The fact that Abdullah Almalki was "an arab running around" in Canada was enough to eventually get him detained and tortured in Syria. That and a little guilt by association.
Almalki was one of three Canadians whose cases were the focus of the Iacobucci inquiry in 2008. All three men were detained in Syria based on information supplied by Canadian officials. Yesterday Almaki released documents obtained through an Access to Information request and the Montreal Gazette has a story on it. Here are the reasons why Almalki originally came to be regarded as a person of interest.
Which seems straightforward enough. But unfortunately Almalki had made the mistake of knowing the wrong people.Almalki had first come under investigation by CSIS in 1998 when some of his company's communications equipment was found in the hands of the Taliban.
He met with CSIS and explained that his export company shipped store-bought equipment to a Pakistani firm, Microelectronics, and that he didn't control what happened to it after that point.
Almalki came under renewed focus in the heated aftermath of 9/11 because he could be loosely tied to Ahmed Said Khadr, once the highest-ranking Canadian member of al-Qaida. Almalki had worked for Khadr at Human Concern International, an Ottawa-based charity that performed development work in the Muslim world.And "loosely tied" was enough. As the story reports, on the same day that an RCMP investigator was writing this:
O Div. (Ontario Division) task force are presently finding it difficult to establish anything on him other than the fact he is an arab running around.... that same RCMP was writing a letter to Syrian intelligence that...:
...labelled Almalki "an imminent threat" to Canada's national security and linked him to al-Qaida.
That was enough to get him detained when he went to Syria to visit family in October of 2002, held for 22 months and tortured.
As far as I know, none of the RCMP or CSIS personnel involved in this has ever been fired or otherwise sanctioned. They've all probably been promoted. The Canadian government has refused to accept responsibility for any of it. Despite the Iacobucci inquiry's finding that Almalki and the others should be compensated, the feds are stonewalling and forcing all three of them to fight it out in court.
Almalki's case just got a lot stronger. We should pay the man. And apologize profusely. And the next time Jim Judd speaks up to lament the judicialization of intelligence matters, we can stick him with the bill.
Two years ago Kerry Pither, author of Dark Days, commissioned a replica of the underground cell Almalki was locked in for 482 days in Syria for being "an arab running around".
You can see it here.
At the time it was publicly considered suspicious activity in itself that any Canadian would travel to Syria. What kind of Canadian has business interests in Syria? Of course what we didn't know then was that Canada was Syria's 3rd largest foreign direct investor.