The North American Security Intelligence Partnership

CBC, via WikiLeaks :

228182
SECRET 2/10/2009
SECRET OTTAWA 000768
Subject : Visas Viper : The "Toronto 18" as candidates for Visas Viper Program

SUMMARY At Embassy Ottawa's monthly Visas Viper meeting on September 09, 2009, a list of 27 indidivudals (sic) who were involved in the so-called "Toronto 18" conspiracy, a plot to engage in terrorist activities in the Toronto metropolitan area, was submitted for consideration. All of these individuals are watchlisted in the Consular Lookout and Support System (CLASS). Post is submitting their names to be included in the Visas Vipers program.

The Visas Viper program is the entry level into US terrorist watchlists.

Pogge, yesterday : Apparently we need to hold the Arar inquiry all over again

"The Canadian Security Intelligence Service, Canada's principal intelligence agency, routinely transmits to U.S. authorities the names and personal details of Canadian citizens who are suspected of, but not charged with, what the agency refers to as "terrorist-related activity."

In at least some cases, the people in the cables appear to have been named as potential terrorists solely based on their associations with other suspects, rather than any actions or hard evidence."

Evidently even working as an undercover police informer busting terrorists will get you on that list.
In addition to the Toronto 18, the embassy cables name nine others.
Among those nine names is Mubin Shaikh.

Mubin Shaikh, a Canadian Muslim, was recruited by CSIS in 2004 to infiltrate possible terrorist groups.
Shaikh infiltrated the Toronto 18, secretly taping them and setting up the RCMP sting resulting in their arrest.
He testified against them at their trial as the Crown's star witness. Without him there would have been no trial, no convictions.
And now he's in the US terrorist database.
I'm sure other Canadian Muslims will be really keen to help CSIS out now.

So did CSIS put their own mole on that list? Or do they just have no autonomy at all over their own data.

“Clearly it’s a mistake,” Mr. Shaikh said in an interview. He argued that most people who are on watch lists belong on the lists, and that he has “compete confidence” in Canada’s ability to safeguard intelligence sources.

Good for you. I don't.

Yesterday CSIS gave a damage-control response to breaking news of their continued handing over of Canadian names and personal details to US watchlists :

 " ... any decision to hand over names is the result of a detailed process, in which an individual's threat level is assessed by a committee of Canadian security officials, including a senior executive at CSIS.

Lawyers from the Department of Justice also participate, and often a representative of the RCMP.

As part of the process, someone plays the part of devil's advocate, challenging the information gathered on the individual being considered.

Even then, said the official, the decision to hand over a name to the Americans is subject to written ministerial directives and internal CSIS policies.

None of which explains how Mubin Shaikh got on there.

But as Evan Dyer pointed out during RCMP Commissioner Zaccardelli's grilling about Arar four and a half years ago, all that rigorous bureaucratic bullshit doesn't mean fuck all if US security forces are already physically present in the room when "persons of interest" are being discussed at INSET meetings.
INSET, the Canadian Integrated National Security Enforcement Teams, are the Canadian counter-terrorist forces comprised of CSIS, the RCMP, Border Services, and other security groups. They handled both the Arar and Toronto 18 cases.

As Pogge put it : "Our "principal intelligence agency" doesn't work for us; it works for American intelligence agencies."

"We don't want another Arar," said the security official. But at the same time, he said, CSIS is acutely aware that if it did not pass on information about someone it suspected, and that person then carried out some sort of spectacular attack in the U.S., the consequences could be cataclysmic for Canada.
U.S. authorities, already suspicious that Canada is "soft on terror," would likely tighten the common border, damaging hundreds of billions of dollars worth of vital commerce.

So we're just haggling about the price of our sovereignty and Charter rights now then.

Or, as most of the WikiLeaks-released Ottawa Embassy cables usually sign off with:

"Visit Canada's North American partnership community at
http://www.intelink.gov/communities/state/nap /"

Yeah. Thanks. How's our security perimeter coming along?
.
Update : WikiLeaks has now released the S E C R E T OTTAWA 000768 cables. Same redactions as CBC.
.

Server in the Sky

"Server in the Sky" is the FBI's proposed shared database of biometric information - our fingerprints, palm prints, and iris scan data - to be exchanged among the US, Canada, UK, Australia, New Zealand, and eventually the EU, to catch criminals and terrorists. The International Information Consortium, as the five founding nations including Canada call themselves, will meet behind closed doors in May in San Francisco to plan their strategy.

Tom Bush, the FBI Assistant Director of the Criminal Justice Information Services Division was on CBC's The Current last week. "It's to catch the worst of the worst", he said, "murderers and rapists".
However an RCMP statement carried in the Globe and Mail instead placed greater importance on the sharing of "information on terrorist files".

Perhaps one of Server in the Sky's most alarming aspects is that Canada's Privacy Commissioner, Jennifer Stoddart, heard of it for the first time last week by reading about it in a UK newspaper. No Canadian officials had informed her of the project.

From The Guardian : "The FBI is proposing to establish three categories of suspects in the shared system :

• "internationally recognised terrorists and felons",
• those who are "major felons and suspected terrorists", and finally
• those who the subjects of terrorist investigations or criminals with international links."

Suspected terrorists? Subjects of terrorist investigations?
A few paragraphs into the FBI's explanation and we're already into Maher Arar territory.
Stoddart agrees and says so on CBC's The Current.: Canada has a very weak 25 year old Privacy Act, she says, with no human rights standards built in to our agreements with other countries. Additionally she is alarmed by "the conflating of criminals and suspected terrorists", the lack of oversight of the biometric info once it passes to other countries, and the rise of "a survellance society".

Also, as Council of Canadians points out, despite Canadian horror at the grotesque misuse of intelligence data in the Arar case and the subsequent support for recommendations for greater paper-trail accountability, getting rid of any legal impediments to cross-border intelligence information-sharing was one of the primary security aims of, yes you guessed correctly, the SPP.

UPDATE : The Office of the Privacy Commissioner of Canada has a blog! :

"In terms of Canadian participation, our citizens rightfully expect that their personal information remains safeguarded and understandably, could be reluctant to see that information freely shared with two countries that were ranked near the bottom of Privacy International’s ratings of privacy protection around the world."

Go, Ms Stoddart!

Canada and torture

According to Ottawa, turning a blind eye to the torture of Canadian citizens abroad is just the price of doing business with the international intelligence community in the 'war on terror'.

CBC : "Human rights abuses are not necessarily enough to keep Canada from sharing information with security agencies overseas, Ottawa tells a federal inquiry on torture in a newly released submission.
Canada must maintain relationships with "non-traditional" allies, some of whom do not always treat people appropriately, in order to fight terrorism, says a government brief made public Thursday."

This astonishing submission was made last week to Supreme Court Justice Frank Iacobucci's federal inquiry into the cases of Abdullah Almalki, Ahmad El Maati and Muayyed Nureddin, Canadians who allege they were tortured in Syria after Canada submitted a list of questions to Syrian authorites to be asked of them.

This is precisely what happened to Maher Arar. Syria, you will recall, had no interest in Arar but obligingly tortured him for nearly a year as "a goodwill gesture towards the US" after the RCMP labelled him as a terrorist. Indeed Syria attempted to return Arar but Canada was not at all keen to have him back, citing "embarrasment" as one unofficial reason.

Right now Canada is a country which, despite being a signatory to the UN Convention Against Torture, is complicit in having its citizens tortured abroad as the price of admission to the war on terrorism club.
How many Maher Arars are we willing to hand over so that Syria will trust us? How many Benamar Benattas will it take to keep the US appeased?
The inquiry continues.

A good start

Quite awe-inspiring, wasn't it - seeing all those lawyers out on the streets in Pakistan, getting their heads bashed for defending their constitution. Lawyers getting tear-gassed, lawyers throwing rocks, lawyers ... scuffling. Almost made me feel bad about all the lawyer jokes. After all, wasn't Gandhi a lawyer?...Hello, what's this?...

"Gasps broke out in a U.S. federal appeals court Friday as a U.S.government lawyer spoke of Maher Arar's "unequivocal membership of al-Qaida."

Right. OK, what do you call a thousand and one lawyers in chains at the bottom of the ocean?

SPP : Avi Lewis and Amy Goodman

on Democracy Now : Audio and transcript

Excerpts :
Avi on SPP and Maher Arar :
"The connection between the SPP and Maher Arar is a really deep one. Two weeks after 9/11, the head of the business lobby in Canada, a guy named Tom d’Aquino, called immediately for deep harmonization and integration of US and Canadian policies in order to keep the border open and the trade flowing. Two months later, without any debate or without any legislative debate or really public involvement, they announced this “smart border” initiative for harmonizing the border. And, well, you know, it was a piece of spin, the “smart border” initiative. Nine months later, they announced that they had synchronized and harmonized Canada and the US's approach to passenger screening of international passengers. And one year after 9/11, based on that precise harmonization, Maher Arar was taken and subjected to extraordinary rendition and began his yearlong odyssey in hell in a Syrian prison. So the connection between this mobilization that’s going on in ten days in Quebec around the SPP and the situation of Maher Arar is one that won't be made broadly in Canadian or US media. But for people who care about sovereignty of nations and civil liberties, it's at the heart of it all."

Avi on Conrad Black and media consolidation :
"we need to make the connection between the ideological interest of media barons and how they play out in our public discourse, if these -- in the same way that Enron needed to be seen as a policy and political phenomenon and not just a scandal. If we see them as just corruption trials, then all of a sudden they don't have political consequences. So we have to make those connections."

Meet the old boss, same as the new boss

The new head of the RCMP was possibly one of the officials responsible for blacking out portions of the Arar report.
Yeah, well, Stockwell Day was his boss then and he's his boss now.

The G&M reports this bizarre analogy from a security official by way of explanation :

"Some security officials says there is no great mystery as to why such references were blacked out: Foreign intelligence is not viewed as fundamentally different from any other borrowed good or service. For that reason, Canada is wary of passing along secrets it gets from other sources, or even pointing to those sources."

“If you borrow your neighbour's pickup truck to haul a load to the dump, you don't give the keys to the kids to go for a Slurpee at the 7-Eleven,” said one official who declined to be identified. “Intellectually, it's not a difficult concept to grasp.”

Excuse me? You were the one driving the damn truck:

New York Times: Deported Canadian Was No Threat, Report Shows :

"Several months before Mr. Arar arrived in New York, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police gave a PowerPoint presentation to the F.B.I. about Canadian terrorism that mentioned Mr. Arar three times, along with other people they believed might be engaged in terrorist activities. While the American agency asked for a copy of the slides and background material, the newly released information shows that the Canadian police “were not successful in convincing the F.B.I. to institute a criminal investigation.”

CBC : RCMP shared intelligence with Syria, Arar inquiry told :

"RCMP Supt. Mike Cabana who headed up the investigation in the Ottawa area said Canadian officials were concerned Arar was being abused early in his captivity in Syria, but they exchanged intelligence anyway."

In fact, RCMP, you did one worse : after giving the kids the keys to the truck knowing they would wreck it, you told them you didn't want it back to save yourself from embarrassment.
And as of today, even after Justice O'Connor's inquiry has brought all of this to light, you're still lying to us about it.

Arar Redux

There's nothing new in today's disclosures from Justice Dennis O'Connor's redacted Arar report except the naming of the complicit US agency - the CIA.

The Globe and Mail notes that up till now "Canadian agencies have borne the brunt of the blame for the scandal."

So fucking what?
It was still the RCMP and Project A-O Canada who knew the testimony fingering Arar was obtained by "extreme coercion" in Syria, who knew the US would probably send Arar to Syria to be tortured as well, who continued to use that testimony to smear Arar at home, who didn't want him back because it would embarrass both them and the US, and who ultimately rolled over for the CIA.

From the Globe&Mail :

"Ottawa officials fought to keep the information secret, frequently arguing that it did not want to compromise the goodwill of foreign allies who sent in intelligence from abroad."

The goodwill of foreign allies who sent in intelligence from abroad.

"The federal Attorney-General had tried to counter disclosure by repeating what has become a mantra: National security would be imperilled if Canada is forced to divulge state secrets – esspecially ones received from foreign agencies, or "third parties."

For "a mantra", read "standard ass-covering".
You know what the greatest threat to our national security is here, A-G?
Your willingness to keep secret the extent of Canadian intelligence agencies' eagerness to roll over for the CIA.

Ahmad Abou El Maati, the truck driver who fingered Arar under torture, is back in Canada and free again, having recanted his coerced confession and apologised to Arar.
Who else is still over there?