found that the 20-member Ottawa team, known as Project A-O Canada, placed a "first-rate" team of financial investigators on the case. But the squad was understaffed, under-resourced, and out of its depth.

"The officers ... had little training or experience in investigations concerning national security and terrorism," the judge writes.

Shortly after the probe began, the RCMP spotted Mr. Arar talking to one of the lead Ottawa suspects outside a restaurant. Judge O'Connor did not begrudge the subsequent RCMP attempts to check out Mr. Arar, but he says what followed was a multitude of errors.

Somehow, while knowledgeable RCMP officers were internally describing Mr. Arar as a possible "person of interest" who might be compelled to testify against others, other Mounties were labelling Mr. Arar a major suspect in his own right. Disregarding standard information-sharing procedures, Project A-O Canada investigators took the unprecedented step of dumping raw intelligence -- including an entire database -- on the laps of the U.S. counterterrorism agents, without placing restrictions on its use.

Soon after, Mr. Arar was arrested by U.S. border agents while transiting through a New York city airport in 2002. He was deemed an al-Qaeda operative and sent to Syria, where he was tortured.

"Lack of training and experience . . . and the lack of oversight by senior officers in the RCMP likely combined to create a situation was grossly unfair to Mr. Arar," Judge O'Connor found. "The offensive language in the lookout request led to serious and unacceptable risk for Mr. Arar in the United States."


19/09/06, Jeff Sallot, How Canada failed citizen Maher Arar, (Back).

OTTAWA — Maher Arar is an innocent victim of inaccurate RCMP intelligence reports and deliberate smears by Canadian officials, a commission of inquiry says in a report that also recommends the federal government pay him compensation.

Mr. Arar, a Canadian citizen who was deported from the United States to Syria -- where he was tortured as a terrorist suspect -- has suffered "devastating" mental and economic consequences as a result of his ordeal, Mr. Justice Dennis O'Connor says in a report released yesterday.

"I am able to say categorically that there is no evidence to indicate that Mr. Arar has committed any offence or that his activities constitute a threat to the security of Canada," the judge says.

Mr. Arar, 36, said he had tears in his eyes when he first saw those words jumping out from the report.

The judge, he said, "has cleared my name and restored my reputation."

The report says there is no doubt Mr. Arar was tortured in a Syrian military intelligence prison soon after his deportation from the United States in 2002.

Judge O'Connor said he wants to personally thank Mr. Arar for his patience and co-operation during the long inquiry process. "I take my hat off to him."

The 822-page report, which has been censored because of government concerns about national security, also calls for the further independent investigation of the cases of three other Canadian Muslim men -- Abdullah Almalki, Ahmad El Maati and Muyyed Nurredin -- who were imprisoned in the Middle East under similar circumstances.

They also say they were tortured.

The RCMP should never share intelligence reports with other countries without written conditions about how that information is used, Judge O'Connor writes.

He also says Canadian government information should never be provided to a foreign country if there is a risk of it being used to torture people.

The report, the result of more than two years of hearings, some of them secret, clears federal officials of any direct involvement in the U.S. government's decision to deport Mr. Arar to the Middle East. Mr. Arar was arrested at Kennedy Airport in New York while travelling on his Canadian passport.

Judge O'Connor blasts the RCMP for providing U.S. authorities with inaccurate intelligence that resulted in Mr. Arar, and his wife Monia Mazigh, being put on a border watch list as dangerous al-Qaeda terrorist suspects.

RCMP antiterrorism investigators violated the force's existing policy when they gave U.S. officials three CD-ROM discs with raw intelligence that had not been analyzed for accuracy.

The Mounties, the report continues, should have flagged the material as being from unproven sources and should have taken precautions to make sure it was not used in U.S. deportation proceedings.

Senior RCMP officers failed to properly supervise the newly created antiterrorism unit to make sure policies were being enforced.

Even after Mr. Arar's return to Canada, the RCMP was causing problems for Mr. Arar. The Mounties, the report says, misled the Privy Council Office at an important meeting, by failing to disclose "certain key facts that could have reflected adversely on the force."

The details of the meeting and who specifically from the RCMP was responsible are not included in the public version of the O'Connor report.

Paul Cavalluzzo, the commission's chief lawyer, declined to say how much material was cut from the public version of the report. But, he said, the commission disagrees with the government on some of its national-security claims and may have to fight it out in the federal courts for the eventual release of evidence that Judge O'Connor believes should be known by the public.

Some of that censored information could be relevant to the cases of the three other Muslim men.

Mr. Cavalluzzo said the commission is not recommending another full-blown inquiry. But the other cases should be examined by an independent fact-finder.

The minority Conservative government, which inherited the Arar file from the Liberals, was cautious and non-committal in its first reaction to Judge O'Connor's report.

What happened to Mr. Arar was "very regrettable," Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day said.

The government will study the report before responding in detail, Mr. Day said, delaying further discussion of compensation or possible disciplinary action against the Mounties.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper said later in the day that he will bring in new measures within weeks to respond to the recommendations.

The Canadian Security Intelligence Service, which reports to Mr. Day, escapes relatively unscathed. CSIS did not share intelligence about Mr. Arar with the Americans.

U.S. officials refused to testify at the Canadian inquiry. But the report says it "is very likely" they relied on the faulty RCMP intelligence when they decided to send Mr. Arar to Syria, the country of his birth, rather than home to Canada.

"The RCMP provided American authorities with information about Mr. Arar which was inaccurate, portrayed him in an unfair fashion and overstated his importance to the investigation," the report says, referring to the Mountie probe of possible al-Qaeda terrorist activities in Ottawa after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

The RCMP asked the Americans to put Mr. Arar and Dr. Mazigh on a watch list as "Islamic extremist individuals suspected of being linked to the al-Qaeda terrorist movement," the report says.

"The RCMP had no basis for this description, which had the potential to create serious consequences for Mr. Arar in light of American attitudes and practices" at that time, the report says.

The Mounties also erroneously told the Americans Mr. Arar was in the Washington area on Sept. 11, 2001, when, in fact, he was in San Diego.

Mr. Arar was the victim of a smear by Canadian government sources even after his return to Canada after a year in Damascus prisons.

"Canadian officials leaked confidential and sometimes inaccurate information about the case to the media for the purpose of damaging Mr. Arar's reputation or protecting their self-interest or government interests," the report says.

Judge O'Connor referred to "leaks" to the Ottawa Citizen newspaper and CTV News that Mr. Arar had admitted training at an al-Qaeda terrorist camp in Afghanistan, a country he's never seen.

The "confession" was obtained by Syrian torturers.

Judge O'Connor says that the Mounties went to extraordinary lengths to investigate Mr. Arar, even after his return to Canada. "They found nothing."

The Arar case cast a shadow over diplomatic relations with Washington until former prime minister Paul Martin obtained assurances from the White House that this would never happen again. The Liberals also set up the Arar inquiry.

Judge O'Connor, the Associate Chief Justice of Ontario, does not recommend a specific dollar sum for compensation. Mr. Arar is suing Ottawa.

Judge O'Connor suggests that the Canadian government and Mr. Arar try to negotiate compensation and Ottawa should take into consideration the Arar family's suffering.

"Psychologically, Mr. Arar's experiences in Syria were devastating," the report says. Economically, "Mr. Arar went from being a middle-class engineer to having to rely on social assistance to help feed, clothe and house his family."

Mr. Arar said that after his return to Canada there were several times when he was ready to throw in the towel.

But the strength of his wife kept him going in a search for justice.

"My life has been ruined," he said of the smears by government officials and other parts of his ordeal.

"I wanted the people responsible for what happened to me to be held accountable. Justice requires no less. I call on the government of Canada to accept the findings of this report and hold people accountable," Mr. Arar told reporters. He declined to name names, but said the government has the report and can see who in the RCMP needs to be disciplined.

Asked if Canadians should have confidence in the Mounties, Mr. Arar paused for several seconds then said he's looking forward to the second part of Judge O'Connor's report -- this winter -- dealing with recommendations for civilian oversight of the federal police force.

The Arar family recently moved from Ottawa to Kamloops, B.C., where Dr. Mazigh received a university teaching appointment.

THE FINDINGS OF THE COMMISSION OF INQUIRY BY MR. JUSTICE DENNIS O'CONNOR

1. RCMP GAVE THE U.S. WRONG INFORMATION ABOUT TERRORIST LEANINGS

'One aspect of the Canadian and American lookout requests that is highly alarming is the most unfair way in which Project A-O Canada described Mr. Arar . . . The requests indicated [he was] part of a group of Islamic extremist individuals suspected of being linked to the Al Qaeda terrorist movement, a description that was inaccurate, without any basis and potentially extremely inflammatory in the United States in the fall of 2001. The provision of this inaccurate information, particularly without a caveat, at what turned out to be a critically important time in Mr. Arar's ordeal was unfortunate, to put it mildly, and totally unacceptable.'

2. SENIOR RCMP OFFICIALS FAILED TO MONITOR INEXPERIENCED OFFICERS

'It was incumbent upon the RCMP and its senior officers to ensure that Project A-O Canada received clear and accurate direction with regard to how information was to be shared and to exercise sufficient oversight to rectify any unacceptable practices. I observe that, given that Project A-O Canada had few officers with experience or training in national security investigations, I would have expected CID [Criminal Investigations Division] to exercise more, rather than less oversight. That did not happen.'

3. OFFICIALS SHOULD HAVE KNOWN ARAR WAS BEING TORTURED

'Leo Martel, the Canadian consul in Damascus, visited Mr. Arar the next day in an office at the Palestine Branch. He did not observe any physical signs of torture on Mr. Arar and indicated in his report of the meeting that Mr. Arar had appeared healthy but added, "of course it is difficult to assess." 'There were actually many indications that all was not well. . . . I am satisfied that the October 23 consular visit should have alerted Canadian officials to the likelihood that Mr. Arar had been tortured when interrogated while held incommunicado by the SMI [Syrian Military Intelligence]. Some Canadian officials did operate under the working assumption that Mr. Arar had been tortured. Others, including the Ambassador, were not prepared to go that far based on the information available. In my view, after the first consular visit, all Canadian officials dealing with Mr. Arar in any way should have proceeded on the assumption that he had been tortured during the initial stages of his imprisonment and, equally of importance, that the "statement" he had made to the SMI had been the product of that torture.'

4. DEPARTMENTS FAILED TO CO-OPERATE TO SECURE ARAR'S EARLY RELEASE

'I conclude that the RCMP and CSIS should have supported DFAIT's [department of foreign affairs] efforts to obtain a "one voice" letter, because of a number of factors. Had the RCMP and CSIS put their minds to the task and approached it with a view to offering real support, they could have done so. In the end, proposing a letter that inaccurately said that Mr. Arar was a subject of a national security investigation was not helpful.'

5. OFFICIALS SHOULD HAVE BELIEVED ARAR HAD BEEN TORTURED

'After Mr. Arar's return, some officials in the Canadian government did not believe Mr. Arar's public statements that he had been beaten or tortured. As it turns out, their conclusions were wrong. Mr. Arar had indeed been beaten and physically tortured during the first two weeks of his imprisonment in Syria. Inaccurate memoranda and other written communications such as those I refer to above can contribute to and support false conclusions.'

6. OFFICIALS LEAKED DAMAGING INFORMATION TO THE MEDIA

'When Mr. Arar returned to Canada, his torment did not end, as some government officials took it upon themselves to leak information to the media, much of which was unfair to Mr. Arar and damaging to his reputation. . . . At least one leak sought to downplay the mistreatment and torture Mr. Arar had suffered in Syria. Quite predictably, the leaks had a devastating effect on Mr. Arar's reputation and on him personally. . . . Mr. Arar, an educated, hard-working engineer,has had great difficulty finding employment. It seems likely that the smear of his reputation by the leakors has taken its toll.'

7. RCMP FAILED TO INFORM THE GOVERNMENT PROPERLY

'On November 14, the RCMP produced a timeline that omitted several significant facts . . . These omissions were serious and the effect of the timeline was to downplay the potential problems with the RCMP investigation. In the circumstances that existed in November, 2003, it was very important that the RCMP accurately brief the government on what had occurred, to enable the government to make an informed decision on how to proceed.'


19/09/06, 10 Key Players, (Back).

What Judge O'Connor said about various individuals involved in the Arar affair

MICHEL CABANA

The judge found that the track record of this RCMP inspector went awry after he became project leader for an Ottawa counterterrorism squad. "Project A-O Canada provided information to American agencies in a manner that contravened RCMP policies requiring that information be screened for relevance, reliability and personal information."

FRANCO PILLARELLA

Canada's ambassador in Syria long expressed doubts that the Syrians had tortured Mr. Arar. "The Ambassador seemed strangely reluctant to conclude that it was even likely that Mr. Arar had been abused or tortured. ...in an email message to Ottawa reporting on the proposed meeting with Mr. Arar, Ambassador Pillarella made the troubling comment that the meeting 'should help us rebut the recent changes of torture.'"

GARRY LOEPPKY

The former RCMP deputy commissioner resisted attempts by Foreign Affairs to have the Mounties sign off on a letter to Syria saying Mr. Arar was not suspected of terrorist activity in Canada. "Deputy Commissioner Loeppky indicated that the RCMP did not believe it would be advisable" for then foreign affairs minister Bill Graham to send it.

LEO MARTEL

The Canadian consul in Syria accompanied Mr. Arar back to Canada after he was released, but neglected to report the freed prisoner's complaints of torture. "Beginning in early November 2003, Mr. Martel prepared a number of written communications in which he indicated that Mr. Arar had told him on the trip home that he had not been beaten while in Syrian detention. They were incorrect."

GAR PARDY

The former director-general of DFAIT consular affairs passed along consular reports on Mr. Arar to Canadian colleagues that ended up back in the hands of the Mounties. "I am satisfied that Mr. Pardy was acting in good faith in authorizing the provision of the consular reports to the RCMP and that he believed he had the necessary authority to do so."

BILL GRAHAM

Right before Mr. Arar's release, the former foreign affairs minister told reporters that the prisoners has not been tortured. "Minister Graham was not given the full picture about the likelihood of torture. That was unfortunate as he was the senior Canadian official responsible for seeking Mr. Arar's release. The perception that Mr. Arar had not been tortured were wrong and no doubt the Minister's statements planted the seeds of misperception in the minds of some."

RICK FLEWELLING

When U.S. agencies advised the RCMP that Mr. Arar was taken into U.S. custody, officers such as Corporal Flewelling were blindsided by the subsequent "extraordinary rendition" to Syria. "Corporal Flewelling responded [to the FBI] that there was insufficient evidence to charge Mr. Arar in Canada..."

WARD ELCOCK

The former chief of CSIS has long insisted that his agency never conspired to send Mr. Arar to Syria. The judge now says he was right. "I am satisfied that CSIS did not participate or acquiesce in the American decisions to detain Mr. Arar and send him to Syria. Further CSIS did not provided any information about Mr. Arar either before or during Mr. Arar's detention in New York."

JACK HOOPER

This top CSIS official had reservations about Mr. Arar's eventual return to Canada. "Although Jack Hooper apparently did not attempt to interfere with a proposed letter to be signed by the Foreign Affairs Minister, CSIS joined with the RCMP on June 18 in proposing inaccurate language" suggesting Mr. Arar was the subject of a national security probe.

MAHER ARAR

The Syrian-Canadian engineer deported by the U.S. in 2002 as an alleged al-Qaeda suspect was cleared in the judge's report. "I am able to say categorically that there is no evidence to indicate Mr. Arar has committed any offence or that his activities constitute a threat to the national security of Canada."


20/09/06, Editorial, Feigned innocence and the torture of Arar, (Back).

While an innocent Canadian was detained and tortured in a Syrian jail, Canada played innocent. That pretended innocence prolonged the torture of Maher Arar.

Willfully and recklessly innocent -- that was Canada's Foreign Affairs Department in the Arar affair. Its ambassador in Syria, Franco Pillarella, held Maher Arar's fate in his hands. He should have known that there was a strong likelihood Mr. Arar was tortured, Mr. Justice Dennis O'Connor concluded in his inquiry into the Arar affair. But he did not face up to that fact.

Nearly as damaging was this country's true, and reprehensible, innocence. Canada's consulate in New York was woefully naive when Mr. Arar was still in New York, under the control of the U.S. government, and might have been spared deportation to Syria. Despite several warnings that this deportation was coming, the consulate refused to believe the United States would do such a thing. In the post-9/11 world, this was crushing, albeit sincere, naiveté.

The result of all this innocence was torture that went on and on. In his report to this country's independent inquiry into the Arar affair, legal scholar Stephen Toope made clear that Mr. Arar suffered two types of torture that met the United Nations definition under its Convention on Torture: first, beatings on his hands with thick steel cables, carried out only in his early days in detention; and second, the ongoing torture of being confined to a cell the size of a grave for 10 months. It may have been in Canada's power to stop that second form of torture that much sooner.

Syrian torture of prisoners was no secret. The U.S. State Department had reported that Syria's prisoners sometimes had their fingernails pulled out, objects forced into their rectum, or their bodies forced into a wheel's frame so exposed body parts could be whipped. Mr. Pillarella, however, wrote a secret memo on Oct. 22, 2002, just one day after the Syrians informed him that they were holding Mr. Arar: "Arar has apparently admitted that he has connections with terrorist organizations." Two weeks later, Mr. Pillarella sent back to Ottawa a statement from the Syrians on what they had gleaned in their interrogation of Mr. Arar -- an apparent confession of terrorism training in Afghanistan highly damaging to the Canadian's interests. Mr. Pillarella sent no warnings that the purported confession might have emerged under torture, although Judge O'Connor said there were plenty of warning signals by then that torture was occurring. No one at Foreign Affairs in Ottawa assessed the reliability of the confession, and it was distributed, without any caveats about torture, to the RCMP and CSIS. While neither agency had uncovered anything damaging about Mr. Arar, both would obstinately and self-servingly refuse to co-operate in a letter asking for Mr. Arar's release. (Mr. Arar has since said he signed the Syrian statement under torture. That Syrian statement has been totally discounted by Judge O'Connor.)

Somewhere between the willfully blind and the naive stands the innocent foreign affairs minister, Bill Graham (now in opposition), whose apparently sincere efforts to free Mr. Arar were undermined, not only by Canada's security establishment but by his own department's diplomats.

Consider Mr. Graham's genuine effort on Jan. 16, 2003, after a delay of several months, to contact his Syrian counterpart by telephone to ask for Mr. Arar's release. One day earlier -- a coincidence? -- Mr. Pillarella gave an embassy official a letter to give to Syrian intelligence. This letter contained a list of questions from the RCMP to be put to another Canadian in another Syrian cell, Abdullah Almalki. Some of the questions involved Mr. Arar. No wonder Mr. Graham's plea did not budge the Syrians.

Through its innocence, both real and willful, Canada gave the United States and Syria what both wanted: a long time to detain Mr. Arar.


21/09/06, Margaret Wente, Arar's blackened name, (Back).

By the summer of 2003, public unease over the case of Maher Arar was steadily growing into outrage. How could our government have allowed a Canadian citizen to be sent off to the hellhole of a Syrian jail?

But not everyone was convinced that Mr. Arar was blameless. Many people thought there was more to the story than met the eye -- that Mr. Arar did, in fact, have terrorist connections that, for national security reasons, hadn't come to light. This skepticism found lots of confirmation -- in the press.

Amid mounting evidence that the government, and especially the RCMP, had botched the case, certain senior officials were desperate to cover their behinds. So they deliberately spread stories that painted Mr. Arar as a guilty man.

On the whole, the media were quite sympathetic to Mr. Arar. But that fall, the Ottawa Citizen, the Toronto Star, The Globe and Mail, the CBC, and CTV all ran stories with allegations from unnamed government officials that he was tainted. In one, he was described as "a very bad guy" who had received military training at an al-Qaeda base. In another, a source was quoted as saying he was "not a virgin." In other stories, Mr. Arar was said to have divulged crucial information to the Syrians about the al-Qaeda network in Canada. The Globe ran with a story in which unnamed officials said that Mr. Arar was "roughed up" -- but not physically tortured -- in Syria.

We now know that none of this is true -- and that the "crucial" information he coughed up was extracted under torture. In an emotional press conference after he returned to Canada, he described how Syrian interrogators whipped him with the frayed end of a thick electric cable. "They hit me with it everywhere on my body," he said. "I was terrified, and I did not want to be tortured. I would say anything to avoid torture."

Mr. Arar's moving statement poured fuel on the demands for an inquiry. Then, four days later, came the most damaging story of all -- a Page 1 piece in the Citizen headlined "Canada's dossier on Maher Arar: The existence of a group of Ottawa men with alleged ties to al-Qaeda is at the root of why the government opposes an inquiry into the case." The story, by Juliet O'Neill, contained a wad of confidential information. "It is the existence of a suspected Ottawa-based al-Qaeda 'cell' and what its members were believed to be up to, that a security source cites as the root of why the Canadian government is so fiercely opposed to a public inquiry," she wrote.

The material was clearly leaked in order to further blacken Mr. Arar's name. And the story kicked off one of the more bizarre chapters in Canadian media history. The higher-ups were appalled that such sensitive material had been leaked, and probably worried that there was more to come. And so the RCMP launched a criminal investigation into Ms. O'Neill -- and also itself -- on the grounds of violating state security.

The RCMP's conduct of the investigation only confirms its impressive record of incompetence. It mounted a raid on Ms. O'Neill's house, seized her computer, and rifled through her underwear. Today, the case is bogged down in the courts with no end in sight. No charges have yet been laid against anyone. But Ms. O'Neill has become the latest poster person for the rights of a free and fearless press -- even though she was a conduit in the smear campaign.

In his devastating report on the case, Mr. Justice Dennis O'Connor spells out the media's contribution to Mr. Arar's pain. "When Mr. Arar returned to Canada, his torment did not end," he writes. "The impact on an individual's reputation of being called a terrorist in the national media is severe."

"The media are too willing to be used," says Christopher Waddell, associate director at Carleton University's school of journalism. He thinks it's past time for a debate on the widespread use of anonymous sources, whose motives may be anything but pure. "It's time to hold these people accountable."

The day after Mr. Arar's press conference in 2003, The Globe's Hugh Winsor wrote: "The media is equally complicit for printing or broadcasting this unverified spin." He was right. And he still is.


21/09/06, Jeff Sallot & Colin Freeze, House apologizes for Arar's treatment, (Back).

Motion passes unanimously in Commons; names removed from terrorism watch list.

OTTAWA , TORONTO -- A packed House of Commons apologized unanimously yesterday to Maher Arar for Canadian involvement in his deportation from the United States and torture in Syria.

In a related development, the government said it has taken the names of Mr. Arar, his wife, Monia Mazigh, and their two small children off a border-watch list that is used to track terrorist suspects.

Amid sustained cheers and applause, MPs approved on a voice vote a Bloc Québécois motion that said: "It is the opinion of this House that apologies should be extended to Maher Arar for the treatment he received."

Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day and other Conservatives joined in to support the motion.

The vote came midafternoon with most MPs present. Prime Minister Stephen Harper was in New York for meetings at the United Nations.

The motion is not legally binding in the same way a bill to pay compensation would be. But the minority Conservative government has said it is in talks with Mr. Arar's lawyer to reach a financial settlement for his ordeal.

Without a doubt, Mr. Arar "suffered a serious injustice," said Conservative MP Jason Kenney, Mr. Harper's parliamentary secretary and spokesman when the Prime Minister is away from the House. "We want to come to an honourable conclusion with him."

"It is very emotional for me," Mr. Arar said when he heard the news of the House motion. "I am very grateful to the MPs who passed this motion."

Mr. Arar said he still needs an apology from Mr. Harper on behalf of the government.

He also appealed to the Prime Minister to lodge an official protest with the U.S. government for deporting him to Syria in 2002. Mr. Harper is expected to meet with senior U.S. officials while he is in New York.

A commission of inquiry exonerated Mr. Arar on Monday and said that Ottawa should formally protest to the United States and Syria for Mr. Arar's treatment.

Mr. Justice Dennis O'Connor, who headed the inquiry, said it is very likely the Americans relied on inaccurate RCMP intelligence reports when they arrested Mr. Arar at New York's Kennedy Airport and deported him in the dead of night to the Middle East as a terrorist suspect.

Judge O'Connor also said the RCMP tried to cover up the extent of its involvement with the U.S. authorities, misleading the Privy Council Office on this point at a time when the government was trying to decide whether to convene an inquiry.

Interim Liberal Leader Bill Graham, who was foreign minister when Mr. Arar was arrested, joined a chorus of opposition MPs who said RCMP Commissioner Giuliano Zaccardelli should be held accountable.

Mr. Graham stopped short of calling for the commissioner's resignation, though several other opposition MPs did say he should be axed.

Mr. Kenney and other government ministers did not try to defend Mr. Zaccardelli. Instead, Mr. Kenney said "we are not going to take precipitous action in regard to personnel" at the RCMP.

Mr. Graham said he accepts responsibility for not pushing hard enough to find out what the RCMP's involvement was in the case at the time the Liberal government was in diplomatic talks with Syria to try to get Mr. Arar released.

Likewise, "Mr. Zaccardelli will have to take his responsibility," Mr. Graham said.

Mr. Zaccardelli, who has been out of the country on police business, has still not made a public statement about the inquiry's findings. And nobody else at the RCMP is talking.

The Arar case has Liberals and Conservatives pointing fingers at each other. The Conservatives say it is a scandal that they inherited after the election and they have to clean up the mess. The Liberals are pointing to statements by Mr. Harper and other Conservatives when they were in opposition castigating the government for trying to defend a "suspected terrorist" who supposedly slipped through a Canadian net only to be caught by Americans.

Judge O'Connor's report contained a major and disturbing surprise, Mr. Arar said in a telephone interview. The report says that not only had the 36-year-old computer engineer been put on a border-watch list, so had his wife and their two young children.

"Why did they do this to my children?" Mr. Arar asked as he wept.

NDP Leader Jack Layton also found it "outrageous" and demanded to know when the names would be removed. "I can report to the House that action has already been taken," Mr. Kenney replied.

The watch list in question is an intelligence data bank maintained by the Canada Border Services Agency.

An agency spokesman said that government officials are reviewing the judge's findings. The CBSA was not prepared to comment whether the agency routinely puts the names of children of suspected security threats into its data base.

Still, a couple of retired Mounties stood up for the RCMP and its embattled commissioner.

"You have to recognize that Justice O'Connor was not critical of the commissioner. He was pointing out institutional failures that need to be addressed," former RCMP chief Norman Inkster said in an interview.

And while certain pundits have suggested that the RCMP has lost its way, Mr. Inkster countered that "to say there is an absence of internal integrity of an entire organization is a huge leap."

He pointed out that the RCMP is a sprawling organization, consisting of 21,000 officers who act as the local police forces for eight provinces and 200 municipalities, and who also strive to protect Canada from international terrorist threats. Problems related to the Arar case, Mr. Inkster pointed out, were found to be mostly limited to a small number of officers who had been thrust into national-security work immediately after 2001.

Mr. Inkster, who headed the RCMP from 1987 to 1994, said the judge's recommendations will be helpful, and that Mr. Zaccardelli "is a professional" who can be trusted to improve training and ways for police to share information. Regardless, "because people, without thinking, are challenging his integrity and leadership, it will be hurtful," Mr. Inkster said.

Another RCMP official involved in 2001-era terrorism investigations took the mounting criticism with a grain of salt. "The bottom line is we should be proud of our front-line officers: If we put their necks on the chopping block it's the wrong message to send," said Ben Soave, a retired chief superintendent who headed Toronto-area national-security investigations after 2001.

Conceding that the recommendations may prove beneficial, Mr. Soave said that the RCMP, just like many organizations after 9/11, faced incredible pressure and a steep learning curve in the past five years. Many improvements have been made, he said.

Apart from the findings, Mr. Soave wondered whether the terrorist organizations might be studying police methods revealed through the public-inquiry process, or whether international law-enforcement partners will continue to trust Canada with secrets.

"All the time the terrorists are getting much more smart and they are bloodthirsty," Mr. Soave said.


08/11/03, Juliet O'Neill, Canada's Dossier on Maher Arar, (Back).

Originally in the Ottawa Citizen

There is said to be a sign in an office at the RCMP that reads like this: "Beware rogue elephants -- The Easter Bunny."

It's a half-joking reference to "rogue elements" of the RCMP that Solicitor General Wayne Easter has said may have passed information about Maher Arar to authorities in the United States, from which he was deported to Syria last year.

The other half of the joke is no joke at all. The RCMP -- not rogue elements, but workaday investigators -- had caught Mr. Arar in their sights while investigating the activities of members of an alleged al-Qaeda logistical support group in Ottawa. RCMP watchers were suspicious when they saw Mr. Arar and their main target, Abdullah Almalki, talking outside in the pouring rain away from eavesdroppers.

It is the existence of that now-disbanded alleged group, most if not all of whose members, including Mr. Almalki, are now in prison abroad, that a security source cites as the root of why the Canadian government is so fiercely opposed to a public inquiry into the case of Mr. Arar.

And it was in defence of their investigative work -- against suggestions that the RCMP and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, had either bungled Mr. Arar's case or, worse, purposefully sent an innocent man to be tortured in Syria --that security officials leaked allegations against him in the weeks leading to his return to Canada.

One of the leaked documents is about what Mr. Arar allegedly told Syrian military intelligence officials during the first few weeks of his incarceration.

It contains minute details of seven months of supposed training at the Khalden camp in Afghanistan by the Mujahadeen in 1993. It alleges he was trained in small arms use and military tactics and names specific instructors. It even contains a code name he is said to have confessed to: Abu Dujan, after a legendary Muslim fighter who was recognized by a red headband that signalled a determination to fight to the death for the prophet Muhammad.

Mr. Arar says he confessed to training in Afghanistan when he was tortured, agreeing to an Afghan camp name at random. He had never been in or near Afghanistan.

The document also tells of a purported trip by Mr. Arar to neighbouring Pakistan while en route to the Mujahadeen camp. It says he went at the behest of Montreal members of a group named the Pakistani Jamaat Tabligh, described as an Islamic missionary organization not know to be involved in acts of violence or terrorism. It said he had been assigned in the early 1990s, while studying at McGill University, to recruit followers for the Jihad.

There was nothing in the document about any terrorist activities in Ottawa or anywhere else. It gave an account of his work record, including his salary at one company, and said his lawyer had told the RCMP he would speak with them when he returned from a trip to Tunisia in January, 2002, but there had been no further contact from the RCMP.

The document said Mr. Arar had told U.S. interrogators in New York City that he had travelled to Pakistan with the Tabligh group, but he denied going to Afghanistan and that he first met Mr. Almalki at a family gathering. He allegedly told the American interrogators that Mr. Almalki approached him and one of his brothers in 1994 or 1995 with a proposition for a joint business venture in the communications/computing field in Ottawa. But the brothers decided against it because conditions in Ottawa were too competitive.

One of Mr. Almalki's brother's had told Mr. Arar in 1998 that Mr. Almaki had worked for an aid organization in Afghanistan. The last time the brother had seen Mr. Almalki was in October, 2001. Mr. Arar later heard from the brother that Mr. Almalki had moved to Malaysia. (Mr. Almalki's family says he was arrested in Syria during a visit from Malaysia. Mr. Arar saw him in prison in Syria and said he had been tortured.)

Mr. Arar is demanding a public inquiry into the role of the RCMP and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) into his deportation. He also wants to know if Canadian officials devised the questions he was asked in the United States and during torture sessions in Syria, says Mr. Arar's spokeswoman, Kerry Pither. She said the questions focused on Afghanistan and his knowledge of Mr. Almalki.

When the RCMP called on Mr. Arar in January, 2002 -- the same month that RCMP executed a search warrant against Mr. Almalki, seizing computers and files and interrogating two of his brothers -- Mr. Arar was out of the country.

He telephoned the RCMP from Tunisia and later agreed to meet them, accompanied by his lawyer. The RCMP never followed up, Mr. Arar says. Mr. Arar had disappeared, says a security source -- a notion Ms. Pither says is outlandish. Mr. Arar was in Canada for the next six months and could have been contacted with a phone call.

When an RCMP investigator knocked on his door a couple of weeks later, he found Mr. Arar and his family were gone. Neighbours said he and his family had held a garage sale, packed and moved. However, Ms. Pither says the RCMP could have contacted Mr. Arar through his lawyer. She did not know whether they had moved at that time.

Eight months later, while returning to Canada from Tunisia, where Mr. Arar's family was on an extended family visit that had begun in June, Mr. Arar was pulled aside at New York's JFK airport, detained and then, under a deportation order citing him as a member of a prohibited terrorist group -- al-Qaeda -- was spirited to Syria, from where he had emigrated when he was 17 years old.

It is the existence of a suspected Ottawa-based al-Qaeda "cell" and what its members were believed to be up to, that a security source cites as the root of why the Canadian government is so fiercely opposed to a public inquiry into the case of Mr. Arar.

Such an inquiry could open a can of worms involving Syrian, American and Canadian investigations into alleged terror plots in Ottawa and alleged shipments of electronic and computer equipment to al-Qaeda terrorists in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Perhaps most difficult for the government, an inquiry would present a dilemma over what to do about suspects who have wound up in prison in their native countries, including Mr. Almalki. If Mr. Arar has caused such an uproar, others may do likewise.

An inquiry might also put the spotlight on allegations of a plot to bomb the U.S. Embassy and on allegations that the plot had been abandoned in favour of apparently easier targets -- on Parliament Hill and elsewhere in the nation's capital.

Right suspect, wrong target was how one source put it when the CanWest News reported last summer on Mr. Almalki's suspected involvement in an alleged U.S. Embassy bombing plot. The RCMP officially denied knowledge of the plot last July, effectively shutting down the story that stemmed from a report in the New Yorker magazine by investigative journalist Seymour Hersh.

The story told of how after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in New York City, the Syrians had emerged as one of the Central Intelligence Agency's most effective intelligence allies in the fight against al-Qaeda, sharing hundreds of dossiers on al-Qaeda cells throughout the Middle East and in Arab exile communities in Europe. Syria had accumulated much of its information, Mr. Hersh wrote, because of al- Qaeda's ties to the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, Islamic terrorists who have been at war with the secular Syrian government for more than two decades.

The contents of seven search warrants issued to the RCMP by an Ontario Court of Justice judge the day before Mr. Almalki's apartment was searched, remain sealed. And most, if not all the targets of the RCMP investigation into the alleged cell are said to be in prison abroad. Only Ahmed Said Khadr, an Egyptian-Canadian, is said to be at large, possibly in Afghanistan.

The Foreign Affairs Department has for months had a list of seven Canadian men with alleged links to terrorism in prison abroad. Until a few weeks ago, that list included Mr. Arar. The seven are among the more than 3,000 Canadians in prison in foreign countries, most of them in the U.S. and most of them on more common criminal charges, such as possession of drugs.

Gar Pardy, the recently retired consular affairs chief from Foreign Affairs, says the RCMP and CSIS persistently opposed Foreign Affairs' efforts to bring Mr. Arar's case to the prime minister for intervention.

"The RCMP and the security people, that's where the division came down," Mr. Pardy said in an interview. "They were saying we have our responsibilities and we don't agree. I think it delayed our efforts to get him out of there to some extent, although I don't think by a heck of a lot quite frankly.


23/09/06, Jeff Sallot & Colin Freeze & Tim Appleby, View from the top of the Mounties, (Back).

Canada's top police officer worked hard to earn his rank from humble roots. But now he's at the centre of the biggest RCMP crisis in decades, and his job is at stake.

[photo, RCMP Commissioner Giuliano Zaccardelli, centre, and Prime Minister Stephen Harper tour the RCMP Depot in Regina last month. (CP/File)]

There are lots of horses but few real Mounties hanging around the Musical Ride stables on weekends when the tour buses in Ottawa stop by. The small museum and equestrian complex includes Mountie mannequins decked out in historic RCMP gear. The walls are adorned with sepia-toned photos and oil paintings of the force's exploits in the Northwest Territories of the 19th century.

A retired Mountie, a salty Newfoundlander with a love of horses, acts as the guide for the tour groups visiting Canada's capital from as far away as Taiwan. On this particular Saturday, the cameras come out as the group moves from the tack room to the stable proper. Some visitors hold their noses because of the smell. But most just smile as they pose next to one of the tall, dark horses.

There is only one active-duty Mountie around, an officer working with his horse in the indoor arena. He is RCMP Commissioner Giuliano Zaccardelli, 59, a bright and ambitious Italian immigrant who grew up in Montreal and went on to became Canada's top cop.

He is now at the centre of the biggest crisis to hit the force since the national police were last enmeshed in security-intelligence investigations three decades ago. A judicial commission of inquiry reported this week that his poorly trained and inexperienced anti-terrorist investigators passed along raw and inaccurate intelligence to the United States that very likely led to Canadian Maher Arar's deportation and torture in Syria as an al-Qaeda suspect. Even worse for Mr. Zaccardelli, the inquiry found the RCMP tried to cover its tracks by misleading senior government officials about the force's early involvement in the Arar case.

How long can Mr. Zaccardelli survive in his job after such a damning report? The minority Conservative government is not going out of its way to defend the Commissioner from opposition calls for his head. And the man himself is staying out of sight.

Last summer, Commissioner Zaccardelli was still riding high and proud for the tourists.

He is the quintessential Mountie, proud and steeped in RCMP lore. In his riding gear he looks ready to lead a horse patrol through a mountain pass in pursuit of the bad guys. But his career path has been decidedly more urban, first as a white-collar crime investigator and then in charge of organized crime.

In fact, Mr. Zaccardelli did not learn to ride until late in his career. He took it up only after he was named commissioner in 2000. He felt it was important for the image of a force that began as a paramilitary horse regiment for its leader to be able to take a salute from the Musical Ride from a saddle rather than the grandstand. He bought fancy tailor-made leather riding boots for $1,064 for such occasions.

In the navy blue business suit he sometimes wears for appearances before a House committee, he's just another pale-faced Ottawa mandarin. But at state events and other formal ceremonies, where he wears his red serge tunic and his service medals, he glows. Politicians and senior officials go out of their way to say hello.

It's important not to underestimate this man's pride, say people who have worked closely with him in government. He comes from proverbially humble immigrant roots and worked his way to the top. He's married, and has no children.

"And there is some sorrow there," a friend said. "He's made the RCMP his entire life. It would be tragic for him to have to leave under a cloud."

Another old friend, retired RCMP superintendent Ben Soave, says he's never met anyone who is so proud of his job: "Anything that tarnishes the image of the force would hurt him tremendously."
There were several possible candidates for the top job six years ago when then prime minister Jean Chrétien was looking for a replacement for Philip Murray, who was retiring. Mr. Murray had been seen as a bit of a pencil-pusher, good with administrative details and excited by managerial theories. His style was to run a decentralized operation, but many in government felt he took that too far, that there was a breakdown in accountability.

Mr. Chrétien was not a big fan of the Mounties, with good reason, say former Liberal government officials who were around at the time. He had seen how relatively low-level investigators ran amok in the Airbus case, leading to a costly legal settlement in former prime minister Brian Mulroney's defamation suit against the government.

Mr. Chrétien blamed the Mounties for security lapses that allowed an intruder to break into 24 Sussex Dr. while he and his wife, Aline, were sleeping. And then at a country fair in Prince Edward Island on a steamy day in mid-August, 2000, a man in a heavy coat got close enough to hit Mr. Chrétien in the face with a cream pie.

Within days, Mr. Chrétien had a series of job candidates out to his cottage in Quebec for informal chats. Mr. Zaccardelli, then the deputy commissioner in charge of the organized-crime branch, charmed the Chrétiens.

"Aline was very impressed with the language skills and the sensibility of Zack," said Canadian organized crime expert Antonio Nicaso, who has heard the commissioner recount the story.

Mr. Zaccardelli and Mrs. Chrétien both speak Italian, his native tongue and her third language.

On Aug. 30, 2000, Mr. Zaccardelli was named Canada's top cop. Mr. Chrétien called his choice for commissioner another "little guy" from Quebec, a scrapper who fought his way up.

Mr. Zaccardelli had arrived.

By most accounts, Mr. Zaccardelli's first year was a success. His force became more cohesive and disciplined; his reputation as a sophisticated manager unscathed. The force's major objectives — organized and white-collar crime — were his specialties. He began devoting a lot of time to building better ties with international police forces.

Then came Sept. 11, 2001. Among the many things that changed after the terrorist attacks in the United States was the mandate of the RCMP. Suddenly, fighting organized crime was no longer the government's top priority. National security was.

After Sept. 11, the Mounties were thrust back in the intelligence game, big time. That's when things began to go wrong. Years before, the RCMP had been stripped of the responsibility of gathering intelligence on national-security matters. After a number of scandals in the 1970s, intelligence gathering was given to the new Canadian Security Intelligence Service.

Intelligence work was like chess. A CSIS agent's job was to gather raw intelligence, analyze it and choose what to pass on to other international agencies and what to pursue at home. Once intelligence was gathered and analyzed, it was passed on to the RCMP to pursue.

But police work was like playing football; its officers like players rushing down the field.

What happened in the Arar case is that the RCMP, the linebackers of law enforcement, handed raw intelligence to the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation without having it checked out by the chess players. The Arar inquiry report strongly suggests that if CSIS and its Garry Kasparovs had been running the case, Mr. Arar would not have spent a year in a tiny and filthy Syrian prison cell.
Commissioner Zaccardelli has always talked of holding Mounties to the highest possible standards. "I see accountability as the cornerstone of both a personal and organizational badge of honour," he once wrote, in an autobiographical speech. That sense of honour, he said, had been shaped by "early life experiences and the values I was called to live by as a small boy from Prezza, Italy."

That village, population 1,200, is located in one of the most sparsely populated regions of Italy. It was occupied by the Germans during the Second World War, and Mr. Zaccardelli has said that, before he was born, his mother fled the village to live in the fields during the Nazi occupation. Many villagers left after the war.

In the 1950s, the Zaccardellis arrived in Canada with little more than their Old World values and all the suitcases they could carry. "Zack," as he is known to colleagues, was 7.

"If I had to name the single most powerful effect being an Italian immigrant to Canada in 1954 has had on me, it would be the impact of watching my parents carve out a new life," he would later say. "They worked hard, so hard. My father put his head down, took whatever jobs there were to be had."

The labourer's son started delivering newspapers when he was 8. During his teens, he worked in restaurants. He always liked the pictures of Canadian police in their uniforms, ones just as red as the uniforms worn by his beloved Montreal Canadiens. By high school, he knew he wanted to be a Mountie.

Having read history and philosophy didn't pay off when he tried to enter Loyola College (now Concordia University). The school's history program rejected him.

"The dean of arts suggested I go down the hall to the commerce department where he said they'll take anyone," Mr. Zaccardelli would recall.

After Loyola, he went to the RCMP training centre in Regina.

Cadet Zaccardelli was an odd duck in the police academy. Very few prospects were not Canadian-born. He was one of only a handful college graduates. His father felt the Mounties would not accept an immigrant. The son believed he would get in, but not necessarily rise in the ranks. "I never thought I'd even make corporal let alone get a commission," he said years later.

But his quiet ambition and commercial expertise enabled him to work in every region of the country. In time, he rose through the ranks.

A few years ago he returned to Prezza as a celebrity. According to an account published in the Canadian Legion Magazine of this 2002 visit, shops and schools closed as the village welcomed Mr. Zaccardelli. A band played the Canadian and Italian national anthems for the joyous occasion. The altar boy who had left a half-century ago had come back as the "Commissioner of the Red Jackets."

"It is this place that shaped you into the person you are today and taught you to read and write, and more importantly the family values and respect of others," the local mayor said upon Commissioner Zaccarelli's return.

His Italian heritage is a big part of his personality, says Liberal MP Maurizio Bevilacqua, an old friend.

Italian criminals could expect far worse treatment from Zack because of where they were from, says another friend, former Toronto police chief Julian Fantino.

And values are a staple of the commissioner's speeches, which he usually writes himself. "At the RCMP, we don't want to only pay lip service to values — we know them, we live them, and when they are violated there are consequences," he has said. "I believe that law enforcement — perhaps more than any other area of public service — has a higher calling to be accountable."

Mr. Zaccardelli added: "We exercise tremendous power, able to deprive individuals of freedom and property. We have no choice but to operate in a transparent, open and accountable manner."

His old friend, Mr. Soave, gives him high marks for trying to make the force more transparent.

"The force has gone back and forth on this. It used to be, 'Don't talk to the media.' Then it was everybody talking to the media. People were doing it without training and mistakes were made."
The RCMP is one of the biggest, most complex law-enforcement organizations in the world. Commissioner Zaccardelli has pointed out that the 19th-century version of the force once consisted of 300 officers preoccupied with stopping "whisky-toting claim jumpers and horse thievery." Today, more than 21,000 people work for the RCMP, which sprawls from the Atlantic to the Pacific to the Arctic Ocean.

On any given day, any given Mountie might find himself arresting a drunk in a remote community, or handing out traffic tickets on B.C.'s Lower Mainland, or doing a forensic analysis of complex financial crimes in one of Canada's largest cities, or dealing with international forces on child pornography. The force's leaders have to be versed in a mind-boggling array of statutes, techniques, regions and methods.

Mr. Zaccardelli is a stickler for solid investigative work and once got testy when the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation indicted hockey impresario Alan Eagleson. It took the RCMP two more years to lay charges in Canada and the Mounties took heat for being inept.

Mr. Zaccardelli, then deputy commissioner, hated that perception. "This illusion has been created that the Americans did this great investigation and that the Mounted Police did nothing," he said at the time. "With all due respect to the American authorities, they don't have one shred of evidence.

He explained: "The only evidence that the Americans had and used at the grand jury was 100 per cent what we provided from our investigation."

As deputy commissioner, Mr. Zaccardelli was in charge of the RCMP's organized-crime investigations. This was a coup for him because organized crime was the big issue of the day. With an eye on the top job, he began using his post as a platform for the theories that would become his mantra: All crime ties back to organized crime, which is by nature transnational. "There are no more borders," he told a newspaper. "That means policing must have no borders."

In December, 1999, Algerian Ahmed Ressam was caught by U.S. border guards in Washington State. The Montreal resident had travelled to British Columbia to cook up a bomb, which he plotted to use to kill random Americans at the Los Angeles airport.

After Mr. Ressam's arrest, police on both sides of the border discovered there was a whole group in Montreal with similar ideas. "This is much bigger than just Montreal," deputy commissioner Zaccardelli told reporters at the time.

Within days of the Algerian's arrest, the Mountie travelled to the Washington, D.C., to reassure the head of the FBI and the U.S. Attorney-General that Canada could contain the growing threat of terrorism.

It was still about two years before Sept. 11, when the terrorist attacks would throw the Mounties into disarray. Two years before sloppy police work would lead to Mr. Arar's torture, a judicial inquiry and the damning report that threatens Mr. Zaccardelli's tenure at the top.
Political masters liked what they saw in Mr. Zaccardelli when he was deputy commissioner. In the late 1990s, there existed a perception that the RCMP had drifted off-course and he could steer things back in the right direction.

Mr. Zaccardelli was disciplined and would be sure to know how to take charge. He would bring in smart people. He would modernize the RCMP. He would restore accountability. And his background made him perfect for the trend of international co-operation.

In his five years at the top, Commissioner Zaccardelli has acquired many admirers in the international law-enforcement community. The FBI liaison officers in Canada speak highly of his professionalism and that of the force.

But he has also made a few enemies, including Shirley Heafey, the former chair of the RCMP Public Complaints Commission. She says Mr. Zaccardelli made her job impossible, withholding information that she said was vital to her investigations of police conduct.

That secrecy has been the other side of Mr. Zaccardelli and the police force he leads. While he says police have to live up to high standards, he has also stated he has never very much liked "the cult of accountability" that has led the public to lose faith in police.

"This change has been fed by a scandal-mongering media, the immediate availability of facts without interpretation or analysis as a result of Internet," he said. The results, according to Mr. Zaccardelli, is a lot of time and money is spent scrutinizing police, officer morale takes a hit, and detectives become averse to risk for fear of generating a bad headline.

Secrecy is a huge part of the RCMP culture. After four Mounties were killed by a lone, crazed gunman in 2005, one high-ranking Alberta Mountie gave a speech that is still making rounds among the Mounties via e-mail. He cautioned colleagues that publicly second-guessing the force was unforgivable. "After we lost our four members in March of this year, even a veteran of the RCMP added his voice to the cold and timid voices who so eagerly wanted to point their fingers at others as the cause of this loss.

"Their conduct and their words will never be forgotten or forgiven."
Like many of his colleagues, Commissioner Zaccardelli has sometimes made a career of being bland. "How can you pick Zack out of a room full of Mounties? He's the stiff, watchful one," he once quipped in a speech.

Being stiff has its advantages. Often Commissioner Zaccardelli's red coat appears to have been made of Teflon. And he has proven highly adept at riding out crises over the years.

Mr. Zaccardelli has weathered maybe a dozen storms during his five years at the helm. He has been accused of being extravagant by buying a jet for work use and for his hospitality expenses, of being slow to implement guidelines for riot squads on the use of non-lethal force. And some think he's been too close to the Liberals.

In fact, many Liberal politicians can hardly utter his name without spitting. They say he is partly to blame for Paul Martin's loss of the last election. In the middle of the campaign, with the Liberals fighting to shake off the political effects of the sponsorship scandal, Mr. Zaccardelli dropped a bombshell in the form of a letter to an NDP MP Judy Wasylycia-Leis. It said the RCMP had opened an investigation into her complaint of a possible criminal leak of insider information about income trusts from then finance minister Ralph Goodale's office to Bay Street traders.

Mr. Zaccardelli's friends in the law-enforcement community say he faced a Hobson's choice: If he hadn't disclosed the investigation in a timely fashion he could have been accused of withholding information to favour the Liberals in the campaign.

With his own career now under fire, Mr. Zaccardelli does not have many champions of his cause on Parliament Hill. Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day and other ministers have not come to his defence, saying they will not be making any precipitous decisions on RCMP personnel.

Mr. Zaccardelli may have one more chance to explain what went wrong if he appears before a parliamentary committee. MPs want to see whether he's tough enough to publicly finger the culprits within his force in the Arar affair, and hand them walking papers.

The inquiry found that Mr. Arar was the victim of inaccurate RCMP intelligence reports and deliberate smears of his reputation. Mounties ignored their own policies — policies intended to protect Canadian citizens from injustice — to help their U.S. counterparts. Mr. Arar's wife and two children were put on a terrorist watch list. Mounties misled the government's most senior officials in the Privy Council Office about what they had done to help the Americans.


23/09/06, Edward Greenspon, A point of pride, but some regrets, (Back).

Letter from the Editor (Editor-in-chief that is)

This has been both the best of weeks and worst of weeks for The Globe and Mail. Apologies Mr. Dickens.

The best: that the commitment we have made over the past four years to the story of Maher Arar, both in editorials and news reporting, almost 600 in all, came to a conclusion of sorts with the release of the first report from Mr. Justice Dennis O'Connor.

Veteran Ottawa correspondent Jeff Sallot, in particular, has been close to the case, doing much of the work detailing Mr. Arar's battle for justice. He also helped break the stories of two other Canadians who had brushes with the Syrian gulag, and exposed the innocuous Canadian courier map that led them there.

We took up the case of Maher Arar, initially, not because we thought he was an innocent man. As journalists, we were agnostic on that question.

Rather, we felt he had been denied due process in being suddenly whisked off to Syria and thrown into a prison notorious as a torture centre. The Canadian government had failed in one of its most basic functions, the protection of the rights of one of its citizens, and answers were required.

Terror has become a central issue of our age, and The Globe has addressed all facets of it. Our support for Mr. Arar's fight to find out how he had been arbitrarily seized, deported and tortured does not detract from our editorial board's support for tough measures to combat terrorism abroad or the threat of terrorism at home.

In a Tuesday editorial, the day after the release of Judge O'Connor's report, we spoke again of the need for authorities to remain vigilant in the face of terrorism. But we also understand that as a uniquely diverse country, we must be equally vigilant in resisting fear and prejudice.

We live in a society based on law, and therefore, due process. As a child, I devoured dystopian books about societies where due process breaks down. Later, my work took me to some of them.

As soon as we learned the timing of the release of the O'Connor report, we decided we would give this story of Kafka coming to Canada special treatment.

On Monday morning, hours before the release, we learned of four more dead Canadians in Afghanistan, an occurrence that is becoming all too familiar. We left open the question of how we would play the two stories until we could see the report some time after 3 p.m.

A little after 4, having digested the breadth of Judge O'Connor's findings and their unequivocal nature, about eight editors met in my office. We spoke about how the report represented a truly important moment and contained a significant cautionary tale.

Part of the role of editors is to signal to readers when they think stories go beyond the realm of news and into the lifeblood of the country.

We decided we should go big with Arar, even if it meant relegating the Afghan story to the bottom of the page. And, unusually for Page One, we chose to rely largely on the powerful words of Judge O'Connor himself over our own reportage.

The headline we originally crafted read: How Canada failed Maher Arar. But it fell somehow short. We added the word citizen: How Canada failed citizen Maher Arar. We discussed how the word citizen stopped you -- usually a no-no in journalism, especially in headlines. But we wanted people to stop, and think, and remember that just because your neighbour looks different and just because these are scary times, there is never any excuse for according different rights to different groups of citizens.

These are the same fundamental values for which Canadian soldiers are fighting in Afghanistan. Over the past several months, The Globe has enjoyed remarkable coverage from correspondents such as Graeme Smith and Christie Blatchford. This week, we were pleased to learn that Christie has won the 2006 Ross Munro Media Award for defence reporting.

Christie's writing captures the humans behind the mission, with their passion, their grit and wit. She transports readers with her along the bumpy roads in the soldiers' light-armoured vehicles and into the maze of grape fields that sometimes serve as battlefields.

So much for the good. I had been deeply touched 10 days ago by the attack at Dawson College. Perhaps it was because I attended that particular CEGEP before going on to university (although at a previous campus); perhaps it was because my daughter is approaching postsecondary education age and badly wants to study in Montreal; perhaps it's because I find any stories involving violence against kids especially disturbing.

As part of our coverage, we sent Jan Wong, an extraordinarily talented feature writer, to her native Montreal to prepare a weekend piece on the human dimension of the attack. Jan did exactly as asked -- and then some. She wrote a poignant tale of a mother who teaches at Dawson and her son, who is a student, and their anguished day. The piece was exceptionally moving. It captured the humanity beautifully.

But that is not the part of the article that has stirred a hornet's nest in Quebec. Jan also ventured into the sensitive territory of ethnic and language relations in a province that has struggled to maintain its identity in an overwhelmingly English-speaking continent. She noted that the shooter in this case, as with two earlier school rampages in Quebec, was not fully francophone and raised the possibility that a continuing sense of alienation in non-francophone communities might have somehow contributed to the shootings.

The response was swift and furious. Quebeckers of all stripes were deeply insulted. They felt the depiction was outmoded in the cosmopolitan reality of modern Montreal and that any connection to past language battles was spurious and contrived. Some federalists worried that the flames of separatism could be fanned.

While we feel the reaction to the article has been disproportionate -- including personal attacks on Jan and her family -- in hindsight, the paragraphs were clearly opinion and not reporting and should have been removed from that story. To the extent they may have been used, they should have been put into a separate piece clearly marked opinion. That particular passage of the story did not constitute a statement of fact, but rather a thesis -- and thus did not belong in that article.

I can offer several explanations as to how the editorial quality control process sometimes breaks down on tight deadlines during gruelling weeks. But none are germane. The fact is they did, which is ultimately my responsibility. We regret that we allowed these words to get into a reported article.

Edward Greenspon


26/09/06, Editorial, The Mounties should get off their high horse, (Back).

The RCMP's public image has been soiled by the Maher Arar affair, and no one has stepped forward on behalf of the 133-year-old police force to take responsibility. That silence, in the face of authoritative criticism from a judicial inquiry, has only reinforced the impression of a headless, and heedless, organization. RCMP Commissioner Giuliano Zaccardelli and his political masters, who are said to be muzzling him, are allowing an iconic name to suffer grievous harm.

Where is the man who once spoke so confidently on the subject of Mr. Arar, a Canadian citizen deported to a Syrian torture cell? Three years ago, Mr. Zaccardelli said the force had acted with "the highest ethical standards" on the Arar file. Two years ago, he sent a spirited note around to RCMP staff. "In the end, our story will be told," he said.

And so it has been. The RCMP, in the anxious months after Sept. 11, 2001, told the United States that Mr. Arar was an Islamic extremist suspected of links to al-Qaeda. The RCMP had no basis to say so, reported Mr. Justice Dennis O'Connor, who spent 2½ years investigating. Mr. Arar was merely "a person of interest" -- he had been seen talking to a man under investigation, and so he was being investigated. No high ethical standards here.

At nearly every stage, the RCMP compounded its initial wrong. It told U.S. intelligence that Mr. Arar had refused the RCMP an interview, when in fact he had merely insisted that he be allowed to bring a lawyer with him. Then it told Washington Mr. Arar left for Tunisia shortly afterward. (In fact, he left five months later.) No wonder Washington was alarmed. It was the United States that deported Mr. Arar to Syria, his birthplace.

Even as Canada's foreign minister was trying to persuade Syria to free Mr. Arar, the RCMP was delivering questions about him to his Syrian captors. When Mr. Arar was at last set free, after a year in detention, the RCMP fudged the truth. "When briefing the Privy Council Office and senior government officials about the investigation regarding Mr. Arar, the RCMP omitted certain key facts that could have reflected adversely on the force," Judge O'Connor wrote in his report. No high ethical standards here, either.

His inquiry might never have been called except for another egregious Mountie misstep -- the raid on the home of Ottawa Citizen reporter Juliet O'Neill to find out who was leaking intelligence on Mr. Arar to her. That raid prompted the memorable line from then-prime minister Paul Martin that Canada "is not a police state."

After all that, the public deserves and needs to hear from the RCMP. Not from a public-relations officer but from someone who can truly speak for the force. Instead, perhaps at the Conservative government's behest, Mr. Zaccardelli has gone into hiding. He was in Brazil at an Interpol conference when Judge O'Connor released his report last week. On Sunday, at an Ottawa ceremony honouring fallen officers, he was in the unseemly position of being chased and cornered by reporters. The RCMP website contains no acknowledgment of Judge O'Connor's report. It is as if it never happened.

The RCMP did not act ethically in the Arar case. If it had, Mr. Arar's nightmare of deportation and torture probably would not have happened, or lasted as long as it did. Someone needs to say on behalf of the RCMP that it understands it went wrong, that it has learned from its mistakes, that it is keen to show it still deserves the faith Canadians have placed in it over the decades. Its silence is destructive.


26/09/06, Jeff Sallot, RCMP chief free to testify, Ottawa says, (Back).

Tories won't state whether they have faith in Zaccardelli after release of Arar report.

OTTAWA -- The government says RCMP Commissioner Giuliano Zaccardelli is free to testify at a House committee about the Arar report, but Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day declined to answer directly in the Commons yesterday when asked whether the Conservatives still have confidence in their top police officer.

Friends and law-enforcement associates have said Mr. Zaccardelli has been muzzled by the government, unable to defend his actions after last week's damaging inquiry report that said the RCMP sent U.S. officials inaccurate information that very likely resulted in Maher Arar's deportation to Syria.

Mr. Day (the minister responsible for the RCMP) and Prime Minister Stephen Harper denied that Mr. Zaccardelli has been muzzled. MPs will be free to attend a public security committee meeting where Mr. Zaccardelli can answer questions, Mr. Harper told Liberal Opposition Leader Bill Graham.

Another Liberal, Lucienne Robillard, asked the Prime Minister directly whether the government "still has confidence in the Commissioner of the RCMP."

Mr. Harper did not reply. Mr. Day did, saying the inquiry produced "a detailed report. Thousands upon thousands of documents were submitted."

Mr. Day went on to say that he had seen a television news clip of Mr. Zaccardelli on Sunday night telling reporters at a ceremony for slain police officers that he would not talk at that event, but wanted to speak to the committee.

"I think that is entirely appropriate," Mr. Day said. "I agree with his position." The committee is scheduled to hold its first meeting of the new parliamentary session this morning, to elect a chair.

Separately, Mr. Arar, whose deportation to Syria and torture are at the centre of the affair, said his lawyers have heard nothing from the government about compensation since the inquiry report recommended compensation eight days ago.

Jason Kenney, Mr. Harper's parliamentary secretary, told the Commons last week that the government accepts the recommendations of Mr. Justice Dennis O'Connor, the head of the inquiry, and that the government is talking with Mr. Arar's lawyers about compensation.

Mr. Kenney said Thursday on behalf of the government that lawyers "are, I hope, in the process of concluding talks with counsel for Mr. Arar in order to achieve a dignified result for Mr. Arar. We are going to act quickly in his regard because it is clear Mr. Arar was the victim of a serious injustice."

Mr. Arar said that rather than acting quickly, government lawyers have not yet contacted his lawyers about compensation since the inquiry report was presented Sept. 18.

Calls to Mr. Day's press spokeswoman seeking comment yesterday morning and afternoon were not returned. Reached on her cellphone last night, spokeswoman Melissa LeClerc said she would pass along an interview request.

Meanwhile, officials in other government departments say the government has put a gag order not only on Mr. Zaccardelli, but also on other senior officials, such as CSIS director Jim Judd.

One official, who has knowledge of the government's communications plan for dealing with the fallout from the Arar case, said the Privy Council Office ordered that nobody talk about the Arar file except Conservative ministers. The PCO is the Prime Minister's central government agency. This official asked not to be named because of the gag order.

Meanwhile, Mr. Arar told an access-to-information conference that he is concerned that the government is still claiming national security confidentiality to prevent the publication of Judge O'Connor's full report.

Sections of the published document were censored, but the government received a full version. Commission lawyers say they will fight the government in Federal Court for the release of material Judge O'Connor believes should be on the public record.

Marlys Edwardh, one of Mr. Arar's lawyers, told the conference that the government tried to censor one document indicating that her client was being tortured by the Syrians.


29/09/06, Jeff Sallot, "Mr. Arar, I wish to take this opportunity ...", (Back).

THE ARAR CASE

"Mr. Arar, I wish to take this opportunity to express publicly to you, to your wife and to your children how truly sorry I am" RCMP Commissioner Giuliano Zaccardelli, testifying before the House national security committee yesterday.

With a report from Colin Freeze.

OTTAWA -- RCMP Commissioner Giuliano Zaccardelli apologized to Maher Arar and his family yesterday, but also said the mistakes his Mounties made in the Arar security case do not require him to resign.

"Mr. Arar, I wish to take this opportunity to express publicly to you, to your wife and to your children how truly sorry I am," he told the House national security committee.

When asked whether he should offer his resignation, he said: "I'm the commissioner of the RCMP and I intend to continue to be the commissioner of the RCMP."

Meanwhile, Public Safety Minister Stockwell Day said the government will investigate what role the RCMP -- or other federal agencies -- may have played in the cases of another three Canadian Muslim men who, like Mr. Arar, were imprisoned in Syria and tortured.

Mr. Zaccardelli's apology is his first substantive statement on the Arar case since the release 10 days ago of a judicial inquiry report that said it is "very likely" American authorities deported Mr. Arar to Syria on the basis of false and inflammatory RCMP reports that the Canadian computer engineer was an Islamic extremist linked to an al-Qaeda terrorist group.

The commissioner said he knows his apology "can never take back the pain" of the family's long ordeal.

Mr. Arar, who does not have a television at his new home in British Columbia, listened to the televised hearings over a telephone line, his lawyer said.

The RCMP and Mr. Arar's lawyers are trying to arrange a time for the commissioner to talk with Mr. Arar by telephone, possibly today, to personally apologize.

Mr. Arar appreciates the commissioner's apology, said Lorne Waldman, Mr. Arar's lawyer. But the government itself has not apologized, Mr. Waldman noted.

An apology by the government would be part of a final settlement of claims for compensation brought by Mr. Arar, Mr. Day said.

Mr. Day reiterated his confidence in the RCMP and the commissioner. But some opposition MPs were less certain. Mark Holland, the Liberal co-chairman of the committee, said he thought Mr. Zaccardelli should resign.

Serge Ménard of the Bloc Québécois said he's troubled by the commissioner's testimony. The top Mountie, he said, didn't have an adequate explanation for his failure to tell cabinet ministers that the force had passed incorrect intelligence to the United States before Mr. Arar's deportation in 2002.

Mr. Arar "rotted in a Syrian prison for one year," Mr. Ménard said. "How could you leave someone in a prison like that when you knew he was an innocent man?"

Liberal Irwin Cotler, the former justice minister, said Mr. Zaccardelli didn't have a good answer for why he didn't publicly clear Mr. Arar's name after a series of slanderous and inaccurate "leaks" to reporters from government sources suggesting Mr. Arar trained at an Afghan terrorist camp.

The smear campaign against Mr. Arar continued after his release and return to Canada, the inquiry report said. Mr. Zaccardelli acknowledged that members of his force might have had something to do with this. But he quickly denied a suggestion by Conservative MP Rick Norlock that an outside police force should be called in to investigate the "leaks."

The RCMP will do everything it can to find out who spread the misinformation, he said.

New Democrat Joe Comartin said Mr. Zaccardelli is "on probation." The NDP wants to see what comes out of the investigation of the cases of the three other Muslim men, Abdullah Almalki, Ahmad El Maati and Muyyed Nurredin.

Mr. Day said the government is trying to determine the best way of investigating these cases without going through the long legal process of another formal judicial inquiry.

At a news conference later in the day, Mr. Zaccardelli said there will be no disciplinary action for the Mounties who passed the faulty information to the American authorities.

They made errors, but did not act maliciously, he said. The officers were given a talking to by superiors -- the RCMP calls it "operational guidance" -- about what they did wrong and what they should have done.

Mr. Zaccardelli said several times yesterday that Mounties corrected the record with U.S. authorities while Mr. Arar was still in American custody in New York. But the Arar inquiry report, written by Mr. Justice Dennis O'Connor, gives a different version of events.

The report says the Mounties told the Americans they could not establish a link between Mr. Arar and al-Qaeda. But the judge says the Mounties "did not go further and correct the inaccurate information already provided to the American agencies about Mr. Arar, including the label of Islamic extremist."

Mr. Zaccardelli also said the Americans had their own information about Mr. Arar before they deported him -- information the Americans refused to share with Canada. "We shared all of our information. The Americans did not share all of theirs."

Under questioning, Mr. Zaccardelli said the RCMP did not try to deliberately deceive cabinet ministers and others in government about the fact the Canadian police force had told the United States that Mr. Arar was an al-Qaeda suspect.

Judge O'Connor said "the RCMP omitted certain key facts that could have reflected adversely on the RCMP" at a key briefing Nov. 5, 2003. Mr. Zaccardelli said this omission was not deliberate, but simply a problem assembling all the information needed to brief the government. Files were held at a wide variety of locations.

Judge O'Connor also said Canada should file a formal diplomatic protest with the Americans about the deportation. Mr. Day said Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay is working on that.

On Wednesday, the federal government launched a court application, saying it will fight to keep secret the censored portions of the Arar commission report.

Paul Cavalluzzo, chief counsel for the commission, said he will be going to court to fight the government motion. "We're going to co-operate to have this matter heard as expeditiously as possible," he said.

It's been estimated that no more than 0.5 per cent of the report written by Mr. Justice Dennis O'Connor has been censored, but the fact that portions are blacked out has left many observers wondering just what is being shielded.

During the 21/2-year commission, the federal government frequently invoked national-security considerations to keep documents and testimony from public view.

Judge O'Connor has said he worked hard to make all relevant information public through the inquiry process.

*****

Key dates

Sept. 26, 2002: Mr. Arar arrives at JFK Airport in New York, on a flight from Zurich, headed for Montreal. He is detained by U.S. authorities, questioned, told he is inadmissible to the United States and asked where he would like to go. He says Canada.

Oct. 4, 2002: Mr. Arar is visited by Maureen Girvan, Canadian consular officer in New York. She later says she never thought the Americans would send him anywhere except home to Canada.

Oct. 8, 2002: Mr. Arar is taken from his cell at 3 a.m., and told by U.S. officials he is being deported to Syria on suspicion of terrorist activity. He is bundled aboard a private jet.

Oct. 9, 2002: Plane lands in Jordan. Mr. Arar is quickly transferred by car to Damascus where he is to be jailed by Syrian military intelligence.

Oct. 10, 2002: Mr. Arar gets first look at cell he describes as size of a grave. He spends most of next 10 months there.

Oct. 11, 2002: Mr. Arar is tortured for the first time, beaten on his palms, wrists, lower back and hips with electrical cable; confesses -- falsely, he says -- to terrorist training in Afghanistan.

Oct. 23, 2002: Mr. Arar meets Canadian consul Leo Martel for the first time. Beatings have lessened since he was first jailed, and Mr. Martel later says he couldn't detect any signs of physical torture. Several more consular visits occur in subsequent months but none are private; Syrian officials insist on being present.

Early April, 2003: Mr. Arar is briefly allowed some time in an outdoor courtyard, the first time he has seen sun in six months.

April 23, 2003: Mr. Arar meets Canadian Ambassador Franco Pillarella and two visiting Canadian MPs, Marlene Catterall and Sarkis Assadourian. Again Syrians insist on being present and he can't speak frankly.

Aug. 14, 2003: Routine consular visits resume after long interruption. Mr. Arar describes living conditions and later says he told the consul he had been tortured. Consul says he knew living conditions were bad, but Mr. Arar never spoke of torture.

Aug. 23, 2003: Mr. Arar is blindfolded, put in a car and driven to new prison. Treatment improves and there is no further torture. No longer held in solitary confinement, he can mix with other prisoners.

Sept. 19, 2003: Mr. Arar is teaching English to fellow prisoners when he hears that another Canadian has arrived at prison. It's Abdullah Almalki, an acquaintance from Ottawa who has also been tortured.

Oct. 4, 2003: After days expecting further interrogation, Mr. Arar is told instead he will be going home to Canada. He doesn't believe it.

Oct. 5, 2003: Mr. Arar is taken to meet a prosecutor who reads out a confession of his supposed terrorist past and tells him to sign it without giving him chance to read it.

He is then taken to meet the head of Syrian military intelligence, who has been joined by Canadian officials. Mr. Arar is freed and put on a plane to Canada.

Sept. 18, 2006: Inquiry report blames the RCMP for supplying inaccurate and unfair information about alleged terrorist leanings to the Americans, a likely basis for the U.S. decision to detain and deport. It says Mr. Arar has committed no crime and is no threat to Canadian security.

Sept. 28, 2006: RCMP Commissioner Giuliano Zaccardelli apologizes to Mr. Arar, but says he will not resign. He receives support from government and some opposition parties.


29/09/06, Editorial, How Zaccardelli failed RCMP, Arar and Canada, (Back).

Apologies delayed are sometimes worth the wait. RCMP Commissioner Giuliano Zaccardelli gave a full and graceful apology yesterday to Maher Arar for the RCMP's role in the Canadian citizen's deportation from the United States to Syria, where he was detained for a year and tortured. But an apology is not the same as accountability. Mr. Zaccardelli's two hours of testimony before the House of Commons security committee amounted to an evasion of his own responsibility. The key to understanding this evasion came in Mr. Zaccardelli's reply to the committee's very first question -- "what did you know and when did you know it?" He said that, when Mr. Arar turned up in a Syrian jail, he took pains to inform himself. "I found out that investigators were speaking to American officials while Mr. Arar was in detention [in New York]. I learned that, in that process, they tried to correct what was labelled as false and misleading information. That is my first point of knowledge."

In other words, the Mounties knew early on they'd been wrong when they sent incendiary information about Mr. Arar and his wife, Monia Mazigh, to U.S. authorities. ("Islamic extremist individuals" suspected of al-Qaeda links, the RCMP had called them. The correction was to say it had no definitive information establishing any links.) And Mr. Zaccardelli personally knew not long afterward that the Mounties had been wrong.

This was not a trivial error. And the flimsy attempt at "correction" did not make up for it. The Mounties knew -- from the beginning -- that their false information may have helped contribute to Mr. Arar's deportation to Syria, a state whose prisoners are known to face torture, and whose judges lack independence. The Mounties should have moved heaven and earth to make it known that Canada had no case against Mr. Arar. Mr. Zaccardelli should have hammered at the doors of the solicitor-general and the foreign affairs minister to make sure they knew. There is no evidence that happened. Far from it. The evidence from a 2½-year independent inquiry is that the Mounties persisted in advancing the view that Mr. Arar was the subject of a national security investigation. This contributed to prolonging his detention.

As early as Oct. 31, 2002, just 10 days after Canada received official confirmation that Mr. Arar was in Syria (he arrived on Oct. 9, and The Globe broke the story on Oct. 12), lawyer Michael Edelson asked the Mounties to confirm that he was not wanted in Canada for an offence and that he was not a terrorism suspect. "The RCMP," wrote Mr. Justice Dennis O'Connor, who conducted the inquiry, "was of the view that the matter was entirely DFAIT's [the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade's] responsibility and that the RCMP had no role to play. In fact, the RCMP officers were upset about even being asked to write a letter." This was a major opportunity for Mr. Zaccardelli to help make up for the RCMP's crucial early mistake. He missed it.

The RCMP's stick-in-the-mud behaviour was an early sign that the Mounties were not predisposed to securing Mr. Arar's freedom. On Jan. 15, 2002, the RCMP, working through Canada's ambassador to Syria, Franco Pillarella, gave Syrian intelligence officers questions to ask about Mr. Arar. The very next day, then-foreign affairs minister Bill Graham phoned his Syrian counterpart to ask for Mr. Arar's release. But the RCMP had already fatally undermined Mr. Graham.

Without the RCMP onside, Canada was never able to speak convincingly for Mr. Arar. In May and June of 2003, the Canadian government proposed sending a letter from Mr. Graham on behalf of Canada. But the RCMP insisted on saying that "Mr. Arar was a subject of a national security investigation" -- even though he was not, said Judge O'Connor. "This language would have had a prejudicial effect on DFAIT's efforts to have Mr. Arar released." Mr. Graham did not send the letter. Finally, on July 22, about 3½ months after the government first tried to draft the "one voice" letter, a letter from the prime minister was delivered to Syria, and Mr. Arar was released from his tiny cell and placed in a more humane prison.

Even after Mr. Arar returned to Canada from his Syrian nightmare in October of 2003, the RCMP prevaricated about its role. According to Judge O'Connor, the RCMP "omitted certain key facts that could have reflected adversely on the force" when briefing senior government officials and the Privy Council Office. If it was still doing this a year after Mr. Arar's apprehension, the chances seem slim that it was trying to get the truth out while he was detained.

On this point, Mr. Zaccardelli quarrelled with Judge O'Connor's findings. He said the Privy Council Office had given the RCMP just 24 hours to put together a briefing note. It was a difficult task requiring information from a variety of sources in different provinces, Mr. Zaccardelli said. What he didn't say is that the RCMP had a year to get its information straight. Mr. Zaccardelli could not have been surprised by the Privy Council request. This excuse is symptomatic of his overall evasion of responsibility.

Yesterday, Mr. Zaccardelli even played down the RCMP's role in the deportation. He turned repeatedly to Judge O'Connor's statement that he could not be "definitive" that the RCMP's information prompted U.S. authorities to deport Mr. Arar to Syria. But Judge O'Connor also said the evidence showed it was "very likely" they "relied" on the RCMP's information. He could not be definitive because he had not heard from U.S. officials.

Mr. Zaccardelli appeared blind to the implications of his testimony. As RCMP commissioner, he knew his force had supplied false information to the United States in the anxious days and months after 9/11. Yet, the Mounties never lived up to their duty to minimize the damage they caused. As a result, Canada did not wholeheartedly pursue Mr. Arar's freedom.

The commissioner should be as graceful in accepting responsibility for his failures as he was in apologizing yesterday. Mr. Zaccardelli should resign.


29/09/06, John Ibbitson, What lesson will Arar teach RCMP?, (Back).

There's a danger that the police force will play too strictly by the rules.

The epilogue remains to be played out, but the public drama of Maher Arar is almost at an end. What we do not know is whether we have learned the right lesson or the wrong one.

RCMP Commissioner Giuliano Zaccardelli should have resigned after Mr. Justice Dennis O'Connor's report revealed a series of passive failures and active misdeeds by the RCMP that resulted in Mr. Arar's deportation from the United States to a Syrian torture chamber.

But he did not resign. Instead, Mr. Zaccardelli offered a heartfelt apology yesterday before a parliamentary committee -- though there were also uncomfortable questions about the RCMP's conduct after the Arar affair came to light that he dodged and evaded -- accompanied by promises that the reforms recommended by Judge O'Connor had been or would be implemented.

The government of Canada must still negotiate an appropriate settlement with Mr. Arar and his family, to be accompanied by a formal apology, and then it will be time for them to get on with their lives, knowing that every Canadian of goodwill feels remorse for this country's failure to protect one of its own, and that we wish them well.

Certainly, the puerility of the opposition questions and vacuity of the government responses on the matter in Question Period yesterday suggest that there are no more political points, of even the cheapest kind, to be scored. Nor is there any profit in hounding the commissioner over his refusal to resign. The best thing to do is note Mr. Zaccardelli's conduct, and this government's decision not to sack him, and move on.

So what are we left with? Sadly, a diminished confidence in the competence and integrity of the national police force. The Mounties have done some fine work in detecting and preventing alleged terrorist threats in the wake of 9/11. Their handling of the Arar affair tarnishes that record. They have only themselves to blame.

If the right lesson is learned, the force will handle potentially damaging but as yet unsubstantiated evidence more carefully. All police forces will make sure that preliminary speculation is not treated as established fact, then spread around the planet. The Mounties' record of neglect in this regard is a sorry one, going back to their mishandling of the Airbus affair and beyond.

But there is also a danger that the wrong lesson will be learned. Canada's security depends on close, even intimate, co-operation among police and security services around the globe. Cops and spooks need to share information on both a formal and informal basis. Front-line officers need to be able to make quick decisions when time is of the essence. A police force where everyone plays strictly by the rules, with all the forms filled out and all the signatures obtained, is a police force that hands out nothing worse than traffic tickets.

One of the biggest challenges in governance is holding public servants accountable for their actions, without turning them into automatons. The reluctance to reward initiative, to take risk and to bend the rules when they need to be bent, contributes to sclerosis and timidity in the public service. And yes, this culture is the inevitable product of irresponsible opposition politicians and voracious media.

To the extent police forces become infected by that culture, the bad guys have the advantage.

The very worst outcome from the Arar affair would be a terrorist attack, one that was allowed to slip through the security screen because dots weren't connected, police didn't talk to each other and agencies were more interested in protecting their turf than in getting the job done.

Many of us worried that a public inquiry into the Arar affair could encourage a culture of timidity within the RCMP. The inquiry was necessary, nonetheless. But we're still worried.


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