When is it safe to release a captured Islamic terrorist from prison or detention? According to a top official of Canadaâs intelligence service, the answer is: never.
In public testimony at a court hearing in Ottawa last November, which got no attention south of the border, the senior Middle East analyst for the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), identified only as âP.G.,â declared his agencyâs âbeliefâ that people who have joined militant ânetworksâ linked to Al Qaeda and affiliated Islamic movements âmaintain their ties, and their relationships to those networks, for very long periods of time. These ties are forged in environments where relationships mean a great deal, and it is our belief that the dedication to the ideology, if you will, is very strong, and is virtually impossible to break.â
In an official paper that he drafted outlining the serviceâs position on the release of alleged jihadi detainees held by the Canadian government under a controversial post-9/11 security procedure, P.G. wrote that âIndividuals who have attended terrorist training camps or who have independently opted for radical Islam must be considered threats to Canadian public safety for the indefinite future. It is highly unlikely that they will cast off their views on jihad and the justification for the use of violence.â The paper adds that âIncarceration is certainly not a guarantee that the extremist will soften his or her attitudes over time; quite the contrary. The Service assesses that extremists will rejoin their networks upon release.â
In a section of the paper carrying the subhead âOnce a Terrorist, Always a Terrorist?â, P.G. noted âthere have already been instances where released detainees have rejoined extremist groups ⊠At least 10 detainees released from the Guantanamo Bay prison after U.S. officials concluded they posed little threat have been recaptured or killed fighting U.S. or coalition forces in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and one of the repatriated prisoners is still at large after taking leadership of a militant faction in Pakistan and aligning himself with Al Qaeda.â
The CSIS paper cites several well-known cases as evidence that Islamic militants are likely to maintain, and even intensify, their extremist views and violent tendencies as a result of imprisonment. In one case, Allekema Lamari, an Algerian âextremist,â was released from a Spanish prison only to later mastermind the deadly March 11, 2004, bombing attacks on Madrid commuter trains. Then there are the cases of Ayman al-Zawahiri, who, the paper, says spent three years in an Egyptian prison for his involvement in the 1981 assassination of President Anwar Sadat, only to emerge as Osama bin Ladenâs principal deputy, and Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi, the militant who spent seven years in prison in his native Jordan for extremist activities, only to emerge as self-proclaimed creator and leader of Al Qaedaâs ultraviolent affiliate in post-Saddam Iraq. The CSIS paper also pointedly notes that after serving half of an eight-year terrorism-related sentence in a French prison, Algerian Islamic militant Fateh Kamel returned to Canada; Kamel, the document says, once boasted: âKilling is easy for me.â
The CSIS paper and the testimony of P.G. were made public during court hearings on the detention of Mohamed Harkat, a former Ottawa gas-station attendant and pizza delivery man who was arrested by Canadian authorities in December 2002 based on information gathered by the CSIS. After 9/11, Canada instituted new antiterror laws that gave the government power to expel foreign terror suspects based on secret intelligence information and to jail them without trial pending deportation hearings.
Lawyers for Harkat went to court to argue that their client should be released on bail, subject to electronic monitoring by authorities and tight control over his activities, while officials examine whether it would be appropriate to deport him to Algeria, where some say he could suffer human-rights abuse. In a similar case involving an alleged Islamic militant from Montreal, a judge ruled that the suspect could be released on bail while deportation proceedings continued. In Harkatâs case, however, a judge ruled that the suspect must remain in prison.
Barbara Campion, a spokeswoman for the CSIS, said her agencyâs view is that Harkat is âsuch a threat that he shouldnât be releasedâ on bail. As to P.G.âs wider assertions that it was unsafe to ever release a jihadi militant, Campion noted that Canada only was detaining a handful of militants under its antiterror laws. She said that there might be a qualitative difference between the Canadian detainees (whom authorities believe could be truly dangerous terrorists) versus the hundreds of detainees at Guantanamo (many of whom were rounded up with Taliban forces in Afghanistan and may not pose a serious terrorist threat ).
While the Canadian government regarded them as dangerous, there might be a qualitative difference in the relative dangers posed by the release of the suspects held by Canada and the release by the U.S. government from the Guantanamo Bay detention center of captured suspects who fought with Taliban forces in Afghanistan rather than with Al Qaeda.
Two U.S. counterterror officials, who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the subject, said that whatever the Canadians believe about the risks of releasing detained jihadis, the Bush administration was likely to continue to release detainees from detention who were not regarded as serious risks to resume terrorism, in full recognition that some of them might return to the battlefield.
Under cross-examination by Paul Copeland, a lawyer for Harkat, P.G. made statements which raised questions about the policies and procedures of the CSIS. For one thing, P.G. acknowledged that the information in his paper about how 10 detainees released from Guantanamo Bay had rejoined terror groups originated in a Washington Post story. Copeland noted that P.G.âs official paper omitted information indicating that the 10 suspects who re-offended were among 202 detainees released from the U.S.-run prison facility and asked why this figure was not in the paper. P.G. said that when he wrote the paper, âit did not seem as if [the 202 figure] was important for the paper,â at least in part because CSIS did not have information on what had happened to the other 192 suspects who had been released.
Copeland also asked P.G. if he had looked into whether any of the information that the CSIS had collected regarding Harkatâs alleged terror links had come from captured Al Qaeda leaders who might have been subjected to âtortureâ by foreign agencies that had held or questioned them. Copeland noted that the Canadian government stated that some of the information it used to build its detention and deportation case against Harkat came from Abu Zubaydah, the captured Al Qaeda training-camp chief who, according to U.S. news reports, may have been subjected to harsh treatment while in U.S. custody. (Zubaydah is believed to be currently held by the U.S. government in a secret CIA detention facility overseas.) P.G. told the court that while he was concerned about the possibility that some of the intelligence may have come from detainees who had been tortured, he had ânever, personally, asked any individual whether or not specific information was obtained under torture.â
CSIS spokeswoman Campion said that as a small agency, her service had to rely heavily on intelligence-sharing relationships with foreign intelligence services, and she insisted that it was CSIS practice not to rely on âsingle sourceâ information. She said that while the CSIS does âtake what weâre given,â the service is concerned about possible mistreatment of sources and âalwaysâ corroborates the information from multiple sources before using it against someone. She noted that earlier in the Harkat case, a judge ruled that because of concern that Abu Zubaydah may have been been mistreated, the court would ignore any information he supplied about Harkat. Nonetheless, the judge ruled there was sufficient other evidence for authorities to detain Harkat. Campion added that CSIS operations were subject to detailed and regular scrutiny by a government oversight panel called the Security and Intelligence Review Committee.
Apart from his pessimism about the possibility that jihadi suspects could somehow reform and be released back into society, P.G. predicted that Al Qaeda and related groups are likely to persist and prosper whether or not Osama bin Laden remains alive and at its helm. âIn this regard, we are in a no-win situation,â P.G. testified. âIf Osama bin Laden remains at large, he remains a rallying cry, and a symbol for his organization, and as a paragon, if you will, of resistance to the West. If Osama bin Laden is killed and/or captured, he becomes a martyr to the cause of Islamic extremism and the war against the West. I think in either case, Mr. Bin Ladenâs removal from the scene is irrelevant, in the sense that Al Qaeda has already set the standard for international Islamic extremism.â |
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