Sign up to receive SPP updates:
RSS feed.  |
ABOUT THE SPP | BACKGROUNDERS | MEDIA | VIDEO/AUDIO |
SPP resources SPP Summit - New Orleans SPP Summit - Montebello Teach-in |
March 27, 2008 The extent of Canadian government complicity in torture, partly exposed during the Maher Arar Commission over the past two years, is becoming even more apparent with the U.S. show trial of Canadian citizen Omar Khadr. On February 9, we learned that on more than one occasion in 2003, while U.S. officials monitored, CSIS agents interrogated Khadr at the Guantanamo Bay detention centre, where he has been imprisoned since July 2002, in direct contravention of his international rights as a child soldier. “The Canadians called me a liar, and I began to sob,” said Khadr earlier this month, in his first public statement since his arrest in Afghanistan. “They screamed at me and told me they could not do anything for me." Describing the conditions of his detention, Khadr said, “Military police poured pine oil on the floor and on me and then, with me lying on my stomach with my hands and feet cuffed together behind me, the military police dragged me back and forth through the mixture of urine and pine oil on the floor.” Khadr was 15 when U.S. forces arrested him in Afghanistan. While other U.S. allies, such as Britain, France and Australia, have successfully repatriated citizens trapped in the legal limbo of Guantanamo Bay, the Canadian government refuses to lift a finger to help one of its own. The Canadian government is also trying to block the release of information it has on the Khadr case. That’s why Khadr’s lawyers were at the Supreme Court of Canada yesterday, arguing that “he’s entitled to the documents because Canadian officials infringed on the Charter of Rights when they interviewed him at Guantanamo in 2003 and then passed the results of the interviews to U.S. authorities,” according to the Canadian Press. Supreme Court judges asked federal prosecutors why sensitive information about Khadr was passed on to U.S. prosecutors, challenging the prosecution “to reveal whether Canada sought restrictions on how the United States could use the information – gleaned during three interrogations that Canadian security agents held with Mr. Khadr in 2002,” reported the Globe and Mail today. “Obviously it was shared for a purpose,” said Mr. Justice Ian Binnie. “You are the one who knew how it was shared, and whether there were restrictions.” At the same time yesterday, various groups held a press conference on Parliament Hill to demand the government release everything it has on Khadr and immediately repatriate him. "The full information is not being divulged, and is it being done because of national security concerns or because of embarrassment?” asked Sameer Zuberi of the Canadian Council on American-Islamic Relations during a news conference. The Justice Department is still trying to block a Federal Court ruling last year that Ottawa had to disclose everything it had on Khadr’s case. According to a Canwest News Service article, federal government information could include, “communications that Canada had with the U.S. government after learning U.S. forces had seized the then-15-year-old on an Afghan battlefield in July 2002. The lawyers believe those and other documents could contain information that would help Khadr defend himself at his eventual trial before a U.S. war crimes commission in Guantanamo. “In part,” continued the article, “they want to see an almost totally censored nine-page RCMP report, sent on August 31, 2002, from the Canadian Embassy in Pakistan to Ottawa. Khadr's U.S. military lawyer, navy Lt.-Cmdr. Bill Kuebler, said it will likely show what the U.S. government told Ottawa about Khadr's involvement in the firefight.” Kuebler has said it is possible that the U.S. government may have lied to Canadian officials by claiming it had evidence proving Khadr threw the hand grenade that killed a U.S. medic because new evidence suggests it was another fighter. But we’ll only know once we see what information Canada has on record. If the new evidence is correct, it would further erode Prime Minister Harper’s statement that Khadr’s Military Commission trial represents a fair legal process, and further embarrass Canada internationally as a country where human rights can be traded away for a better relationship with the Bush administration.
|
|||||||||||
|
||||||||||||
 |
NACC
Workers
Water
Energy
Military
Safety & regulations
Transportation corridors
