Journalistic Exploitation By American Leakers
The Toronto Globe and Mail, that upstanding national voice of Canada ran a piece last Saturday about Maher Arar. You may remember him. Arar was the man who was falsely accused by our Royal Canadian Mounted Police Force, with a little help from their friends at The Canadian Security and Intelligence Service (CSIS). After that bit of phony footwork, they slyly passed their hush hush info to the U.S. authorities…knowing it was pretty well all guesswork, except, of course for Maher’s name. Then that American bastion of liberty and freedom, the FBI, arrested Mr. Maher and its sister group, CIA, sent him to Syria to be tortured. As far as CSIS and the Mounties were concerned, Arar was just another Arab. Who cared?
Later on…much later on…after months of torture in a slimy Syrian jail and after a thorough investigation of all the facts and background, the Canadian Government’s security guru, Stockwell Day, not exactly a left-wing terrorist sympathizer, declared it was all a big mistake. Mr. Maher, it turned out, was innocent. Totally innocent as a matter of fact. A humiliated Canadian Conservative government then paid Mr. Maher 10 million or so dollars as compensation for the Mountie/CSIS bungling. The FBI looked on in shock and awe as the Canadian Prime Minister issued a formal and official apology to a man who had been wronged and called on the U.S. to "come clean".
That was bad enough. But a few days ago, on Thursday the 18th, horror of horrors, two American legislators, a Democrat and a Republican also issued an apology to Arar.
Clearly, U.S. authorities knew the apology was coming and assigned themselves a small domestic counterinsurgency mission. They needed a friendly media outlet. These shadowy men or women…we don’t know who they are…had already let it be known inside the Washington Beltway that they had a secret to share with some enterprising Canadian journalist. If they could just get their little “secret” out, then they could nullify the effect of the Congressional apology to Arar and justify the fact that although he is an innocent man…he is still not allowed to fly in an airplane that might pass through the United States. So they decided to leak their “secret” to justify their complicity in the torture of the Canadian and their continued harrassment of him.
Incredibly, or maybe not, 2 days after the American Congressmen apologized, a nasty little story popped onto the front page of our national mouthpiece.
The Globe story purported to be the result of cloak and dagger journalism. The intrepid reporter, followed in the footsteps and style of Judith Miller who helped Dick Cheney and George Bush make the case for invading Iraq. Miller had her “inside” “unnamed” sources of information who assured her that Iraq was awash in WMD and nuclear bomb projects.
He was allowed by the unnamed people to get a look at some classified documents, (selected ones, of course), and then was sent on his way.
The result of the reporter’s “investigations” appeared on the front page of the Globe on Saturday.
Postscript: the U.S. “intelligence” seen by the Globe was provided to American police by a convicted fraud artist, who worked for al Qaeda and told American intelligence officials he had caught a glimpse of Arar in Afghanistan. The problem is…Arar has never been to Afghanistan.
The "source" is now in prison.
