This is in regards to the testimony of ex-Foreign Minister Bill Graham at a Canadian government inquiry into the deportation by the US of a communications engineer with dual Canadian/Syrian citizenship who was sent to Syria by the US authorities to be tortured. He was intransit through the US on his way back to Canada after visiting the Middle East when he was deported to Syria to be "interrogated" (i.e. tortured) as to alleged terrorist connections. He was finally released by the Syrians and sent back to Canada after being held and tortured in a Syrian jail for a period of a year.
How Washington steamrolled Ottawa and sent Arar to be tortured
“The real frustration I had, I guess, with (U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell) and the ambassador (Paul Cellucci),” Mr. Graham testified Monday, “was that they consistently asserted that somebody in Canada had given them the go-ahead, if you like, to deport Mr. Arar.”
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Mr. Graham said the United States maintained until as late as Mr. Arar's return to Canada in the fall of 2003 that Canadian security officials gave U.S. authorities information on Mr. Arar. Mr. Graham testified that he was unable to verify this information with either CSIS or the RCMP.
“So my frustration was very much around that: Why couldn't we get to the bottom of absolutely whether anybody here had anything to do with it?” Mr. Graham said. “If (Mr. Powell) had given me a name, we could have quickly tracked it down and said to the person look, ‘Did you or didn't you?' We could have found out. We never got a name. We never got a lead in Canada of anybody we could go to. That was the frustrating aspect.”
Mr. Graham also confessed his uncertainties about the thoroughness of the briefings he received.
“Of course, when Mr. Powell looks you in the eye and says, ‘Bill, you don't know what's going on and I do because I've talked to the people who know,' this obviously makes it difficult because you are sitting across the table and saying ‘Hey, that's not my advice, but you don't have quite the same confidence in terms of the level of information you are getting.'”http://www.vivelecanada.ca/article.php/20050530123654569Well Bill, after witnessing Colins adeptness at laying on the bullshit at the UN in his famous WMD performance, you should have known you couldn't trust the guy as far as you could throw him.
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