Canada throws up yet another roadblock to Abdelrazik

"A Montreal man stranded in Sudan must get himself removed from a United Nations blacklist before he can return to Canada, Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon said Friday."

Un-fucking-believable

Background :

• Canada has Abdelrazik detained - and tortured, he says - in Sudan in 2003.
• Sudan releases him but not before his passport expires and his name is added to the UN Security Council's list of terrorist suspects.
• Destitute, he moves into the weight room of the Canadian embassy in Sudan.
• His family in Montreal send money for a ticket but Canada refuses to issue a temporary passport.
• In December 2008 Ottawa says he could be given a temporary passport - after he books a flight home.
• He books one; they withdraw the offer.
• Ottawa then says he must first have a fully paid ticket but in February his lawyer says anyone contributing to it can be charged with aiding a possible terrorist.
• Nonetheless in March 170 Canadians including Stephen Lewis and a former solicitor general of Ontario buy him a ticket home.

And now this.

The RCMP has cleared him. CSIS has gone so far as to ask for an internal probe to clear itself of allegations made in secret Foreign Affairs department documents.


So what's the fucking hold-up? Apparently The Security of North America


Canada feared U.S. backlash over man trapped in Sudan

Senior Canadian intelligence officials warned against allowing Abousfian Abdelrazik, a Canadian citizen, to return home from Sudan because it could upset the Bush administration, classified documents reveal.

"Senior government of Canada officials should be mindful of the potential reaction of our U.S. counterparts to Abdelrazik's return to Canada as he is on the U.S. no-fly list," intelligence officials say in documents in the possession of The Globe and Mail.

"Continued co-operation between Canada and the U.S. in the matters of security is essential. We will need to continue to work closely on issues related to the Security of North America, including the case of Mr. Abdelrazik," the document says.

The Abdelrazik documents - prepared by senior intelligence and security officials in Transport Canada, the unit that creates and maintains Canada's own version of the terrorist "no-fly" list - make clear that it was the U.S. list that kept Mr. Abdelrazik from returning to Canada when he was released from prison three years ago. "

Un-fucking-believable.
This has nothing to do with the security of Canada, much less the Security of North America, unless - like this government - you count sacrificing a Canadian citizen and the sovereignty of Canada to be worth the price of keeping those trucks flowing back and forth across the border without any accompanying U.S. frowny faces.

Update : What Dawg said.

Chris wrote to his MP asking what assurances he has that as an international traveller the government will protect him. You can do the same.

To contact Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon directly :

Telephone: (613) 992-5516 Fax: (613) 992-6802 EMail: CannoL@parl.gc.ca .

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Abdelrazik has his ticket!

G&M : "More than 100 supporters of a Canadian citizen stranded in Sudan have flouted Canadian law by purchasing an airline ticket home for the one-time terrorism suspect.
The activists, including former solicitor general Warren Allmand, bought the ticket for travel April 3 and put it in the hands of Abousfian Abdelrazik. It's now up to the government to issue Mr. Abdelrazik travel documents, said his lawyer, Yavar Hameed."

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With thanks to commenter Sumeet Jain of the British Association of South Asian Studies who set up the facebook account to facilitate this and to everyone who responded.

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The ball is now in the Canadian government's court.

The RCMP have said there is no information linking him to criminal activities.

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Here the Montreal Gazette describes our government's vile and Kafka-esque machinations after Sudanese investigators cleared Abdelrazik. Canadian security operatives had originally requested to have Sudan - a country with a notorious record of torture and abuse in its prisons - arrest and detain him in our very own Canadian version of rendition :

"Our former Liberal government, and now the Conservative one, have persisted in treating this citizen this way. Look at the absurd Catch-22 he's in now, housed in our Khartoum embassy: For no stated reason, Ottawa refused to issue him a passport, so he can't come home. For some time Ottawa said he could be given a temporary passport - after he booked a flight home. He booked one; they withdrew the offer. Now Ottawa insists he have a fully-paid ticket, but he has no money, and anyone who helps him financially will be charged under anti-terror laws, Ottawa says.

Frankly, we would rather have a dangerous terrorist walking around than accept the idea that Ottawa can condemn a citizen to this sort of quasi-legal hell.

If they can do this to him, they can do it to you."

Exactly.

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So how's the Con's bid to revive Canada's draconian Anti-Terror Act powers coming along?

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Last Thursday, Paul Kennedy, chair of the Commission for Public Complaints Against the RCMP, told a Commons committee he's powerless to tell whether the Mounties have made the changes needed to prevent another Maher Arar affair.
The RCMP watchdog says he can provide no assurances the government has enacted the Arar inquiry's recommendations.

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UN report on torture and rendition cites Canada

Report of the Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms while countering terrorism,
Martin Scheinin*

The Guardian : "While the practice of extraordinary rendition was put in place by the US, it was only possible through collaboration from other countries, the report says. It identifies the UK, with ­Bosnia and Herzegovina, Canada, Croatia, ­Georgia, Indonesia, Kenya, Macedonia and Pakistan, as countries that provided "intelligence or have conducted the initial seizure of an individual before he was transferred to (mostly unacknowledged) detention centres in Afghanistan, Egypt, Ethiopia, Jordan, Pakistan, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Syria, Thailand, Uzbekistan … or to one of the CIA covert detention centres, often referred to as 'black sites' ".

The Independent :
"Grave human rights violations by states such as torture, enforced disappearances or arbitrary detention should place serious constraints on policies of co-operation by states, including by their intelligence agencies, with states that are known to violate human rights," he said. "The prohibition against torture is an absolute and peremptory norm of international law. States must not aid or assist in the commission of acts of torture ... including by relying on intelligence information obtained through torture."

In his Nov 2007 ruling on the Safe Third Country Agreement, Justice Michael Phelan of the Canadian Federal Court ruled that "The U.S. does not meet the [UN] Convention Against Torture prohibition." That ruling was subsequently overturned.
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The report notes that "lack of oversight and political and legal accountability has facilitated illegal activities by intelligence agencies", and is exacerbated by "increased cooperation between intelligence agencies" when "condoned or even secretly directed by government officials".

The phrase "sentiment analysis" was new to me on the issue of racial/ethnic profiling.

"While data mining is not prohibited as such, it should not be allowed to include variables that result in compromising the right to non-discrimination.
Data-mining software that performs “sentiment analysis”, which extracts and summarizes opinions from unstructured human-authored documents on the Internet in order to create a terrorist profile - and which is apparently used by intelligence agencies in the United States, Canada, China, Germany, Israel, Singapore and Taiwan - must not be used as the basis for deprivation of liberty or inclusion on "watch lists".

And I was surprised, although I probably should not have been, by this statistic :

"On the introduction of a profit motive into situations which are prone to human rights violations ... 70% of intelligence activities of the U.S. are being outsourced to private actors."

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Canada, Sudan, and the stench of hypocrisy

Two headlines on Canada and Sudan, just hours apart

Canada urges Sudan to cooperate with the International Criminal Court
after the bench issued an arrest warrant for President Omar al-Beshir for war crimes in Darfur.

Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon :

"Canada strongly supports the work of the ICC, including its work in Sudan," he said, calling for "ongoing international scrutiny of Sudan's commitments to human rights."

Sure. Unless, of course, Canada is making use of Sudan's crappy human rights record to detain and torture a Canadian citizen, Abousfian Abdelrazik. Then we're not so keen on those "commitments to human rights".

CSIS asked Sudan to arrest Canadian, files reveal
Abdelrazik is 'first case of Canadian rendition,' MP says

"Canadian security operatives asked Sudan - a country with a notorious record of torture and abuse in its prisons - to arrest and detain Canadian citizen Abousfian Abdelrazik, according to heavily redacted Canadian documents, marked "secret."

The newly obtained documents provide the strongest evidence to date that Canadian Security Intelligence agents engaged in the Bush-era U.S. practice of getting other countries to imprison those it considered security risks aboard rather than charge them with any crime."

Abdelrazik fled to Canada in 1990 after being imprisoned in Sudan for his political beliefs following the coup by the same President Omar al-Beshir the ICC is after today. Abdelrazik was granted refugee status and in 1995 he became a Canadian citizen.
While he was visiting his ailing mother in Khartoum in 2003, Canada had him arrested and interrogated there. Despite his being declared innocent of terrorist ties and released from prison by Sudan, even despite Sudan's offer to fly him home to Canada, Canada refused to return or reissue his expired passport and his name subsequently went on the U.S. no-fly list.

On April 3, 2007, Foreign Affairs point man on the case, Sean Robertson, sent a cable to the Canadian embassy in Khartoum :

"Mission staff should not accompany Abdelrazik to his interview with the FBI."

A month later a Canadian embassy official in Khartoum told Ottawa that Mr. Abdelrazik had been told by the FBI that he would never see Canada again unless he implicated others as al-Qaeda operatives.

I do believe we've been here before.

Let Foreign Affairs Minister Lawrence Cannon know you're watching - Cannon.L@parl.gc.ca. -and support Abdelrazik's return to Canada on Facebook.
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Previous Creekside posts on Abdelrazik. . . Dr. Dawg's superior coverage.
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Six years later, and counting

Why did Canada illegally render Algerian asylum-seeker Benamar Benatta to US authorities on Sept 12, 2001, where despite being cleared of charges of terrorism, he was illegally held and tortured for another five years?

Muslim - check

Knows something about planes - check

Applied for refugee status in Canada a week before 9/11 - check

On Sept 5, 2001, Benatta, an 33 year old Algerian air force lieutenant who had been in the US as part of a US/Algerian military exchange program, entered Canada from the US on an expired visa to claim refugee status.

On Sept 11, 2001, following the WTC attack, he was interviewed in Canada by the FBI.

On Sept 12 the RCMP drove him to the US border and handed him over to US authorities.

In November 2001, the FBI cleared him of any connection to terrorism and he was charged instead with carrying expired ID papers.

Five months later he received council, learning for the first time about the WTC attacks and why he was being held. Benatta speaks only French.

In 2003, the federal US magistrate hearing his case called it "a sham perpetrated by the FBI and INS to justify his rendition from Canada", and stated their explanations "bordered on ridiculousness". The magistrate recommended his immediate release from custody.

Benatta was then held for a further three years in another US prison, shackled in a cell with "WTC" written on the door. He claims to have been tortured by prison officials and other prisoners.

In July 2006, he was returned to Canada to continue with his Canadian refugee application, which is still pending.

Benatta appears to have spent almost five years in two US prisons because Canada handed him over to US authorities for being a Muslim who knew something about planes.

In April, Stockwell Day promised to look into it.

Benatta will attend a rally being held in Toronto at noon today to demand a public review.

How's everyone doin' with that "one security perimeter" concept?

Benatta Coalition for a Public Review

h/t Mostly Water for rally details