My name is Kerry Pither. I've been working on these cases now for more than six years, and my work isn't over yet. When I first started working on these cases, I had been asked by Monia Mazigh to help her in her campaign for the release of her husband, Mahar Arar. That was in May 2003.
I didn't realize, when I first came in to join that work.... There were questions about the involvement of Canadian agencies, but at the time it was mostly believed in Canada that this was the fault of the United States. Several years later, we now know of course that it was the actions of Canadian officials that led to the U.S. decision to send him to Syria for torture, and that it wasn't just Maher Arar, that there were three other Maher Arars: Ahmad El Maati, Abdullah Almalki, and Muayyed Nureddin. That complete picture would take several years and courageous decisions by all four men to go public—tell their stories publicly and demand answers publicly—and two judicial inquiries to uncover.
The picture is this. Four Canadians, all targeted by the same RCMP investigation and by CSIS, all end up being interrogated and tortured at the hands of the same Syrian interrogation team, and in the case of Mr. Almalki by an Egyptian interrogation team, and all of them being imprisoned at the Palestine branch of the Syrian military intelligence.
All have described in gut-wrenching detail how, among other unspeakable atrocities, they were whipped with cables, and in the case of Mr. El Maati subjected to electric shock. Mr. Almalki has described being restrained so that he could be whipped with cables in a car tire. He's described what it was like to survive daily life for 17 months in a dark, underground cell the shape of a grave: three feet wide, six feet tall, seven feet deep. Mr. El Maati has described what it was like to spend almost all of the two years and two months that he was detained in solitary confinement and in wretched conditions, and how at times, with his hands locked behind his back, he was forced to eat like an animal off the floor. Mr. Nureddin has described how his Syrian interrogators would periodically stop whipping his feet to douse them with cold water, to ensure that the nerves were working and that the pain was intense.
All of these men, while being subjected to this torture, were being asked questions provided by Canadian officials or based on information provided by Canadian officials. And here we are today, almost six years after I first became involved and seven years and four months after the torture began for Mr. El Maati, pushing for changes that will stop this from happening again.
I urge the committee to urge the Government of Canada to do two things. First, I agree with my fellow presenters here today that the Government of Canada must be called upon to provide a public, detailed accounting of how each and every one of the recommendations in the Arar enquiry's factual report has been implemented. In doing so, the committee must examine how those recommendations need to be augmented in light of the findings of the Iacobucci enquiry, which was not mandated to make recommendations on its own, and to ensure that those augmented and additional steps are taken.
For example, the Iacobucci enquiry has determined that it wasn't just the RCMP that provided questions to Syrian interrogators; it was CSIS too. Justice O'Connor's recommendation that his recommendations be examined by CSIS for applicability to their actions must be taken doubly seriously, given the findings of the Iacobucci report.
Recommendation 21 in Justice O'Connor's report called on the Canadian government to pull back the border lookouts issued for Ms. Mazigh and for their children. Today, Mr. Almalki's family is experiencing the same kinds of problems that Ms. Mazigh and her and Maher's children experienced. They too appear to have been placed on border lookouts. On March 4, Mr. Abdullah Almalki's 14-year-old son was subjected to a body search while leaving Canada to visit his mother's native home, Malaysia, and his wife was subjected to a body search as well.
They were told they were on a no-fly list. They carried with them—and this is a pretty heavy thing to have to carry around in addition to your passport—the Iacobucci report. They convinced the authorities to let them onto the plane after reading a section of the report that said that the allegations against Mr. Almalki had been inaccurate, unfounded, and inflammatory. The authorities agreed and let them board their plane.
Justice O'Connor's 22nd recommendation does two very important things. It calls on the Canadian government to register formal objections with the United States. In Syria, of course, the same thing now must be done. In light of the Iacobucci findings, formal objections must be registered with the governments of Syria and Egypt for the torture they inflicted on three Canadians.
The second thing Justice O'Connor calls for in recommendation 22 is for the RCMP to inform American agencies of any caveats that should have been applied to information shared and were not, and, very importantly, to correct any inaccurate information provided to the Americans about Mr. Arar.
In the Elmaati, Almalki, and Nureddin cases, Justice Iacobucci finds numerous examples of how inaccurate and inflammatory information was shared about them, not just by the RCMP but by CSIS too, and not just with the United States, Syria, and Egypt, but with numerous other countries, many of which are not even specified in Justice Iacobucci's report. The consequence, of course, is that it makes it very risky, if not impossible, for these men to travel safely.
In sum, Justice O'Connor says of information shared about Mr. Arar that “inaccuracies should be corrected and caveats attached”. The same must happen for information and allegations shared about Messieurs Elmaati, Almalki, and Nureddin.
Another recommendation that needs to be considered in light of Justice Iacobucci's report is Justice O'Connor's 23rd recommendation, which called on the government to assess Mr. Arar’s claim for compensation in the light of his report and respond accordingly. I agree. The same should be done for Messieurs Elmaati, Almalki, and Nureddin. He encouraged a creative approach to mediating a settlement that could involve an apology.
I urge the members of this committee to recommend that the Government of Canada do the same as it did for Maher Arar, which was the right thing to do, and apologize officially to Mr. Elmaati, Mr. Almalki, and Mr. Nureddin for its role in their detention and torture. An apology, of course, is an important signal to the men themselves, to all Canadians, and to the world that someone, somewhere, feels remorse and that officially, at least, the Government of Canada regrets the role it played in the torture of its own citizens.
The third, and in some ways the most important, step the committee must urge the government to take is to insist that the Government of Canada recognize that Justice O'Connor's factual recommendations were designed to work in concert with the review mechanism he recommended in his policy review report. As he says at the start of the recommendations in his factual report:
The recommendations are operational in nature and are intended to complement those made in the Policy Review report, which are directed at providing a robust independent, arm’s-length mechanism for the review of the RCMP’s national security activities. Such a mechanism is essential for ensuring that those activities remain consistent with Canadian values and principles.
His recommendations rely, he says repeatedly, on an expectation on the part of the RCMP and others involved in national security investigations that “the legality of their actions will be reviewed”. The RCMP may well have taken steps to ensure the appropriate distinction between their law enforcement work and that of CSIS, as Justice O'Connor recommends in his first recommendation, but as Justice O'Connor says in that recommendation, it is the role of the review body to make sure that remains the case.
Justice O'Connor calls for more ministerial directives to provide guidance for national security investigations. He says they should be made very public. There's no evidence that many of those have been issued, which may be the explanation for the fact that no one has missed the role the independent review mechanism was to play here in ensuring adherence to those ministerial directives.
The RCMP says that it has adhered to Justice O'Connor's recommendations that call for centralized control of information sharing. The point of that centralized control was to provide “an appropriate level of accountability, thereby facilitating review”. The review isn't taking place.
Then, perhaps, the best example is recommendation 10, of course, which says, “The RCMP’s information-sharing practices and arrangements should be subject to review by an independent, arm's-length review body”. Maybe that's the recommendation, the mysterious number 23 that we're not sure of, that hasn't been recommended yet, because of course there is no independent, arm's-length, effective body in place.
In summary, you can't just go halfway. I'm certain that were Justice O'Connor to have known that his recommendation on review was not going to be implemented, he would have written a very different set of recommendations for his factual report.
The others here have talked about why this mechanism is so important. I come back again to Mr. Abdelrazik's case and echo Mr. Neve's concerns: where is this man to turn when he comes home and has questions to ask about what happened to him?
Mr. Chair, committee members, it has now been seven years, four months, and ten days since the sequence of events began and Ahmad Abou Elmaati was detained, whipped with cables, and asked questions based on Canadian information. It's long past due time for Canada to put all the measures in place that will stop this from happening again.
Thank you very much.