If you call a national-affairs reporter, today, we can't promise you our phones aren't being tapped. If you have confidential information that you think needs to be revealed in the public interest, we can't promise you that the police won't get your name. We'll do our best, but they're seizing our hard drives and reading our e-mail.
Until this week, there were good reasons to oppose the idea of holding a public inquiry into the deportation and alleged torture of Maher Arar. Those reasons have now vanished, with the RCMP's decision to go after people who leak information to reporters on the case.
Everyone knows the bare bones of the Arar affair. Canadian security and intelligence officials suspected the Syrian-Canadian (he holds dual citizenship) of terrorist connections. They passed on their information to U.S. officials, who detained Mr. Arar when he arrived at a New York airport, and who then sent him to Syria, where he languished in prison for almost a year before being released.
Both Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin have resisted calls for an inquiry into the Arar affair for two good reasons. First, such an inquiry could compromise national security, by revealing the ways in which Canadian and U.S. police and intelligence agencies co-operate in their efforts to detect and prevent terrorist threats. The fruits of that co-operation are self-evident: Canada and the United States have been spared a sequel to the attacks of Sept. 11.
The other reason for avoiding an inquiry is that many of the answers to questions about who told what to whom reside south of the border, and U.S. officials are unlikely to co-operate with a Canadian investigation.
In the absence of a public inquiry, the best recourse appeared to be internal investigations, which are under way at both the RCMP and CSIS. But this case is politically charged, and the reputations of both agencies, along with the Department of Foreign Affairs, have been brought into question. So while the investigators investigate, sources at all three departments have been leaking information to journalists.
These weren't acts of altruism; the leakers were, in general, trying to exculpate their particular agency. ("See? This proves we didn't do anything wrong, though we can't say the same for the other guys.") Some of leaked information appears to exonerate Mr. Arar; some of it appears to implicate him in terrorist conspiracies. Sources within the RCMP, in particular, were anxious to pass on information that appeared to prove they had good reason to be suspicious of Mr. Arar.
The media have served as a source of information and debate over Mr. Arar's guilt or innocence, and over the culpability of the Canadian government and its agencies in his detention and alleged torture. That, in itself, is a travesty of justice, but it is also the only way for the public to get some idea of what is going on in this mysterious and disturbing affair.
But someone in the RCMP has decided that the leaks must stop. Since the force was unable to figure out who inside its shop is talking to the press, the next course of action was to raid the press.
Whatever else they achieve, the searches and the threats of criminal charges under the Security of Information Act will almost certainly shut down the leaks. The media will continue to debate the Arar affair. But information will now be much harder to obtain.
Since the government will not or cannot be candid about who did what in this affair, and since the media are being intimidated by the police, the only recourse left is to hold the public inquiry, whatever the risks to national security.
A distinguished retired judge will have to be found; he or she will need to be given broad powers to subpoena individuals and evidence; much of the inquiry will doubtless be held in camera, and some of its findings may have to be kept from the public. But better this than innuendo and threats and assaults on the fourth estate.
In a perfect world, Prime Minister Paul Martin and President George W. Bush would agree to a bi-national inquiry, with American and Canadian representation. But that's a pipe dream. A Canadian-only inquiry will have to do. The sooner it gets started, the sooner the spectre of secrecy, intimidation and threats to a free press can be cleared away.
