Column for Sept 24: Arar and us
The Arar case is not the end
Reaction to Mr. Justice Dennis O'Connor's $15-million report into the wrongful arrest, deportation and torture of Maher Arar has been fascinating. And instructive.
Consider the Harper government. When the then-Liberal government began belatedly, timidly asking for Arar's release from his Syrian torture chamber in the fall of 2002, opposition leader Stephen Harper was dismissive. The Liberals, he claimed, were "hitting the snooze button on security matters." His colleague, Stockwell Day, even argued the government's "lack of vigilance" had allowed a notorious terrorist like Arar to avoid detection and detention in the first place.
Today, although Prime Minister Harper acknowledges Arar was indeed an innocent victim of injustice, he refuses to do the right thing and unreservedly apologize for the horrific fate Canada consigned him to. And, not coincidentally, for his own acquiescence in that fate. While the government has finally removed Arar and his family from Canada’s terror watch list, Stockwell Day, now our Public Safety Minister, has offered to do little more himself than oh-so-gently suggest to the United States — which illegally dispatched Arar to Syria to be tortured on the basis of the false information provided by Canadian authorities — that it "may wish to do the same."
The Conservative government is not alone in wanting to dance around the uncomfortable reality that it was our collective post-9/11 hysteria — perhaps even more than the Mounties’ admittedly bad behaviour — that led us to frame Maher Arar. And possibly others.
Many of the same MPs who last week passed the unanimous resolution apologizing to Arar for his treatment were among those who encouraged it by clamouring for the government to introduce tougher laws, and abrogate civil liberties and due process in the months following 9/11. There does not appear to be a lot of reflection about that.
And Ottawa journalists, who allowed themselves to be used by unnamed government and RCMP sources to foment public fear by falsely claiming there was hard evidence Arar was a terrorist, now seem far more interested in speculating about whether the commissioner of the RCMP will resign or be fired than they are in reporting on how and by whom they were duped.
At one level, the current fixation on the RCMP’s failures is understandable. After all, Arar's journey into hell began with a flawed, incompetent RCMP anti-terrorist investigation known as Project A-O Canada. That hastily organized post-9/11 investigation identified him as a "person of interest" simply because he happened to have met with a number of other Arab Canadians who also – perhaps equally wrongly -- were suspected of terrorist activities. In April 2002, investigators handed over an A-O Canada computer database full of raw data, including Arar's name, to US authorities. Four months later, the Americans grabbed Arar and deported him to Syria to be tortured.
The Mounties then made the situation even worse by not only suggesting to American officials that Arar and his family really were indeed Islamic extremists but also misleading the government of the day about their own role in Arar's detention and torture.
So the RCMP has much to answer for in the Arar case, as Justice O'Connor rightly pointed out.
But he also made it clear in his report that "systemic problems go beyond Arar's case." He urged the government, for example, to launch an independent investigation into the cases of three other Arab-Canadian men who claim they too were set up by the Canadian government to be tortured by third countries.
And they aren’t the only Arabs to have been subject to cruel and unusual detention, including in Canada. Five men, in fact, are currently in jail or on strict bail under secret “security certificates” that allow the government to keep them in a kind of permanent limbo without ever having to test their evidence in a court.
The reality is that the Arar case is not the iceberg, but its tip. And the RCMP is not alone in its responsibility for what happened to Arar — and continues to happen to others.
Stephen Kimber, the Maclean Hunter Professor of Journalism at the University of King's College, is the author of five nonfiction books as well as a novel, Reparations, which was published this spring by HarperCollins.
Column for Sept.17, 2006: Horne case again
Horne case isn't over
Last week’s decision in the Gabrielle Horne case has clarified a couple of key issues in the ongoing dispute at the province's largest hospital.
For starters, we now know the Capital District Health Authority had no legitimate reason to vary Dr. Horne’s hospital privileges on a supposed “emergency” basis four years ago.
Which means that none of what followed from that single initial wrong-headed decision— the closure of Horne’s “globally pioneering” cardiac research program, the attacks on her professional reputation, the threat of international academic sanctions against Dalhousie University for its silence-is-consent role in the dragged-out debacle, the meter-is-still-ticking, millions of dollars in unnecessary legal bills sucked out of the health care budget to pay for this fiasco... None of it needed to happen. None.
What we don’t know is why the health authority has decided to make its humiliation worse -- and our eventual cost higher -- by continuing, even in the very decision that exonerated her, to claim Dr. Horne is somehow “the author of her own misfortune.” (If that borrowed turn of phrase sounds eerily familiar, it’s because that’s the way the self-interested, blame-the-victim judges of Nova Scotia’s appeals court -- in attempting to slough off the justice system’s responsibility for Donald Marshall, Jr.’s wrongful murder conviction 35 years ago -- described the native youth who spent 11 years in prison for a murder he didn’t commit.)
We also don’t know why the health authority’s board hasn’t fired its in-house legal department, which unconscionably dragged this matter out well past its best-before date, or asked for a refund from its high-priced, hired-gun lawyers who achieved such dismal results.
Make no mistake. Despite the authority's best efforts at spin, last Friday’s "decision of the board of directors on certain preliminary issues" in the Horne case represents a complete capitulation.
After dancing -- for two tortured pages out of a five-page decision -- around the question of whether there really were grounds to justify the hospital's draconian measures, the panel finally had no choice but to find that even Horne’s alleged “lack of collegiality was not sufficiently problematic” to do what they did.
What makes that especially interesting -- and revealing -- is that the panel never heard from one witness concerning Dr. Horne’s supposed lack of collegiality, or listened to the "string of witnesses" her lawyer was preparing to call to refute those allegations if they'd been made.
Instead, the panel cut short the hearing after less than two days, not even ruling on a second preliminary motion -- about whether the variance had been legally approved -- in its unseemly haste to get the inevitable over with. Which means we didn't get to hear more of the unedifying details of a potentially damaging back-dated letter the administration tried to use to justify its actions against Dr. Horne. Or learn more about the personality conflict with a colleague that appears to have been the real root cause of all that has happened to Dr. Horne over the past four years.
While the panel seemed willing enough to repeat accusations against the doctor tarted up as findings of fact, it couldn't bring itself to do what it should have done a long time ago: apologize to Dr. Horne for putting her through four years of professional and personal hell.
Which is one reason why the panel’s decision itself will almost certainly become yet another item in the lengthy statement of claim Horne’s lawyer is expected to file within the next few week. “We believe the decision makes our case even stronger,” understates Horne’s lawyer, Ron Pizzo.
Given what has transpired so far -- including the gutting of Horne’s well-regarded multimillion dollar research program as well as the incalculable damage to her career and life – the ultimate cost to taxpayers could be enormous.
“Gaby isn’t looking for compensation for the sake of it,” Pizzo explains. “But the simple fact is she’ll need money to restart her research.”
Given the impact of the board's latest ill-considered decision on this case's eventual cost to the health care system as well as its ongoing abysmal failure to oversee the actions of the hospital's administration, we also have every right to ask why our health minister hasn’t already dismissed the board or, at the very least, launched an investigation to find out what went wrong this time and make sure it doesn't happen again.
It's time we started asking.
Stephen Kimber, the Maclean Hunter Professor of Journalism at the University of King's College, is the author of five nonfiction books as well as a novel, Reparations, which was published this spring by HarperCollins.
Column for Sept. 10, 2006 Layton and Afghanistan
Why are we there?
Jack Layton may not be right, but he is not wrong either.
The NDP leader’s call for Canada to immediately pull our troops out of Afghanistan and press for multilateral negotiations — including with the Taliban — has roused righteous and predictable furies.
His political opponents, thankful that Layton had put his foot where most of them fear to tread, were anxious to step down hard. In an interview on CBC-TV’s The National, Foreign Minister Peter MacKay disingenuously argued it was “disingenuous” for Layton to claim to be supporting our soldiers while questioning the soldiers’ mission (the one MacKay’s government gave them, which is now apparently sacred and beyond question). As for negotiating with the Taliban, with whom we are engaged in ugly, close and mortal combat that will not ultimately end without some form of negotiation, MacKay was scornful. “What’s next?” he mocked. “Tea with Osama bin Laden?”
Our overstocked army of retired generals-turned-well-paid-consultants-and-commentators were equally eager to pop up like shooting gallery targets to denounce Layton for his affront to our fighting men and women. Retired Major-General Lewis MacKenzie tut-tutted that Layton was “following the polls and playing domestic politics on the backs of our soldiers.”
Meanwhile, the gaggle of camp-following cheerleader-war correspondents, led by the Globe and Mail’s over-the-top Field Marshall Christie Blatchford, claimed Layton wanted to talk peace “with the killers of these… terrific, courageous and dogged soldiers… If I could have,” Blatchford wrote, “I would have reached into my television set and grabbed [Layton] by the throat.”
More understandably, Truro’s Jim Davis, the father of Cpl. Paul Davis, who died in Afghanistan in March, claimed it was “despicable” for Layton to be “playing politics with the lives of our soldiers.” He was offended at Layton’s seeming suggestion his son might have died in a mission that is not “our mission.”
In the end, that is the question. What is our mission in Afghanistan? What are our specific, measurable goals? How will we know when we’ve achieved them? What is our plan to extricate ourselves once we have accomplished what we set out to do?
Despite the rhetoric on all sides, we have not had a real national public discussion about those very important, entirely legitimate questions.
Are we engaged in an exercise in nation-and-democracy building that, by its very nature, requires us to fight a counter-insurgency first war in order to make the country safe for that democracy to flower?
If that is our goal — and most of us, me included, want to believe nation-building is why we’re there — are we going about it in the most effective, efficient way possible?
That is, at the least, debatable.
Five years after it was ostensibly routed, the Taliban — aided and abetted by our supposed ally in Pakistan — is very much alive and well. So too are the drug cartels and the warlords, who have made common cause with the Taliban against the foreign occupiers, among which they include us. To complicate matters, the democratically elected government we have been so keen to encourage is itself freckled with warlords and drug barons, and rife with corruption. And, worst of all, according to a recent report in the New York Times, some combination of fear, frustration and resentment is driving growing numbers of impoverished Afghans in the country’s rural south into “openly collaborating with the Taliban.”
Canada’s defence minister conceded last week that “we cannot eliminate the Taliban, not militarily anyway.” Our best hope, Gordon O’Connor suggested, is to “get them back to some kind of acceptable level, so they don’t threaten other areas.”
If that is true — and it appears to be — why not look for ways other than war-to-the-death (Negotiations, perhaps?) to find that “acceptable level.”
So long as our focus is solely on combat, we will not only not be making real headway on reconstruction but we will also be losing the more important war for the hearts and minds of Afghanis.
General James L. Jones, NATO’s top commander — hardly a bleeding heart softie — last week criticized the international community for not matching military might on the ground with economic and other aid. Jones, who described international aid programs to Afghanistan as being “in some stage of life support,” made the important point that “the future of Afghanistan will not be determined by the military.”
Jack Layton may be wrong to suggest the answer is to unilaterally withdraw our troops, but he is right to suggest we need to discuss why we’re really there and how best to accomplish our goals.
Stephen Kimber, the Maclean Hunter Professor of Journalism at the University of King's College, is the author of five nonfiction books as well as a novel, Reparations, which was published this spring by HarperCollins.
Column for Sept. 3, 2006: Politics and Privacy
Press, politicians and private lives
In last week’s letters-to-the-editor section, reader Chris Chisholm took me to task for writing a “pile of sanctimonious crap.” Which was how Chisholm ever-so-gently characterized my column from the week before in which I’d argued the public doesn’t need, or have the right to know the salacious details — if indeed there are salacious details — of Premier Rodney MacDonald’s recent separation from his wife.
In the letter, Chisholm raised a couple of inter-related points I think deserve to be explored.
The first is the privileged position of reporters, who often know things they don’t report. “Kimber implies,” Chisholm writes, “that while he is privy to the rumours, innuendo and perhaps even facts, we, the public, should not be afforded the same level of diligence.”
I’m sorry if I implied I knew stuff regular readers didn’t. I didn’t, and don’t. I only knew what I’d read in Frank, in the mainstream media and in some of the blogs I’d been sent. I’d seen nothing in any of them, however, that convinced me the intimate details of the premier’s personal woes — as interesting as they might be from a drive-by, train-wreck perspective — rose to the level of public interest.
That said, I take Chisholm’s point. Reporters often uncover shards of rumours, innuendo and “perhaps even facts” in the course of doing their jobs. Some of it is stuff voters deserve to know about. But too often it gets saved up for cocktail party gossip instead, because that’s easier than doing the due diligence required to put together a news story.
Over the course of my career, I’ve occasionally spent time tracking down and confirming what I thought was an important story, only to have other reporters dismiss it with an airy, Oh-we-knew-that-already.
Our job, I agree with Chisholm, is to “uncover the truth and report facts that will allow the public to determine if the reasons for the premier’s separation will affect his responsibilities.”
The question, of course, is where do we draw the line in publishing what we find?
Chisholm raises the case of Gerald Regan, our premier during the seventies who — much later — was charged with rape and sexual assault (he was found not guilty), as well as serial inappropriate behaviour with girls and young women he had power over. Chisholm suggests “the closeness of reporters and politicians… kept most of Regan’s purported transgressions secret for too long.”
As someone who covered Regan’s years in office and who — also much later — wrote a book about it, I know there is some truth in what Chisholm says. There were journalists who did try to tell that story, of course, but they were prevented from doing so, largely for legal reasons but also because their bosses (and many of their colleagues) took my current position in the Rodney MacDonald story that we had no business reporting on “that stuff.”
How do we determine when “that stuff” rises to the level of news?
I think, in the end, we need to ask our selves a couple of questions. Are the politician’s private affairs affecting her or his ability to do their public job? Is the person using their public position to reward or punish others — giving a cushy job to a lover, for example, or firing someone who refuses their sexual advances? Those are newsworthy.
The problem, of course, is that we first need to at least ask some unseemly questions to even answer those questions. But, having answered them, what then?
Many of my colleagues — whose judgment I respect — argue MacDonald brought this on himself by running an election campaign that revolved around “family values” and often featured his wife and child in photo opportunities. If Rodney’s own marriage was breaking down at that time and/or if — as the gossips have it — his transgressions led to the meltdown, then he is, at the least, a hypocrite who deserves to be exposed.
While I have some sympathy for that argument, my counter view is that it is, in itself, often a hypocritical argument. None of us ever knows enough about what goes on behind closed doors in someone else’s marriage to begin assigning blame for its failure. And shouldn’t we judge what a politician does in terms of “family values” by his or her public policy actions rather than the dubious evidence of their private peccadillos? (Consider Martin Luther King, or John Kennedy. Or consider Stephen Harper, whose apparent family-friendly personal life is counter-balanced by mean-spirited public policy decisions on child care funding, for example.)
I’m not sure there is a simple, one-size-fits-all answer to any of this but it’s important that we at least continue to have the discussion.
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About
STEPHEN KIMBER, the Rogers Communications Chair in Journalism at the University of King's College in Halifax, is an award-winning writer, editor and broadcaster. He is the author of one novel -- Reparations -- and eight non-fiction books.