The Globe and Mail posted two different stories related to Security Certificates last night. The first article concerns Mohamed Harkat and reports that the house arrest and constant surveillance he's been subject to will stop in favour of much less onerous measures.
Some lesser restrictions - including an order to keep wearing an GPS ankle bracelet, stay away from cellphones and stay within the confines of greater Ottawa - remain as the government continues its long running bid to deport Mr. Harkat as a threat to Canada.
Harkat had been in the news recently when a Federal Court Justice publicly lectured CSIS. It seems the agency had neglected to inform the courts that an informant whose testimony was a critical part of the case against Harkat had failed a polygraph test. Years ago. Apparently that rather crucial bit of information had slipped the minds of our intelligence professionals on five separate occasions. There has now been a change in position on the part of Harkat's accusers.
The government contends that Mr. Harkat is still a threat, just not as much of a threat as he used to be...
Moving right along... the second article has more far-reaching implications.
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In the case of Adil Charkaoui, it appears the government is actually going to withdraw crucial evidence because the court has ordered the revelation of information that the state regards as being vital to national security. The government is going to scuttle its own case.
Rather than comply with a judge's order to disclose sensitive intelligence, they want to pull the evidence - saying they now hold Mr. Charkaoui to be less of a threat to national security than further court-ordered revelations of the secret information that was used to build the case against him.
And the spooks are not amused by the trend towards increasing transparency.
...former CSIS head Jim Judd recently lamented in a speech the growing "judicialization" of intelligence matters; he told an audience that "this has to be the decade that spies came in from the cold - whether voluntarily, or kicking and screaming." Some of his subordinates have been less polite in the past, complaining they have suffered nothing less than a "judicial jihad" on their secret sources and methods.
It sounds suspiciously like they're complaining because they don't get to operate outside the law.
Given the long list of errors and abuses that have been attributed to our security establishment in recent years, that rings more than a bit hollow. CSIS, along with the RCMP and DFAIT, were found to be partially responsible for the detention and torture of three Canadians. The abuse of another Canadian, Maher Arar, was blamed in part on the improper sharing of information with American intelligence services, which is one of those relationships CSIS wants to go to great lengths to preserve. And the Security Intelligence Review Committee recently issued a report that was critical of CSIS in the matter of Omar Khadr and announced its intention to do a serious review of the agency's conduct in the case of Abousfian Abdelrazik. Is this all a "judicial jihad?" Or is it a necessary and overdue attempt to rein in some people who are out of control?
The objection to Security Certificates was always that the suspension of due process created the possibility of abuse. When they now claim that the case against Charkaoui is less compelling than the need to keep their own methods in the dark, it's hard not to question whether it was all that compelling to begin with.
The headline for this article is "Divisive terror law losing traction" and it's suggested that the use of the Security Certificate is in decline and may be on its way out. We live in hope.
Omigosh -- there's that deference deficit showing up again, pogge. You gotta watch that, pogge -- very naughty of you.
Wow, but Judd can get me going. Of all the bricklefritzin' nerve -- "judicialization" and, from unnamed (of course) subordinates, "judicial jihad." Great. So we have public servants in this country who are semi-public racists?
The courts call CSIS on their incompetence, and what do they do? They whine, just as some (notably, not all) CIA personnel have been doing lately. Wimps, whining wimps.
And they have been incompetent. We know that they've been running on evidence from Abu Zubaydah, probably Ahmed Ressam, maybe Omar Khadr, all of it at least tainted and some of it risible. Everyone who knows those files knows what's wrong with that testimony -- well, everyone but CSIS, apparently.
We've seen in the U.S. that many officials and agents do not give a good goddamn whether any of the people they've persecuted are in fact guilty of anything -- a corollary of which is that they don't care about the quality of their own work. I can't help feeling a lot of the time that they can live with that kind of sociopathy in themselves because they do not believe that people who are not Americans are fully human. Some of them have said things close to that.
So what is Judd's excuse?
Beverley McLachlin fires a nice shot across the bow.