Tainted Evidence: Canada tosses CIA terror testimony obtained through waterboarding.

[sabra]

Source: Newsweek

Tainted Evidence
Canada tosses CIA terror testimony obtained through waterboarding.


The Canadian government is no longer using evidence gained from CIA interrogations of a top Al Qaeda detainee who was waterboarded.

According to documents obtained by NEWSWEEK, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), the country's national-security agency, last month quietly withdrew statements by alleged Al Qaeda leader Abu Zubaydah from public papers outlining the case against two alleged terror "sleeper" operatives in Ottawa and Montreal.

The move, which so far has received no public attention, is the latest sign of potential international fallout from the CIA's recent confirmation that it waterboarded a handful of high-profile Al Qaeda suspects in 2002 and 2003. The use of waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques were approved by the Bush White House and Justice Department. Waterboarding, which critics charge is a form of torture, involves strapping a suspect to an inclined board and forcing water into his lungs, typically by pouring water through a cloth placed over his nose and mouth.

The Canadian cases involve two men: Mohammed Harkat, an Algerian native living in Ottawa, and Moroccan-born Adil Charkaoui of Montreal. Both were arrested after the September 11 terror attacks and detained without charges on suspicions of links to Al Qaeda. Unable to develop enough evidence to bring criminal charges against either man, the CSIS sought to deport them on grounds that they had both allegedly spent time in Al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan in the 1990s. (Both men now have been released on bail but remain under government scrutiny).

At least part of the case against the Canadian suspects was derived from the CIA-supplied statements of Zubaydah, the suspected Al Qaeda logistics chief who was arrested in Pakistan in 2002 and became the first high-value detainee subjected to waterboarding. A Canadian government dossier filed with the courts after Harkat's arrest, for example, stated that "a foreign agency" (an apparent reference to the CIA) "advised the Service in March 2003 that Abu Zubaida was able to identify the respondent by his physical description, including that he operated a guest house in Peshawar, Pakistan in the mid 1990s for mujahadeen travelling to Chechnya."

But last month, the CSIS filed a revised version of the dossier on Harkat as part of its case to deport the suspect. The new version deleted the detailed information from "the foreign agency" about Abu Zubaydah's identification of Harkat. Instead, in the new dossier, dated Feb. 22, 2008, the CSIS said simply that, "Based on its investigation, the Service concludes that HARKAT has associated with Abu Zubaydah (sic), one of (Osama) bin Laden's top lieutenants since the early 1990s." A footnote in the dossier attributes this information to news articles from the British press and to a counter terrorism newsletter published by a Chicago think tank.



Read more: http://www.newsweek.com/id/118992

[eib1]

1. Thank you, Canada!

Show common sense, there's precious little of it here.

[fed-up]

2. kicking AND rec'cing nt

[aquart]

3. GOOD.

[bhikkhu]

4. "key was that both confessed to assasinating JFK,

Jimmy Hoffa, Jon Benet Ramsey, and Morris the Cat".

Humor aside, wouldn't you? Torture is worse than useless vile cruelty. Some credit to Canada for belatedly giving its cruel and vile uselessness some press.

[Solly Mack]

5. K&R

[gratuitous]

6. Even the bad excuses have been stripped

Well, at least in countries where courts still take the principle set down in our own Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Amendments seriously. Too bad the United States, which promulgated these bedrock rights, has seen fit to abandon them because George W. Bush and his administration cronies are so piss-their-pants scared.

[Heywood J]

7. It's even more ironic in that Canadian rules for illegal evidence

are more lax than in the US. The evidence is inadmissible if it "brings the administration of justice into disrepute." This is pretty much an admission by the government that such a thing would happen - a kangaroo court.

[Lone_Star_Dem]

8. I'm glad to see this. K&R .. n/t

[Supersedeas]

9. nothing to see here as the Poll Watch Blackout of real news continues