Former cia assistant general counsel A. John Radsan, who was with the Agency from 2002 to 2004, sees other examples of Canada’s support for Washington’s interests. He points to the (very quiet) Canadian position on Guantnamo Bay, where hundreds of “enemy combatants” from Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere are being held under a form of military justice rejected by nearly every other Western country and by the statutes of international law. Wesley Wark, for his part, is troubled by the lack of substantive debate on Canada’s escalating role in Afghanistan. Says Wark: “We really haven’t come to grips with the changing national security environment. And the lack of debate on Afghanistan is symbolic of that. I think the government believes that it would be worse to have a debate than to not have one, because Ottawa is anxious to avoid deepening the public’s perception that the international war on terror is an American endeavour that has little connection to Canada.”

Indeed, could official Canadian reticence on Guantnamo Bay be related to the possibility that Taliban fighters captured by our troops in Afghanistan could end up there And has political pressure to co-operate with the cia compelled csis and the rcmp to hand over information about Canadians to American authorities, as is alleged in the cases of Maher Arar and Abdullah Almalki

ttawa and Washington have been co-operating closely on intelligence since the end of World War II, when Britain and the US entered into an alliance to share information captured by electronic eavesdropping. Then in the 1950s, with the Communist threat growing, bases containing sophisticated intercept capabilities were set up in Canada, New Zealand, and Australia. This expanded alliance became known as the “Five Eyes.” Martin Rudner, director of the Canadian Centre of Intelligence and Security Studies at Carleton University, points out that even before 9/11 drew the groups members closer together, it had developed a “uniquely intimate international intelligence partnership—“one so effective it could often read the enemy’s coded messages as quickly as the intended recipients.

By the late 1980s, bases in the five countries had been linked into a secretive web, known as Echelon, run by powerful dictionary computers that can sort through vast flows of electronic data, including emails, to target almost anyone in the world. The Echelon system is now largely focused on Islamic terrorism, and according to Rudner was likely used in the arrest of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks. In early 2003, Rudner says, the nsa asked the Five Eyes to intercept communications between diplomats on the United Nations Security Council during the debate over whether to invade Iraq. Canada, which opposed Washington’s plan to remove Saddam Hussein, refused to go along, but Rudner argues this marked “one of the rare singularities” in which Canada stood apart from its intelligence allies.

The US has demonstrated that to protect itself from attacks, it will reach beyond its borders, even into countries considered allies. Believing that Norway was incapable of dealing with Islamic terrorists, the White House sent cia agents into that country. Several alleged terrorists were handed over without trial by Swedish officials in December 2001, and one suspect was picked up on the streets of Milan in February 2003. Faced with this kind of pressure, Ottawa agreed to join the Bi-National Planning Group in December 2002.

“There has been a shift of resources radically in the direction of the Islamic world and a continued attempt to exploit liaison relationships with Canada,” says Richard Betts, a member of the US National Commission on Terrorism and the director of the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University. Liaisons with other countries have become the norm for the US. According to Rudner, since 9/11, more than one hundred countries have signed information-sharing agreements with Washington. In 2002, the European Union granted American authorities access to personal data on terrorist suspects and set up joint teams to investigate and interrogate prisoners. And in 2003, the US and Britain formed a working group on international terrorism to track chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons development.

gainst this backdrop, few are predicting that the wide definition of terrorism in Bill C-36 will be rescinded. At present, terrorist suspects can be detained for seventy-two hours and compelled to provide evidence that might be self-incriminating, and a judge can require the signing of a peace or recognizance bond lasting a year. Most vulnerable to the arbitrary application of the law, critics maintain, are members of Canadas visible-minority communities. And given that laws are generalized precepts—affecting one community today but, if they stay on the books, another tomorrow—the results of the Bill C-36 review will tell Canadians much about what kind of society they are destined to live in.

In some arenas, change is already apparent. In order to advance peace negotiations in Sri Lanka, Paul Martin’s government tried to maintain relations with the Tamil Tigers. But in April, Stephen Harper’s Cabinet—perhaps reacting to reports that the Tigers were blackmailing Canadian Tamils into giving them financial support—classified the Tigers as a terrorist group. Strictly speaking, anyone who gave money to the Tigers or attended one of their meetings could be subject to csis surveillance or criminal charges and could, if he or she is not a Canadian citizen, be deported. Both Almalki and Arar were accused of being associated with fundamentalist Muslim groups. And the question remains: is their legal status much different from the “enemy combatants” incarcerated at Guantnamo Bay Whether csis and the rcmp agree with the basic US position that suspected terrorists fall outside the norm of international law is open to question. Certainly, there is no formal agreement in place to keep prisoners captured by Canadian soldiers in Afghanistan from being shipped to Guantnamo. Canada has agreed to turn its prisoners over to the Afghan government; the Netherlands, by contrast, did not send troops until it had received assurances that its captives would not be sent on to Cuba.

Like Almalki, Maher Arar had been abroad vacationing with family. He was returning home from Tunisia when he was detained in New York. According to University of British Columbia president Stephen Toope, who interviewed him for the Arar inquiry, Arar was held for eleven days (beginning on September 27, 2002) at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan. On the last night, he was awakened at 3 a.m. and told that he was being transported to Syria. “He told me,” says Toope, “that he began to cry and immediately said that he would be tortured. He felt “destroyed.’”

Arar was taken to New Jersey, put on a Gulfstream V jet registered to a series of dummy companies, and flown—via Washington, DC; Portland, Maine; and Rome—to Amman, Jordan. The next day, he was blindfolded and driven to Syria, where he was dumped, exhausted and hungry, at the gates of the Far Falestin detention centre. “He ventured to me,” says Toope, “that he was so frightened at that moment that if he could have figured out some way to kill himself, he would have done it.” That night, Arar was questioned by George Salloum, then led to the tiny cell where he would spend the next year as anonymous “prisoner number two.”