WikiLeaks opens can of worms for former CSIS head on use of torture
On July 2, 2008, Canada’s top spy, Jim Judd, sat down in Ottawa with Eliot Cohen, a senior advisor to U.S. Secretary of State Secretary Condoleezza Rice, to discuss security matters.
Judd, then the director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, told Cohen that Canadians had an "Alice in Wonderland" worldview. Canadian judges, he told Cohen, "have tied CSIS in knots, making it ever more difficult to detect and prevent terror attacks in Canada and abroad."
Judd’s comments were revealed this week in secret diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks.
"Judd derided recent judgments in Canada’s courts that threaten to undermine foreign government intelligence and information-sharing with Canada," the Americans reported.
"These judgments posit that Canadian authorities cannot use information that ‘may have been’ derived from torture, and that any Canadian public official who conveys such information may be subject to criminal prosecution."
Ten months later, in March 2009, at a parliamentary committee, Bloc Quebecois MP Maria Mourani asked Geoffrey O’Brian, a senior legal adviser to CSIS, whether Canadian security services use information obtained by torture.
O’Brian said: "Frankly, I’m tempted to say that there are four words that can provide a simple answer, and those four words are either ‘yes, but’ or ‘no, but,’ and the ‘yes, but’ is, do we use information that comes from torture? And the answer is that we only do so if lives are at stake."
This was a politically incorrect answer after the public inquiry into the case of Maher Arar. Arar is a Syrian-Canadian who American security forces sent to Syria for torture after the RCMP gave them bad intelligence that wrongly suggested he was a terrorist. In a handful of similar cases, other Canadians ended up being mistreated in Egypt, Syria and Sudan, the victims of a worldwide American anti-terror campaign that outsourced torture to other countries.
Canadian judges took a dim view of the complicity of Canadian security forces, and so did the government. In 2007, Prime Minister Stephen Harper apologized to Arar and handed him $10 million.
O’Brian was off script, and Judd showed up at the next committee meeting to tell MPs that.
"We do not condone torture," he said. "We do not rely on information obtained by torture."
So, that’s clear enough, and so is the policy of the government of Canada.
So Judd privately complained to Cohen about Canadian rules, then defended them in public. There is reason to believe that the powers that be at CSIS do not like having judges tell them what to do.
In 2007, former top CSIS official Jack Hooper told a reporter that judicial oversight amounts to a "legal jihad," preventing the agency from doing its job.
Last month, Federal Court Judge Kevin Aalto ordered CSIS to stop wiretapping conversations between a terror suspect and his lawyer, a gross violation of solicitor-client privilege. CSIS had recorded 171 such calls since December 2008, when agents ignored an earlier order to stop.
The CSIS and RCMP officers charged with protecting Canadians from terror threats likely feel, as the Jack Nicholson character put it in A Few Good Men, that we can’t handle the truth, and they have too many rules. CSIS agents may be tempted to go through the looking glass and make their own rules in their effort to protect us from threats we don’t understand.
Organizations want to avoid accountability and scrutiny, and there is no doubt that Canadian security forces played a role in some terrible miscarriages of justice in their zeal to help our American allies after the attacks of Sept. 11. That kind of injustice — torture of innocents, civilian casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan — are what motivated WikiLeaks editor-in-chief Julian Assange to unleash his destabilizing information barrage.
In 2006, Assange wrote an essay in which he set out his plans to "radically shift" the behaviour of governments, including the American military and intelligence apparatus, which he conceives as an authoritarian conspiracy, drawing its power from information shared in secrecy.
Such a conspiracy, he wrote, is a "cognitive device," like a computer, and to function effectively its information inputs and internal calculations must be secure. With his unprecedented information releases, Assange is attempting to disrupt the function of that apparatus.
A conspiracy "sufficiently engaged in this manner is no longer able to comprehend its environment and plan robust action," he wrote. He expressed the hope that this would weaken authoritarianism and lead to "more humane forms of governance."
Assange has launched a radical, subversive, carefully conceived, entirely legal attack on people like Judd and organizations like CSIS, harnessing the power of the Internet in an unprecedented threat to imperial power.
It will be interesting to see how the empire strikes back
