One of the arguments of those who oppose the use of security certificates to imprison and deport terrorism suspects is that the accused, and even the lawyers defending him, are often kept in the dark about the evidence supporting the individual's imprisonment. Apparently the real reason for that is that the intelligence agencies can't always find it.
The sudden appearance of a damning CSIS report that paints alleged terrorist Adil Charkaoui as a jihadist insider is feeding claims by Charkaoui and his supporters of a smear campaign, while also raising questions about security at Canada's spy service.CSIS' assistant director of intelligence admitted earlier this month to a federal court judge that the service had recently "discovered" a report of an April 2001 interview with Charkaoui.
The interview did not form part of the evidence used by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service to detain Charkaoui under a security certificate in 2003, even though it deals with his purported extensive knowledge of Islamic-extremist circles in Montreal.
It's interesting that this "discovery" is occurring now, isn't it?
The interview resurfaces just ahead of Charkaoui's scheduled appearance this Thursday before the Supreme Court of Canada, where he will argue he was denied fundamental justice because CSIS destroyed notes and tapes of its interviews with him.
Timing is everything.
Obviously I have no idea if this interview is legitimate or not. But it's difficult to credit the idea that Charkaoui is a serious threat to national security, and that the security certificate process is a credible way to deal with such threats, when some evidence from the investigation was destroyed but damning evidence is allowed to get lost in the system for nearly seven years and suddenly surfaces days before a Supreme Court hearing. After everything else we've seen from CSIS and the RCMP there's just a bit of a credibility gap here. Or as one intelligence official said, exhibiting the typical (non-blogging) Canadian gift for understatement:
The timing, along with the ambiguous explanation given by CSIS, has even struck members of the intelligence community as odd."It's got some disappointing features," said David Harris, a former chief of strategic planning at CSIS, of the interview's sudden reappearance. "I would suggest it is an unusual situation."
Quite.
Can we do the Maher Arar inquiry over? I don't think the right people got the point.
At least he admitted it's a feature, not a bug.
The leaks described later in that report are disturbing too. Man, I hate living through this replay, but something is very rotten in Ottawa. Yes, CSIS could leak one day to a journalist for one reason, tomorrow to terrists by accident, but as we have reason to suspect from some American cases, it is much more likely that they would be leaking to foreign governments for some very twisted political reasons. And they could be doing that at American direction.