The terror of limbo

>> One year after the Supreme Court declared security certificates unconstitutional, Moroccan-born al-Qaeda suspect Adil Charkaoui longs for a return to normal life. But as Parliament plans to vote on a new version of the law that jailed him for 21 months, his future remains as uncertain as ever

CONDITIONS “WORSE THAN JAIL”: Charkaoui

by CHRISTOPHER HAZOU

On February 18, 2005, Adil Charkaoui walked out of Rivières-des-Prairies detention centre almost two years after he was arrested under a security certificate and accused of being an al-Qaeda sleeper agent.

“I was released but I’m not free. I have this bracelet of shame,” he says, lifting his pant leg to reveal a thick black GPS monitor strapped to his right ankle.

He’s just arrived at the offices of QPIRG McGill. He looks tired and restless as he sits on a couch in a small room, slightly bigger than the cell where he spent 21 months, he tells me.

He has a long list of court-ordered conditions to abide by if he wants to stay out of jail. When he leaves home, he must be accompanied by one of three relatives authorized by the court. He has a curfew. He cannot leave the island of Montreal. He can’t associate with anyone who has a criminal record. He is prohibited from using the Internet, and cannot use any phones or computers except the ones in his house, which are monitored. And he must allow police access to his home at any time, without a warrant.

“It’s worse than jail,” he says bitterly. “In jail, you’re free. With the conditions, it’s not normal. It puts psychological pressure on you every day.”

Charkaoui’s case, and those of five other men currently under security certificates, has raised troubling questions about government secrecy, due process, the rights of non-citizens and the validity of evidence obtained under torture or duress.

The government claims he’s a deadly terrorist, patiently laying in wait. He and his supporters argue he’s the innocent victim of a draconian legal regime and overzealous security establishment. Shrouded in secrecy and unsubstantiated allegations, Charkaoui’s story offers more questions than answers.

“The American dream,but in French”

Born in Morocco in 1973, Charkaoui immigrated to Canada in 1995 with his parents and sister. They settled in Montreal, where the family opened a small pizzeria and he began a bachelor of education at the Université de Montréal. “For me, Canada was the American dream, but in French,” says the 34-year-old French teacher.

He married a Moroccan woman, and in 1999, they set off for a visit to their country of birth along with Charkaoui’s mother. At the airport in Dorval, they were briefly detained and searched by the RCMP. He says that, much to his surprise, he was told that he was on a terrorist watch list and warned against boarding his flight.

They decided to continue on to Morocco, where they were stopped and searched again at the airport before being allowed to go. “In Morocco, they followed me everywhere,” he says.

On the journey back to Canada, armed FBI agents boarded their plane while on a stopover at New York’s JFK airport. He was handcuffed at gunpoint and taken for interrogation along with his wife. “They gave me a pen and paper and told me to put the names of all the young Muslims in Montreal that I knew that prayed at mosques,” he says.

He was told that if he didn’t cooperate, he would “never see the sun again,” and that under U.S. immigration law, he could be detained indefinitely—a portent of things to come. However, the Americans eventually said they had no evidence against him, and that his problem “was with Ottawa.” He and his wife were then set free “after several hours,” he says, and put on a small plane back to Canada.

Arriving in Montreal, he contacted an RCMP officer who had given him his card at the airport prior to leaving. “I met with the RCMP guy here at a café,” says Charkaoui. “He told me, ‘Look, you are young, you are Muslim, you have many contacts in the mosque. You play soccer with them, you pray with them.’”

Charges without evidence

Two weeks later, he received a call requesting that he come down to the Citizenship and Immigration Canada office on St-Antoine to discuss his application for citizenship. He was met by agents from CSIS who told him they were conducting a “security interview.”

“I met with them one or two times at the immigration building, which I had no problem with,” he says. “But then they asked me to meet with them at coffee shops like Tim Hortons.”

He says CSIS tried to recruit him as an informer to spy on Montreal’s Arab and Muslim communities, promising him Canadian citizenship in return. He refused to collaborate, he says, because he felt they were unfairly targeting Arabs and Muslims. Nevertheless, he agreed to keep meeting with them. After the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, he says they became “more aggressive” and, in early 2002, he was given an ultimatum to cooperate. Again, he refused.

A few months later, he says he received a final visit from CSIS agents, threatening him and claiming that Ahmed Ressam, the so-called “Millennium Bomber,” and al-Qaeda suspect Abu Zubaydah, who is imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay, had incriminated him. “I told them, ‘I don’t want to see you, I don’t want to meet with you anymore.’”

Almost a year passed. Then, on May 21, 2003, Charkaoui was stopped by police while driving to school and arrested. At the time, his pregnant wife was in a wheelchair, recovering from a car accident. He was imprisoned in Rivières-des-Prairies and held there for the next 21 months.

Charkaoui is reluctant to talk about his time in detention. He was housed with the general population at RDP, amid violent offenders and other security detainees.

“They told me, ‘We have grounds to believe that you were, you are, or you will be, a danger to national security. We have grounds to believe that you were, or you are, a member of al-Qaeda. We have grounds to believe that you did, or you are doing, or you will do, terrorism’,” he says. “They don’t need to prove anything. They just have to make some doubts about you, and you lose your status and they deport you.”

FACING A TRIAL?
Charkaoui outside the Supreme Court, Feb. 1

Accusations all around

The Coalition Justice for Adil Charkaoui was formed the week of his arrest. Mary Foster was at its first meeting and is one of Charkaoui’s most dedicated supporters. “I was shocked by the fact that someone could be arrested under these vague suspicions,” she says.

Wary of journalists only interested in sensational headlines, Foster becomes exasperated when asked about the accusations made against Charkaoui. She admonishes me that people are supposed to be presumed innocent until proven otherwise.

“Why has the government not come up with a precise charge?” she asks. “Why has the government been unable, after all these years and of this public outcry, to bring a case to court against him?”

In the fall of 2004, Le Devoir published an open letter from Charkaoui protesting his innocence and challenging the government to charge him in court if it had evidence to the contrary. Evoking Émile Zola and the infamous Dreyfus Affair, the former French literature student titled his plea “J’accuse.”

Following a growing campaign of public pressure and a successful polygraph test, Charkaoui was finally released on bail in February 2005. At the hearing, CSIS admitted that its agents had destroyed records of their interviews with Charkaoui, saving only summaries.

“There was a lot of [public] pressure,” he says. “It took many hard working activists, my family and my lawyers to make the public understand that it’s [all] a big mistake.”

Charkaoui returned to school, completing his master’s in education and starting his Ph.D. He now has three children, including a son born while he was in RDP and a second daughter born nine months after his release. He teaches at a school whose name he is barred from revealing, lest his students or coworkers be exposed to harm. Work is the only place he doesn’t need a chaperone, but two of his supervisors are entrusted with “reporting” on his behaviour.

“Perhaps you’d say I have a normal life,” he says, “but it’s not normal.”

Freedom, of a kind

In a landmark decision handed down in February 2007, the Supreme Court of Canada ruled in favour of a challenge by Charkaoui and three others under security certificates, deeming parts of the previous security certificate law unconstitutional. The judgment was suspended for one year to allow the government to make amendments.

Despite his legal victories, Charkaoui’s troubles weren’t over. In June, someone leaked a classified document to La Presse purportedly describing conversations in which he discussed attacks similar to the ones of Sept. 11. It also claimed he had visited al-Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan. He denied both accusations.

Then in August, it was revealed in Federal Court that Ahmed Ressam had withdrawn his allegations against Charkaoui and Ahcene Zemiri, another Montrealer imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay. Over a period of four years, Ressam had incriminated more than 100 people in exchange for a lenient sentence. The cases of at least two others named by Ressam were subsequently dropped by American authorities.

Nevertheless, this past December, CSIS announced that it had once again “found” summaries of interviews—more than six years after they were allegedly conducted—supposedly describing how Charkaoui was providing information about Islamic extremists and their recruitment efforts in Montreal. Noticeably absent, however, was anything directly damning of Charkaoui himself. He categorically denied being an informant. His supporters complain that CSIS has a habit of suddenly discovering new evidence or leaking classified information just before he’s due to appear in court.

Reached for comment, CSIS directed queries to the Department of Public Safety. Minister Stockwell Day declined to discuss Charkaoui’s case, but in an e-mail exchange, the department’s director of communications, Mélisa Leclerc, defended security certificates, writing that “individuals subject to security certificates are free to leave Canada at any time and return to their country of origin.”

But it’s not that simple. A “pre-removal risk assessment” carried out by Citizenship and Immigration Canada in August 2003 concluded that Charkaoui would face a “probability of torture, risk to life, and [the] risk of being subject to cruel and unusual punishment” if he returned to Morocco.

Asking for an inquiry

Charkaoui’s lawyers were in front of the Supreme Court again last week, arguing for a dismissal of his case. On Feb. 23, his certificate will expire unless Parliament passes the government’s new security certificate law, Bill C-3. If C-3 is made into law as expected (it passed the House of Commons’ third and final reading this week, and awaits Senate confirmation), Charkaoui may face a secret trial with a “special advocate” appointed by the court. Or he may not.

“There are a lot of unknowns,” says Johanne Doyon, one of Charkaoui’s lawyers. “We don’t know if C-3 will be adopted. We don’t know if there will be a new certificate against him. Anything’s possible. There could be a trial. There could be no trial. There could be a stay of proceedings.”

Unable to challenge the secret evidence the government claims to have against him, and with suspicion still lingering, Charkaoui is optimistic, despite all he’s been through. “I have a very strong feeling that they will not send another security certificate,” he says, adding that he wants a commission of inquiry into his case, like Maher Arar had.

“They have to apologize and they have to clear my name,” he says. “I know it’s not going to be easy, but we are going to fight for it.”