The Federal Court of Canada said Thursday a security certificate against a Montreal man who has been imprisoned or under surveillance for six years will be dropped.
Judge Danielle Tremblay Lamer said the only question remaining is how soon it will happen.
This was expected. The government and CSIS are standing by their claims about Charkaoui but that's to be expected too. In the absence of solid evidence to back up their claims, he'll soon be a free man which is the way it's supposed to work. Meanwhile he spent two years in jail and four years under house arrest. I wonder if he'll sue.
And it now seems fair to wonder if we'll ever see another security certificate case.
It will be good to see an end to the security certificates, but a major concern remains.
Canadian citizens have every interest in knowing whether CSIS, which acts in their name, is professionally and ethically competent. There is evidence that in other cases CSIS agents have been complicit in serious violations of international law. We are still prevented from knowing the quality of the evidence they were using against Charkaoui, Harkat, and others; it must have been pretty flimsy, and yet the government still insists on referring to that evidence to keep a sword hanging over the heads of individuals they recognize they cannot convict fairly.
I think we need another inquiry. I want to know what CSIS was doing, what kind of testimony they were taking seriously. Every day I read American analysts and lawyers who, working only from evidence that is publicly available, can poke holes in most of the testimony that I suspect CSIS has fallen for. How credulous are our agents anyway? Or how ideologically inclined are they to believe obvious political propaganda?
I think we need another inquiry.
You certainly won't see anything that would satisfy you from this government. Their kneejerk position is to keep everything secret. And I wouldn't expect the Liberals to be a whole lot better here both because some of the skeletons in the closet are theirs and because transparency doesn't come all that easily to them either. Despite their rhetoric.
I thought we already knew whether CSIS was professionally and ethically competent. That is, they aren't.
I suppose in part it's a reflection of the whole "security" gig, so that if they do something successful we never hear about it, but yeah--I've never heard about anything CSIS has ever done that was both useful and not something the cops could have been doing. And come to think of it, if CSIS did something useful that led to, like, arrests of real live spies or something, you'd hear about that. Closest I've ever seen was those half-assed guys that would have never gotten anywhere if the RCMP plant hadn't helped them out. And was CSIS even involved in that nonsense?
CSIS was created basically as a damage-limiting exercise, so that various things the RCMP had been doing that they shouldn't have been doing, like opening people's mail who had the wrong politics, would instead be done by an outfit with no law enforcement powers, so if someone's illegally snooping on you and harassing you, at least they can't arrest you. But that raises the question of whether we really needed *anyone* doing that stuff. Anyway, Canada really only needs spies to the extent that we participate in the whole US imperial espionage thing, and the bad side effect of that is that our spies will inevitably be mostly oriented towards their raison d'etre, the US. So on top of all the usual problems with spies, our spies will basically be traitors.
All in all, I don't think the damage limiting by taking spy stuff away from the RCMP has been a success. CSIS was an interesting experiment, but they're way more trouble than they're worth. Axe 'em.
I'm with Le Carre, ALL spies are more trouble than they are worth.