"Human Error" Thus Forgivable

"It does not explain any of the underlying factors behind why the missiles were launched at PS752, which is the stated cause of this accident."

"The report says what happened, but it doesn't answer the why. It is incomplete. It raises more questions than it answered."

"Given this unprecedented situation, where the state whose military was implicated in the event led the investigation, and given its impact within Canada, we feel that it is important to publicly convey our independent assessment of the final report."

"To date, Iran has provided no evidence to support this scenario [contained in the report]; however, it is a plausible explanation of what happened."

"Nor does the report discuss what steps the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has taken since then to identify the underlying safety deficiencies that allowed such an error to occur, nor what safety action has been taken to prevent such an event happening again."

"Without this, how can the international civil aviation community be assured that such a tragic event won't happen again?"

"[The filing of Iran's final report] doesn't end the quest for answers."

Kathy Fox, chairwoman, Transportation Safety Board of Canada, Montreal 

"The underlying facts behind each of those [basic events in the report], is left unexplained or unknown."

"There are many things beneath the surface that are not in the report."

Ewan Tasker, Canadian representative observing Iranian investigation 

"It is unthinkable that a government can so ruthlessly murder innocent passengers as a sacrifice for its military adventurism and as a way to prevent a war in the face of its reckless behaviour."

Families of Flight PS752 victims

"They're hiding the information about the man responsible for ordering the missile launch and those who kept open the airspace that night."

"We know that they don't want to tell the truth."

Mohsen Ahmadipour, Gatineau Quebec

 

 

On January 8, 2020, Ukraine International Airlines Flight PS752 left Tehran airport on what would under other circumstances, be a normal flight. But this was not a normal day. There was a tense atmosphere prevailing, a situation of downplayed conflict. Tehran was expecting an American response to Iran's having shot off a number of missiles toward a U.S. military base in Iraq which wounded a number of American military personnel. That launching of missiles was a retaliatory move by Iran on the targeted death-by-missile of its top general who led the Al Quds division of the Iranian Republican Guard Corps.

 

On Jan. 8, 2020, Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps shot down Ukraine International Airlines Flight 752 in the skies over Tehran with two surface-to-air missiles, killing all 176 people aboard, including 138 people with ties to Canada. (Ebrahim Noroozi/Associated Press)

Flight PS752 was shot out of the sky mere minutes after takeoff. Struck by two Iranian military missiles. Loss of life was total, both passengers and crew, totalling 176 lives lost. The majority of the passengers were en route to Canada. There were 55 Canadian citizens aboard the flight, and another 30 people were permanent residents of Canada, while dozens more were either attending universities in Canada, or had other connections, travelling on visas.

 

According to the long-awaited Iranian report, Flight PS752 was erroneously identified as an incoming missile, a military threat. Caused, it was asserted, as a result of a misalignment of the missile launcher's radar which made the passenger plane's trajectory appear as though it was approaching Tehran, not moving away from it. Leading the operator to take immediate action to shoot down an 'incoming missile'. The operator, moreover had no permission to shoot, from senior officers, as would normally be the case. 

 

 Ukraine International Airlines Flight PS752 Reuters

The report, in fact, provides no evidence whatever to support the Iranian government's version of how events unfolded. No Canadian officials were given permission to hear the cockpit recordings, nor were they given access to the flight data recording from the black box There was no breakdown of Iran's military actions, an inadequate completion of the scope of Iran's report, critiqued the Transportation Safety Board.

 

Making it obvious that there was a lack of transparency and a presentation lacking sufficient independence of Iran's investigators from its government. The report as described by appointed representative Ewan Tasker to Iran's investigation,  is "thin" on answers, outlining basic events, yet failing to dig deeper on Iran's military and government roles in the tragedy. Mr.Tasker had rendered 120 questions and concerns from Canada before the completion of the report; the report failed to address them. 

 

The Transportation Board, despite the report, remained with unanswered questions of the utmost importance in the case. Starting with the sequence of events leading to the fired missiles. Then there is the stark disbelief that Iran would maintain open airspace during a military alert, to permit civilian airlines continued operation under such tense conditions. At the very time that Iran was anticipating the potential of an American attack with its defence forces in a state of readiness for war.

 

Iran took the U.S. assassination of Major-General Qassem Soleimani as a statement of war intent. Air traffic between Baghdad and Tehran had been suspended as a reflection of safety concerns, with measures in place to manage risk posed to civilian flights during the crisis. According to the Aircraft Accident Investigation Board of the Islamic Republic of Iran, the plane "was under control of Iranian air traffic control and the takeoff clearance was issued after coordination with [the] military sector."

 

Nine Ukrainian crew members were killed, along with 167 passengers   Reuters

 

Canada's Responsibilities for its Islamic State Citizens

"Those Canadian citizens who came here, they came to kill us and they came to kill our kids and to destroy our towns."
"And the moment that we arrested them and had them in our prisons or our camps, we were saving the Canadian people in Canada. We were preventing them from doing any terrorist attacks."
“So doing nothing towards those citizens, [Canada refusing to repatriate them to take them off Kurdish hands currently responsible for them], that’s really not respectful for the sacrifice that we have done."
"The Canadian citizens who are here, they are six men and 12 women and some kids so when we talk about Canada … it’s as big as 10 million metres squared. It’s a very big country compared to our country [Kurdistan]."
"I’m just surprised how a big country like Canada cannot take six or 12 citizens to their country."
"The situation is really getting worse. We have those women in our hands, and every day, they are taking care of the kids, how to make them ISIS, how to make them follow ISIS ideology."
Mustafa Bali, spokesman, Syrian Democratic Forces

"I think it was pretty clear from our experience in Al-Hawl that there’s a small subset of women who kind of run the show at the camp, who are very much kind of overpowering a lot of the other women in the camp, policing what they wear, policing what they can say, policing how they act."
Foreign fighter expert Prof. Amarnath Amarasingam, Queens University, Kingston, Ontario

"The reality is that these individuals are Canada’s problem, yesterday, today and tomorrow. If they show up at our consulates or embassies, they will be a very real problem."
"If they help to reconstitute the Islamic State, they will be an even bigger one. And if they conduct terrorist attacks and take more lives, that will be on us."
Former Canadian Security Intelligence Service analyst Jessica Davis

At Al-Hawl camp in northern Syria, children watch as women confront Kurdish guards in a confrontation that quickly turned violent. Stewart Bell

For the past six months and more, since the Islamic State geographic caliphate was fully dissolved, Al-Hawl (Hol) camp in Syrian Kurdistan has housed an estimated 70,000 ISIL family members, women and children. Among them are 40 Canadians. Along with other foreign-sourced women who were pleased and excited to become part of a bold new Islamist enterprise in the creation of a dominating caliphate whose geographic presence was meant to expand, just as its ideology continues to fester in the Middle East and beyond.

The Canadian government -- like most other Western governments whose citizens answered the call to jihad and fled to Turkey to enter Syria and join the Islamic State terrorist group -- has no intention to reclaim its citizens. This is the very same government that overturned the previous Conservative-led government which had legislated a revocation of citizenship to any Canadians of immigrant status who left the country to go abroad to fight in the name of terrorist jihad with Islamic State. Justin Trudeau made it clear that to him, "A Canadian is a Canadian" and he would have no part of a two-tier citizenship system.

So these are still Canadians, their citizenship is intact (unlike Britain which detached their citizens), but the Liberal government sees no need to exert itself to relieve the pressure on the Kurds whose ill fortune it has been not only to be forced to be the only reliable fighting force to counter the malevolent deadly threat of Islamic State, but to imprison and to guard them, at the cost of manpower and treasury, attempting to handle a poisonous situation no other country is willing to undertake, much less assist with.

Al-Hawl Camp,  Associated Press

As for those Canadian Islamic State members who have returned of their own volition to Canada, many are free to roam the streets of the country, (instead of being peremptorily imprisoned) while Canada's security and intelligence agents twist their hands, and bemoan the fact that unless they are able to amass hard evidence directly implicating these ISIL stalwarts, arresting and imprisoning, much less trying them for the crimes they are suspected to have been involved with, won't pass muster under Canadian law.

The Turkish military invasion of southeast Syria enabled by a brain-distracted Trump administration has had the effect of disabling the Kurdish military from its preoccupation with ferreting out ISIL sleeper cells, as they must now respond to the defence of their nation and their people. Moreover, the hundreds of Kurdish YPG fighters deployed as guards over the prison camps housing tens of thousands of ISIL members and those of their families have been hollowed out in numbers, responding to the emergency imposed by Turkish President Erdogan's ambition to annihilate the YPG 'terrorists' and establish a 'safe corridor' between Turkey and Syria.

Recep Tayyip Erdogan's plan is to forcibly dump Syrian refugees, an estimated two million of the three-and-a-half million living in squalid refugee camps inside Turkey, fearful of returning to Syria where the Baathist regime's Alawite President Bashar al-Assad will resume barrel-and-chemical-bombing them once again. In forcing the Syrian Democratic Forces to withdraw their guards for the urgency of the battlefield against Turkish invasion, the fears now focus on Islamic State prisoners being freed from their prison custody, enabled to resume their reign of terror, as a result.

In the Al-Hawl prison camp where the ISIL women and children are incarcerated, a message from ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi called for his supporters to free the women from what he called the "prisons of humiliation", pleasing the women no end. They had, in effect, the hard-core among them, been effectively running the camp along an Islamic State model, in defiance of the Kurdish guards, and even threatening them with knives and cudgels.

The Kurdish guards speak of the camp as a "ticking time bomb". A dismembered body, days ago, was discovered in a septic tank at Al-Hawl. Some time later the body of a 20-year-old women was found as well, with 16 fatal stab wounds, according to a camp official. Last month, a 14-year-old girl had been murdered, her penalty for refusing to wear a niqab. Guards have reportedly been stabbed by these ferociously Islamist-violent woman of Islamic State. Little wonder that the camp has been described as a "mini caliphate".

Somehow, the camp women have been able to take possession of cellphones, of knives and even, it was reported, guns. The 400 guards who were responsible for the camp prior to this week's redeployment, make no pretense that the women haven't taken command of the day-to-day operations of the camp. They have been making efforts to smuggle themselves out of the camp, efforts that increased after they were called on to "rise up" by Baghdadi.

Guards at Al-Hawl camp in northern Syria arrest women accused of gathering to whip a woman for violating their religious code. Stewart Bell

 

Defending Canada While Holding Canada to Account

"[The National Defence counter-intelligence unit can not] arbitrarily conduct surveillance on Canadian citizens; [investigations may take place when a clear link is present to defence security interests]."
"[In] an increasingly complex global information environment, and with Canadians constantly travelling all over the world [military-intelligence personnel may incidentally gather some information about Canadian citizens]."
Capt.Nicola LaMarre, National Defence spokeswoman

"We're worried about what it means when they collect inadvertent information."
"We don't know the scope or the degree to which Canadians' information is being captured."
Tim McSorley, national coordinator, International Civil Liberties Monitoring Group, Ottawa

Military spies will be allowed to gather the information of Canadians in certain circumstances. (Jonathan Hayward/Canadian Press)

"We have a Charter of Rights and Freedoms … when governments, regardless of which stripe, do not defend those rights, Canadians have to pay."
"I hope people take notice of this. I hope people are angered that governments violated people’s fundamental rights."
"And I hope people remember to demand of governments, this one and all future governments, that nobody ever has their fundamental rights violated."
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, October 2017

Under Canadian law military intelligence is able to collect and share information about Canadian citizens -- and that includes material gathered by chance -- when it supports a legitimate investigation. This is a federal directive newly disclosed on a public request for information by the Canadian Press. The incidental or 'chance' information-gathering includes anything dredged from the Internet. And this concerns civil-liberties advocates who think in terms of the vast amount of data and sources available in cyberspace.

The directive, encompassing eight pages dated August 2018, is titled Guidance on the Collection of Canadian Citizen Information, made available through the Access to Information Act. It represents an instruction manual meant for National Defence employees and members of the Canadian Forces, that any information collected on Canadian citizens must have a "direct and immediate relationship" to a military operation or activity, warning as well that "emerging technologies and capabilities" increase the potential for such data to be scooped inadvertently from open sources such as social-media feeds.

Whether inadvertently collected or intentionally, data on Canadians may lawfully be kept and used in support of authorized defence-intelligence operations, points out the directive. Parliamentarians attached to the national-security and intelligence committee are in the process of examining the directive through a study on the manner in which Canadian Forces gather, use, keep and share information about Canadians, forming part of their intelligence work.

This study follows on an earlier report the committee produced that concluded the military has one of the largest intelligence programs in Canada, with little outside oversight. Thousands of pages of data were examined by the committee along with a number of closed-door briefings, to find that defence agencies carry out an entire range of intelligence activities. Information is collected through sensitive methods by means of human sources, technical means and investigations; activities that encompass considerable risks, among them the potential for Canadians' rights infringements.

Stricter controls on the military's intelligence-gathering including the possibility of legislation setting out when and how defence intelligence operations can take place, is being called for by the committee. The Canadian Forces national counter-intelligence unit carries out Canadian citizens' information which includes identifying, investigating and countering threats to the security of Canada's military from foreign intelligence services, or from individuals or groups engaged on espionage, sabotage, subversion, terrorist activities and other criminal activity relating to security concerns.

The activities of intelligence gathering, ensuring that specialized agents acquire and maintain critical information pertaining to the actions and activities of Canadians whose sympathies may lie with an outside body engaged in terrorism, potentially threatening the safety and security of other Canadians and/or Canadian institutions logically would seem to justify the requirement for such data collection. Without which it would not be possible to be alert to danger, and to the capacity to react, in apprehending dangerously sinister plans to wreak havoc on Canadian interests.

There have on occasion been just such incidents which have been identified and apprehended, those involved placed on trial, convicted, sentenced and imprisoned. There have also been instances where Canadian intelligence units have shared information with foreign-partner counterparts as within the Five Eyes compact in a bid to allow for cooperation between Western democracies threatened by common enemies. Aside from which it is no secret that malign actors on the international scene have infiltrated Western societies, requiring that their activities be monitored.

All this by way of setting the stage for events that brought the Charter of Rights and Freedoms into direct confrontation with the imperative for Canadian Defence and intelligence to apprise their global defence and intelligence partners in discussions and prevention of terrorist attacks. Particularly at a time when Islamists have demonstrated their facility in carrying out horrendously murderous attacks on Western democracies. Not to mention the issues involved in Canadian Muslims enrolling themselves as members of Islamist terrorist groups.

Omar Khadr appears at the courthouse in Edmonton with his lawyer in hopes of getting a Canadian Passport to travel to Saudi Arabia and permission to speak with his sister in Edmonton, December 13, 2018. Greg Southam/Postmedia

As, for example the prime minister asserting that Ottawa’s apology and reported $10.5 million compensation to Omar Khadr is about the former Guantanamo Bay inmate’s Charter rights, not about the details of the case. Details, what details? That the Khadr family, Egyptian immigrants to Canada, the father a confidant of Osama bin Laden, who raised funds within Canada for the support of al-Qaeda activities and who took his sons to Afghanistan's jihadi training camps where 15-year-old Omar was taught how to make explosives and threw one at a U.S. Army medic, killing him, blinding another.

Details, details. American surgeons saved Khadr's life from life-threatening injuries he sustained during that attack in which he took part against an American military group in conflict with the Taliban. As a prisoner in Guantanamo Bay prison for Islamists Khadr claimed to have been mistreated. As a Canadian he was visited by a Canadian diplomat and by the CSIS group who questioned him there. That, according to the prime minister, abridged his Charter rights, therefore Canadian taxpayers were on the hook for $10.5 in 'compensation'.

And there were others. Just after the horrific 9/11 attacks in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania, the international community was placed on high alert, and Muslim men were under great scrutiny, a web that caught another Canadian, Maher Arar who happened to be in the wrong place at the right time, was apprehended by U.S. agents and sent to his home country of Syria where he was arrested, imprisoned and tortured. His Charter rights too were judged to have been abridged and a similar pay-out of 'compensation' awarded him for his pain and troubles; Canadian investigators charged with giving questionable data to their U.S. counterparts.

Wait, why stop there!? There's also the 'settlement' reached by the Liberal government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau with three other Muslim-Canadians, Abdullah Almalki, Ahmad El Maati and Muayyed Nureddin who sued the government for $100,000 million. Trudeau saved Canadian taxpayers quite a bit of tax funding, he claimed, with the final payout to the three men of $31 million, who wee 'falsely accused of terrorist links' but not by Canada. 

El Maati had been detained in Syria after travelling to the region from Canada for his wedding, which he was never able to attend. Nureddin, a geologist and educator in Toronto, was imprisoned while visiting family. Almalki, an Ottawa electronics engineer, was held for 22 months. And they alleged that Canada was instrumental in aiding in their ordeals. And our government agreed with them, yet even so in language couched to imply perhaps yes, perhaps not.

That uncertainty can be read in the joint statement issued by Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale and Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland who formally apologized to the three men "for any role Canadian officials may have played in relation to their detention and mistreatment abroad and any resulting harm."

Is this the price of being Canadian?