National Security State and Canadian Border Services Agency

Canadian Border Services Agency: When doubts are raised about the fragility of democratic rights, the national security state relies on its courts to provide legal reassurance that torture, indefinite detention without charge, secret trials, overseas military occupation, the iron curtain of governmental secrecy, and other crimes of state can be rationalized as necessary byproducts of certain organization duly-authorized mandates, according to Rabble. In the Harkat and Diab cases, judges have again closed ranks behind the national security state, protecting the technocrats who, like the notorious Schreibtischt ter -- desk murderers of the Nazi era -- do not have to wipe the blood from their hands, as they simply shift paper about, blithely disconnected from the human wreckage they cause. Canada desk torturers work at such institutions as the Canadian Border Services Agency, the and Communications Security Establishment, all of whose employees operate under the rubric of internal memos that have directed them to exchange information with foreign intelligence agencies even when there is a "substantial risk" of torture. Canada War Department is the latest to join their ranks . Needless to say, such memos have been given the go-ahead by Justice Department lawyers. At the same time, itself acknowledged in a 2008 memo that if torture-tainted intelligence were dismissed, the secret trial regime would collapse and Two judicial decisions released last week remind us that the concept of national security is incompatible with democracy: the former almost always trumps the latter, and various enemies-du-jour are regularly created and then served up on the altar of "security." In each instance, profoundly disturbing decisions were dealt to Mohamed Harkat, facing deportation to torture in Algeria based on secret hearsay, and Hassan Diab, facing extradition to France on clearly trumped up allegations likely gleaned from torture. In Canada, both individual judges and courts have served this role most obediently. Their decisions almost unanimously start from the proposition that scandal-plagued bodies like the and the Department of Justice are composed of well-intentioned functionaries who may, in moments of excessive zeal, cross some boundaries. Although those crossed boundaries implicate Canadian officials in severe human rights violations, no one is ever held to account. Consider that despite two judicial inquiries finding Canadian complicity in the torture of four of its own citizens -- a complicity usually overseen by Justice Department lawyers -- no one has been charged, much less tried, for their involvement in torture. Rather, complicit individuals have received promotions or otherwise retired from public life and are now serving as commentators for the CBC or receiving puff profiles in the Toronto Star . (www.immigrantscanada.com). As reported in the news.