Proceedings of the Special Senate Committee on the
Anti-terrorism Act
Issue 4 - Evidence - Afternoon meeting
OTTAWA, Monday, March 14, 2005
The Special Senate Committee on Anti-terrorism Act met this day at 1:15 p.m. to undertake a comprehensive review of the provisions and operations of the Anti-terrorism Act, (S.C. 2001, c.41).
[English]
Senator Joyce Fairbairn (Chairman) in the chair.
The Chairman: This is the eighth meeting, with witnesses, of the Special Senate Committee on the Anti-terrorism Act.
For our viewers, I will explain the purpose of this committee. In October 2001, as a direct response to terrorist attacks in New York City, Washington and Pennsylvania, and at the request of the United Nations, the Canadian government introduced Bill C-36, the Anti-terrorism Act. Given the urgency of the situation then, Parliament was asked to expedite our study of the legislation, and we agreed. The deadline for the passage of that bill was mid- December 2001. However, concerns were expressed that it was very difficult to thoroughly assess the potential impact of this legislation in such a short period of time. For that reason, it was agreed that, three years later, Parliament would be asked to examine the provisions of the Act, and its impact on Canadians, with the benefit of hindsight and in a less emotionally-charged atmosphere within the public.
The work of this special committee represents the Senate's efforts to fulfill that obligation. When we have completed the study, we will make a report to the Senate that will outline any issue that we believe should be addressed, and allow the results of our work to be available to the government and to the Canadian people. I should add that the House of Commons is undergoing a similar process.
So far the committee has met the Honourable Anne McLellan, our Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness, the Honourable Irwin Cotler, Minister of Justice and Attorney General for Canada, and Jim Judd, Director of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service. We continue our discussions of the threat environment with the Anti-terrorism Act within which it is expected to operate.
This afternoon we will hear from Professor Michael Clarke, who is joining us by video conference from London. Welcome, Professor Clarke. Professor Clarke is Director of the International Policy Institute at King's College London.
We will then be joined by Professor Martin Rudner, who is Director of the Canadian Centre of Intelligence and Security Studies at the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs here in Ottawa.
Finally, colleagues, we will conclude our afternoon session with John Thompson, President of the Mackenzie Institute in Toronto. As our time is limited with these witnesses, I would again, as always, ask you to keep your questions crisp and, when possible, the answers succinct as well.
We will now go to our witness in London. Mr. Clarke, we invite you to make a statement to our committee, after which we will ask questions.
Michael Clarke, Director, International Policy Institute, King's College London: International terrorism is a subject that is much debated, as you will know, in London in our own Parliament, and a great deal of discussion takes place as to the precise nature of the terrorist threat that modern democracies face. My only opening introductory statement would be something to the effect that we are entering into a second phase of terrorist structures to understand. There is a natural second phase. When terrorist organizations have been demonstrably successful and governments then get on their tail and are able to disburse them to some degree, they then go into a second phase. We have seen that with most of the terrorist groups that operated in Europe, the Irish Republican Army, IRA, of course, Euskadi ta Askatasuna, ETA, in Spain, the Red Brigades in Italy, and the Red Army Faction in Germany. A lot of these European organizations went through similar processes in the 1970s and 1980s. Now we can see that jihadist terrorism, the Salafi Jihadi movement in the world, which we have generally speaking given the phrase al Qaeda to, and that is a shorthand term, is in this second phase. It is still a pyramid structure. They have established what I consider to be the gold dust of terrorist organizations, which is a franchise. They have a brand name, which is well recognized and lots of organizations who want to become part of the franchise. They still have a terrorist structure, which is relatively centralized, and very united and determined at the top, but which is really quite flaky further down. They do not mind that flakiness because that all helps to disperse and make more difficult the job of the security services in trying to track it. On the one hand, we have still a hierarchical structure in its very core, but a decentralized structure in the rest of its organization. That is one of the reasons why Salafi Jihadism — from now on I will refer to it either as jihadism or al Qaeda — poses unique challenges to our anti-terrorist organizations.
Senator Lynch-Staunton: We have been following with special interest the debates in your Parliament on a new anti- terrorism law, which as a result of the decision of the law lords that we are all familiar with, in particular that aspect of it which you call control orders. The equivalent here is security certificates. The difference is that security certificates in Canada come under the Immigration Act, not the Anti-terrorism Act but security certificates are being used by the intelligence services to detain terrorist suspects. Can you summarize what is in the new law, which is significantly different from the old law regarding, particularly, control orders, so that we can benefit hopefully from the result of that?
Mr. Clarke: Yes, the control orders work at the lower level exactly as other restraining orders would have worked in many other domestic cases. People can be subject to curfews. They can be required to subject themselves to electronic tagging and to have various types of restriction placed on their movement; people they are not allowed to approach or see, and things they are not allowed to do. That exists in U.K. law in many other ways for domestic purposes. That all applies in the control orders, which are discussed in the new bill. The difference in control orders as far as the new bill goes is that they are potentially taken to a very high level. Someone can be put under house arrest in effect and not allowed to have any communication with the outside world and someone would have to have explicit permission in advance to meet or have any form of communication with other people. We are talking about control orders at a very high level of restraint in this case.
It is also the case that it raises all sorts of problems because these control orders would not arise from a judicial process as such. It is not clear when they would finish. If someone is regarded as a danger to society, then they may continue to be a danger for quite a considerable period and there is an open-ended nature to these control orders that would not normally apply to ones applied more domestically.
The other difference between the new legislation and the old legislation, which went out of business at midnight last night, is that the old legislation, the Prevention of Terrorism Act, as far as control orders were concerned, was deemed only to apply to foreign nationals who, for whatever reason, could not be deported. Our law lords ruled that was unlawful and so the new control orders can apply to all British citizens and foreign nationals. Those are the key differences it seems to me.
Senator Lynch-Staunton: Can you tell us what the process of control orders is? How are they issued, what is needed to issue them, who authorizes them and are they subject to any form of judicial review so that the detainee has an opportunity to answer to them?
Mr. Clarke: Lower level control orders will continue, as is the present case, to be recommended by a magistrate. The controversy that went on here last week involved the higher level control orders where the government's position was that they wanted the home secretary alone to be able to authorize those control orders. However, the compromise that was reached very late on Friday night was that a judge would have to be involved in the issuance of a control order at a high level. There is judicial involvement now at all levels and there is a review process, which will be conducted by the judiciary, although I have not yet seen an explicit statement of how long after a control order is activated that the judicial process has to take place. I have to say I do not have a citation for that particular detail.
The other thing worth mentioning is that part of the compromise last Friday was also that this process would require review. There is not a sunset clause whereby it automatically goes out of business as a piece of legislation after six months, but it will be completely reviewed with the possibility of radical redrawing of the law if it is judged to be unsatisfactory in a year's time.
Senator Lynch-Staunton: Is it a magistrate then who issues or authorizes a control order, or is there a political involvement at say the ministerial level too?
Mr. Clarke: At lower levels, a magistrate is able to issue a control order and that has happened in the past. However, it is difficult to imagine that the sort of cases that the government is worried about would be regarded as that lower level. In these cases the government is acting on advice supplied by the security services who only need reasonable suspicion, reasonable grounds. There was a push from the opposition parties and the lords to change the burden of proof to balance of probabilities, but the government successfully resisted that and the security services only need reasonable suspicion. I find it hard to imagine that on a security-service reasonable suspicion, the requirement of the home secretary backed up by a senior judge would not be required, but in principle a magistrate could make these orders.
Senator Lynch-Staunton: I am glad you clarified the part about the grounds for issuing it, because the last report I saw was that they were trying to get rid of reasonable grounds and have something more substantial. I understand now that reasonable grounds continue.
Once a detainee is under a control order, what recourse does he have to counter the evidence, proof, or alleged proof? Does he appear in front of a magistrate within a given period of time, or can he be held indefinitely and brought, if ever, before a magistrate or court of law?
Mr. Clarke: Anyone subject to a control order under this legislation does not have to be informed what the nature of the evidence is. Although there will be a review of the case at some point in the future — I should know what that point is but at the moment I do not — there is no guarantee that the person who is subject to the control order will know specifically enough what it is about to be able to refute it. On the other hand, all of the people who have been subject to control orders do have, or have had in the past, some legal representation. Although the Act is rather draconian in its conception, it has worked in a more judicial way than many of its critics have argued.
Senator Lynch-Staunton: If I understand, the new law will be in effect only for six months, and subject to review and hopefully to replacement by something more permanent and fair?
Mr. Clarke: That is correct. A review is due in November, and then six months after that. That is not quite the same as a sunset clause because the law would have to be either significantly amended, or it is possible that the government might lay in front of Parliament a blanket bill to either take it or leave. I think there would be another political row about that if that was the case. In a sense, this is less satisfactory to the critics of the law than a sunset clause would be, but it is quite close to a sunset clause because it does mean that there is a six-month trial followed by another six months in which the trial would be trialed.
Senator Lynch-Staunton: How much did the fact that you are probably going to have an election in May play in this debate? Was it as non-partisan as possible, or did the political fortunes of each party play out on this, and perhaps some things were said and done, which under a non-election phase would not have been said or done?
Mr. Clarke: My own personal view is very much that this whole controversy was exacerbated by electoral politics. The issue of the old law should have been dealt with a lot earlier. The government walked itself into trouble by leaving it very late, and then trying to drive it through both the Commons and the Lords, with very little time for discussion over some fairly fundamental issues. That was partly driven by the electoral timetable as well as by the expiry of the old law according to the law lords' ruling. Also, the degree of hysteria which we witnessed in this country on both sides of the argument last week was very much an exercise in dodging blame. If this law is seen to fail, or if this law simply becomes extremely controversial in its implementation, then both government and opposition were trying to be sure that the other side was blamed. I do not think it reflected particularly well on British politics.
Senator Smith: I read one very brief article that Prime Minister Tony Blair was particularly irritated at the hereditary peers in the Lords, to the point where he is now thinking about doing them in once and for all. It was not entirely clear to me what the position was that some of these peers were taking that irritated him so much?
Mr. Clarke: Yes, the 90 hereditary peers who are left: They take the view that they are unelected and they are there precisely to provide some continuity, and to take a view on constitutional questions. This bill raised the question of the substitution of habeas corpus in this case, and that seemed an important constitutional question. Of the 90 heriditaries that voted against the government, their argument was that they have a wider duty to act as conservators of the constitution. The other peers, the life peers, have all been created by government. They are unelected and they will serve there as long as they want to or until they die. What the government came up against in this case is having professionalized the House of Lords a little bit, they found the people who are in the lords were all the more dedicated politicos who took very strong and individual views about this particular legislation: former ministers, former home secretaries, former chief police officers and senior military people. What irritated the Prime Minister so much was that from his perspective he thought that anyone with a security background would understand the need for this legislation. His argument was always that the security services are giving him very clear advice, and it would be irresponsible if he did not respond to that advice. Against that, he was now up against a House of Lords that was more vigorous politically than it has been for some time, and who saw in this not so much a security problem, but a constitutional issue on which they should rightly and properly dig their toes in.
Senator Smith: Thank you for that. I sensed that was the gist of it, but it was not articulated in this article I read. Thank you for clearing that up.
We had an earlier witness today in which the subject of the Finsbury Park mosque, with which I am sure you are quite familiar, came up and as to whether the actions the British government took with regard to what was going on there a few months ago had been successful and warranted. Our previous witness thought, on balance, they were, and that they had been recruiting for some people for some time to engage in outright terrorism. What are your thoughts on that whole situation and the approaches that were taken? What is the most appropriate approach for that type of situation?
Mr. Clarke: There were two issues here. On the Finsbury Park mosque, it had become very clear not just to British security authorities, but also to the mainstream Islamic community in the UK and particularly in London, that the Finsbury Park mosque did not represent mainstream views and was a dangerous focus for Salafi and Jihadi radicalism. That is not a reason necessarily to move against it, but there was enough evidence that this was a threat to public safety. Most people, and certainly mainstream Muslim opinion in Britain, have not objected to the actions the government has taken.
The second issue is that of the radical cleric, Abu Hamza, who was banned from preaching at the mosque, took to preaching on the streets outside and attracted a very large following every Friday. This outraged the tabloid press in the United Kingdom and many sections of public opinion; although I am sure that the security services were happy about that, because every Friday they got a pretty good readout of who was attending this particular radical cleric's meetings. They got good photographs of them and they could do a complete check. Abu Hamza arguably was far less of a problem when he was in the street outside Finsbury Park mosque than he now is when he is the subject of an extradition claim from the United States and is incarcerated.
Senator Smith: Is he being viewed as a martyr by the mainstream Islamic community now in the UK?
Mr. Clarke: Not by the mainstream community, but certainly by the more radicalized sections of the Islamic community in Britain, in two or three different places. They have seen the Abu Hamza case as a test. The British government does not have any specific charges against Abu Hamza, but is involved in extradition proceedings since the United States has fairly clear charges against him, which are presently being tested in the British court. Abu Hamza and his legal team have been playing for time and are trying to draw the process out, because there is some propaganda to be made out of this, as well as Abu Hamza's natural reluctance to be extradited to the United States.
Senator Andreychuk: There has been much said that we are spending our time in Canada, the UK and elsewhere, looking at the same machinery and tools that we put in place when we did it rather quickly after 9/11. I want your advice as to whether we are still on target, and where we should be looking and perfecting the process. Should we look at other ways, means and laws to help us protect ourselves against terrorists?
Mr. Clarke: Senator, that is an important question. My view is that the nature of the threat is many-fold and from two main directions, one being enthusiastic amateurs who are a problem because of their potential numbers. In Britain and other European countries, most of these enthusiastic amateurs leave large trails of forensics behind them, so they are not difficult to track and penetrate. Security services tried to move against them, not on prevention of terrorist grounds but for firearms offences, counterfeiting or credit card fraud because they do not want to reveal the forensic evidence. If these groups realized how many mistakes they were making, they would stop making them. That is exactly what happened in the U.K. with the IRA in the mid-1970s. The court transcripts actually gave the IRA a manual of what to stop doing. By the early 1980s, most British policemen that I have spoken to have admitted that the IRA were forensically more clever than we were. The threat from the gifted amateurs is the sheer ubiquity of their plotting and networks, which serve to confuse or draw smoke across the path of the people in whom we are more interested. However, the threat exists.
The more important threat is the fact that the core membership of jihadism and al Qaeda, which number 30 to 35 people, is still plotting spectaculars. They spend three to five years plotting any given spectacular. It is clear from the record that 9/11 took four or five years to plan. The attack on the USS Cole, which seemed like a clever opportunistic attack, took three or four years to plan. We know that planning is still occurring and, every now and then, those spectaculars will tend to work or at least get close to working. In these cases, we are dealing with a dynamic between some hard-bitten professionals who can bide their time until conditions are right, and a series of enthusiastic amateurs who are easy to track but who confuse the issue. In counterterrorism, the problem is that we do not have enough truly good intelligence information about the hard-bitten professionals, and our security services are stretched in dealing with the enthusiastic amateurs.
In respect of law, that does not mean we need to create exotic versions of our prevention of terrorism acts. There is much to be said for the French model, whereby a known association with terrorist groups is a fairly serious offence. That provides a way of producing relatively uncontroversial evidence, not forensically sensitive evidence, which can enable dealing with people who are involved in these enthusiastic amateur groups. A legal code is required that suppresses this would-be criminal behaviour before it becomes networked so that the problem is captured, to permit a clearer view of the true strategic terrorist issues, which still exist. They will hit us less frequently but when they do, they will be well-worked conspiracies.
Senator Andreychuk: Following up on that, the definition of ``terrorist activity'' in Britain was looked at in Canada. Do you think the definition of ``terrorist activity'' and this association need to be looked at?
Mr. Clarke: There is always a problem in defining ``terrorist activity,'' and there is no international consensus on this. The United Nations high level panel report, which was quite strong on terrorism for all kinds of reasons we well understand, was unable to come up with a single definition. The panel recorded the fact that in 40 years none of its members had ever agreed to a definition. For my money, the working definition we have in the United Kingdom is good enough, if only we can fit our other legal arrangements around it. We will never have a completely satisfactory definition of terrorism. It will always be contingent on the political context in which it exists at any given time. That answer is rather vague but I cannot give you a good definition of terrorism that excludes other kinds of behaviour that normally we would not think of as terrorist.
Senator Fraser: Professor Clarke, you may recall that at the beginning of this session, my colleague Senator Lynch- Staunton compared the control order provisions in Britain to our security certificates. I do not know whether you have had an opportunity to become familiar with our anti-terrorism legislation but it seems that the control order provisions are also comparable to the provisions in our anti-terrorism legislation for recognizance with conditions, sometimes known as ``preventive detention.'' In a nutshell, those provisions are such that you can be arrested but you must be brought before a judge within 24 hours who, having heard the evidence, then has the power to release you unconditionally or to release you upon various conditions and to imprison you if you refuse to accept the conditions. Both the conditions and the imprisonment can last a maximum of 12 months. How would that compare with the system that has just been adopted in Britain?
Mr. Clarke: That compares almost as a mirror image, apart from the maximum of 12 months. Our control orders are potentially indefinite. That is the difference although there is now provision for review. They are based on the principles that security services' reasonable suspicions would be enough to bring someone before a judge, who would review the evidence. The essence of the problem is having the evidence reviewed in private to ensure that evidence that could compromise the security services or forensically reveal to the terrorists and terrorist groups in the ways I described earlier, is kept confidential. That is the essence of the problem. One of the issues British politics became wrapped up in last week was that no one truly touched upon the heart of the problem. Why is it that evidence cannot be presented in private? If the public understood some of the sensitivities involved, perhaps they would be more sympathetic to the notion of control orders.
Senator Fraser: More generally, in a number of countries we have seen, since 9/11, a push-back against anti- terrorism legislation and provisions on the grounds of protecting civil liberties. Do you think that collectively we are running risks with our push-back? Do you think we are taking this too far?
Mr. Clarke: I do not think that we are taking it too far. I am more nuanced in the way I think the threats affect us. Terrorism is a problem but it is not a bigger problem to most of society than organized crime is. Certainly, we should not ignore it but I do not believe that the threats to society in Europe are of a different order of magnitude today than they were 20 years ago. I say that in spite of the 9/11 experience and one or two other events. The civil liberties arguments have to be made but it is not beyond the wit of our systems to come up with a way to enforce our legislation in such a way so as to guarantee civil liberties in the vast majority of cases.
In the United Kingdom, I believe 701 people have been detained under the prevention of terrorism legislation since 2001, 17 of whom have been convicted. About one half have been released with a form of judicial warning, and all have been tracked in some way after release. The numbers of difficult cases are low but they raise important questions on civil liberties, and the problem is finding the right balance.
Senator Kinsella: I would like to ask about the state of intelligence gathering today, and whether there is sufficient interface globally with the various intelligence-gathering operations. Are we at the stage now of needing to proceed to a new level of intelligence gathering in the anti-terrorism struggle? What are some of the parameters of that new plateau of intelligence gathering, and how might all that have to interface with our democratic values and protection of human rights?
Mr. Clarke: As far as intelligence gathering goes, I think we all accept that western countries are better at it now than they were before 9/11. In some cases, they are considerably better, but not nearly as good as we would need to be to feel more secure in the way we are handling the general counter-terrorism campaign.
The essence of the problem of intelligence gathering and sharing is twofold. First, most organizations and countries have difficulty unifying their own intelligence-gathering facilities; that is certainly the case in the United Kingdom and most European countries. Intelligence — policing, military intelligence and national intelligence services — is not particularly good. It is better now than it used to be, but it is still not particularly good.
The second aspect is that when we have a unified national product, we do not share it very well with our partners. We tend to share intelligence at the wrong levels. We either share intelligence that is at so high a level of abstraction that it is not very useful, or intelligence that is more like raw intelligence, which actually serves to confuse everyone because it is unevaluated. The middle level — evaluated, national intelligence — is the most valuable sort; but at that point, it risks giving away sources. Then we run into problems of lack of trust between countries and some of the problems that have arisen where intelligence really has leaked. We have quite a long way to go, therefore, in sharing the right type of intelligence. There is any amount of material being exchanged, but most of it is not of the right type.
In terms of what intelligence we need, that really is an essential question. The American National Security Agency gathers intercepts of one sort or another around the world at a rate of two million an hour. That means, in any 24-hour period, they have 50 million pieces of information to look at or to evaluate in some way, and to select. That is very impressive but, equally, it is easy for a piece of information to get lost. There is any number of examples where information was extremely useful, such as predictions of the Madrid bomb that came out in December 2003 and predicted almost exactly what would happen in Madrid. They were available but nobody understood the significance. That is not surprising in the wealth of information.
We cannot go on assuming that if we gather enough information, and interpret it quickly enough, that this will be sufficient. What we lack in the intelligence business in this regard is human intelligence. That is always the most valuable; and in terms of the core of al Qaeda and jihadism that I was talking about, as far as the professionals go in this jihadist movement, that is the most difficult human intelligence to establish. One simply does not break into the top levels, even after years of trying.
What we have is a pyramid where it is easy to penetrate the bottom, but there is not a lot to be learned there other than confusing signals; it is very hard to penetrate at the top with human intelligence. The Western world has become a little fixated on the amount of information flying around on the Internet, and through phone and email messages. All of that is relevant, but even if we understood that material better, it still would not give us the real human intelligence we need.
I do not have any clever answers as to how to do this, other than that all of our intelligence organizations have to reorientate much more quickly. Even in Europe, where we pride ourselves on more of a tradition in dealing with the Arab world, we are desperately short of Arabic speakers in order to understand the material fast enough and develop better relationships with communities that are close to the jihadists themselves.
One final point I would make in terms of penetration is that one of the best ways forward is to try to penetrate these organizations through their links with the criminal world. All jihadi groups engage in criminality; many use criminal networks for certain things at certain periods. Given that terrorists' and criminals' objectives are normally rather different — criminals require stability and terrorists try to create instability — I think there is a way into terrorist groups through some of the criminal contacts they make. I know many intelligence organizations are working hard on that, but it seems to me, standing back from it, that this is one of the advantages we could do more with.
Senator Joyal: I would like to return to the control orders that you spoke of earlier. When you said that it would help to have a review of the orders in public instead of in private, and that it would enhance the effectiveness of the order, could you expand a little more on that view? It seems to be not exactly the way the new bill has been drafted.
Mr. Clarke: From the point of view of political acceptability and the human rights issues, my argument would be if it were possible to legislate against the sort of networking that some of these individuals engage in and criminalize some of that behaviour, the presentation of evidence of these lesser offences would not be as compromising to the evidence base that the intelligence and security services have to work with. These individuals engage in this networking very freely in our open societies and cock a snoot at our societies at the ease with which they are able to plot and plan. If we have to produce evidence against a group say in Luton, in Bedfordshire in Britain, where there has been quite a lot of relatively amateur activity, that shows some of these groups are accumulating elements of weapons of mass destruction, chemical elements, technologies which could help them build bombs, revealing that evidence would reveal the forensic mistakes they made, so security services are reluctant to do that. If it were possible to catch some of those groups simply on the basis of their knowing association with terrorist organizations, that sort of evidence would not be so compromising or revealing. It would still leave the problem of telephone taps being inadmissible but, again, if telephone-tap technology could be guaranteed not to be so easily tampered with, there is no reason in principle why it should not be admissible. Its inadmissibility is generally on grounds that it is easy to fake. If that technological problem could be solved, I do not see why telephone taps should not be admissible evidence.
Senator Joyal: Could you restate for us the provisions of the legislation in terms of appeal or review? In other words, once a magistrate has been shown proof that the intelligence security wants to provide to the magistrate, and an order has been given, you mentioned that there is an automatic appeal after 12 months. The police or the security service has to go back to a magistrate and re-explain why the order should remain in force — or how does it work in the new bill?
Mr. Clarke: There is a review procedure whereby not that the order would have to be reimposed, but that it will be looked at by a process of judicial review within a year. That is the idea. Of course, it could be looked at and simply rolled over and the person who is subject to the control order would still not know what it was for, what it was about or what the evidence was. That is still possible.
In reality, however, most of the people who have been subject to control orders do have a form of at least remote legal representation, which has sought to keep their cases nearer to the front of people's minds.
The panel who deal with all these control order cases publish on their own website as much of the evidence against these people, or the nature of the evidence, giving as much indication as they say they can without compromising security, so it is possible, certainly in a journalistic sense, to lay out the nature of the charges against some of these particular detainees.
Indeed, last week, in the British press, although the names of all but three of the present detainees were not known and they were known just by letters, the newspapers all printed a little paragraph about the general nature of the charges that brought control orders about. There were phrases such as, ``known to be associated with Afghan mujahedeen groups'' and ``believed to be seeking bomb-making equipment.'' It was that sort of thing. It was not very specific, but it gave an idea of the nature of the charge. That would continue under the process of the new control orders, but they do have to be reviewed by judicial process.
Senator Joyal: What are the detainee's rights? Can he be represented by a lawyer to contest some of the facts that might be brought before a judge? For instance, let us make a simple hypothesis that there is a mistake on the identity of the person. It is not that person; it is another person. How could that be brought to the knowledge of the magistrate so that a proper decision can be made?
Mr. Clarke: Legal representation is possible and does take place. In that case, the legal representation would have to be made at the process of review of that case. If it were mistaken identity, that is where it would have to come out. I must say, that is not a trivial issue. In most of the subjudicial procedures that governments go in for, particularly things like internment, which is not dissimilar to this, mistaken identity normally features in a number of cases.
Senator Joyal: Do the new procedures apply as much for British citizens as they do for foreigners with no immigrant status in Britain?
Mr. Clarke: That is correct. Under the old law that the law lords in the U.K. deemed unlawful, those detention orders would only be applied to foreign nationals who, for whatever reason, could not or would not be deported. It also, in reality, applied to one or two foreign nationals who were in psychiatric hospitals. One gentleman refused to leave the hospital when they tried to release him. Of the nine controversial cases in the United Kingdom, two and possibly three were also psychiatric cases. The new law applies to foreign nationals as well as British citizens. The old law was only for foreign nationals who, for whatever reason, could not be deported.
Senator Joyal: If I understand the old law correctly, it did not have any specific period to bring the detainee in front of a magistrate for a review process.
Mr. Clarke: That is correct. The old detention orders were more draconian than the new ones will be. Partly because of the controversy of last week, the new ones are more bounded by some of the concerns for review and civil liberties than the previous Prevention of Terrorism Act, which, after all, was enacted in a more fevered atmosphere in all our countries.
Senator Lynch-Staunton: I wish to follow on the questions of Senator Joyal to complete the process or understand it better. The information that is submitted to allow the control order to be issued is information gathered by intelligence services and is presented as evidence, because the argument is reasonable suspicion, et cetera. Does the detainee, as we would call him or her here, have the right to see all that evidence, or can the intelligence services refuse to show him or her all or part of it on the grounds of security?
Mr. Clarke: The evidence will be presented by the police through the intelligence services, and the detainee would not have the right to see all of it. If the police chose to make the detainee aware of its general nature, that would be up to them. Under the Act, they have no right in principle to see all the evidence. That was the case in the old Prevention of Terrorism Act, and it remains the case in the new one.
Senator Lynch-Staunton: Does the magistrate then have no authority to allow the release of any of that information to the detainee?
Mr. Clarke: That is my understanding. The information would be available only in private, and the police will make the decision as to how much of the information will be given to the detainee or at what level of abstraction they would offer some information.
Senator Lynch-Staunton: Have you had cases where a control order has been lifted or annulled because the information was wrong, or the detainee could prove that whatever was in that so-called evidence was such that it could not be acceptable because of errors, et cetera?
Mr. Clarke: In that case, again, there is still no requirement to reveal to the detainee what the nature of the evidence is, for the same reasons as the detainee would be held in the first place. I must say that, in that case, the detainee would then have a case in civil law to sue the government for wrongful arrest, and it would be then very difficult for the government to withhold at least some information. That would make for some interesting test cases.
Senator Lynch-Staunton: I gather that has not happened?
Mr. Clarke: No, it has not.
Senator Lynch-Staunton: The detainee, in effect, can be kept under lock and key for as long as the police feel it is necessary for the safety of the nation?
Mr. Clarke: That is correct. One of the criticisms about this legislation that was not compromised on by the government is that it is not clear when any of these control orders could naturally come to an end. If you think about it, if someone is subject to a control order on the grounds of security of the state and they do not know what the evidence is, that detainee would not then know how to behave in order to get the control order lifted. It gives them no power to reform or to become a different member of society.
One of the real problems of these control orders is that once they are imposed, it is very hard to see how they could be lifted without the government and the police then appearing either very unjust or incompetent. What will have changed after, say, three or four years, when this detainee has met all the conditions of the control order and has not been aware of what the detainee has to do differently? It is a very difficult problem.
Senator Lynch-Staunton: To get to the current situation of the eight or nine who were subject to the law lords' decision, have they now been released under condition and, if so, under what conditions?
Mr. Clarke: I missed the last part of the question.
Senator Lynch-Staunton: I believe there were eight or nine detainees directly subject to the law lords' decision. I understood they were to be released, or about to be released, under certain conditions — house arrest, refusal to communicate, electronic ban, and that sort of thing.
Mr. Clarke: Yes.
Senator Lynch-Staunton: Has that been determined yet?
Mr. Clarke: Yes, they are all released under slightly varying control conditions. One or two have gone back to their families. Their control orders relate to tagging and curfews, and they are disallowed from associating with any political groups or parties. Somebody like Abu Katada has gone back to his family, but he is subject to extremely strict control orders. One man whose name we do not know is subject to an even stricter control order, which is to put him into a house with no use of telephone. He is forbidden to communicate with anyone. There was some scandal or comment that, in fact, he was left with no food, no money, no one to contact, no hotline that worked at the Home Office and so on. There are many teething troubles here, but the people who have been released have been released in different levels of control order, according to the assessment of threat they represent. The man who is genuinely regarded as a problem in this respect is this man Abu Katada. He is not subject to the most severe form of control order, but nevertheless it is fairly severe. I think the authorities want to watch everything that he does.
Senator Joyal: On the same issue that Senator Lynch-Staunton asked about, is it not possible that, with regard to control orders, the police will decide to take the easiest way, by avoiding having to make a foolproof case before a court in our adversary system? From one year to another, they will consider that the case has been dealt with because each year they will tell the judge exactly the same thing. In the end, we will have somebody in jail for years without having had the opportunity to really review whether the person is guilty or not, or whether the police service has done a lousy job in its investigation of that person.
Mr. Clarke: That is the point that many of the civil liberties groups have made in the U.K. over the last few weeks. This is a loophole for, as you say, either bad police work or a failure to really review a case and look at it properly.
The guarantee that it will not happen lies with the judiciary in the sense that now, because the Home Secretary will not be responsible for these orders, a judge will have to be responsible. We have, therefore, some faith in the judiciary to prove these orders. I am personally reasonably satisfied with that. I think the judiciary is so uncomfortable with this departure from customary law that I am fairly confident that in the next few years they will look at all these cases carefully and will not want to be rolled over by bad police work.
There is one other aspect worth mentioning as well, in line with your question. These control orders have been designed with jihadists and al Qaeda in mind. The new law that makes them apply to any U.K. citizen also means that they could be applied to other people with other causes. It has been pointed out that this could be applied to Gerry Adams and Martin McGuiness because of their associations with the Sinn Fein and IRA. It has been asked how long it will be before animal rights activists fall afoul of this law. How long will it be before people with quite different causes to promote are regarded as a threat to national security on the basis of evidence that the security services cannot reveal?
In all of this, we are dependent on the independence of the judiciary in making very careful and balanced judgments on the basis of the arguments that the police and, behind them, the intelligence services come up with.
Senator Lynch-Staunton: If the police fail to convince a magistrate to issue a control order because he finds the so- called proof weak, can the police then go to another magistrate to find one who will issue the control order, or is there only one chance and if you fail you cannot come back?
Mr. Clarke: There is no statute of limitations, as it were. If a control order fails, the police can reapply. Again, if the police and security services really want a control order, it is difficult to imagine it being turned down if their evidence shows reasonable grounds for suspicion. That, again, is part of the argument we had last week. Because the level of proof is relatively low, a judge is likely to say that it sounds reasonable to him or her.
The Chairman: Thank you very much, honourable senators, for being so concise. Mr. Clarke, it has been a pleasure to have you with us today. You have answered many questions that were in the air over this particular legislation. We may call on you in the future.
Mr. Clarke: It has been a great pleasure. Thank you very much.
The Chairman: Honourable senators, we have with us from the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs at Carleton University, Mr. Martin Rudner, the Director of the Centre of Intelligence and Security Studies at Carleton University. Welcome, Mr. Rudner. Please begin with some comments to our senators and they will follow up with questions.
Mr. Martin Rudner, Director, Canadian Centre of Intelligence and Security Studies, Norman Paterson School of International Affairs, Carleton University: Honourable senators, thank you for the honour and privilege of appearing before the committee. This afternoon, I would like to share with you a review of the evolution of jihadist terrorism since Iraq to examine the kinds of changes that I see as having occurred in what we generally call the al Qaeda or jihadist movement and, in particular, its ramifications for this country and for sectors of significance to our national security and public safety.
If we look at events in Iraq, we can differentiate two aspects to the violence. One aspect is an insurgency against what some Iraqi nationalists and Baathists see as an occupation by the U.S.-led coalition. That violence seems to be diminishing since the elections of January 30.
More significant for our purposes, we see a second campaign of violence led by a group that calls itself the al Qaeda group in Iraq, whose targets, purpose and strategy are quite different. They see Iraq as a replacement for Taliban Afghanistan and the new battlefield on which they want to test their strategy and launch a broader campaign of global jihad or terrorism, as we would see it, whose targets include ourselves.
We see the difference between the insurgents and the terrorists even in Iraq. There is a difference in leadership. For example, we know that the al Qaeda leadership is a man called Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who himself is not an Iraqi but a Jordanian. We see the membership of that terrorist group being composed of people mainly from outside Iraq: recruits from Saudi Arabia, Syria and elsewhere in the Arab world and, indeed, Western Europe and the United Kingdom. We see its targets being quite different.
Let me give you an example from what we know from their sources about the primary targets of their violence currently in Iraq, because it is relevant to ourselves.
The first target — and they say so explicitly — is the Shiite population of Iraq. They describe the Shia in terminology that is the most appallingly racist and derogatory as one could imagine. It would not be appropriate to quote that in the Parliament of Canada. They see these people as subhuman and worthy of destruction, which is why we see in the terrorist campaign in Iraq the targeting of innocent people in a mosque, at a wedding, in front of a bakery, on the streets, people seeking to vote candidates for election, members of the judiciary and lawyers.
The second target is the Kurdish population, who they identify as having compromised themselves by their connections to the West, to Israel, and to democracy.
The third target is explicit, the Sunni Arab population of Iraq itself, and in particular, the people who have demonstrated a propensity for democracy. They target them precisely because democracy is considered man-made law, and man-made law contradicts the divine law as they understand it. The terrorists have targeted the secular population of Sunni Arab Iraqis.
The fourth target in order of priority is the United States and the coalition. There are only four in priority. In fact, the terrorists say that they do not even have to attack this target, because, they claim, ``The Americans are the world's greatest cowards.'' In other words, the terrorists believe they can frighten them out of Iraq. What does this mean? How do they propose to frighten the United States, its coalition and the West?
There are two prongs to a strategy to frighten the West. The first prong is the mobilization of a new generation of jihadists in the democratic societies of Europe. I do not know whether this has yet crossed the Atlantic to North America. These would include, in particular, a young second generation population of Muslims born in the Netherlands, France, Britain, Italy and Spain. I mention those countries because security services have arrested people of that genre in those countries for recruitment and activities aligned and linked to terrorism. This is a new generation of young, very well-educated people and not an immigrant population.
A second element includes converts from the prisons. We see in Spain in particular, in France, Germany and Britain a major effort by radical clerics to convert non-Muslim prisoners who are considered socially marginalized or repressed to form a new cadre in this jihadist revolutionary militant movement, which they see as targeting the democratic institutions of countries in Western Europe.
That is the first prong of the strategy. The second prong of the strategy, significantly for Canada, is the energy sector including oil. We see this in Iraq. The jihadists, al Qaeda in Iraq, have specifically targeted oil and gas fields, oil and gas infrastructure, the pipelines between Kirkuk and Ceyhan in Turkey, the oil-loading platforms, and the electricity grid. The targeting of the energy sector has been damaging, of course, to efforts at reconstructing the Iraqi economy, but that is not the primary objective. The primary objective was and is to raise the world price of energy. They saw energy at a high price, $50 a barrel, as, ``bleeding America bankrupt.''
In their view, America is a coward society because Americans need heating for winter, air conditioning for summer, cars on the road and power for industry. In their view, to deprive Americans or Westerners of their cars, of their industry, central heating and air conditioning would make the cowards fade away in weakness and capitulation. In that sense, the energy sector has become a primary strategic target of this new Iraq-born al Qaeda movement.
I was asked to speak for 10 minutes. I think I have hit that on the clock, so I would be delighted to discuss with you this and related questions. Thank you for your attention.
The Chairman: Thank you, Mr. Rudner, you are a perfect witness.
Senator Andreychuk: Mr. Rudner, you make this analysis. Is it in line with what our intelligence and security people are also assessing? Do they have a different take on how the jihad members are developing?
Mr. Rudner: My sense of it is, senator, that this is a shared view. It came as a bit of a shock, especially in the Netherlands. As you may know, there was the murder late last year of a very controversial Dutch filmmaker, Theo van Gogh. This led to the unravelling of a terror network in the Netherlands, which stunned the Dutch, because this consisted primarily of young people who were either born in the Netherlands or spent most of their formative years in the Netherlands and had been part, the Dutch thought, of a multicultural Dutch society. They found that people were highly marginalized and, more importantly, were carriers of rage against the system.
The Dutch experience stunned Western Europe. You had people such as the Swedes, Norwegians, Germans, French, Spaniards and others who suddenly began looking in those directions and finding very much the same thing in other European countries. The sharing of intelligence among the Europeans and with Canadians is such that our own intelligence services and the RCMP would be well aware of this new phenomenon that we see arising in Europe. One of the new groups emerging among the jihadists is a group called Al Takfir wa al-Hijrah which means, interestingly enough, in Arabic, take yourself apart and then go into exile. The notion here is that you take yourself apart from the mainstream Muslim community, and you go into exile. The analogy, of course, is the experience of the prophet Muhammad who set himself apart in Mecca, then went into exile in Medina, counterattacked and was successful.
Al Takfir regard Osama bin Laden as a weakling and a traitor. The intelligence services see this as an evolution of a threat, but in a direction of much greater severity than we have encountered until now. It is, therefore, to be taken much more seriously because its basis is no longer an immigrant community, which essentially is identifiable, but a much more embedded community of second-generation people, also converts to Islam from the prison who are bringing prisoner skills, so to speak, to the terrorist effort and composing a much more serious threat.
Senator Andreychuk: I do not think it is a new phenomenon that if you jail people or marginalize them that they learn skills that are less than positive. We know that organized crime, criminal behaviour and the like have always looked to these people for reinforcement. How then is this new movement within our countries, labelled terrorism, different than those people finding themselves attracted to crime, organized crime and all negative previous criminal behaviour and otherwise?
Mr. Rudner: There is a fundamental difference between a criminal and a terrorist, in the sense the criminal, in the end, wants material gain from the criminal effort. For an example, take the shoe bomber. This was a person who was not born a Muslim. He was in prison. He was converted in prison to a philosophy and a religious outlook which led him to sit aboard an aircraft and try to ignite a bomb in his shoe and bring down an aircraft, including himself, which is no longer just criminal. You do not gain from that. You sacrifice yourself from that. That is a transformation of a different order of magnitude, I would suggest, than the ordinary patterns of recruitment of criminal types, even in a prison. This is a transformative exercise of transforming criminals to terrorists.
Senator Andreychuk: One more point on that: Having worked in and around the criminal system for a considerable length of time, it was apparent that those recruited at lower levels hardly gained. It was always the organization. I have not discerned that difference. If you use the shoe bomber, he was looking for something to attach himself to, for whatever psychological or other reasons. Is it psychological? Is it ideological? I do not know.
These are people that seem to be fodder for someone who can manipulate. This is what I am trying to say. What is the difference in the manipulation or in the attraction that terrorists are using that the criminalized organized crime are not using?
Mr. Rudner: It is a very important question. There is minor literature on this, and it cannot be major for one reason: the notion of a terrorist as a suicide bomber who is anonymous. Al Qaeda does not disclose the names of their suicide bombers. You have personalities who are prepared to commit suicide, and anonymously, which is quite distinctive. Of course, we cannot interview those people.
There are studies of people who were suicide bombers and were not successful. There is a scholar, Marc Sageman, for example, who has written a book recently in an attempt to determine precisely what were the motives of people who were prepared to commit themselves to terrorism, including terror which would cost them their own lives, anonymously. The problem is that the subset of the sample that he was able to interview were the subset of ``failures,'' fortunately, so he does not have, in effect, the ``successful,'' so to speak, suicide bombers to be able examine.
It is a grave problem. We do not understand what motivates people, in a secular sense, to do that. There is literature, I should add, on the theological side, which provides a theological explanation in terms of Islamic law and doctrine why people are prepared to make that sacrifice, but that is a different paradigm altogether.
Senator Smith: Mr. Rudner, you have spoken with some authority on the depth of the problem that has been created by the jihadist movement. I do not think anyone would quarrel with you over the fact that it exists and that it is problematic.
I assume you are familiar with the gist of the draft legislation before us. I think what you are saying to us is, look, you have a real problem here, and you have to give the appropriate government authorities the tools to deal with it. To get specific, if you were sitting here, would your inclination be to pass the legislation as it is, or would you think it needs amending, tightening up or loosening up? Where is your head on these issues that we have to grapple with?
Mr. Rudner: The shorter answer is that the real problem we face is the need for tools that allow for the pre-emption of terrorist acts. We do not want to have investigations afterwards to find out who did it. We want to have inquiries beforehand on how we can thwart attacks, and we want to do so within the boundaries of lawfulness and under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms of Canada, no question. However, I believe there is also something missing in the legislation. This is a personal hobby horse, which I will put forward for the committee's consideration.
If one of the targets — I believe a primary target of the terrorist — is the energy sector, we have to include in the legislation provisions for critical energy infrastructure protection that does not exist now. Part of the problem is that the energy sector in Canada is predominantly owned by private interests. The question then becomes one of what are the responsibilities of private owners to the community for the protection of that infrastructure? Should there not be a legislative requirement for owners of critical infrastructure to relate to government and to the authorities in a way that ensures the protection of infrastructure and the security of Canadians' access to the product of that infrastructure — in other words, energy?
That is a different answer to the question you were putting, but I believe it is an important one for the consideration of the committee.
Senator Smith: I forget who broke the story about how loose security was with Quebec power plants up north and how vulnerable they were to being blown up. There is an obvious correlation between oil-related energy activity, as opposed to the broader electrical world, and various other sources. Are you talking across the board or are you particularly focused on oil? If the ability of Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Iraq to export oil was greatly diminished, that would drive prices sky high. Is it particularly oil or is it across the board?
Mr. Rudner: They have targeted the oil sector of all those countries you mentioned, but those oil installations are highly fortified. Were I a terrorist wanting to damage the economy of the United States through the energy sector, including oil, natural gas and electricity, I might look at Canada as a major supplier of all three currents of energy — oil, natural gas and electricity — to the United States. I dare say we are not fortified. I am not saying we are not protected but we are certainly not fortified. If one wants to strike at the soft overbelly, to use a phrase, we are it. In that sense, if you ask, are there things which the legislation ought to contemplate as it is being reviewed before the Parliament of Canada, one of the elements that must be considered as part of such a review is whether critical energy infrastructure protection, or other areas of infrastructure protection, ought to be included in the act. In effect, we must ask the question: What are the obligations of owners of the private elements of that infrastructure to national security?
Senator Smith: When you saw that story three or four weeks ago on how lax and vulnerable security was in these northern Quebec power plants, were you thinking that might almost be an invitation to some jihadist to take a trip up there?
Mr. Rudner: For me this is not a new topic, and yes, that confirmed a fear that I had. By the way, I do not believe I would be the only one in Canada in government and the private sector that is concerned. The private sector would share this concern. For example, one of the questions that arises if the United States announced an orange level alert, which is a high level of alert, what do we do? What does it mean for us? Who pays for what we do? How are we expected to respond? In other words, there is a whole series of questions which arise just on the alert level and that is beside the point. How do you actually protect and reinforce those installations so they are secure from attack, especially given the vulnerabilities and the integration of both Canadian energy supply market and the North American market in its entirety?
Senator Smith: What are your thoughts on how the West should respond to Iran and the nuclear issue there?
Mr. Rudner: That is an extremely difficult question, senator. In my mind, there is no justification for Iran to have nuclear power given the immense amount of fossil energy they have at their disposal. There is probably only a single use for their nuclear effort and that is military. A militarized Iran, under the regime we see there today, is a danger to its neighbourhood and a danger beyond its neighbourhood. It is a very serious and profound threat.
Senator Kinsella: I would like to build on where Senator Smith took us in terms of the legislation that is in place that we are reviewing. Would you like to see more parliamentary oversight built into this legislation?
Mr. Rudner: It is a very important element of both the legislation and the counter-terrorism effort to have public confidence in the counter-terrorism system as a whole. For public confidence, one has to have effective review and oversight. In my opinion, one needs to have three levels of oversight and it is not unusual when one looks at the experience of countries across the world. One needs an executive oversight. For example, in Canada, we have the Inspector General of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, CSIS, who reports to the Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness on the conduct of CSIS. Then, there has to be an executive oversight more broadly, which is performed in Canada on CSIS by the Security Intelligence Review Committee, SIRC. There also must be a parliamentary oversight. These are not replicas of one another or duplicates of one another. Each performs a valuable role, and each as a whole reinforces the notion that the public is assured that things that have to be done in secret, and we know they have to be done in secret, have a certain level of transparency to institutions we trust. We trust Parliament, we trust SIRC and we trust an inspector general. Yes, we need oversight, and parliamentary oversight is appropriate.
Senator Kinsella: On human rights, the civil liberties dimension of what is before us, do you think that the model that is in this legislation now of the five-year sunset two years from now that is going to come into effect and certain provisions will cease to be, do you think they should be reinstituted? Number two, this mechanism that after three years we are having the review in both places of the operation, do you think that model is a valuable model and should be maintained so that there would be a review three years out of this legislation? Are there other models of oversight as far as this specific legislation is concerned?
I understand what you said about these other areas: However, as far as this law that we are seized with, from that perspective of protecting Canadians' civil liberties and human rights?
Mr. Rudner: The concept of sunset and review is vital precisely because what we are saying is this is in my mind and I believe in the minds of those who introduced the legislation, an emergency. It is an asymmetric war and that is a technical term for this emergency. We are fighting terrorism and we are fighting a form of war against terrorism, yet we have a civil society that wants to live peaceful and ordinary civilian lives.
Yes, we need urgent legislation; it is a form of emergency legislation. It should have a sunset clause and it should be reviewed by our Parliament. If Parliament should decide that the emergency continues, it should decide that the legislation should continue precisely because the emergency has continued. In my opinion, the emergency is continuing and it is getting much more dangerous. The legislation should be continued and in certain ways enhanced, for example, with respect to the critical infrastructure element.
Senator Kinsella: I was glad you raised the critical infrastructure issues, not only on the energy side, but of course things like potable water, et cetera, are quite critical. On the energy side, given the nature of the concern and the literature that abounds around coastal defence and the dirty ships and dirty containers that come into our ports, far off the coast we have our wells. To what extent, in your opinion, are they particularly vulnerable targets to a suicide ship that approaches from international waters? Are we doing enough about that kind of a threat, which is way offshore?
Mr. Rudner: One would not want to give guidance to our adversaries, but were a hostile adversary to land and capture an offshore platform, this would be catastrophic in its implications for Canadian security, the Canadian energy sector, the price of oil, the response of neighbouring countries including the United States, and our capacity to protect ourselves and the energy supplies to them. If one wants to think of a blow which could ``make America bleed to bankruptcy,'' those would be the types of efforts. I trust that our Canadian defence and security authorities are aware of that and are taking appropriate measures. This is precisely the kind of issue which should be looked at as part of our anti-terrorism effort. It is not solely a sovereignty or defence-of-Canada issue. It is a counter-terrorism issue.
Senator Kinsella: Do you think the wells off Canada's Atlantic coast are as well protected as the wells in the Gulf of Mexico?
Mr. Rudner: Again, I am hesitant to go into that terrain, mainly because one does not want to give guidance to the adversary. Let me say, the Norwegians have a major offshore energy sector, both oil and gas. They have introduced methods of protection and exercises for those protections, to ensure that nothing remiss happens to those offshore platforms. Norway is a NATO ally of Canada's and the Norwegian Intelligence Service is a friend of Canada's. One trusts that there is a sharing of both experience and knowledge between them.
Senator Fraser: Professor Rudner, I would like to return to what you were saying about the horrified Dutch discovery of terror networks with roots in second-generation communities. It would be very easy to say if it is happening there it is probably happening here too. Easy assumptions are dangerous. Is there any evidence at all of any such phenomenon in this country?
Mr. Rudner: Senator, sadly, there is. There were young Canadian Muslims who were educated in the Catholic school, in a town called St. Catharines, Ontario. No more middle Canada do you find. Those young men found themselves in Afghanistan being trained by the Taliban. One was arrested for attempting a reconnaissance with a terrorist attack on Singapore; another was arrested elsewhere in Afghanistan. I believe there were three, all of whom were ultimately brought to justice by the authorities or detained by the authorities.
Yes, we do have indications of young Canadians, of a second generation, having been recruited. The Israelis arrested a young Canadian who was alleged to have planned to return to Canada and attack targets here, sponsored by Hamas. Yes, we already see that as a phenomenon here, though there is no evidence that it is as institutionalized as it has become in Europe where you have Al-Muhajiroun in Britain, for example, publicly advocating a mass jihad among young British Muslims and converts. We do not have that here yet. Where we are in Canada in that domain is something that only the security and intelligence services know. Quite advisedly, they do not wish to go public because one does not want to cause panic; one does not want to cause animosities in Canadian society. It is much better to have the security people work on this thing quietly but also effectively, within the bounds of appropriate secrecy.
Senator Fraser: In the meantime, what does the wider society do? You spoke about rage in Europe. What do we do to avert or diminish rage here? We cannot just sit back and say, angry young men will be angry young men, and let the spies take care of them. We have to work as a society to avert these problems. What do we do?
Mr. Rudner: Let me give the carrot and the stick answer. About three weeks ago a major American human rights organization called Freedom House published a report about American mosques and the dissemination of mainly Saudi-originated literature through American mosques which were jihadist inciting. The report is publicly available and is shocking as to what they found. Whether such documentation circulates in Canada, I do not know. I would have thought in Canada that would violate our hate legislation. One of the sticks we should be using is to ensure that material which is inciteful should not be permitted to enter Canada, whether it is destined for mosques or for Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, LTTE, or for anyone else for that matter. This is serious incitement of terrorism.
The British government at the Home Office introduced a strategy about a year ago called ``Cohesion and Equity.'' This strategy is directed specifically towards the Muslim community. They want to promote cohesion in the Muslim community within Britain, but also equity for Muslims in British society. It stood on a principle, and the principle was presented by the then Home Secretary to the Muslim community. The Muslim community responded favourably. You must demonstrate your loyalty. This is interesting because in a democracy, we normally do not ask people to demonstrate loyalty.
Senator Fraser: No, we do not.
Mr. Rudner: It was interesting that the British Muslim community accepted that as a principle. We will demonstrate our loyalty to the United Kingdom. These were two examples of approaches which have seen taken by countries whose values are similar to our own. One must stop incitement and one must promote cohesion and equity; whether or not you want the demonstration of loyalty, frankly that is not material. The issue is cohesion and equity.
Senator Fraser: I am disturbed by this kind of discussion. It raises in my mind a lot of the questions that Senator Jaffer frequently puts about racial profiling, collective assumptions, and whole communities. I am very perturbed listening to you. I am not disputing that there are terrorists on every continent and undoubtedly some in Canada as well. There seems to be a tone in what you are saying that goes beyond that, and I find that disturbing. I am offering you a chance to correct it.
Mr. Rudner: Let me make the point back to what we talked about in Iraq. The primary targets of this jihad are not the Canadians, the West, or the ``infidels.'' The primary targets, in fact, are other Muslims. The target among Muslims is those who are secular, who support democracy, and who want to balance their faith with the values of a diaspora society. For the jihadists, that is unacceptable. Those Muslims are defined as apostates, and for jihadists, the penalty for apostasy is death. We of the non-Muslim secular society are seen as tempting those Muslim people to leave the true faith and become apostates, and that is our crime. Now, this involves a different mindset than the one with which we are familiar or even comfortable. It is a totally different paradigm but that is not relevant. Rather, the belief system that the jihadists uphold it is the belief system for which they are prepared to fight and to attack other Muslims and non-Muslims.
We may not like it. It may not look appealing in terms of our values, but it is exactly because it contests our values. It especially contests the values that affect what they think Muslims should believe in their direction and not in our direction.
Senator Fraser: What percentage of the general Muslim community would these extremists account for? Is it 1 per cent or as small as one-tenth of 1 per cent?
Mr. Rudner: No one knows but I will give you some figures that are known. It is said in the United States that 8 per cent of American Muslims attend the mosque regularly. Of that 8 per cent, probably a very small fraction adhere to the jihadist view. Part of the problem is that the number of clerics who adhere to this view is rather different because most of the Muslim communities in Europe and in North America tend to be relatively poor, from lower middle-class or working-class communities, for the most part. Most of the clerics are financed out of charitable foundations and other sources, mainly from Saudi Arabia. Both the clerics, and the materials that are sent with the clerics, tend to be Wahhabi or Salafist. In a nutshell, they belong to a group that we will call jihadists, for want of a better term. In other words, there is a segment within the community that is much more inclined to jihadism than the community itself is. That is where it influences a second and younger generation in ways that the fathers and mothers find disturbing. It is the fathers and mothers who are contacting the British Home Office to say they are prepared to demonstrate their loyalty and they expect the British government to take steps to ensure that their children are not galvanized toward terrorism by this form of radical jihadism.
Senator Lynch-Staunton: I have two questions, one of which was asked by Senator Fraser and well answered in respect of the second generation and its presence in Canada. The second question has to do with the question asked by Senator Smith last week when Mr. Jim Judd and Mr. Dale Neufeld appeared. They were asked whether there are mosques similar to the famous one in London preaching extremism. Mr. Neufeld answered:
...there are a couple that we believe have that role of facilitating fundraising and perhaps talent spotting individuals to go for training, as you have suggested.
Unfortunately, there was no continuation of the subject that could best be discussed by them. Do you have any familiarity with this issue? Are there more than two and are they preaching jihad philosophy?
Mr. Rudner: Public information shows that there is a third mosque in British Columbia that is notorious for recruiting at least a couple of young Canadian Muslims, one of whom was killed in Chechnya, I believe, and another one who has gone missing as a result of that jihadist struggle. The cleric concerned was quoted as saying some outrageous things about Canadian Jews and about Canadians in general. Yes, there is a presence.
I will give you an example of some of the literature that one sees of this jihadist movement. This may shock senators but Al-Muhajiroun in Britain was quoted as saying that they will wage a struggle until the green flag of Islam flies over the British Parliament.
This is not poetry but prose. There is a thrust in Islamist literature that sees a takeover of the United States of America by force to make it Muslim. Of course, one sits back and asks whether they are serious. From a Western secular perspective, it seems literally incredible but through the lens of Muslim history, these things are plausible. If senators are interested, there is academic literature that analyses this issue, ``We have been there, we have done that and we have the T shirt.'' The Islamists lost Spain because they were not good Muslims, and Vienna and the Balkans because of the apostates. They say they were at the gates of Vienna and Paris and, yes, they could be at the gates of Washington and London. They see it in those terms. I am not trying to conjure up a horror story. I do not believe that terrorism will succeed in terrifying us, and I certainly do not believe it will succeed in defeating us. My concern is that they might try to defeat us.
Senator Lynch-Staunton: You are giving a history lesson and there is nothing new in it but the tools. The philosophy and the aims are the same as they have been for centuries.
Mr. Rudner: Part of the problem is that in our universities and in society, we tend not to take others seriously in the sense that we do mirror imaging. We assume that others see the world in exactly the same way that we see it, with the same paradigms and value system, except that one may like certain things a bit more than another, so let us negotiate. In this case there is a completely different paradigm. We have a different view of the way in which the world is structured between what they would call the Dar-ul-Islam — the haven or globe of Islam — and Dar-ul-Harb — the world of chaos, meaning non-Muslim.
In fact, from the jihadist point of view, we are fundamentally weak and chaotic. We constitute a threat to them only to the extent that we make good Muslims into apostates in that we tempt them away from the true faith. We stand to be corrected, therefore, and the course of history will ultimately lead to the domination of perfection over imperfection and the divine over the secular. We understand what their outcome would be. We have to begin to understand that they are serious and learned; and they are competent scholars, philosophers and thinkers, but from a paradigm that is the antithesis of ours. What we consider human rights, they regard as idolatries. What we regard as Parliaments making law, they regard as anti-god activity by petty human beings.
Senator Joyal: Professor Rudner, I would like to refer to your study commissioned by the Department of Justice and published March 31, 2004. In particular, I refer to page 64 and the paragraph under heading, ``Protect the Arab/ Muslim Diaspora.''
Mr. Rudner: I do not have a copy, but please ask.
Senator Joyal: I will read the first sentence:
Canada's Arab and wider Muslim communities are especially vulnerable to the Global terrorist onslaught. Not only do Islamicist terrorist groups and cells embed themselves in their otherwise peaceable communities, but militant recruitment, fund-raising, incitement, and operational activities serve to radicalize community institutions and subvert the moderate communal leadership.
Mr. Rudner: Senator, that was not a report for the Department of Justice but rather it was an academic article for the journal, Canadian Foreign Policy.
Senator Joyal: I understand that it was published by Justice, as well.
Mr. Rudner: I did not know that.
Senator Joyal: Perhaps they were funded by the Department of Justice.
Mr. Rudner: No, it was purely academic, done on my time and effort.
Senator Joyal: The views do not necessarily represent the views of the Department of Justice.
Mr. Rudner: They may have reprinted it from the academic journal.
Senator Joyal: Probably. That is the source of the writing I wanted to outline at this point.
If we return to the two lines I just quoted, there is something lacking in your recommendation, with great respect, which is the fact that it would be too easy to do a lot of initiatives to appear to fight terrorism and not address what I call the medium-term challenge of involving the Arab community of Canada in the responsibility of taking its share of the Canadian challenge. There is nothing worse than creating the impression in a community as important as the Arab community in Canada that it is singled out as being the source of the evil. Being the source of the evil, it must be contained. Having to be contained, it must be watched. Having to be watched, it must feel the reaction of repression. We all know the end result of this is the safest road for radicalism.
As much as we have an emergency situation and we must have specific means to address the emergency, we must also be concerned about the negative impact that might be created — without us willing it — in the Arab community in Canada. It is important for us as a Parliament and as a government to take measures to ensure that the Arab community feels that they are a part of the level of peacefulness and stability through which they can live, prosper, practice their faith, educate their children and have equal opportunities that average Canadians have.
I am surprised that in your approach to the section, ``Protect the Arab/Muslim Diaspora,'' you took a paternalistic approach to the Muslim community. It is not one that, in my opinion, expresses the principles of equality that we like to foster in Canada among the various groups, and especially among that group that is singled out presently all over the world as being the incarnation of the evil. It is incumbent upon us to be effective, fair and balanced in the legislation we are reviewing, and to be concerned about the social condition that we are creating in Canada at the same time. Otherwise, my opinion is that we will need to have more control, more Big Brother, more spying and everything.
It must be balanced in a way. My opinion is that as long as leaders from the Arab community will not speak out for fair levels of peace, equality and their right to be what they are according to what they choose, we will always be in danger of losing the fight over terrorism.
Mr. Rudner: Senator, I agree with you absolutely. If you read a few pages on in that article, I make the point precisely as you do. The recommendation in that article is, first, that we set up systems to mobilize the Muslim community as part of the counterterrorism effort. This includes, at a political level and also at an operational level, that the intelligence services, police services and security services should make an explicit effort to recruit young Canadian Muslims with security clearance, so that the Muslim community feels itself part of the Canadian community that is responding to a threat to Muslims and all Canadians. We agree fully.
The section that you quote for is, if you will, a diagnosis. What is the problem? The problem is that you have a peaceful community that is being undermined by certain radicals — and I give an explanation how I think those radicals are penetrating and threatening that community. The solution is to bring that community into the Canadian fold in government, public policy, counterterrorism efforts and the counterterrorism services themselves. We are in full agreement.
I am pleased to say that this article preceded the decision of the Government of Canada to establish the new multicultural round table. I do not refer to the multicultural round table because the article was written and published a year before that proposal even came forward from government. That was the kind of idea that the article presages. It goes beyond the round table. If you read the remainder of the article, you will see that we are both saying the same thing.
Senator Joyal: To a point, I feel the government came late with the round table. It was a promise made three years ago. When we adopted the legislation in the early winter of 2001, the then Minister of Justice made the statement — I think it was in written form in a letter — that the government was pledging to establish such a round table. I do not want to impugn any motive, but the round table was established a couple of months before our committee started working. You can think whatever you want on this, but the reality is that for the last three years, the government did not do anything to involve the Arab community, and the Arab community felt targeted.
It is reasonable to have that impression. I do not mean that they might be justified to have it. That is another thing. However, it is reasonable to conclude that they have been targeted as a community and they feel uncomfortable in Canada.
If we are to ensure that there is oversight, as you have suggested — and again, I quote the same page on the top of the page — you were saying that
...Parliamentary oversight in Canada has been relatively weak and segmented, certainly by way of comparison to other Westminster-based systems like those of the United Kingdom or Australia.
My perception is that if there is parliamentary oversight, there is more of a chance that the Arab community will feel that it has its day in court. Its members will feel when there are initiatives or implementation of one or another of the aspects of the government initiative, or initiatives by CSIS, the RCMP, immigration officers or customs officers — name the list of officers involved in maintaining security in Canada — that they have a capacity to seek redress in a situation where they want to call upon Parliament.
It is important that there be oversight, not only to ensure that CSIS and the RCMP forces maintain the fair level of effectiveness that they should attain, but that all Canadians are part and parcel of the initiatives; and that they feel they have redress to seek a forum to get it. It is as important in one direction as it is in the other.
Mr. Rudner: We are in full agreement, senator. Later in that article, I make that case of the value of parliamentary review, together with the other systems of review, precisely to build up public confidence in a democracy in an area which, by definition, has to be kept secret and can be intrusive.
Permit me an advertisement that may interest the committee. On May 18 and 19, my centre, together with SIRC, will host an international symposium, ``Making National Security Accountable: International Perspectives on Intelligence Review and Oversight.'' We will bring leading scholars at a world level from Europe and elsewhere — practitioners, prominent human rights lawyers, and Chief Justice of the Federal Court — for two days of discussions on these very issues. Members of the Senate and Senate staff would be more than welcome to attend and participate.
Senator Joyal: Thank you for that information, professor.
The other point, and I want to conclude on that, is the issue of loyalty. I am disturbed by that.
I always thought that loyalty is not something that you impose on somebody. Loyalty is the conviction of any citizen or any person that he or she is entitled to the same measure of justice, opportunities and protection as any other citizen.
As a French Canadian, I want to be loyal to Canada. Why? Because I feel Canada is treating me fairly. I feel that if I am aggrieved, I have the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. There is other legislation and institutions to which I can bring my complaint. If I feel that I am aggrieved, I can seek redress. There is a justice system that works fairly, and I trust the justice system.
Loyalty is not something where you bring people in front of a public officer and say, ``Swear or make a solemn affirmation that you will be loyal.'' You do not command loyalty. Loyalty is a conviction that you acquire when you are treated fairly in a country. That is why you remain loyal to it and that is why you defend that country. You feel that it is your own status that you are defending. People can make the solemn affirmation or swear on whatever holy scripture they want, but in their soul and heart they will not really believe that they are totally loyal to the country.
This is something that has much more appeal to education, to understanding the way the system works and the way the institutions protect them, than it does to anything else, unless I do not understand what you meant by loyalty.
Mr. Rudner: Senator, one could think of loyalty as one of the obligations reciprocal to human rights. You have entitlement to human rights. One of your reciprocal obligations from these human rights is to respect the system that has given you human rights.
I will give you an example. We know there are cases in Britain and the United States where people within the Muslim community noticed things happening that were of concern. They notified the authorities so that the authorities could take appropriate measures leading to the arrest of terrorist groups. This has happened. In other words, one should not think of Muslims in any way as being disloyal or in any sense not feeling obligations for the safety and security of society. Indeed, it is to the contrary. Successful counterterrorism, successful law enforcement and successful intelligence requires people in civil society, in all the communities, to have a willingness to notice transgressions and to feel obliged to inform the authorities about transgressions which threaten national security and public safety, because it is their own safety and their own security. This happens.
Senator Joyal: If I am aware that a crime or an offence is on the verge of being committed, I have a responsibility to notify a police officer; otherwise a section of the Criminal Code says I am an accomplice to that act. Maybe the concept is difficult to manipulate, but where does the legislation stop and where is the proper role of a citizen in the implementation of the objective of the Criminal Code, criminal offences or statute law? I totally agree that if any citizen in Canada or any person is witness to, or happens to know that, an offence is about to be committed that entails damage to a person or to property, that person has the responsibility to bring it to the knowledge of the police.
I am not at all implying that the activities of terrorism are not criminal offences. They are. There is no doubt that any citizen, whatever his or her background, who is aware of such an act about to be committed has the responsibility to report it. I would not like to place a heavier burden on the shoulder of a citizen for that kind of act than for any other act prohibited in the Criminal Code or in any other statute law of Canada. There is no difference in crime. A crime is a crime. If citizens are aware that a crime is to be committed, they have a responsibility to report it. As I say, to me it is a matter of education. It is not a matter of targeting a group per se on a specific kind of crime.
The Chairman: Senator Joyal, this has been a wonderful discussion and debate. I am sure that it will continue as we carry on. I hate to interrupt, except I know that we have very few minutes left and Senator Andreychuk is interested in asking a question too. Thank you very much for your part of the debate, Mr. Rudner.
Senator Andreychuk: I was going to say that it was a good philosophical discussion.
I want to pick up on that very point and not talk about it in legal-obligation terms. We have put in place a round table not because it is a legal issue, but to allow community input so that their perspectives are taken into account. Those are the communities that feel most vulnerable under this new legislation. We have covered the fact that it should have been in place three years earlier. That might have gone a long way to affording the community some measure of comfort.
Professor, do you really think that the round table in itself is sufficient? Are there other measures that a society should take when it says that it is multicultural and diverse and lauds that around the world? What other measures beside a round table should we take?
Mr. Rudner: Senator, there is a range of measures. The round table is important but, frankly, it is only a small element in the whole.
For example, my inclination would be to look at best practices of other societies similarly situated, and the initiatives that they have taken to see if those initiatives are relevant to our own experience.
For example, one initiative being taken in Britain is that the British government proposes to establish training programs for Muslim clerics so that people trained in Islamic law and in the Islamic preaching should also be trained in the principles of British law and the principles governing British values in society.
One of the difficulties they had, by the way, was defining ``Britishness.'' Everybody knows what the English, the Irish, and the Scots were, but nobody knew what the British were. A major effort was put into this, and I was involved in this by the Home Secretary. How does one define ``Britishness'' in a way that would be inclusive of everybody and have a concept of cohesion?
In Canada, we might want to think of the need for an institution to upgrade the training of clerics so that, in teaching their religious doctrines, they would also find ways to mesh these with Canadian values such as our Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The Government of France is doing this on a compulsory basis. I am not persuaded that making Muslim clerics listen to a Marxist lecturer from the University of Paris will achieve much benefit in terms of persuading people. We ought to be looking at best practices. That would be one example of a best practice on the clerical side.
One wants to look at school curricula. One wants to have Canadian Heritage, through its heritage programs, find ways and means of blending religious traditions with the values of Canadian society — our multicultural principles and our human rights principles. In other words, we want to reach out inclusively, and make the point that our Canadian values are not at odds and do not undermine people's traditions. In fact, they supplement and enrich them in important ways.
We ought to look at various institutional arrangements such as our security services recruitments. We ought to be making, as the British and Americans are, major efforts to recruit people from Arab and Muslim communities into the security services so that people feel that they are a part of the counterterrorism effort and are included, in every sense of the word, in the Canada that is resisting terrorist threats. They would also, to my mind, add value to our security and intelligence services by bringing their knowledge — the language and the cultural, social and religious knowledge — to the security community and to the counterterrorism effort so that it can focus very specifically on threats. Yes, senator, a range of initiatives is warranted.
Senator Andreychuk: On a slightly different topic, you were saying that it is a very minor fraction — 1 per cent of all Muslims in Canada — that may adhere to the philosophy being espoused in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere, and that the rest of the Muslim community probably has the same dialogue and discourse that all other religions have about interpretation and faith.
The criticism that I have heard is that we in Canada and other Western societies put too much emphasis on that small fraction and percentage, giving it more strength in the Middle East, and that the struggles in the communities in Saudi Arabia go much deeper than a religious fight. It is not secular in religion; it is a society in flux, with many things happening including new technologies, the role of women, the place of religion, and the varying and competing philosophies that have come to the fore certainly after the fall of Berlin. There is a host of things bubbling that allows a small, powerful, well-educated, well-financed group to exercise the big words, power and control, which have less to do with religion and all of the other things that we seem to give them credit for. How would you respond to that?
Mr. Rudner: Your portrayal of the Saudi situation is very much spot-on. There is an implication to this. The implication is here in Canada. In the Muslim communities in Canada, there are a number of clerics, most of whom come to Canada from abroad. There are very few Canadian-generated, so to speak, Muslim clerics, whether they are jurists, preachers or teachers. They come from abroad, the majority of whom it is said — I have not seen formal studies but certainly impressionistically — come from Saudi Arabia or from countries strongly influenced by the Salafist doctrine or Wahhab doctrine. Most of that funding comes from those sources. A small number of people who are preachers, teachers and judges can have a powerful impact on a community where they become the sole voice of religious authority. This has happened in Western Europe and, according to the information, it has happened in the United States, and presumably Canada as well. The question then is: how do we ensure that they are consistent with Canadian values? It is not our job; it is the Muslim community's job. It is Canada's responsibility, in my opinion, to enable the Muslim community to do the things it needs to do to ensure that it is comfortable with the religious doctrines being promulgated in its own community.
Senator Andreychuk: Coming from another church that has had to struggle with an ideology and priests coming in, what makes you think that that struggle is not going on in the Muslim community?
Mr. Rudner: Here in Canada, there is little information from within the Muslim community coming out, mainly because people feel, for reasons we discussed this afternoon, very shy. They do not want to talk about these things lest Canadians come to the conclusion that there is ``a terrorist problem in the community.'' I can understand that reticence.
We have seen other societies similarly placed in Western Europe, in multicultural societies, where in fact those debates are happening. Those Muslim communities are more mature than the Canadian one in the sense that they have been there longer; they have a second and third generation. They have people in the U.K. and elsewhere in Europe who want to establish teaching institutions, schools, and training institutions for clerics. That debate is happening. While this debate is occurring, the Muslim community is calling on governments to support them and help them set up, run and finance these institutions, so that they can create a British Islam. That is a contradiction in terms to the jihadists.
Senator Andreychuk: You have no information as to how the Muslim community in Canada is responding to this small fraction within their community. We would be best to have a dialogue with the Muslim community in Canada.
Mr. Rudner: Senator, you would find it very difficult to entice people to speak honestly and openly, because of the fears that they have, and those fears are legitimate. To say these debates are happening, people might fear that some might come to the conclusion that there is subversion and threats. People would be much more reticent than we would anticipate, and I understand that reticence.
Senator Andreychuk: What brought the public debate in Britain? You are arguing against yourself.
Mr. Rudner: As I mentioned, the community in Britain is much older. The Muslim community in Britain dates back a century and a half. You have people not only born in Britain two generations ago but five generations, and who feel very comfortable. They are middle class. They are saying, ``Why do we have these North Finsbury mosque things happening, which we regard as anathema?'' They will set up their own mosques with their own preachers trained in the U.K. They can afford to set up these mosques and training colleges, and have their children study there and become preachers. As a mature community, they are capable of contesting these incomers.
Our Canadian community is much younger and not quite there yet. They may need help from Canadian society and government to get there.
The Chairman: I want to thank colleagues and Mr. Rudner for this thoughtful discussion.
When this part of our hearings is concluded, we will invite people from across the country to tell us how the rules and procedures that were taken through Parliament three years ago have affected them.
This has been a very interesting and lively discussion this afternoon. I thank you for it.
Senators, we will conclude the afternoon with a conversation with and presentation by John Thompson, who is the President of the Mackenzie Institute.
You were sitting through the some of the discussion this afternoon, Mr. Thompson, so you know we have a group of people here at the table eager to hear what you have to say. Please go ahead and then we will spend the rest of the hour with questioning.
Mr. John Thompson, President, Mackenzie Institute: Thank you for the invitation. I have not prepared a formal statement; rather I thought I would speak informally for about five minutes. I understood that you were spending the day examining what, in my military-intelligence days, we would call the threat environment. I thought perhaps you might hear quite a bit, especially from some other sessions, about some of the particular threats and activities that have occurred in the country. Certainly, there is a lot of static going on in the background and minor incidents here and there. I thought I would speak about a different dimension in the threat that terrorism poses, the soft threat, and to make a point about how terrorism has become so much more than the violent actions of the violent people. The gunmen and the bombers are one aspect of the threat that terrorism presents but, by themselves, they are quite helpless if they do not have a political front and a fund-raising arm to support them. This is a point that is often forgotten in addressing what terrorism is capable of.
By way of example, we are all familiar with Sinn Fein which, for years, argued that it was removed from the IRA and operated legally as a party. Then when the IRA staged the big bank robbery in December of this past year we found out that Gerry Adams, the leader of Sinn Fein, had actually approved of the robbery. You get an example there of how sometimes the political front can be closely tied to the operational front.
The Tamil Tigers, which is a group that I have spent a great deal of time on, primarily because the threat they offer in Canada, is really quite limited. They have only committed violence against people within their own community, and that on a very limited basis. However, the sophistication and size of their political front and their fund-raising arm here has always frightened me, primarily because it is such an extensive template that any other group that started to copy this would be a considerable threat indeed.
With the jihadist movement that is, I suppose, best represented by al Qaeda, that sort of meta-network, network of networks, we face that new threat where we have a tremendous complex of groups, societies and organizations all loosely interrelated, all more or less operating in parallel. Their only common touch-point tends to be in ideology. It is very difficult to prove the relationships of their front organizations but they do have front organizations; people who are either deliberately and knowingly supporting the movement or doing so indirectly or sometimes even unconsciously.
Front organizations propagate the political message that a terrorist group would like to put out. They create the condition for recruitment and fundraising, and they try to make sure that these activities can continue as unimpeded as possible. Of course we have seen that the jihadist movement, especially in Europe, Australia and to a lesser extent in the United States, has certainly been able to gather new recruits and new support through the use of fronts, whether or not these fronts, again, are deliberately or closely tied to a terrorist group or at some remove. It is always different in every case.
The other aspect about the fronts that must be remembered though — we have been dealing with insurgents of one stripe or another throughout the 20th century — is there is one sort of common point that comes up with every insurgent group. I do not talk about root causes of terrorism so much. I gave up on that a long time ago and have come to the conclusion that terrorism is a matter of individual choice that comes out of the psychological terrain of the individuals who choose to adopt it. It is sort of a crime of self-actualization or self-identity. Someone who becomes a terrorist normally has to then pick up an ideology that can give vent and direction to act in, but to become a terrorist you normally have to lie to yourself. When you get involved in an ideology, again, it has normally got a rather slanted point of view about the world. I believe it was Lenin, back in 1918, who observed that the revolutionary has one truth and against that one truth, which is the inevitable victory or the sanctity of his cause, all other truths are disposable. Those who become terrorists tend to lie to themselves, their supporters and the rest of the world. We find the same thing, of course, with front organizations. Often they are quite happy and cheerful about misleading you. They represent one truth, which is their cause is going to win, and against that one truth everything else does not really matter. They lie about where their funding comes from and they lie about their message. Their propaganda tends to involve a distorted view of the world, and they go on from there.
This means that sometimes when you are listening to complaints about, for example, the behaviour of your police or security agencies, some of those complaints are coming from a rather pointed angle. In the last year, al Qaeda released, as a result of the suppression of their central command council and their loss of structures in Afghanistan, a series of what they called jihad manuals over the Internet to their supporters to try and set up a whole new level of organization. They are trying to create a large number of autonomous individuals and self-sustaining cells that are no longer answerable to the central core, but parts of the jihad manual also stressed, of course, that people involved in the movement should endeavour to deceive and misdirect whenever possible.
For example, it was suggested to all supporters of the jihadist movement that whenever someone is arrested, it is always described as being a result of racism or ethnic profiling, that the suspect is always innocent and, of course, when released from incarceration, Guantanamo Bay or similar circumstances, to always allege that they have been tortured. This relates also to another aspect of terrorism, and terrorism is itself a psychological activity. A large part of it also involves psychological conflict. Psychological warfare and propaganda are areas that we tend not to understand well. We do not discuss it much. Instead, we think of propaganda as hearing a message contrary to our own beliefs that we find distasteful. My brother loves watching Fox News and hates the CBC. He thinks the CBC is full of propaganda. My next-door neighbour thinks Fox News is full of propaganda and the CBC is the home of truth, and that is all they understand of the use of the word. Of course, that is not entirely accurate at all.
Propaganda and psychological warfare are things that we have always been involved in at the Mackenzie Institute; trying to study and understand it. To give you, I suppose, the Readers' Digest version of what psychological warfare always is, is that any group or society that is involved in a conflict has to sustain a trinity of beliefs. The first belief is simply that we are the good guys. The next belief is that the enemy is the bad guy and the third belief is that we are going to win. In essence, psychological warfare consists of supporting your own trinity of beliefs and undermining that trinity of beliefs in the society you target. When a jihadist or jihadist supporter starts making allegations that every arrest is the result of ethnic profiling or racism, or that every prisoner has automatically been tortured, what they are really doing is simultaneously supporting the trinity of beliefs that other jihadists believe in — they themselves are the good guys and the societies they are fighting against are evil and corrupt. Of course, because these allegations play in our press and some of our people tend to believe these allegations without question, they tend to undermine our own commitment to defend ourselves, and our trust in our own security organizations and police.
When we hear comments that our laws are too strict, too flawed, and too dangerous, these arguments may have some validation. They need to be looked at carefully, but perhaps it would be wise to consider that some of the people making these criticisms are not coming together from an entirely altruistic perspective and that you should pay attention to who is actually criticizing the system because they may be doing it for ends that are entirely different.
I have probably let off a small hand grenade of my own and some of you would like to discuss this point at some length so I will conclude with this.
Senator Kinsella: I will begin with your opening comment about Gerry Adams. Gerry Adams says he did not authorize the bank robbery. How do we determine the truth of the proposition?
Mr. Thompson: There are probably two ways that you can determine the truth about Gerry Adams and the only sure way will be to wait for the fullness of time and see what comes out. This is perhaps not a welcome comparison, but I remember during the Cold War, allegations were being made about communist parties in Western societies, for example, the Communist Party of Canada. They always dismissed comments that they were funded from Moscow as a complete fabrication. Only later did we find out that 90 per cent of their funding had come from the Soviet Union.
Senator Kinsella: Do you think Sinn Fein or IRA should be included in the list? Should we have 36?
Mr. Thompson: Absolutely. This idea that somehow or other to list Sinn Fein would hobble the peace process is really quite ridiculous. The peace process has wound on for 10 years.
Senator Kinsella: Clearly the Tamil Tigers should be on the list as well.
Mr. Thompson: Absolutely.
Senator Kinsella: Maybe we can just turn to another topic. Under the legislation we are reviewing there are a number of mechanisms whereby people can face interdiction and investigative hearings. Do you think that there is any justification at any time for the use of interrogation techniques that by an ordinary definition might fall under the rubric of torture?
Mr. Thompson: I can speak a little more about that than perhaps other people can. When I was in the Canadian military, I was trained in interrogation techniques and used them in a number of peacetime exercises. There are two perspectives that my instructors were always very careful to instil in us. One is that if you use torture, you demean yourself. Another point that was always raised was that perhaps one of the finest interrogators in history was a Luftwaffe officer in the Second World War who pulled out volumes and volumes of information from captured Allied airmen by offering tea, sympathy and cigarettes. In fact, he was so welcomed by many of the airmen that had been captured that he received U.S. citizenship after the war.
That having been said, there are times when you may want to use techniques that, under Amnesty International's definition, might be construed as torture. Other interrogators might see them as being innocuous; hard and cruel, but not necessarily torture.
Senator Kinsella: Could you give one or two examples?
Mr. Thompson: When we were handling Canadian soldiers who had been picked up and escaped in evasion exercises, the whole idea was to familiarize them with some of the things that might occur to them in the very mild level if they had ever been captured in a real operation. You would give them about six to eight hours of disorientation, accompanied by what was called conditioning, which was usually exercising; being forced to run while blindfolded and hooded, and not allowed to sleep until we had actually started to extract information from them.
Senator Kinsella: What about the use of pharmacological agents?
Mr. Thompson: That never came up in my own experience at all. I never heard anything about it. Some of the literature suggests that the results from various suppressants are mixed results. You can get someone who is extremely talkative, but he will talk about what he was doing in grade school rather than about the question you would really like to ask him.
Senator Kinsella: Today, is it your understanding that the Canadian Forces continue to have these training programs with techniques of interrogation that might not meet the test of Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch?
Mr. Thompson: I know the Americans do. I have not heard of it in the Canadian military. There have been a lot of lost capabilities in the last couple of decades, and I think the interrogators course is one of the things that went out the window.
Senator Kinsella: Is it your view that Canada should abrogate its obligation under the United Nations International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, which we ratified in 1976, that provides for the following: That in times of national emergency, even when the life of the nation itself is threatened, that there are certain human rights that cannot be abrogated from and one of them is torture?
Do you think Canada should renounce that treaty?
Mr. Thompson: No, I do not. That having been said, again the definition of torture remains. If you are talking about beating someone, hitting them, linking them up to car batteries and everything else, never do that under any circumstances. It does no good both for the information you are after and for yourself, if you are administering these treatments. If, however, you are aware that say, there are 500 kilos of ammonium nitrate fertilizer in a truck somewhere in the Toronto area, and it is probably going off in eight hours, then I might consider something that did not involve physical pain to try to find out where it was. For me, physical pain is where torture really begins. That is a definition that many other people would not accept.
Senator Kinsella: Is there much in the literature on this as to these extraordinary methodologies for interrogation?
Mr. Thompson: Not in any literature I have seen openly published. Torture is one of these grey areas. If you are trying to find the distinction, the difference between black and white, you are going to find a big wide band of grey. Where exactly in that grey area is the border? That is something that there really is going to be no concrete answer to. Personally, I would rather stay in the light grey area.
Senator Fraser: Mr. Thompson, why do you think the Tamil Tigers should be listed as a terrorist entity?
Mr. Thompson: The conflict has killed 65,000 people; the use of systemic intimidation to raise funds among their exile community; the heroin smuggling operations; the fact that they are the only terrorist group in the world to have killed two national leaders; the pioneering of the use of the suicide belt bomb; and, until the second intifada began in 2000, they had launched more suicide attacks than all other terrorist groups in the world combined.
Senator Fraser: Let me come at this a slightly different way. What difference does it make to have an organization listed as a terrorist entity? Does it actually change anything?
Mr. Thompson: First of all, some of the signs right now in Sri Lanka are that the conflict is about to begin again. I should have made this point; it crossed my mind when I was talking about Sinn Fein and the peace process. There is a problem with terrorist groups actually ever coming in to surrender, or to reach a peace process. Terrorism is often a crime of self identity. People who are involved in terrorism really cannot give it up. It is very difficult for them to do this. If your only job-making skills are slanted political history and bomb making 101, what are you going to do in a modern society: run a Starbucks; sell software? They cannot.
Terrorism provides them with an income. Most terrorist groups that have continued for any length of time, tended to do so by becoming involved in a growing level with organized criminal behaviour. They eventually get to the point where the terrorist group actually morphs from being a terrorist group to an organized criminal society. The Chinese Triads, for example, began as rebels against the Manchu Empire. There has not been a Manchurian emperor since 1911. Part of the beginning of the Sicilian Mafia was in the Italian nationalist rebels in the 1820s. Of course, Italy has been united for over 150 years and we still have the Mafia.
For the Tamil Tigers, for their leadership, the conflict gives them prestige and status, something they would not have had any other way. It also has been very good for them financially. As the case has been with the IRA, 10 years of negotiations have not really resulted in anything substantive towards peace in Northern Ireland. They cannot give it up.
With Tamil Tigers, it is the same thing. If you look at the negotiation process that has continued, they are not yielding on some very fundamental issues. They want full autonomy. They want a land of their own, but when you look at Velupillai Pirapaharan, the national leader of the Tamil Eelam, when he talks about having a land of his own, it is a sanctuary for criminal activities. Mr. Pirapahran is an unusual terrorist in that he began as an organized criminal back in 1973. He was an extortionist in the Sri Lankan underworld. The first manifestation of the Tigers overseas was through their use of heroin smuggling.
We have seen especially with the tsunami, the Tigers have used the opportunity to stockpile supplies. From some of the material in the last couple of months, you can see that they are making a case for the resumption of the conflict. A lot of Tamils, both parents and teachers, have put in a lot of effort over the last 20 years to keep their children out of the Tigers. The Tigers have been notorious for using child soldiers and with the social disruption caused by the tsunami, a number of these children are unprotected and the Tigers have been recruiting wholesale.
Senator Fraser: My question is what difference does it make to list an organization as a terrorist entity under Bill C- 36? Does that provision of our legislation actually help in disrupting terrorist organizations at all?
Mr. Thompson: Yes, it would.
Senator Fraser: How?
Mr. Thompson: The Tamil Tigers in Canada have a very strong presence. Their political fronts are well established; they dominate Tamil cultural life, especially in the Toronto area. There have been incidents of violence used inside Canada by the Tamil Tigers. There was an Indian Tamil language broadcaster from Tamil Nadu, who refused to play pro-Tiger ads and they did a drive-by shooting of his home. David Jeyarajran the only newspaper that was contrary to the Tiger line. They could not find him but they found his distributor, broke his legs and set his van on fire. A Tamil cultural centre publicly expressed the view that maybe both sides in the civil war were guilty of human rights violations. For that, a Molotov cocktail was thrown through a window of the centre and the place burned down. Tamil immigrants who arrive in Canada will find that the Tamil immigrant services they attend act as a front for the Tigers. The Tigers control all life in the community. If immigrants take a job, the baby service they might send their children to is operated by the Tiger front. It is open and they are brazen about it. There are thousands who are sick and tired of being hit up for donations every month. They are sick and tired of not being able to express their opinions and they are tired of the danger to their relatives at home. They would love to have the Tigers finally close down so they could be themselves.
Senator Lynch-Staunton: How do you answer the argument put forward by two ministers of Foreign Affairs, by the Minister of Justice and by the Deputy Prime Minister that by not including the Tigers on the list of entities, we are actually helping the peace process, or by including them on the list of entities we are hindering the peace process, whatever that process might be.
Mr. Thompson: The peace process is about to end soon, and that same strategy has not worked with the IRA peace process. The Tigers adopted the peace process for two reasons. First, militarily things had come to a stalemate. The Sri Lankan army could not beat them and clear them out of their sanctuary in northern Sri Lanka and the Tigers could not beat the Sri Lankan army. Things had come to a bloody stalemate. In the aftermath of 9/11, they thought the discussion, especially by the United States, about a war on terrorism was quite general and that the Tigers might receive some attention. The only attack that the Tigers have ever launched on a Western target was when they placed a bomb at a hotel in Colombo where some American Green Berets were visiting. They thought that these new strictures might apply to them and so they attended ceasefire peace talks. They have never yielded to any substantive issues. It has been an issue just to keep their movement going. They have used the entire three years to date to re-stockpile arms. They have not let go of their war tax collection system, and they are still trying to conscript, even during these last three years of peace. They were not ready to talk peace. They might be ready if they were to lose one of their biggest foreign sanctuaries and one of their biggest sources of legitimate funds.
Senator Lynch-Staunton: What is the estimated amount that the community sends to Sri Lanka each year.
Mr. Thompson: In 1995, the Metropolitan Toronto Police made a conservative estimate that the war tax system was pulling in about $1million per month from the Toronto area, and that is a conservative estimate.
Senator Lynch-Staunton: That was nearly 10 years ago.
Mr. Thompson: I believe that it is about $2 million to $3million per month now.
Senator Lynch-Staunton: That figure is per month.
Mr. Thompson: Yes. Recently, I spoke to a Tamil store owner in downtown Toronto who said they were trying to hit him up for $2,000 per month. He would not pay so his mother in Sri Lanka was placed in some danger. The organization is that tight and structured that his reluctance to pay the war tax here meant that the warden of the Tiger structure in Sri Lanka was informed and he followed up with restrictions against the man's mother and her ability to seek medical treatment.
Senator Andreychuk: You have studied the Tamil Tigers and pointed out that the main supporting element of the group in Canada is fear. Is that the case with all groups whose native countries are engaged in war of some kind? Are there other communities in Canada being controlled through fear tactics, or is this unique to the Sri Lankan community?
Mr. Thompson: I would not say it is unique but I would not say it is universal, either; it falls in between. The Babbar Khalsa militants of the Sikh community used fear tactics from 1979 to 1994 when they were trying to take over control of temple funds. There was a nasty civil conflict inside the Sikh community that few outsiders were aware of, other than the odd fight at a temple or a murder. After the attack on the Golden Temple in Amritsar, almost all Sikhs were temporarily united in their outrage. Mainstream Sikhs filtered off but they refused to be intimidated. In the Islamic community there has not been anything like that. The jihadists are around but I have not heard of any intimidation within the Islamic community in Canada. I am not sure they want to undertake that because the motivation is quite different.
A principle of Islam is such that all Muslims belong to the umah, or community. While everyone is supposed to be, I believe, the slave of God or obedient to God, deciding one's duty is an individual's responsibility. Some people from the Islamic community have taken the mickey out of the jihadists; Irshad Manji in her brilliant and courageous book. I understand she has to live ``la vida paranoia'' to ensure the jihadists cannot find her.
Senator Andreychuk: You are drawing a slight parallel to the Islamic community. Is part of the problem that there are many communities coming from many countries, while the Tamils are isolated and cohesive.
Mr. Thompson: Yes, the Sri Lankan Tamils come from one small community. They constitute a minority on one small island nation. I become cynical when someone presents themselves as a community Muslim leader because I have seen this before. Some communities are too diverse to be described as a community. Someone might say he is the leader of the Islamic community and I would wonder what community. Would it be the fourth generation Lebanese whose parents came here in 1900? Would it be the Ismalis from Pakistan, or the Shiites from Iran? It is an automatic reaction when anyone else claims to represent an entire community — I am suspicious of them. I cut my teeth on insurgent movements in the Mohawk warrior society 15 years ago. There were masked gunmen claiming to represent the entire Mohawk people when all their traditional and some elected leaders were elsewhere fulminating that these guys were receiving all the press and attention by claiming to represent all Mohawks.
Senator Andreychuk: I go back to Bill C-36. One of the committee's concerns is that when one utilizes the Act or other acts, it can be perceived as racial profiling. What is your comment on that?
Mr. Thompson: There is a piece of Internet humour that has been ricocheting around since 9/11. It points out that almost all of the actions committed by al Qaeda have been committed by young men from the Middle East. Why should the Americans stop middle-aged, African grandmothers at the airport or young, white, short-haired marine recruits at airports, when they are looking for young men from the Middle East? If I were to track down the Tamil Tigers, I would look for short, dark Dravidian-looking people.
Terrorism and transnational crime is usually out of specific ethnic groups. That is how insurgents and criminals tend to recruit and who they tend to look for — people from a similar background. You cannot actually tackle any major organized crime group or any major insurgent group without going after a fairly narrow band of people.
Senator Andreychuk: Are you saying that the police and the security services actually do profile?
Mr. Thompson: I have not asked them about this, largely because they would be dancing around on the head of a pin if they tried to answer this. I suspect they have to. That having been said, people from an Islamic background could look like almost anyone. Remember, you add in al Qaeda and you have terrorists from the Philippines and Singapore; you have black Africans who are Muslims. It is hard to pick up on people who look Middle Eastern, because the diversity within the Wahhabi community is really quite remarkable.
The majority of people who would belong to the jihadist movement tend to come from the Arab Middle East — from Egypt, Iraq and Algeria — and those are the people we have looked at in the past. That is going to be the first place where the police will continue to look.
Senator Andreychuk: Does it give you any concern that it marks an entire community in Canada?
Mr. Thompson: Some; on the other hand, there is no way around it. The other point, as Mr. Rudner was saying, is that the police have to look for people from that community to support them. You cannot really investigate without having your informers. You cannot get early warning without having people who are telling you what will happen.
When the RCMP and the Metropolitan Toronto Police go after crime in the Tamil community, they rely on information from Tamil informants; people who speak the language and people who do not like the Tigers. It is the same thing for any other group.
If the police are trying to address jihadists, especially looking at young men from Algeria, Egypt or Iraq, they will also have to rely on other young men from Algeria, Egypt, and Iraq.
Senator Andreychuk: What I was really asking about is what if we are targeting the wrong person? We incarcerate this person. We hold them indefinitely. Are we not then adopting the very tactics that the group we claim to be attacking uses? Are we not using their tactics? Is that what you are saying?
Mr. Thompson: It is a fundamental problem in counterterrorism, and always has been in any form of counter- insurgency campaign, and in fighting any terrorist group, that you have to take actions against a group of a sort that might be uncomfortable or disliked. You are damned if you do not take these actions and you are in trouble if you do.
You have really no choice but to look for suspects from one particular community if you are to fight against problems that arise out of that community. There is no way around it.
We are not looking for non-Russians when we go after the Russian Mafia. We are not looking at people from South Africa when we are trying to fight the Chinese Triads. You are not looking at Sikhs when you try to address the Tamil Tigers. There is no way around it.
Senator Andreychuk: You are saying we are disingenuous as a government or as a people in Canada when we say we do not do it.
Mr. Thompson: You have to, unless you want to ignore the problem utterly and take the consequences later.
Senator Smith: I honestly do not know the answer to this and it may sound cynical, but it is not. I am curious, because I am sensing it was not William Lyon Mackenzie you were named after or Alexander Mackenzie — maybe Chalmers Jack Mackenzie. Who is the Mackenzie you are named after?
Mr. Thompson: Alexander Mackenzie, the voyageur. We picked him as a role model. His reputation as an explorer was that he was always willing to go after a route.
Senator Smith: They both came from Dunkeld, Scotland, so maybe they were related.
Senator Andreychuk: That is not helpful to your argument.
Senator Smith: I do not have an argument; I have an open mind. How would you, in three or four sentences, characterize or describe the political philosophy of the Mackenzie Institute?
Mr. Thompson: We exist to provide research and comment on anything to do with organized violence or political instability. We have been going after anyone in that sphere for 20 years. In one week, I remember being called ``a Jew- loving race traitor'' and ``a fascist warmonger'' in two separate phone calls. I guess that puts me in the middle.
Senator Smith: In regard to the legislation that is before us, would your concerns be more related to civil rights, or to it not being tough enough?
Mr. Thompson: If you are talking about the debate between security and liberal rights, there has to be a balance. If you are going to put in the fine gradations on that balance, there are times when we should be leaning on the security side more than we do.
Senator Smith: If you were sitting here, would you be inclined to look at some amendments? If so, what would they be, or would you basically adopt it?
Mr. Thompson: I would stay where we are right now. We have a good tool kit. We have not even used many of those tools yet. They are there and they might be used if necessary, but many of the tools that came through in Bill C-36 have not been used yet. They might never be.
There are some things about Bill C-36 that do leave me uncomfortable. I would like to see the legislation reviewed every five or 10 years, but right now it would be premature to soften up.
It has been almost four years since the 9/11 attack. However, there is what I call an equation in counterterrorism that success equals complacency equals vulnerability. The jihadist movement is still very much alive and still pushing and probing. You do hear occasionally that there are activities going on, sometimes inside Canada, that suggest that the desire to launch an attack is very real. We are not out of this threat yet at all.
Senator Smith: On the situation of the Tamil Tigers, for lack of a better phrase, they seem to be fairly large on your radar screen. Could you tell us how that came about?
Mr. Thompson: We first started to research the Tamil Tigers in 1995. Primarily, we had kept clipping files for a long time in the institute and noticed that the file on the Tamils was starting to grow thicker and thicker. We thought we better look into it and realize what was there.
When we did the initial review, I started to realize that the combination of their front organizations and their international financial activities made them a profound threat. We had someone who had been involved in a few immigration cases, who was hearing from some Tamils that were talking about the extortion they were subjected to, and that they were afraid of the Tigers here. We thought, okay, so we released this paper in December 1995 and it went around the world.
It also got us a significant amount of criticism from the Tigers, and I think that started a love match between the two of us because I have gone after them on three other occasions. They have subjected the institute to some harassment over the years, too.
Senator Lynch-Staunton: Along the same lines, of the 35 entities that are listed under the provisions of the act before us, are you aware of how many of them are active in Canada?
Mr. Thompson: Some of them I do not know. They are the subsets of al Qaeda.
Senator Lynch-Staunton: Or were active.
Mr. Thompson: The Babbar Khalsa were active here, very much the case.
Senator Lynch-Staunton: Which one was that?
Mr. Thompson: They killed more Canadian citizens than all terrorist groups combined.
Senator Lynch-Staunton: Which one?
Mr. Thompson: Babbar Khalsa: They were only placed on the list in June 2003, the second last addition to the list. They are responsible for not just the 154 Canadians killed in the Air India bombing, but about a dozen other murders mostly in British Columbia.
Some of the al Qaeda subsets are definitely here. As you are well aware, about 25 people have been identified as belonging to al Qaeda. That has included some of the subsets: A couple of Canadians were picked up in Iraq by the Kurds; some of the Salafists out of Algeria, Ahmed Rassam and that particular cell.
The Palestinian Islamic Jihad does have a presence in Canada. We have not been able to lock it down, but we suspect they have some involvement in some of the radical Arab student groups, especially at the University of Toronto and Concordia. That is a suspicion. I cannot prove it, as I do not have the resources, but I think they are there from some of the language and direction that has gone on.
I think we mentioned the Iranian group MEK that has been involved in Iraq, and we did list them. They have been quite visible in Canada at times. Some of the other groups have almost shuffled from the scene, and some of the other al Qaeda subsets, especially out of the Kashmir or Pakistan, have appeared in Canada only once. I was trying to remember the name of the group off the top of my head, but this was the Pakistani-based group that also had a presence on the island of Trinidad. Some members from that group were in Toronto in 1993. They had planned to fire bomb a Hindu movie theatre. They may have been involved in the shooting of a couple of Indian Canadian journalists.
Senator Lynch-Staunton: Has being put on the list slowed the entity down, or at least stopped it from raising funds or getting recruits, or have they just gone underground?
Mr. Thompson: Most of them had very little visible presence at all, so it is hard to tell if they are around.
I used to see the anti-Iranian group that used to be based in Iraq on the street corners in Toronto and Ottawa, passing the can around. They had a billboard of Iranian government atrocities. They would ask you to give them your spare change. That is not much of a major threat, but I have not seen them collecting money in four years.
Senator Lynch-Staunton: The two most visible in Canada, the IRA and the Tamils, are not on the list.
Mr. Thompson: The IRA tends to be pretty discreet. One of my tests for looking for the presence of the IRA was to go to Irish-themed bars and start looking for the prisoners' penny box. I have not seen those since 1995. I do hear occasionally in the Irish community that you get somebody coming over from Sinn Fein, and they host a dinner and pass a bucket around at the dinner. The IRA support from Canada has always been like it is from the United States; more symbolic than real. You have to remember that 90 per cent of their funding comes from organized criminal activities. The donations that trickle in from Boston or Montreal allows them to say, ``Our funding comes from our supporters overseas and not from the extortion rackets, the smuggling operation, the collection activities or the illegal drinking bins.''
Senator Lynch-Staunton: Other than those two names, are there other names that should be added to the list?
Mr. Thompson: Right now, no. The Tigers are a big, obvious group, and the IRA has been around for a long time. Most of the IRA's funding, as I mentioned, comes from organized crime. Going after the Tigers would be a very clear signal to a number of other countries that we are serious about terrorism. That could provide us also with some examples we could use in the future, and it would go a long way to restoring the real prospect of peace in Sri Lanka.
Senator Lynch-Staunton: Otherwise, we would ask the Americans, the British and the French to take them off their list, if that would help the peace process.
Mr. Thompson: The British, the Danes and the Americans placed them there for a real reason. We have not, for reasons that I can only guess at.
Senator Joyal: Mr. Thompson, I would like to refer to your opening statements. You mentioned propaganda or psychological warfare. I am tempted to quote the famous dictum that the first victim of any war is the truth. I think it applies on both sides. You mentioned that the trinity of belief is first, we are the good guys; second, you are the bad guys; and third, we will win. I think the trinity of belief applies in the two sides in any warfare because the number of lies that we have heard on the other side that have been verified are as damaging to the positioning of those who fight terrorism as for those who try to commit it.
Mr. Thompson: I guess the classic book on propaganda was Jacques Ellul's book Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes. It goes back to 1960, and I still reread it from time to time. I also remember in the notes some members of the Communist Party of Canada were in the Soviet Union taking training in various things, and their Soviet adviser said, ``You should read this guy. He is dialectally not very correct, but he is very good.'' They thought Mr. Ellul said everything that had to be said about propoganda. Mr. Ellul basically pointed out that if you are going to have a fabric of lies, you still need to put it on a coat hook of truth. He also pointed out there were three general systems of propaganda: the Pavlovian, the Freudian, and the American system, which is based on educational theories.
The long and the short of it is that you cannot really lie for a long time if you are propagandizing, especially if are you a democratic society. In a free society with a free press, it is almost impossible for a government to be involved in real propaganda because you will always be called on it. In a democratic society, if you are involved in propaganda, the press has to consent to become part of that instrument of propaganda. The only reason Britain and the United States were really able to launch major propagandas in the Second World War is that the press saw themselves as part of the war effort. In every activity since — Korea, Vietnam and the current war in Iraq — no Western government has ever been able to claim the full, enthusiastic cooperation of the press. It just does not happen.
In a terrorist group, a great deal of effort is often expended ensuring that the leader of the terrorist group and the message of the terrorist group is the exclusive message from the people they claim to represent. One of the first things every terrorist group does is actually not go after the government or the authority they want to challenge; they go after the people in the middle ground who might offer a different message. Prabhakaran's first action at the beginning of the Tamil Tigers was to shoot a Tamil politician. Their only violent actions inside Canada have been to ensure that they are the only voice that speaks out in public for the Tamil community. That is the same thing for just about every other terrorist group. The IRA spent a great deal of time and effort quashing its rivals over the last 35 years to ensure their message was exclusive.
In the long run, you could accuse the American government of trying to lie from time to time, but they get called on it, the press rakes them over on it, and there is no consensus. In the long run, telling a fabrication harms our own efforts to protect ourselves.
The terrorists ensure they are in a position to lie as completely and successfully as they can. They spend a great deal of time and effort ensuring they are in that position.
Senator Joyal: We claim we want to maintain a level of democracy as a free and open society. The fact is that it has recently happened that the press in the United States has apologized. As you will remember, The New York Times especially and some television stations went overboard with regard to the war in Iraq and failed to exercise the objectivity that the American public and the international community had the right to expect from those media with a world-wide reach. One of the best avenues to ensure that as a society we do not go overboard with the extraordinary powers that the executive government wants to claim in order to fight terrorism is through a permanent review mechanism in the legislation. This mechanism would recall to government that they have to answer at a regular point in time on the decisions and initiatives they take. They must sent a message to citizens that the democratic principle is permanently entrenched in the monitoring of government initiatives, to avoid falling into the kind of excesses that we have seen in recent years.
Mr. Thompson: I quite agree with you. Niestzsche once observed that if you are going to fight against a monster, you have to take care that you do not become a monster yourself. The longer you stare into the abyss, the sooner you find the abyss staring back at you.
Part of the threat that terrorism provides against a democratic society is the risk that our democratic values can be eroded. That is why we find it extremely difficult to fight against terrorism.
These powerful new laws, even though we have not used them all yet, are dangerous. They need to be re-examined every five years or so, to see if we want to keep them. Right now, for the time being, we do need to keep them.
I suppose the other point though, and this goes to some of the things that were said earlier, is that we have managed to set up in Canada a brilliant cosmopolitan society. I live in Toronto. I see the effects of what we have done over the last 20 years and I love it. However, along with all the new arrivals we have had some people with a different agenda who have actually limited the ability of some communities to fully participate in Canadian life. Again, to actually fight against the insurgents, to actually weaken the ability of terrorist groups to operate here would free people in these communities to participate more fully than they have been able to. The Canadian Sikhs had to wage a quiet civil conflict for about 20 years against militants. Many of them were murdered and almost no one was paying attention. Many Tamils still find themselves quite suppressed by the Tamil Tigers. They are not free yet to fully participate in the country. That is the other side of these laws. These laws can actually enhance our freedom, particularly in communities that are more vulnerable to terrorism than the rest of us are.
Senator Joyal: Personally, I share your views that there should be a built-in mechanism in those laws of exception, as a legal expert would call them. I would like to draw your attention to the fact that section 145 of the anti-terrorist legislation that we are reviewing does not establish a permanent mechanism of review. It establishes in section 145(1):
Within three years after this Act receives royal assent, a comprehensive review of the provisions and operation of this Act shall be undertaken...
That is what we are doing now; it happens once. Once we have done this review, it will be over. There is no wording in that section that reads that in another three or five years we will review the implementation of the legislation.
Paragraph (2) of the same section reads:
The committee referred to in subsection (1) shall, within a year after a review is undertaken pursuant to that subsection...submit a report on the review to Parliament....
In other words, it is not the mechanism that you are talking about and that I am thinking of as well. I do not believe in the use of, or the concept of, the word ``war'' because I think it is part of the propaganda initiative. I think that a democratic society should have that kind of capacity through its Parliament to permanently review the use of extraordinary powers that are granted to the executive. In other words, we should consider recommending to the government to amend that section of the Act so that there is a permanent mechanism entrenched in the legislation.
Mr. Thompson: I suspect we are in perfect agreement here.
The Chairman: It has been very useful to have you here today, Mr. Thompson. You go back a long way in giving your views and your experience to Senate committees. We are glad to have you here at this one and may well call on you again. I do wish to thank you and thank all senators for staying with it today.
The committee adjourned.