The Torturer's Apprentice: Canada's Role in Horror War
by C. L. Cook
Of course it's hardly news: 'Canada had role in torture.' Yeah. What? Maher Arar. Omar Kadr. Actions committed and crimes of omission; habeas corpus went the way of the PATRIOT Act long ago up here, and it's worse in Over There, Afghanistan. 

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Canadians are getting next to no real information from the front. Apart from casualty figures, and the attendant interviews with families surviving their loss, the day to day details on Canadian Forces commission of the occupation are vague. The national press seem disinterested in the details.

 

So imagine my surprise to find Canada of interest, and in the headlines over there?

 

 

Questions like: How many have died at Canada's hand? How many are wounded? What of the families surviving their loss? are left half-answered. Another nettlesome point obliquely dismissed is: What happens to prisoners taken into Canadian custody?

This is not a new issue, so the absence of comment from CF can be taken as a tacit refusal to publicly examine in-country policy. For reporters working in the highly concentrated Canadian corporate, and profoundly right-wing State media scene, questioning the military establishment for the benefit of some anonymous Taliban is not on the cards; beyond the pale, so to speak.

 

It's a comfortable Canadian compromise struck between the people and their army: "You don't tell us, and we won't ask you." Has ever a riper, more sinister instrument for mischief been so simply stated? But again, daemon internet intercedes, ruining the perfect solace of the plausibly deniable.

Aljazeera English reports:

"Canadians Ahmad El Maati, Abdullah Almalki and Muayyed Nureddin were arrested by Syrian Military Intelligence during trips abroad between 2001 and 2004 on allegations of having links to al-Qaeda. All three were later released without charge. Frank Iacobucci, a retired supreme court judge who conducted the inquiry, concluded the men had been tortured with methods such as beatings with electric cables, burning with cigarettes and being kicked in the genitals.

"He said in a news conference on Tuesday: "Mistakes were made ... detention and mistreatment were connected to those mistakes, in my view, in an indirect way.''

"Iacobucci said in his report the mistreatment of the men did not result directly from any Canadian action, but Canadian officials indirectly led to the torture of El Maati and Almalki and probably to that of Nureddin, who he concluded had also been tortured in Egypt.

"Each of the three, born in Kuwait, Syria and Iraq respectively, had claimed upon return to Canada to have been tortured and that Canadian security officials had labeled them as "terrorists" and supplied their captors with intelligence and lists of questions to ask them."

Naturally, the eventual Canadian response will be a long-lived Royal Commission of some sort for short term public memory, as in the Arar case.

 

In the aftermath of the Maher Arar case, the government was taken to task. They forked over some millions of dollars, and ample empty apologies to the Arar family, promising the while to fix what broke in the system straight away, etc. But nothing was broken. The system did, and continues to work with the efficacy its intention was designed; otherwise, it would be different. Right?
Aljazeera says too, Canadian Minister for Public Safety, Stockwell Day refused to comment on the case of the three men at the centre of this latest revelation, because its a matter before the courts. As mealy-mouthed a response to the scandalous disregard Harper's government has for either international law or basic decency as one could expect.

 

How many Canadians I wonder can even consider what it means to be at the mercy of the torturer's hot blades? Add to that horror the knowledge your government, the only ones that could help, sealed your fate.

Not directly, mind you. As judge Iacobucci admits, "mistakes were made." Well Canadians be soothed, it's all just a misunderstanding. Things are right as rain again, and the future looks to be comin' down the pipeline.