Canadian Security Intelligence Service: Justice Dennis O'Connor

Canada Border Services Agency Dept: Ministerial instructions to the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, RCMP and Canada Border Services Agency leave the door open to the kind of information exchanges that led to Arar's torture in Syria a decade ago, says Toronto lawyer Lorne Waldman. "It's extremely disappointing that after all of these years, and after all of the effort, we're not any further ahead than we were," Waldman said, according to Vancouver Sun. Justice Dennis O'Connor, who led a federal inquiry into the case, concluded that faulty information the RCMP passed to the United States very likely led to the Ottawa telecommunications engineer's yearlong nightmare. O'Connor recommended in September 2006 that information never be provided to a foreign country where there is a credible risk that it will cause or contribute to the use of torture and a lawyer who represented torture victim Maher Arar says information-sharing directives issued to federal security agencies show the government hasn't learned anything about shunning brutality. Arar, a Syrian-born Canadian, was detained at a New York airport in September 2002, winding up in a grim Damascus prison. Under torture, he falsely confessed to Syrian military intelligence officers about being involved with al-Qaida. (www.immigrantscanada.com). As reported in the news.