Tortured logic on security threats
News that Canada has given its imprimatur to torture came and went with a minimum of fuss.
There was the usual one-day brouhaha in the Commons after The Canadian Press revealed last week that, in 2010, the government quietly reversed a policy requiring Canada’s security agencies to stay away from information gleaned through torture.
Predictably perhaps, Amnesty International attacked the move. But in most newspapers, the story was back-page news.
Many Canadians seemed to tacitly buy the so-called ticking-timebomb explanation — that torture is used only to prevent immediate catastrophes and that any security agency that refused to act on such information, however derived, would be derelict in its duty.
Which, in its own limited way, is true. If, for instance, Morocco’s notoriously ruthless secret police told the Canadian Security Intelligence Service that a bomb was about to explode on Parliament Hill, it would make sense to evacuate the buildings first and ask questions about the provenance of that information later.
However, ticking-time-bomb cases are so rare as to be almost non-existent. Countries like Morocco that use torture employ it not just for exceptional threats but as a standard investigative technique. Thus Syrian jailers tortured Canadian Maher Arar in 2002 — not because they believed he was about to blow up downtown Damascus, but because that’s what Syrian jailers do. Naturally, Arar told his torturers whatever they wanted to hear. His “confession” was then passed on to Canada. But, as Justice Dennis O’connor’s inquiry into the affair later discovered (and CSIS, to its credit, confirmed), the confession was useless — because it just wasn’t true. And that is the practical problem with torture. It is unreliable. Security agencies presumably understand this. But they want access to information obtained under torture anyway. Why? I think the reasons are largely bureaucratic. Intelligence agencies must produce information if they are to justify their existence. Torture always produces information. Therefore torture is valuable. The fact that all or some of this information may be incorrect is secondary. In 2008, for instance, then CSIS head Jim Judd warned the government that it would be impossible to prosecute so-called securitycertificate cases against suspected terrorists without recourse to information from states that use torture. Judd was using this argument to justify the practice. But his statement also revealed the paucity of real evidence CSIS had against five Muslim men then detained under security certificates whom the agency wanted to deport. Tellingly, the courts ended up freeing two of those men. There’s more. As former Supreme Court justice Frank Iacobucci found when he headed a judicial inquiry into security, Canadian agencies have, at times, subcontracted intelligencegathering to foreign torturers. Thus the RCMP submitted questions to Syrian interrogators who were torturing Canadian citizen Abdullah Almalki in 2002. Around the same time, CSIS agents trav- elled to Egypt to get information about another Canadian, Ahmad El Maati, who was being tortured there. Iacobucci concluded that Canadian officials were complicit in the torture of both.
At first glance, the government’s new policy appears to preclude this kind of mistreatment. Information obtained under torture is to be used only in “exceptional circumstances” when lives and property are at risk.
But who decides when circumstances are exceptional? Who calculates that lives are at risk?
The answer is that the security agencies do. Just as they did with Almalki and El Maati, just as they always do. Torture lives on. It is official Canadian government policy.