- Reaction score
- 6,482
- Points
- 1,360
OK......My apologies.
I was reading the "brave Americans" as an insult to their troops. Hence the heat.....
I was reading the "brave Americans" as an insult to their troops. Hence the heat.....
Bruce Monkhouse said:OK......My apologies.
I was reading the "brave Americans" as an insult to their troops. Hence the heat.....
Rodders said:For those of you who draw comparisons between Arar and Canadian soldiers held prisoner and tortured after being captured in Hong Kong, or whom otherwise find cause to criticise him(Arar), do you give any creedence to the possibility that he may in fact have been innocent?
Baden Guy said:Riiiight, so the CPC will be implementing the recommendations of the O'Connor Report to fix all those Liberal **** ups?
Something smell's bad about Arar !,
Yes, anonymous Toronto StarGAP said:EDITORIAL TheStar.com - opinion
While no one disputes that the U.S. has the right to bar any Canadian it likes, as Wilkins so helpfully pointed out, it does not follow that Ottawa should go mute and butt out.
The Ottawa Citizen
Thursday, September 04, 2008
The RCMP has closed its criminal investigation into leaks of the Maher Arar file without laying any charges, according to media reports.
The criminal probe, which was dubbed Operation Soya, began five years ago, after documents were leaked to former Citizen reporter Juliet O'Neill, now with Canwest News Service.
The dossier outlined the RCMP investigation into Mr. Arar, a Syrian-born telecommunications engineer, who was detained at a New York airport in September 2002 by U.S. officers and eventually deported to Syria.
...
http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/20090119/Omar_Khadr_090119/20090119?hub=TopStoriesKhadr ID'd Arar as visitor to al Qaeda training camps
Updated Mon. Jan. 19 2009 7:51 PM ET
CTV.ca News Staff
When Omar Khadr was still a teenager, he identified fellow Canadian Maher Arar as someone who had attended al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan, according to the testimony of an FBI agent.
At Khadr's trial in Guantanamo Bay on Monday, Robert Fuller said Toronto-born Khadr had picked out Arar from various ID photographs, during interrogations in 2002. He was 15 years old at the time, and wounded by shrapnel.
"He identified him by name," Fuller testified. "He said he had never seen him in Canada."
Arar was deported by U.S. authorities to Syria, where he was tortured for nearly a year until he falsely confessed to being a terrorist. The incident sparked a commission of inquiry in Canada, which publicly cleared him of any links to terrorism.
He was awarded $10.5 million in government compensation. The U.S. government, however, has refused to clear Arar's name, and still lists him as a terror threat.
Arar has staunchly denied ever visiting Afghanistan.
According to an affidavit filed last year with the war crimes court, Khadr said Canadian agents also questioned him about Arar when they visited Guantanamo in 2003 and 2004. But he does not say what he told them.
"They showed me pictures and asked who people were. I told them what I knew," Khadr said in the affidavit.
"I tried to co-operate so that they would take me back to Canada," he said. "I told them that I was scared and that I had been tortured."
Khadr's Pentagon-appointed lawyer, Lt.-Cmdr. Bill Kuebler, said that his client, like Arar, has been wrongly accused of terrorist activities.
"It's a case where there was a rush of judgment and there were conclusions reached without the basis of full evidence," he told CTV Newsnet by phone.
The startling testimony came during Khadr's war-crimes hearing in Guantanamo, where he is accused of throwing a grenade that killed a U.S. soldier during a firefight in Afghanistan in 2002.
Shortly after his capture, Khadr, now 22, told interrogators that he had tossed the grenade, the military court heard earlier Monday.
"He pulled the pin and just chucked it over his shoulder," a top-secret female interrogator told a military tribunal in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
"He had never thrown one before, so he just threw it over his shoulder, like he had seen in the movies."
The agent, identified as Interrogator 11, added that Khadr initially took pride in killing a U.S. soldier, but over the course of more than a dozen interviews with Guantanamo Bay officials, he came to realize that the U.S. soldiers had actually saved his life.
Under cross-examination, it was revealed the agent destroyed her notes of the interrogation sessions after she had typed them up -- something she could not explain. She also denied she had promised Khadr he would be sent home if he co-operated.
Khadr faces a number of charges and has spent more than six years in the infamous prison awaiting his trial, which is finally set to begin on Jan. 26. She is the only Western citizen left in the prison.
Khadr's state-appointed lawyer is trying to have those charges thrown out, arguing that his young client made the grenade confession under extreme coercion from interrogators.
But the U.S. agent denied those allegations and told the court that Khadr was often "very happy" to talk.
"When he would come to the room he was always smiling. He would willingly speak to me," she said.
Earlier in the day, Khadr's lawyer unearthed a new side to the case, telling the court that a third person had been found alive when Khadr was captured in a wrecked Afghan bunker more than six years ago.
The revelation raises the possibility that someone other than Khadr threw the grenade that killed Sgt. Chris Speer, the defence argued.
The defence went on to say that the U.S. government should have to create a whole new case for Khadr.
But the judge denied that request Monday.
In response, Kuebler will try stalling the case from going ahead until mid-March.
Kuebler also told the court that he never had access to crucial case documents and should have time to include them in his defence.
It is unclear what will become of Khadr and other prisoners when president-elect Barack Obama takes his oath of office Tuesday.
Obama has vowed to close the prison, a move that could come as early as this week. But he has not said what he will do with the prisoners who have been held there.
Khadr's plight was further muddied last month, when the Pentagon withdrew its charges against him and then re-filed them.
Khadr's defence team argues that Monday's proceedings should include re-arraignment, but the Pentagon has said the re-filing was a mere formality.
Kuebler argues that the move terminated the existing military commission, which means a new one must be established.
The commission judge is considering the arguments made by both sides.
Khadr's lawyers have also argued that statements he has made to interrogators about the case have been extracted under torture.
If Obama issues an executive order to close the prison, the move will likely trigger a case-by-case review of each prisoner left in custody to determine whether they should stand trial in the U.S. or be sent to their home countries.
Last week, Kuebler called on Prime Minister Stephen Harper to request that Khadr be returned to Canada.
However, Harper said he understood Obama's decision to close the prison was a result of widespread concerns that many detainees have not been charged with crimes.
GUANTANAMO BAY, Cuba — A teenaged Omar Khadr identified Canadian Maher Arar, who was tortured in Syria after he was sent there by American authorities, as someone he had seen at al-Qaida safehouses and training camps in Afghanistan, an FBI special agent testified Monday.
Khadr made the identification from photographs the agent, Robert Fuller, showed him during interrogations several months after the Toronto-born Khadr was captured following a firefight in Afghanistan in July 2002.
“He identified him by name,” Fuller testified. “He said he had never seen him in Canada.”
Arar became the subject of a commission of inquiry in Canada, which publicly cleared him of any links to terrorism and gave him a $10.5-million settlement.
The U.S., however, has refused to clear his name.
The evidence is the first public indication of precisely why authorities in the U.S. would have deemed it necessary to “render“ Arar to Syria after detaining him, instead of following the usual procedure of deporting him to Canada.
Monday’s dramatic evidence came at Khadr’s war-crimes hearing in which prosecution witnesses testfied Khadr admitted throwing a hand grenade at approaching U.S. forces in Afghanistan just like he had seen in the movies.
The incident occurred after three other men at the bombed-out Afghan compound had been killed by American forces and Khadr, then 15 and partially blinded from shrapnel, cowered under a bush as the soldiers moved in, a military intelligence testified he told her.
“He pulled the pin and just chucked it over his shoulder,” the agent, identified only as Interrogator 11, told the hearing.
“He had never thrown one before, so he just threw it over his shoulder, like he had seen in the movies.”
The U.S. Dept. of Defence interviewed the Toronto-born Khadr about a dozen times — some sessions lasting as long as five hours — after he arrived at this infamous prison in more than six years ago.
The Pentagon accuses him of throwing the grenade that killed U.S. Sgt. Chris Speer at the badly damaged compound near Khost, Afghanistan, on July 27, 2002.
“He explained that entire day in minute detail,” said the agent, the first witness to testify at the proceedings.
The young Canadian, now 22, was found under the rubble and badly injured with three gunshot wounds following a four-hour firefight.
The agent said Khadr initially expressed pride in having killed an American soldier, but later came to realize it was the Americans who saved his life.
Parts of a 27-minute video seized by U.S. forces after the firefight shows a baby-faced, grinning Khadr in the company of al-Qaida leaders helping assemble and lay improvised explosive devices.
FBI Special Agent Robert Fuller, who interrogated Khadr at the Bagram base in Afghanistan, said as the video was played for the hearing that Khadr told him he was happy to be with the men.
The defence has maintained Khadr’s incriminating statements were the result of coercion and are trying to get the judge to throw them out.
Both agents, however, denied there was any abuse of Khadr of threats against him.
On the contrary, Khadr was “very happy” to see her and she considered the information he provided reliable, Interrogator 11 told Col. Patrick Parrish, who is presiding over the case.
“When he would come to the room, he was always smiling. He would willingly speak to me,” she said.
While Khadr’s leg irons were shackled to the floor, the intelligence agent said she took off his handcuffs to make him feel comfortable and never felt that he posed a threat.
Khadr, dressed in the all-white uniform of Camp 4, where “highly compliant” prisoners are kept, appeared relaxed during the proceedings.
He smiled broadly, chatted with his lawyers, and read documents intently. Sporting a neatly cropped full beard, the six-foot Khadr looks far different than the now-familiar photo of him at 15.
Khadr described in detail how he had been trained by top al-Qaida figures — associates of his father — in surveillance techniques and in making and laying explosive devices aimed at American forces.
His father, who was killed in a raid in Pakistan, ran two agencies that raised funds for al-Qaida. The Khadr family often stayed with terrorist financier Osama bin Laden.
The defence argues intelligence agents abused Khadr, while a “clean” set of law-enforcement interrogators later took incriminating statements from the Canadian.
“The fact that he could provide me with so much detail of everything . . . I thought that information was very reliable,” Interrogator 11 said.
During cross-examination, defence lawyers tried to pick holes in the testimony, but the agent stood her ground.
She denied promising he would go home if he co-operated with her. She was also unable to explain why she destroyed her notes of the interrogation sessions after she had typed them up.
Parrish, dubbed by some the “Docket Rocket” for his move-ahead style, said he would likely rule Tuesday whether Khadr’s trial, slated for Jan. 26, would go ahead or be delayed to give the defence more time to prepare.
The proceedings Monday came one day before Barack Obama, who has promised to close the infamous prison on this isolated stretch of Cuba, is sworn in as U.S. president.
Khadr is the lone westerner still held here.
Earlier, defence lawyers raised the suggestion for the first time that a third person had been found alive in the rubble of the Afghan compound.
Lt.-Cmdr. Bill Kuebler, one of Khadr’s defence lawyers, said he needed more records to help determine whether in fact that was the case.
The court has previously heard evidence that a second person found alive in the rubble was shot dead by American troops. The defence said that raised the possibility someone else threw the grenade that killed Speer.
Khadr’s lawyers have repeatedly argued he should be considered a child soldier, and returned to Canada, but Prime Minister Stephen Harper has refused to get involved in the case.
The military commission process has been widely condemned as a sham legal system.