Very briefly, this cultural difficulty in DFAIT really does need to be addressed. If we ask ourselves how the Maher Arar situation arose, how the Zahra Kazemi situation arose, the Mohammed Alatar situation, the William Sampson situation, the Huseyin Celil situation--all of these are instances in which torture or killing took place, or are very strongly believed to have taken place, on Canadian citizens, and DFAIT has maintained a pusillanimous attitude on disclosure of information.
On May 17th, 2007. See this statement in context.