Re: Don't let RCMP/CSIS 'accountability' pave the way to Canada's 9/11

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Posted by CCD's David Harris in Ottawa Citizen on 17:59:20 2006/12/16

In Reply to: Re: The real lesson to be learned from the suffering of Maher Arar posted by CCD in Al-Jazeerah?

Your browser does not support inline frames, or it has been configured incorrectly. If page does not display on your browser, please <a href="http://canadiancoalition.com/OttawaCitizen20061216/DavidHarris_WillArarLeadToAnother911.html">CLICK HERE</a>. Print Story - canada.com network Don't let 'accountability' pave the way to Canada's 9/11 Syrian jail cells aren't the only consequences of intelligence mistakes David Harris Ottawa Citizen Special Saturday, December 16, 2006 A lot of terrorism experts think the nearly 3,000 victims of Sept. 11 were doomed by the U.S. Congress years before any airliner hit the World Trade Center. Could implementation of the Arar Commission's most recent report bring similar consequences to Canadians? In many ways, the CIA-FBI failures to connect intelligence "dots" on 9/11 stemmed from accountability changes forced on U.S. government agencies in the 1970s. Congressional investigations had exposed wrongdoing by American spy agencies, and adjustments in oversight and accountability were unavoidable. Civil liberties concerns led to new statutes, monitoring, and "Chinese walls" between hewers of foreign intelligence and drawers of domestic intelligence and law enforcement. The problem with jurisdictional and communications barriers only registered when Boeings started coming through office windows. Syrian jail cells aren't the only consequences of intelligence mistakes. Could the implementation of Justice Dennis O'Connor's Arar accountability regime inadvertently set up Canadians for a similar fall? Conclusions would be premature. Fortunately, Judge O'Connor's recommendations are largely reasonable and circumspect. And he's been at pains to emphasize the need for robust counterterrorist forces for today's terrorist danger. All the same, instituting Judge O'Connor's proposals could mean complexity, cost, transition problems and other unintended consequences. These spell vulnerability in an age of mass-destructive terror delivered by relatively small terror cells. Challenges include an expanded number and scope of review bodies. Then there's the new "super-secretariat" to review the reviewers. Good in principle, but this expansion risks undermining compartmentalization and the need-to-know principle, twin pillars of operational secrecy and success. Too many players at an apex of intelligence bureaucracy could mean too much information splashing around too many people -- and leaks. Meanwhile, how much time would operational counterterrorist staff lose through additional reporting, liaisons, meetings and assorted handholding with accountability officers? Moreover, who's to populate the review organisms? Where is the talent and management skill for this highly specific endeavour? Canada's intelligence community is small, so how many specialized lawyers are available with true understanding of security realities? Will unwary bureaucrats and politicians scramble to use our overstock of professional "human-rights" lawyers, academics and lobbies -- folk often friendly to everyone's interests but our own? If British and American experience is a guide, radical Islamists and their apologists will also be in the employment line. Meanwhile, in adding agencies to agencies, what about turf battles? The more organizations, the more turf to covet. Recall the ball-dropping, file-deleting confusion preceding the Air India catastrophe. Would allies cut off the 80 per cent of our foreign intelligence that comes from them, fearing too many unknown cooks stirring Canada's review broth? What about derivative talk about special parliamentary committees modelled on U.S. "oversight" approaches? In blessing the retroactive "review" model rather than the real-time and more-intrusive oversight stratagem, Judge O'Connor wisely jettisoned a loser of an accountability option. Congressional oversight committees notoriously show the political animal's primal urge to trade security leaks for media coverage and advantage in shaping security agendas. This, at the cost of public safety. What about the wallet? After two-and-a-half years of thrilling to clever ideas, two bright commission counsels at the inquiry's last press conference seemed flummoxed by a mundane working-class question: How much will all this cost? No one expected tallies of the proposals' costs to unclever things like MRIs, schools or even our counterterrorism budget. But whenever you take your entire intelligence system for overhaul at the accountability garage, a ballpark estimate is nice. Let's hope the government and senior intelligence advisers think out these implementation issues before seeking easy applause through uncritical acceptance of Judge O'Connor's report. After all, in post-Arar Canada, everyone wants to be on the side of the accountability angels, and a minority government will be tempted, too. One way for politicians and others to get there is to make a show of piling on review measures, mechanisms, policies and procedures whose unintended effect might be to hamstring our protectors when operational efficiency is most needed. Indeed, aspects of the Arar commission's compendious process warn that accountability might become its own reward -- and self-perpetuating industry. Dreams of sinecures and playing in the exciting intelligence leagues light up the eyes of ambitious lawyers, law professors, spy academics and other instant "intelligence experts" who, only six years ago, were still denying the imminence of mega-terror, and couldn't tell al-Qaeda from Alka-Seltzer. So slow down. Let's move carefully, and not stumble into this morass. Otherwise, the only thing Canadians and their security community will lack will be security. And isn't that how we arrived at 9/11 in the first place? David Harris is a lawyer, senior fellow for national security at the Canadian Coalition for Democracies (CCD), and former Canadian Security and Intelligence Service chief of strategic planning. He is counsel to the CCD, which is intervening in the Air India Inquiry. © The Ottawa Citizen 2006 Copyright © 2006 CanWest Interactive, a division of CanWest MediaWorks Publications, Inc. . All rights reserved. =0)document.write(unescape('%3C')+'\!-'+'-') //-->

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Re: More bureaucracy or more security? - CCD's Al Gordon on AM940 Last Angry Man 22:17:31 2006/12/20 (0)

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