On the Horns of a Dilemma

A country is obligated by mandate and for the ultimate protection of its internal security and that of all of its citizens to practise due diligence during times of high alert as a result of unlawful and untoward activities whose purpose it is to produce instability and panic within its jurisdiction and population. Which, of course, is why Canada's national intelligence and policing agencies were on high alert post 9-11.

And, because all of the attackers were adult males of distinctly Arab derivation who had pledged allegiance to the goals of al-Qaeda to deliver a message to the developed world and more specifically the United States that this was the initial engagement in an existential war between militantly Islamist adherents and effete Western values, men of Middle-East extraction were universally suspect.

There is no argument that the use of a wide brush to cast suspicion on dark-complexioned males suspected of involvement with the dark forces of terrorist inclination placed a whole lot of innocent people in jeopardy. As was the case, in Canada, when Maher Arar was unceremoniously and unlawfully bundled to Syria for a year of confinement and torture.

It's a truly tough call. As the waggish lot would have it; not all Muslims are terrorists, but in this very especial atmosphere of Islamic terror versus the West, the undeniable reality was that all those terrorists were Muslim. Granted, not the ordinary, run-of-the-mill, law-abiding, good citizens representative of the greater number of Muslims.

But these were trying times and one supposes under such circumstances there are certain limits to protection. There is such a thing as self-responsibility; the acknowledgement that, given the situation, individuals would do well to suspend the belief in their invulnerability to wrongful suspicion simply because they were personally aware of their own innocence.

Therefore displaying the caution of survival, and not placing themselves into situations where they would become even more vulnerable to mistaken identify and the nasty aftermaths. That having been said, there is never a time when law-abiding citizens should have to fear for their safety against the activities of those very agencies set up to protect them in the first place.

That an utter failure of due diligence on the part of Canada's intelligence agencies led to the incarceration, transference, complicity, and torture of Canadian citizens is beyond deplorable. The lawyer representing the Canadian Arab Federation who made cause before inquiry commissioner Frank Iacobucci in defence of the wrongly accused said it all.

James Kafieh is entirely correct, that Canadian diplomats have an obligation to work for the release of Canadians detained without charge in countries like Syria and Egypt, whose record of human rights violations is well known. Mind-bogglingly, the Canadian Ambassador to Syria at the time that Maher Arar was incarcerated and tortured there, claimed not to have known of any such human rights violations practised by Syria.

So the current enquiry into Canadian actions that seemed most obviously to have led to the detention and mistreatment of Abdullah Almalki, Ahmad El-Maati and Muayyed Nureddin may help to set the record straight, but it most certainly will not help these men to forget the dreadful experiences they suffered while in detention, as innocent men.

Men who were betrayed by the very system in place to support and protect them. As citizens of a country proud of its law-abiding traditions where all the multifarious parts of its immigrant population are given equal treatment and protection under the law of the land.