Forgive me, but my deference deficit, CSIS Director Jim Judd's way of caricaturing and condescending to the independent thought of Canadian citizens, is likely to be showing all the way through this post.
Geoffrey O'Brian, a CSIS lawyer and adviser on operations and legislation, put on an absolutely outrageous performance today before the Public Safety Committee as he and representatives of the RCMP and CBSA testified about their agencies' responses to the findings of the O'Connor and Iacobucci inquiries. According to the Star report, O'Brian claimed that
... there is no absolute ban on using intelligence that may have been obtained from countries with questionable human rights records on torture.
Really, Mr O'Brian? Where is there no absolute ban on pretending that you didn't know about the torture part? Within CSIS, apparently (and I'd like to see the text and subsequent history of that House of Lords decision O'Brian referred to -- notice that he didn't refer to the now-rotting faux-legal corpse of the Bush torture regime).
But I can tell you, Mr O'Brian, of a few places where there is an absolute ban: the American Bill of Rights, the French Declaration, the Canadian Charter, Nuremberg and Geneva and all international conventions and treaties since those that Canada has signed and ratified, making them Canadian law -- look there, Mr O'Brian, and stare over and over again at the absolute ban.
You might be thinking that Mr O'Brian fudged sufficiently with the "may have been obtained" and "questionable human rights records" dodges in the Star summary (which is not a direct quotation). But no -- as the Globe and Mail reports, Mr O'Brian rabbited on about what sounds a lot like the ole ticking time-bomb scenario:
He added that CSIS simply cannot rule out the use of information obtained with the use of torture in specific circumstances.
"We only do so if lives are at stake," Mr. O'Brian told the standing committee of the House on public safety."The premise to that is that it happens rarely in the exchanges of information that we have. Second of all, information that may have extracted by methods which are less than the kinds of methods we would like applied to people ... the recipient of that information doesn't know how that information was obtained," he said.
Gosh, that's convenient, isn't it? Some MI5 and/or CIA guy faxes questions to interrogators in Morocco (where the MI5 and CIA guys had him sent in the first place), who then extract information from a victim by taking a scalpel to his genitals and fax his terrorized answers back to those innocent MI5 and/or CIA guys who really have no idea how that information was obtained? (That's a real British-American case, Binyam Mohamed -- you can look it up.)
Sorry, Mr O'Brian, but none of this is going to wash. The facts about the fantastical adventures of Western boy-torturers* and torture-rationalizers with inflated egos who have turned out to be staggeringly incompetent are tumbling out all around us now, from the work of many fine journalist-historians like Philippe Sands, Jane Mayer, and Barton Gellman, from U.S. congressional hearings and departmental IG reports, from the High Court in London, from our own courts and judges whenever they get the chance.
No one believes that CSIS was ever dealing with a ticking time-bomb. We do believe that, in different permutations and combinations, CSIS, the RCMP, and DFAIT have muddled about in interrogations of at least eight Canadian citizens overseas (not just the four discussed before the committee today), interrogations that look a lot like violations of both Canadian and international law, maybe worse.
And that's why Mr O'Brian was sent out there today to do his tap-dance. They are afraid, and they know better than any of us the reasons they have to be so. Me, I think it is taking a long time for the deference deficit to make enough of the mark that it needs to make in Canada, although it sounds as though the opposition members of the committee today knew how to react to Mr O'Brian's stale diversionary myths and obfuscations.
They are scared, and they deserve to be. Let's keep the pressure on.
* One of the most terrible characters in Jane Mayer's splendid book The Dark Side is a woman who gloried so much in debasing detainees that even her superiors decided she had better be taken off such duty. So, yes -- I know it's not just the boys.
H/T to Toedancer at Bread and Roses
Excellent post, girl.
You can view the whole shebang yourself here :
http://parlvu.parl.gc.ca/Parlvu/ContentEntityDetailView.aspx?ContentEntityId=4326
Notable :
No absolute ban on any information received by the RCMP either.
Although this was called the "Review of the Findings and Recommendations of the Iacobucci and O'Connor Reports", nothing from Iacobucci can be discussed due to pending "several hundred million dollars in litigation".
O'Connor recommendations on incoming and outgoing info are not followed.
Bloc MPs Maria Mourani and Serge Ménard were dogged in their attempts to get answers about Khadr and whether info obtained by torture is still generally endorsed, espite running interference and interruptions from the Cons - Dave McKenzie, Brent Rathgeber, and chair Garry Breitkreuz.
Are persons of interest still sometimes described in communiques as "jihadists"? Yes.
I have little issue with the "ticking time bomb" scenario and torturing to obtain information in that case. But authorities should be willing to face the legal consequences of torturing. That is, if you really think that torturing someone is that only way to save lives, go ahead and do it, but you must be willing to go to jail for it. C'mon, you patriotic tough guys doing what others can't or won't. I'd be willing to face 10 years in prison to save a dozen (let alone a hundred) lives, why aren't you? It seems like just another example of what has been building for decades, but was most evident with Bush's administration - people in power being unwilling to face the consequences of their decisions. See also - current financial crises.
It would seem to me that the police forces would be far more likely to face this type of situation, just on bigger numbers alone. I'm glad we let police forces brutally abuse and torture suspects to extract information from them. Oh wait, we don't do that (well, in theory...)?
Thanks very much for the link to the video, Alison. I've just been reading your post and Dave's, and now I'm mad all over again.
I'm trying to figure out the law re CSIS silence on the Iacobucci findings. CYA should not be a legitimate reason for an agency of the Canadian government to refuse to explain what it has done in the name of the Canadian people in public. I know what could be done in the U.S. -- haul 'em before Congress and make 'em seek immunity or take the Fifth. I don't know what can be done here, or who would have the will to do it.
aweb, I believe that Ignatieff says something close to what you have in your first paragraph in his book about torture. At least I think that that proposition should be put to Mr O'Brian, Mr Judd, and all agents involved so that we could hear their reactions.
Me, I will never do the rationalization part, just the send-'em-to-jail part. I'm not convinced there ever has been a ticking time-bomb scenario that would have played out the way the torture apologists still claim it would.
Just as bad: all these guys elevate "security" to the same or a higher plane as liberty, which to me makes them destroyers of democracy, of my society, of my inheritance from the European Enlightenment. We shouldn't be giving authority to wimps and cowards like them. You're quite right that we have a problem with people in power being unwilling to face the consequences of their own decisions and actions. Time to figure out how we get to the consequences.
Beyond its basically contrived nature, one major problem with the "ticking time bomb" scenario is that it assumes two things which don't generally seem to be true.
1) The "ticking time bomb" idea assumes that the person you're holding really knows precisely the information you want to extract and is not telling you.
In reality, much of the time the person knows nothing--often because the authorities' beliefs about the prisoner are built on BS and the result of previous tortures. We've seen that frequently, they are confident that person X is a terrorist, and also flat wrong. At other times, while the prisoner may be a "bad guy", the organization he's part of has a tight cell structure and doesn't blab key operational information to dozens of people not involved in the operation.
Where assumption (1) is wrong, torture will change lack of information into possession of false information. In "ticking time bomb" scenarios this could well actually *cost* lives, diverting personnel onto wild goose chases.
2) The "ticking time bomb" scenario assumes that if you have the real person and they do know the information you want, torture will accurately extract it from them, or at least significantly more accurately than normal interrogations, and in a more timely fashion.
I've never seen any evidence that this is really true. Much like innocent people, guilty people spout all kinds of stuff under torture, but much of it is lies and it's really hard to sort out what's what. You can use torture to break and brainwash people, but that takes some time (kind of making it unworkable for a "ticking time bomb" situation), and may well cause them to forget anything they knew anyway.
Torture *is* apparently useful for nabbing all the members of an organization in territory you control, as long as you don't mind getting a lot of innocent along with the guilty and you don't mind sequentially torturing a whole lot of people. The French in Algeria, for instance, used torture quite successfully to take down resistance organizations. Despite this success, the Algerians spontaneously rose a couple of years later and threw the French out. So it's questionable how useful the whole process was; it may be that any gains the French got from torture and general police brutality were kinda countered by the Algerians not being wild about being run by foreigners who torture people.
Which brings us back to the moral question. Torturing people is a Bad Thing To Do. We shouldn't do it. How hard is this?
The "ticking time bomb" excuse, the "What would Jack Bauer do?" approach to intelligence gathering, is at best ineffective and at worst, a ploy to grant these agencies sweeping powers to conduct investigations with minimal oversight and zero accountability.
Exactly because it is an excuse, basically a bluff on the behalf of CSIS, I would favour opening it up to saying "go ahead and torture if you think you really need to, but be prepared to suffer the consequences". This would lead to even more double-talk excuse laden hemming and hawwing as to why that's not fair, I'm sure. But it would be even more clear to more people that CSIS is full of it, and doesn't have any good justification for what it is doing (Aside from just liking to "play spies" like they do in the movies, which I suspect is pretty much the whole reason why so many insist they be allowed to do it).
Ignoring intelligence because "somewhere down the line was obtained through torture is ridiculous".
If I tortured someone to find out they had planted a car bomb in one of your loved ones cars and told you, would you ignore it out of principle or use it to protect them? Exactly!!! Anyone who says they wouldn't use that info even if a severely tortured someone to get it is a liar.
Read more:
http://adaugeoindex.blogspot.com/2009/03/march-30-china-is-our-enemy-and.html
Adaugeo Index: "If I tortured someone to find out they had planted a car bomb in one of your loved ones cars and told you, would you ignore it out of principle or use it to protect them?"
I would gladly go to prison and think I was getting the better part of the deal to protect my loved ones. Yet that is something of a non sequitur, both in instance and answer.
There a disconnect in your argument .... the question is about torture "somewhere down the line" - and not about an emergency and immediate danger. If the information cannot be discovered and verified by 'other', more rational means then you are into the scenarios described by PLG - what knowledge you have gained is mostly useless.
Adaugeo Index - you're not Peter Worthington in disguise, are you?
Sorry, TA Index, but that's a fail, given what we know of the history of the eight cases that CSIS has been involved in, not to mention countless other cases that American and British investigators have tracked.
I've now had a chance to watch the full committee video that Alison so kindly linked above. The one thing I regret about opposition members' questions is that they allowed Mr O'Brian to keep moving them back to the scenario that TA Index has just described, as though it was the intelligence obtained through torture that was the first problem.
It has no doubt been a problem, if and when it was used. But it is some way down the list of major problems, which would start with careless dissemination of so-called intel from our end.
The truth is that agents of the RCMP and CSIS and representatives of DFAIT have repeatedly done the following: shared with foreign agencies/governments highly suspect information about Canadian citizens; possibly collaborated in the apprehension of Canadian citizens abroad by second and third parties, or have at least been aware that citizens have been "rendered" or apprehended and have taken insufficient action to free those citizens from detention; have participated either directly or by proxy in the illegal interrogation abroad of Canadian citizens; and have resisted parliamentary and judicial oversight of all those suspect activities.
All those offences precede any use that the agencies and the department might have made of the suspect "intel" that came back from Pakistan, Afghanistan, Syria, Egypt, and Sudan.
And someone has got to hammer that truth home -- in the next committee hearing, in the media, across the blogosphere.
Fine, Index. How about we torture *you* to get that information?
But, you don't have any such information because you weren't involved in the car bombing and you're not a bad guy, you say? That's what they all say, you know. Once we've worked you over for a while you'll sing a different tune.
"The truth is that agents of the RCMP and CSIS and representatives of DFAIT have repeatedly done the following: shared with foreign agencies/governments highly suspect information about Canadian citizens; possibly collaborated in the apprehension of Canadian citizens abroad by second and third parties, or have at least been aware that citizens have been "rendered" or apprehended and have taken insufficient action to free those citizens from detention; have participated either directly or by proxy in the illegal interrogation abroad of Canadian citizens; and have resisted parliamentary and judicial oversight of all those suspect activities."
Yes!
It is a process - god, how reverentially they all used the word "process" over and over - that in the absence of checks and balances has achieved a kind of Kafka-esque self-perpetuation. And if mistakes are made, well the "process" can handle that too - "after the fact", they said - as if the people mangled by it were entirely secondary. O'Brian was clearly offended that anyone would even question this.
Not saying anything that might aid the individual cases currently in litigation with the government was obviously of real concern to them, but the job of the committee was to determine if Iacobucci and O'Connor's specific recommendations on how to stop torture had been implemented. Even though the committee was not allowed to cite individual cases, it was clear anyway that the spirit of those recommendations had not been followed.
Ya know, you can't shut down the police. No matter how annoyed I may become at police brutality, deadly taserings, shootings of harmless people that they "believed posed a threat", lies and destruction of evidence, the police serve a needed purpose in society. Reform is the only thing you can aim at, however difficult that may be given entrenched institutional cultures.
But does CSIS actually do anything useful at all? The Americans need spooks--they're an empire. They've got dominating to do and blowback to contain. But CSIS--this is Canada. There may be occasional people out there who want some of our secrets, but ones that matter enough to be worth the money we spend on these guys, much less the harm they do to society? Sheesh, we're paying taxpayer money to establish a bunch of creeps whose main agenda seems to be suppressing democratic dissent at home, selling out Canadian citizens and indeed institutions to the worst excesses of the US police state, and creating a climate of secrecy and unaccountability that reduces the scope of democracy in our state. We'd be way better off without these dorks.
Right on i have found a spot for conversation in my life, that deals with current issues. ones that affect canadains.I have thought for most of my intellectual life that Canada was a place that held human rights above all else. Have these people forgotten about this "War to end all wars". Man torture isn't cool. What do we say about ourselves, if we let people obtain information from these types of demeaning acts against other people. Is there another way of obtaining information, or not even needing to obtain information, at all? Would diplomacy work in a situation, of disputes, over land, or religion, or any matter? I think so.To turn away from diplomacy, i think is not Canadian at all. Or at least not what i would do. thanks for the conversation! whew.
Skdadl says that CSIS has "possibly collaborated in the apprehension of Canadian citizens abroad by second and third parties" who are then tortured?
According to a law professor on CBC radio today, the court process has revealed multiple documents stating that CSIS requested that the government of Sudan arrest this Canadian citizen.
In response to the question "Did you request his arrest" CSIS has responded by saying they didn't "arrange" his detention.
And, it goes without saying that Sudan tortures at the drop of a hat. So, the request for detention was a request for torture, augmented by the ability to claim wonderment and surprise when torture does occur.
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2009/03/31/sudan-limbo.html
The actual audio of the law professor is here: click on "abdelrazik"
http://www.cbc.ca/thecurrent/2009/200904/20090402.html
I was absolutely shocked to my core that CTV national news covered the Abdelrazik story last night:
http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20090402/abdelrazik_harper_090402/20090402?hub=TopStories
(sorry, my html skills are teh suck)
There was actually a line in there about how his supporters chipped in to buy him a plane ticket "To call the conservative government's bluff" (okay, it's a paraphrase not a direct quote... but they used the word "bluff").