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s the gates of Syria’s austere Far Falestin detention centre closed behind him, Abdullah Almalki remained calm. He was a Canadian citizen, in Damascus simply to visit his mother. Upon meeting with prison officials, he would be immediately released, he thought. At first, the questions were routine: Why had he come to Syria What line of work was he in Then suddenly and without warning, one of the inquisitors pulled a rubber blindfold tight across Almalki’s eyes. He was led to another room, seated in a chair, and presented with the names of three Arab men. Did he know them When Almalki said he didn’t, the room went silent and he was viciously slapped across the face. The sound reverberated throughout the chamber, and at that moment, he later recalled, “they sacked my dignity, they crushed my personality.... [I was] transferred to another world.”Beginning on May 4, 2002, and for the next 482 days, Abdullah Almalki’s world became a damp, cockroach-infested cell not much bigger than a grave. Cats urinated through a small opening in the ceiling and rats often squeezed under the door, but even still he hoped it wouldn’t swing open—an open door only meant more torture and interrogation, sometimes for eighteen hours straight. Stripped to his underwear, Almalki was repeatedly whipped with a thick cable (a guard once derisively told him that he had endured a thousand lashes during one seven-hour session). The worst torture occurred when his knees were forced to his chest and a large tire was placed around his bent body. He was then rolled onto his back, which allowed the guards to freely beat his head, body, genitals, and the soles of his feet.
Before his arrest, Almalki, then thirty-one, sold communications equipment across the Middle East and Pakistan. As such, the interrogations often centred on his work and on Osama bin Laden. Did he know the al Qaeda leader Had he ever trained with the terrorist organization or sold equipment to it But when he was back in his dark cell, Almalki became consumed by other questions. George Salloum, the prison’s chief interrogator, had told him that agents from the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (rcmp) and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (csis) wanted information about a number of Canadian Muslim men—inconsequential people, it seemed to Almalki, whom the Syrians could not have known about or been remotely interested in. Almalki was also troubled by the fact that Salloum had information that could only have come from his personal business records, material that had been seized by the rcmp during a raid on his Ottawa home in January 2002. His interrogators were cryptic about this apparent collaboration, but several months into his incarceration, Almalki claims they produced a list of questions they said had been supplied by the rcmp and csis. —Canada sent these questions,’” he recalls an interrogator telling him. —We have to get answers on them so that we can send them back.’”
This allegation is contained in a lawsuit that Almalki launched in March 2006. The case has obvious parallels with the more-publicized inquiry into the role of Canadian officials in the arrest of Maher Arar, the Ottawa computer engineer who was detained at John F. Kennedy Airport in New York in 2002 and, based on information allegedly supplied by the rcmp, flown in shackles to Syria, where he too was tortured at the Far Falestin detention centre. Partly at issue in both matters is whether Canadian officials will be obliged to disclose vital information about how and why Almalki and Arar ended up being tortured in Syria, and to what purpose the information derived from these interrogations was put. The cases may shed light on the depth of Canada’s involvement in what US Vice President Dick Cheney calls the “dark places” democracies must go to win the war against global terrorism.
The Canadian government, however, may be under no obligation to disclose just how dark its methods have become. Canada’s omnibus anti-terrorism package, Bill C-36, the Anti-Terrorism Act, which passed three months after the September 11, 2001 attacks on Washington, DC and New York, restricts the legal rights of anyone suspected of terrorist involvement. Arar, Almalki, and others may yet be awarded compensation, but given what they went through, these victories might be pyrrhic.
In the aftermath of 9/11, when some in the US media suggested that the Canadian border was a sieve and that some of the terrorists had used Canada as a gateway to the US, Ottawa denied the specific charges, but agreed that the world had changed and that Canada must clamp down. And so our already overstretched military did its part in Afghanistan, and on the home front Bill C-36 was enacted after minimal parliamentary debate.
The 186-page bill rolled back civil liberties related to due process and privacy rights for terrorism suspects. But because its definition of terrorism is so broad—according to Kent Roach, a law professor at the University of Toronto and the author of September 11: Consequences for Canada, it amounts to a threat to life, property, or personal security made, as the legislation puts it, “for a political, religious, or ideological purpose, objective or cause—“many critics believe it is open to abuse. For example, Bill C-36 allows federal ministers to declare a group or organization to be a terrorist front, as recently happened to Sri Lanka’s Tamil Tigers. It also allows the Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness, together with the Minister of Citizenship and Immigration, to issue national security certificates resulting in the confinement of non-citizens suspected of terrorism (sometimes, as it has turned out, for indefinite periods).
At the time Bill C-36 was passed, civil-liberties lawyers insisted that such measures allowed the state to operate on the assumption of guilt, and that freedom of association and the right to hold and express views at odds with normative discourse and conventional culture were under siege. Bill C-36, they said, was little different than the usa Patriot Act. However, like the Patriot Act, Bill C-36 had an out clause: it implicitly recognized that such infringements on civil liberties are untenable in a free and democratic society by mandating a review of the bill three years after it took effect. Four and half years later, that review is still incomplete, and there are indications that when the assessment of Bill C-36 is finally complete, it will recommend enhancing state powers and further broadening the definition of terrorism.
Roach believes that Bill C-36 was inspired by genuine fears. “If a terrorist attack had originated in Canada the ramifications would have been profound,” he says. The Canadian government was deeply worried about losing control of the border and other matters pertaining to sovereignty. Of specific concern was the possibility that if the rcmp and csis didn’t do something to weed out terrorists based in Canada, the Central Intelligence Agency (cia) would take matters into its own hands. To help ensure “intelligence sovereignty,” the government agreed to spend almost $8 billion on security, including extra monies for policing, the military, and immigration, airport, and border control. csis and the rcmp saw their budgets increased, allowing both to step up domestic surveillance. While protecting Canadian sovereignty was the primary objective, there was considerable international brokering. Ties between csis, the rcmp, and the cia were strengthened, and Ottawa entered into information-sharing agreements with the intelligence services of more than one hundred countries, including, analysts say, those operating in rogue states such as Syria, where the use of torture to extract information is routine.
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