New Catholic Times

May 10, 2008 -- As members of the Caravan to End Canadian Involvement in Torture reached their final stopping point May 7 at the national headquarters of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), agitated spies in the massive architorture structure in east-end Ottawa simply pulled the blinds.

It was a fitting symbolic gesture consistent with the thematic continuum that greeted Caravan members during their eight day journey through Central and Eastern Ontario as they confronted sites of Canadian complicity in torture. A combination of denial and transfer of responsibility to some other party typified responses of government and corporate officials who refused dialogue and met caravan members with lines of police and RCMP, surveillance cameras, and locked office doors.

       While not surprising -- who wants to admit that they are complicit in torture? -- the closed-door response seemed to prove one of the points of the Caravan: the hallmarks of openness, transparency, and accountability that serve as the foundation of democracy get shut down when infected by such noxious practices as torture and complicity in human rights abuses.

       The Caravan sought to break the silence around such complicity, including the training and teaching relationship the Canadian government holds with the U.S.-based "School of the Assassins", ongoing efforts to deport refugees to torture from Canada, the government's refusal to condemn the Guantanamo Bay detention centre, Canada's role in hosting potential CIA rendition to torture flights, the Canadian rendition to torture of Algerian refugee Benamar Benatta on September 12, 2001, and Canada's subcontracting the torture of Canadian citizens in Syria, Egypt, and Sudan, among many other issues.

A SIMPLE CHALLENGE FOR CSIS

       At the front gates of CSIS, one of the federal agencies that played a major role in the torture of Canadians Abdullah Almalki, Ahmad El Maati, and Muayyed Nureddin, a fine rain dampened about 35 members of the Caravan as they held an impromptu teach-in for the line of Ottawa police and RCMP officers who prevented their entry into the facility.

       "I have just one question for the people in CSIS," El Maati said, looking for the first time at the building housing the agents who have targetted him for harassment, interrogation, and overseas torture. "I want someone from CSIS to come down here, look me in the eyes, and explain to me why they rendered me to torture in Egypt and Syria."

       It was an incredibly powerful and fitting moment as the Caravan arrived in Ottawa: three men -- Ahmad El Maati, Abdullah Almalki and Muayyed Nureddin -- seeking to confront those responsible for their torture, both at CSIS, the RCMP, and other agencies of the federal government.

       All three men are the subject of the "Internal Inquiry into the Actions of Canadian Officials in Relation to Abdullah Almalki, Ahmad Abou-Elmaati and Muayyed Nureddin." Although their names grace the inquiry, their attendance is prohibited. The doors are also closed to their lawyers, the media, and the public.

       This completely secret inquiry is supposed to determine the role of Canadian officials in the torture of these three men, and the last time the inquiry reared its rarely seen public face -- for two days of legal submissions in January of this year -- commissioner Frank Iacobucci confidently told those assembled that he had viewed some 35,000 pages of documents and heard from 40 witnesses, and that things were going well.

THE SECRET TORTURE INQUIRY

       But how could things be going well when the men have not been able to see one word from one page of those documents, nor hear the evidence of the witnesses, all in the name of "national security"? But as we have learned from the Arar Inquiry, among many other examples, claims of national security confidentiality are congenitally overbroad. Almost always, such claims are designed not to protect anyone's security but rather to shield the government from potential public outrage upon exposure of its nefarious dealings.

       So rather than creating a safe and secure inquiry space for the men to determine how and why this has happened to them, the government of Canada has completely shut them out of the process. To its shame, the government has literally forced these men out onto the road where they joined the Caravan and took the greatest risk any traumatized individual can take: sharing their most vulnerable selves with total strangers in the hope that people would be moved enough to pressure the government to open up the inquiry as a first step towards eliminating the abuses that led to such a human rights nightmare in the first place.

       And so Mssrs. Almalki, Nureddin, and El Maati joined between 30 and 50 people each day of the caravan in confronting Canadian governmental and corporate institutions that are involved in the global torture industry. They also took on the silence that has shrouded the inquiry by taking their case straight to the public, on street corners, at shopping malls, in high schools, in churches, in a variety of other public fora.

POSITIVE PUBLIC RESPONSE

       It is safe to say that Caravan members were pleasantly surprised at the almost overwhelming positive public reaction that greeted them in such settings. Indeed, rather than asking whether the government "had anything" on these three men, as some in the media are wont to do, the common question was an outraged demand -- "how could our government do this?" -- followed by the refrain that no one could trust government anymore.

       But there were also those who were upset and anxious when the group set up in each of the dozens of communities it passed through. Especially chilling were the group of black-hooded, orange jumpsuit-wearing "detainees" who knelt in a position of forced submission on street corners, at the entrances to shopping malls, and in front of the constituency offices of Members of Parliament as other Caravan members handed out thousands of information flyers on Canadian connections to torture.

       That such imagery proved disturbing speaks both to its power and the calculated use of such techniques by those who torture: the real-life use of the hoods, jumpsuits, and other sensory deprivation techniques are designed as much to humiliate, disturb, degrade, and dehumanize those forced into these outfits as they are meant to silence those who, fearing the same fate, are compelled to silence.

       Of course, revealing secrets and the bleak underside of the happy Canadian state face is bound to be upsetting, for Canada is a land built largely on mythmaking: the multicultural paradise built on genocide of First Nations, the peacemaking nation that is home to some of the world's most profitable war industries, the human rights defender that  trades with torturers, the land of "rule of law" that has two-tier justice based on citizenship status, the welcoming nation that deports to torture and other cruel treatment.

Two Catholic schools get first hand history lesson

The May 1 Torture Tour of Toronto, which combined 35 Caravan members with about 25 students and staff from the Caledon East Robert F. Hall Catholic high school, where teacher Gary Connolly, wearing an orange jumpsuit, had begun a week-long fast to highlight the issues raised by the Caravan. The creativity, passion, and insights of the students provided an immediate community-building impetus for a group of folks who, in many instances, had just met for the first time.

       The audiences for talks on Canadian complicity in torture were quite varied, from an Amnesty International group in Napanee celebrating 25 years of struggling for human rights to an amazing group of students and teachers at St. Mary's Catholic High School in Cobourg, which hosted a major presentation from Almalki, Nureddin, and El Maati. Students sat attentively through a two hour talk and power point presentation, asking many questions and expressing their shame and disgust for the criminal behaviour of the Canadian government. (Significantly, students from this school were among the first group of people in Canada to hold a public vigil in support of the rights of Omar Khadr, the Canadian teenager still held at Guantanamo Bay. Many of them went on the next day to join Quebec students for a Parliament Hill rally calling for the repatriation of Khadr).

       Other stops included smaller communities like Brighton (where students leaving high school for the day eagerly received  information, signed petitions, and denounced complicity in torture while waiting for their school buses) and Colborne, where a group of elderly gentlemen enjoying the first "beer on a patio" day of the spring expressed their support and told us to give heck to "those [expletives] in Ottawa."

       Along the way, the community of Caravaners continued to grow, with many who had originally planned to be on it for a short time deciding to go the whole route. Among those were a wonderful film crew from Ramz Media, an independent production company that makes documentaries and short films that address social and political issues in creative and insightful ways, contributing to enhanced awareness and positive action. (See a selection from their filmography at  www.ramzprod.com)