Relying on torture

Has Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government quietly hung out an “open for business” sign when it comes to dealing with regimes that practice torture? That’s the troubling impression given by a directive to Canada’s spy agency that has just come to light.

In it, Public Safety Minister Vic Toews reminds the Canadian Security Intelligence Service that fighting terror is the agency’s No. 1priority. It is “critical” that CSIS share information “quickly and widely” when public safety or lives are at risk, Toews wrote, even if the data “may have been derived from the use of torture or mistreatment.” This is a new policy twist. In effect, it gives CSIS cover to trade in tainted information. Previously CSIS was directed not to “knowingly” rely on such data. Now Toews is directing the agency to act quickly on it.

This isn’t a hypothetical issue. U.S. President Barack Obama has denounced waterboarding as torture. And a manual for Canadian diplomats in 2008 cited the U.S., Egypt, China, Israel, Afghanistan, Iran, Mexico, Saudi Arabia and Syria as states that resort to torture and abuse. It’s a universal crime banned by a United Nations treaty, but it happens more often than we’d care to know. Given that, just how complicit do we want to be?

“There seems to be a strong wish not to tie CSIS’S hands, and to give them the latitude to work with torturers,” Amnesty International Canada’s secretary general Alex Neve told the Star’s editorial board. “This does an end run around the absolute ban on torture.”

Granted, Canadians would expect CSIS to act if it were tipped off to, say, an imminent attack on Parliament Hill, even if the source were a rogue regime. As Toews argues, public safety does come first. But we’ve also seen cases in which CSIS and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police messed up by identifying Maher Arar and others as security threats when they weren’t, putting them in grave danger. Our spymasters aren’t always discerning judges. They need supervising. And we need to know more about that supervision.

As Liberal Leader Bob Rae asked, what’s “the exact nature and wording” of CSIS’S policy on handling information from regimes that torture. Just how free is the agency to collude with torturers?

Does CSIS routinely share such information with foreign agencies? Neve argues that Ottawa should “break the chain” of criminality by not passing it on. Otherwise, torturers will always have a market.

Finally, is CSIS red-flagging and sequestering information from torture regimes so that our courts, for one, know that they’re dealing with toxic material during hearings to detain terror suspects, or other proceedings? Or is CSIS just warehousing this garbage in its files willy nilly, to be hauled out as the occasion demands?

This policy shift raises serious questions. In Parliament, the opposition should keep digging for answers.