Hi all:
Below is a report on two days of hearings, Tuesday Nov. 23 and Wednesday Nov. 24 from the perspective of Brydon Gombay who has been attending the hearings regularly this week.
The hearing today continued in much the same vein with Public Counsel Yavar Hameed completing the examination of Professor Wark and Ministers’ Counsel David Tyndale beginning the cross-examination. The cross-examination seemed like a game of wits with Ministers’ Counsel trying to trap Prof. Wark in the wording he had used and Prof. Wark extricating himself from these traps. The cross-examination will be completed one day next week.
The hearings recommence on Monday, November 29 at 9 am with an expert witness Lisa Given, a librarian who will testify on the ‘credibility of source documents’. It is alleged that the Ministers have not followed accepted procedures with respect to these.
Later in the week another expert witness will testify - Dr. Fawaz A. Gerges, Professor of Middle Eastern Politics and International Relations at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Some of you with ‘yahoo.com, yahoo.ca and rogers.ca domains may not have received some messages recently, apparently due to my bulk mailing. I will try smaller batches and no more messages until Monday or after.
Brydon wrote:
“The word I was forgetting was "insubstantial," which, accompanied by his frequent use of the word, "substance," may well have been deliberate on the part of Wesley Wark. He certainly made it clear that he felt much of the evidence of Mahjoub's association with people named in government documents was insubstantial, and he wished to see something more substantial. He was frank in admitting he did not speak Arabic, had not been to Afghanistan, Pakistan, Sudan, and so on - but these facts fell rather flat, I thought, since I imagine all the lawyers knew that already. Otherwise his expertise was clear, and I noticed the judge paying careful attention and taking notes about what he said. But perhaps all this was from the day before - yes, that was about his choosing to focus on public education about such matters more than on academic articles to advance his career. He made it clear that he realised academic articles reach a much smaller audience than does an op ed.
Yes, next day there was discussion of evidence available to Egyptian authorities which could well have been based on torture, At one point a lawyer was trying to pin him down on comparison "by analogy," and he was careful to say that could be plausible, but was not based on evidence. At one point he suggested it would not be possible for Mahjoub to be in Pakistan and Sudan at the same time, and that CSIS might have had conflicting intelligence about where he was. He spoke more than once about CSIS cherry-picking to make a case, putting in one part of an intercept but leaving out the parts which didn't suit them (or so I understood from the legalese he seems to use as well as do the lawyers). He was firm about saying that Jaballah should not be considered a significant "contact" of Mahjoub's, since Jaballah clearly distrusts M, and is angry at and biased against him (this seemed not to accord with an association that CSIS had attempted to make in documents which of course I have not seen, so it's supposition on my part about the import of this evidence). CSIS had not conveyed the entirety of the intercept. The US and Canada rely on Egyptian sources for information about who these people are and what they do, and extraordinary rendition is part of all this. Canadian knowledge could thus have been "polluted" by such evidence. The CIA is implicated here, with its aim to "get them off the streets," though now the Obama administration has disavowed the practice of extraordinary rendition. Still Canada is reliant on foreign intelligence based on torture, which affects the possible veracity of the intelligence [he didn't speak of the morality of torture, but that was surely implied].
There was some discussion of how the tool used by intelligence gatherers, the "threat matrix," was based in trying to make linkages and seek out what could be diagrammed associations between and amongst different actors - complex links to map group memberships, a practice started by police trying to trace memberships in criminal gangs. Here what CSIS had done was "insubstantial." The intelligence community needs to add "substance" to its list of "contacts." He then went through a list of three significant such contacts, saying that the "substance" of Mahjoub's contact was not provided, or that CSIS fails to "substantiate" the association. In one case (Al Duri?) Mahjoub remained in contact after both had left Sudan, with regard to investments Al Duri made for Mahjoub. Certain contacts - like Kahdr, were indeed a national security concern, but the question of guilt by association was raised. Once again, WW said CSIS was unable to provide "substance."
I could not swear to the accuracy of all of this in a court of law, but what I've written here is based on the notes I took, and I tried to pay close attention, though of course there was a lot about "returnees from Albania" and "vanguards of conquest" which I failed to understand, so have not mentioned here. Jean Smith and John Valleau were there too, and might be able to tell you more.”
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