The Sixth Estate

The National Post has a column by self-declared former Mossad officer Michael Ross complaining that he cannot understand how we could allow someone with dubious ties to an international lobbyist — not to mention a second job as ambassador plenipotentiary for Sierra Leone — to chair the Security Intelligence Review Committee, the small outfit which is responsible for complaining powerlessly whenever CSIS breaks the law. Ross also sounds another increasingly familiar note: that we need to get our act together so we can create a proper foreign intelligence service, like all grown-up countries have.

Now, I’m not sure why exactly Ross feels he can share the contents of the Mossad’s presumably secret watchlist in this article, but I can answer the other part of his question. I imagine that Arthur Porter was cleared for SIRC in exactly the same way that Bruce Carson was cleared for work in the Prime Minister’s Office (in that case, apparently fraud convictions and other problems don’t discount you from holding one of the highest jobs in the country). This “amateurishness” isn’t going to go away while the Harper regime is in command (and possibly not after they leave, either). What Ross calls amateurishness, they call loving one’s friends. It’s very Christian of them, really.

I can’t help wondering whether the real reason people in the intelligence community are so anxious about this isn’t that Porter was a security problem in the first place, but that the whole world found out about it thanks to some uncharacteristic derringdo from our usually placid and complacent media.

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Today’s example of a woefully uninformed journalist spouting off on a subject of crucial national importance is John Ivison, whose Monday column in the National Post is what presently passes for “balanced” commentary on what Ivison says is a renewed push by the government to transform the Canadian Security Intelligence Service into a foreign intelligence agency. By “balanced” I mean that Ivison blathers something about pros and cons, not that he provides anything in the way of intelligent and informed commentary. According to Ivison, we just need to remove one pesky piece of red tape from the CSIS Act and then Canada can have the foreign intelligence agency that a grown-up country should have.

There are two problems with this, both of which strike at the heart of Canadian democracy. I might accuse Ivison of trying to skate over them, but I don’t think he is. I think he is simply, woefully, ignorant. My reason for thinking this is that he claims we must make good reforms at CSIS to prevent another “operational failure” like Maher Arar. First of all, the Arar scandal happened at the RCMP, not at CSIS. It was their Project O Canada which betrayed the country and the values of the police force itself by handing over their database of suspected terrorists to the Americans, free of charge and without caveats.

Second, the Arar scandal was not an “operational failure.” It was actually an operational success: a suspected terrorist was captured after the Canadian and American secret police collaborated against a common enemy. He was detained, interrogated (read: tortured), and supplied information about Middle Eastern terrorist groups. The only “failure” was that the rest of us found out about it. At that point, he was released. But otherwise, that’s exactly how a security police system is supposed to work. Ask an ex-KGB officer, or an ex-Stasi one, or any North Korean or Iraqi. If you find it disturbing that a secret police service should have the power to swipe citizens off the streets and torture them, that’s because you have a more sophisticated moral sense than Ivison or his apparent sources in CSIS.

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In all the hoopla over the sham budget, the Oda contempt ruling, the budget documents contempt ruling, and Bruce Carson, on Wednesday the beginning of another historic moment in the Harper Government™’s defiance of the rule of law and the supremacy of Parliament may be skating by unnoticed. That day, the Committee on Public Security recommended that public safety minister Vic Toews also be found in contempt of Parliament for his protection of disgraced CSIS director Richard Fadden, who last year claimed that various Canadian politicians were under Chinese influence, but refused to say who, and now refuses to apologize to the people whose reputations have now been harmed.

We’re in the midst of even bigger forces at the moment, which is why this one seems minor, but I want to stress that it is not. A secret service, with the approval of the minister, suggests that certain Canadians (even politicians are Canadians, after all) have been subverted by a foreign government. He refuses to request a police investigation, suggesting the subversion is nonexistent anyways. He refuses to apologize or to provide any evidence. The government refuses to demand his resignation for information that is presumably secret and certainly damaging. In front of a Parliamentary committee, moreover, Fadden openly refused their demand that he provide evidence to support his vague accusations.

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This is a good news-bad news thing, but I thought I’d get the good news out of the way first: it seems that our government is actually cooperating on something. Unfortunately, the media completely missed the story.

Canada’s security intelligence service (CSIS) is overseen by a review agency known as the Security Intelligence Review Committee (SIRC). SIRC is charged with monitoring CSIS and investigating complaints, generally ensuring that CSIS doesn’t wander off the reservation and start criminally burning down barns in Quebec like its predecessor, the RCMP Security Service, did. SIRC has generally failed in its job, as can be seen in the general illegal expansion of CSIS into foreign intelligence abroad, and as I will discuss in my next post.

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Insufficient attention in Canada is being given to the expansion of the country’s intelligence services. The Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) more than doubled in the past decade, from $180 million in 2000 to $480 million in 2009. It is also expanding its foreign intelligence activities, in clear violation of the CSIS Act. The most obvious current example of intelligence largesse, though, is the new building being constructed for CSIS’s “partner” agency, the Communications Security Establishment. CSE’s new “Taj Mahal,” interestingly, also intersects with another critical problem: the hollowing out of government and increasing dependence on shady networks of secret contractors.

CSE doesn’t get a lot of attention in the news and has avoided scandals, unlike CSIS or its predecessor, the RCMP Security Service. This does not make it small or unproblematic, though. The organization has spent most of its history since 1945 essentially as a branch plant of American signals intelligence (the National Security Agency). The government did not acknowledge its existence until the 1970s, and it operated wholly outside Parliamentary law until an enabling act was finally passed in 2001. Befitting its low profile, its offices in Ottawa were until recently crammed into some nondescript buildings on the campus of Canada Post. That’s changed, and the new plans are for a massive new campus referred to (in public) as the Long Term Accommodation Project, or LTAP.

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