Terror suspects take Mounties, CSIS to court
| Canwest News Service   Â
|
* All according to the Al Qaeda playbook lesson 18: PRISONS AND DETENTION CENTERS
OTTAWA – Two former Montrealers imprisoned in the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba are taking the RCMP and CSIS to court as part of a bid to prove their confessions to terrorism resulted from torture by the U.S. and others and are therefore worthless.
Update:Â
Blame the torturers
That three Muslim citizens were tortured is a great injustice — but they and their supporters should focus their anger on Syria and Egypt, rather than Canada
Lawyers for Mohamedou Ould Slahi and Ahcene Zemiri have asked Federal Court to order the security agencies and the Departments of Foreign Affairs and Justice to hand over details of interviews the men say they gave to RCMP and Canadian Security Intelligence Service officers at the U.S. naval station prison in Cuba in 2003 and 2004.
The lawyers say the officers probed their clients’ knowledge of al-Qaida, the Taliban and Ahmed Ressam – the failed Algerian refugee claimant in Montreal who plotted to bomb the Los Angeles’ airport in December 1999.
The interview and any related materials, the men’s lawyers believe, could shed light on their claims of torture at the hands of U.S. and other foreign interrogators and are essential for preparation of their defence at upcoming habeas corpus proceedings in U.S. District Court.
Slahi, 38, is a Mauritanian who came to Montreal from Germany in November 1999 and stayed for two months as a landed immigrant before returning to his native land.
The U.S. believes he was a major conduit between al-Qaida cells in Europe and Canada and its former home base in Afghanistan, and that his arrival in Montreal was to help activate the cell of Algerian militants that included Ressam and others.
Further, it believes that while living in Germany he helped recruit three of the 9/11 suicide pilots.
Slahi admits belonging to al-Qaida in the early 1990s when it fought the Soviets in Afghanistan. He also acknowledges his cousin was a senior lieutenant for Osama bin Laden and that he once called him on the master terrorist’s satellite phone, which was monitored by western intelligence.
But he has denied any involvement with the group for more than a dozen years.
After returning to Mauritania in January, 2000, he says he was arrested at the request of U.S. authorities and later landed in a Jordanian prison for eight months where he says he was tortured. In August 2002, he became internee No. 760 at Guantanamo Bay.
Zemiri, 41, is an Algerian who arrived in Montreal in 1994, married a Canadian two years later and obtained permanent resident status. He attended the same Montreal mosque and socialized with the same group of Montreal Algerians as Ressam.
He was arrested by Niagara Falls police in 1998 in the company of a man believed to be a high-ranking member of the Canadian chapter of the Armed Islamic Group, part of the al-Qaida network. Following Ressam’s 1999 U.S. arrest for the Millennium Plot, he claimed – but later retracted – that Zemiri had given him a substantial amount of cash.
Fearing Canadian authorities would deport him back to Algeria because of his connections to Ressam, he left Canada for Afghanistan in 2001.
Zemiri was soon captured and imprisoned by the Afghans in Kabul, where he says he was tortured. In spring 2002, he was taken to Guantanamo Bay as prisoner No. 533. He has not seen his wife since they parted in 2001 or his six-year-old son, Karim.
Initial demands for the RCMP-CSIS interview materials from the men’s defence teams were refused by the government in August, prompting their lawyers to apply to the Federal Court for judicial review.
Despite not being Canadian citizens or having lived in Canada for several years, they insist the men remain entitled to charter protections, including the right not to be arbitrarily detained or imprisoned.
With files from Citizen News Services
Blame the torturers
That three Muslim citizens were tortured is a great injustice — but they and their supporters should focus their anger on Syria and Egypt, rather than Canada
The Ottawa Citizen
CREDIT: Raheb Homavandi, Reuters Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad meet in Tehran. That Canadians imprisoned in Syria were tortured should come as no surprise as it is one of the world leaders in human rights abuses. News that former Supreme Court of Canada justice Frank Iacobucci has determined that three Muslim-Canadian citizens were tortured while imprisoned in Syria and Egypt, has come as no surprise to Canada’s Muslim communities. Anyone familiar with the governance of Arab countries would have never doubted for a moment claims that Ahmad El-Maati, Muayyed Nureddin and Abdullah Almalki had been beaten by prison guards attempting to extract forced confessions from the three.
The brutality of the prison systems in Arab countries is legendary. Countless people have died for the simple crime of being in opposition to the ruling juntas or kingdoms. In mistreating political prisoners, Syria and Egypt are second only to Sudan and Saudi Arabia, now that Saddam Hussein is no longer around. The region is a graveyard of human rights with the population so numbed by decades of authoritarianism that even the genocide in Darfur fails to bring people onto the streets.
So it is unsurprising that Canadians, some with alleged links to 1990s Afghan wars, got caught up in an Arab state-security machine.
What did surprise me and many other Muslim Canadians was the misguided reaction of the three men and the groups backing them, particularly the Canadian Arab Federation, Canadian Council on American-Islamic Relations, and the Canadian Muslim Civil Liberties Association.
If I had been tortured — and I have been — my primary grievance would be against my torturers and their masters. But Messrs El-Maati, Almalki and Nureddin turned their guns on Canada, not Syria and Egypt.
Instead of asking for damages from Damascus and Cairo or demanding that Ottawa file an official protest with Syria and Egypt, the three torture victims went after Canada’s government, and now demand an apology from it.
This, despite the fact Justice Iacobucci made it very clear in all three cases the arrests in Syria and Egypt did not come about as a result of any direct Canadian action. His inquiry “did not conclude that (the detentions or) any mistreatment resulted directly from any action of Canadian officials.”
Despite finding many flaws in Canadian officials’ performance of their duties, Justice Iacobucci concluded that he “found no evidence that any of these officials were seeking to do anything other than carry out conscientiously the duties and responsibilities of the institutions of which they were a part.” In selected cases, there was at most a likelihood of indirect, unintended contribution by officials to circumstances leading to detention and mistreatment.
I would have expected the three gentlemen and their lobbyists would have been organizing demonstrations outside the Egyptian and Syrian embassies, but to my knowledge none have taken place. In fact, in 2005 a visiting minister from Syria was fêted as a guest of honour at a Toronto event hosted by Arab groups, including those prominently supporting the three, today. No one protested at the event to demand an end to torture in the Syrian prison system.
If we as Canadians are being asked to apologize, perhaps it is time for us to ask Messrs El-Maati, Almalki and Nureddin some questions of our own, and demand explanations.
Why, for example, did Mr. El-Maati support the most vicious faction of the Mujahedeen while in Afghanistan?
There are tens of thousands of Canadians of Pakistani and Afghan descent in this country. We all are aware of the phenomenon that author Ahmed Rashid describes as the “Arab Afghans,” many of them Canadians. If human rights are of concern to these groups now, then are they willing to repudiate and denounce the doctrine of armed jihad that inflicted untold suffering on the people of Pakistan and Afghanistan?
So far the media have been very kind to the three men.
For example, Mr. El-Maati would have us believe, through author Kerry Pither, that his move to Afghanistan in 1991 was a result of an inherited “love of travel from his parents,” which took him on “months-long road trips” to Europe. He tells Ms. Pither in her book Dark Days that his “love for travel and adventure, as well as a sense of religious and humanitarian duty, were calling him to Afghanistan. … ‘I finally made up my mind in 1991 to go.’ ”
But soon after his arrival, Ahmed El-Maati joined the army of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, a character reviled as the most vicious of the jihadis.
Mr. Hekmatyar wantonly killed innocent civilians, skinned his prisoners alive and his soldiers threw acid in the face of any Afghan women who dared not wear the burqa.
Despite these well-documented atrocities, as Ms. Pither writes, Mr. El-Maati trivializes his former boss’s crimes as not “any worse than his rivals.”
Whether one was adventuring in Afghanistan or Pakistan or running a private Islamic school in Toronto that was a breeding ground for Islamists, these actions need to be repudiated before Canada starts doling out its next set of apologies.
Ahmad El-Maati, Muayyed Nureddin and Abdullah Almalki were victims of torture and both Syria and Egypt should answer for their crimes. But these men are not Canadian heroes who should be idolized the way they are being treated by the media.
As a Muslim Canadian, I need assurances from the three gentlemen that my religion Islam was not used as political ideology; my country was not used as a parking lot and its passport not defiled as a flag of convenience.
Tarek Fatah is founder of the Muslim
Canadian Congress and author of Chasing a Mirage: The Tragic Illusion of an Islamic State (Wiley 2008).
Â
“Despite not being Canadian citizens or having lived in Canada for several years, they insist the men remain entitled to charter protections, including the right not to be arbitrarily detained or imprisoned.”
If they buy that argument, then anyone who stepped onto any foreign soil would have all the rights of the citizens of that foreign soil. Ridiculous of course but will they go along with it? How long do you have to be on that foreign soil to have ‘rights’ forever, wherever you are? 1 month? 2 years? 2 hours?
Always claim torture, abuse, injury, verbal assault, etc. The dignity and respect we give the captured jihadis and they brutally torture with grotesque mutilations and beheading our military men. Why can’t our leaders see evil and Islam is evil.