Harkat requests 'friend of court' to dispute secret evidence against him

[struggle4progress]

By COLIN FREEZE
Thursday, September 16, 2004 - Page A13

<snip> Mohamed Harkat, an Algerian refugee claimant, is asking for an amicus curiae, or friend of the court, so that he can stave off attempts to deport him. <snip>

A report last year indicated that Maher Arar was forced into naming Mr. Harkat as an associate. This was said to have occurred as Mr. Arar spent nearly a year as a terrorism suspect in Syria before returning to Canada to wage a fierce campaign to clear his name. But Mr. Copeland says this is simply not true -- the two men never knew each other. <snip>

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Report clears CSIS in Arar deportation
But watchdog criticizes spy agency for how it shared intelligence with RCMP
By COLIN FREEZE
Tuesday, September 14, 2004 - Page A8

Canada's spy-service watchdog has cleared this country's intelligence agents of direct involvement in the 2002 U.S. decision to deport Maher Arar to Syria as a suspected terrorist.

But in a heavily censored report, the watchdog also criticizes CSIS for not being careful enough about how it passes intelligence on to the Mounties, especially ones chatting with U.S. law-enforcement agencies.

The findings add further flesh to a skeleton laid out by a public commission during the summer, which explored whether the RCMP could have leaked sensitive intelligence information about Mr. Arar to the United States. When the Ottawa software developer returned to Canada last year, he said Canadian agencies were complicit in the torture he suffered during a 10-month captivity in his native country. <snip>

Secrecy continues to shroud the whole affair and 70 per cent of the May, 2004, SIRC report into Mr. Arar's ordeal remains blacked out for national-security reasons. <snip>

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Sep. 14, 2004. 06:13 AM
Pillarella `briefed' on Arar: Report
False confession came after torture
MICHELLE SHEPHARD
STAFF REPORTER

Canada's ambassador to Syria passed sensitive intelligence obtained from Syrian authorities to Canada's spy agency, according to a document made public yesterday at the Maher Arar inquiry.

Franco Pillarella was given a written report and a "verbal briefing of the results of the Syrians' investigation of Arar," in November, 2002. He then passed the information on to the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), states a report prepared by the Security Intelligence Review Committee (SIRC), the civilian oversight body for CSIS. <snip>

Yesterday's revelation that it was the former ambassador who provided CSIS with details from Syrian intelligence came as a shock to Arar and his lawyers, who surmised CSIS obtained information from their own agents or RCMP officers.
"My view of external affairs had been that they're there to protect Canadians (and) now we see that in this case the ambassador seems to be meeting with the intelligence to gather information that the Syrians had extracted from Mr. Arar, which Mr. Arar states had been extracted under torture, and bringing that information back to Canada," Arar's lawyer, Lorne Waldman, said yesterday. <snip>

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Ottawa used Tunisian police to intimidate relatives, Arar says
By JEFF SALLOT
Friday, September 10, 2004 - Page A7

OTTAWA -- Maher Arar says the federal government is using Tunisian secret police to try to intimidate a witness who will testify at the inquiry into Mr. Arar's deportation to Syria.

Mr. Arar said the witness, his brother-in-law, Mourad Mazigh, was recently hauled in by Tunisian secret police for a frightening interrogation.

The Tunisian police had information that could have come only from Canadian sources, Mr. Arar told a news conference yesterday. <snip>

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