Now That's a Relief

Canada has received truly fortunate news. We can all breathe easier now, relax a bit, feel less strained about the potential for murder and mayhem directed against our free democratic institutions, our government, our population. The Canadian Security Intelligence Service has altered its opinion on the basis of newly-discovered factoids that Mohamed Harkat, who loves this country so much that he refuses to return to his native Morocco, no matter that the government has ordered him to do so, no longer poses a direct threat.

Why this man is so taken with Canada, so loathe to remove himself is puzzling, given the fact that he is not wanted here, other than by his wife and a coterie of witless well-wishers. He has been downgraded, however, as a result of a top secret "threat assessment", that describes his terrorism-related activities as being peripheral, banal, simply of the enabling, accommodating variety to those with whom he has worked, and that he had not quite yet worked himself into the role of action-committed jihadist.

He specialized in the paperwork, the information-gathering, but as the new CSIS study reveals, the threat he poses is not quite as significant to national security as it was thought originally to be. So should we go out and celebrate? He's still here, there's no doubt that he was ever (if there is any doubt, and there always could be) given to be less involved in the violent ideology of fanatical Islamism than when he began his career in covert action against those countries whom Islamist terrorism targets.

He may indeed, as CSIS now appears to believe, never have been the imminent threat that they felt he was as a sleeper agent, but his intentions were not those of loving-kindness to the country that took him in, in any event. He maintained extremely suspect company in the associates he came in contact with. Given the heightened public profile he now enjoys with all the bleating human-rights entitlements he and his followers feel have been denied him, it's felt he is hardly likely to engage in further activity to incriminate himself.

However, it is food for thought that CSIS claims to have no 'evidence' that the man has "renounced his beliefs and support of Islamic extremism". Nor have they any evidence that he may have, on the other hand. "...his role in the international Islamist extremist movement prior to his arrival in Canada (1995) appears to have been largely logistics and facilitation confirmed by his immediate connections within the Canadian network of extremists".

Hardly a clean bill of health from those whose careful scrutiny of his activities, connections, and background would have given them a fairly rounded picture of the man's intentions. His connection to the elder Khadr whose involvement with al-Qaeda is so well known, along with that of the Khadr children and mother, also help to complete the picture. How circumstantial can you get? Yet Mr. Harkat felt completely at ease with the judicial and human-rights-entitlement system in Canada to request additional loosening of his bail restrictions.

Now that surveillance cameras no longer follow his every movement, and his telephone and mail contacts are no longer monitored, he felt he should also be permitted access to a cellphone and computer. And while we're at it, remove the monitoring ankle bracelet. But Judge Simon Noel felt he had been reasonable enough in loosening Mr. Harkat's restrictions: "The ministers still consider that a threat remains. On the basis of the evidence at this point in the proceeding, the court is not in a position to contradict this assertion."

The ankle bracelet, at least, remains in place. Mr. Harkat's problems, and ours as well, could so readily be solved were he to assent to his removal from Canada.