Throughout the day there were four supporters who attended this hearing. The witness who was ‘qualified’ yesterday as an expert witness was Professer Stéphane Leman-Langlois PHD, “Canada Research Chair in Surveillance and the Social Construction of Risk” of Laval University, Quebec City. Information on seven books he has written in areas of Criminology can be found (in French or English) at: http://www.cicc.umontreal.ca/recherche/chercheurs_reguliers/stephane_leman_langlois/stephane_leman_langlois.html
The essence of Professor Leman-Langlois’ testimony was his answers to examination questions posed by Public Counsel Yavar Hameed on the report Prof. Leman-Langlois wrote about the “Public Summary of a Threat Assessment” 2 November 2011, Produced by the Canadian Security Intelligence
Service on the Activities of Mr. Mohammed Zeki Mahjoub, and then a cross examination by Ministers’ Counsel ( I didn’t get his name)
Past witnesses for Mr. Mahjoub such as Professor Wesley Wark, Canadian expert on Security and Intelligene and Professor Fawaz A. Gerges of the London School of Economics and Middle East expert, have both testified that they consider Mr. Mahjoub to be a non-threat to Canada or any other country. However the following testimony contained perhaps the most powerful reasons I have heard yet, from the point of view of the most up-to-date criminology science, to release Mr. Mahjoub from all of his conditions.
Since I missed the first part of the testimony I am going to copy portions of the introduction of Professor Leman-Langlois’ report which covers some of what I missed:
Introduction:
‘Two separate questions -
- First, does the Threat Assessment include facts that may be of use in an evaluation of risk?
- Second, and more importantly, what do those facts, and the offered ‘interpretations’, allow us to conclude regarding the risk presented by Mr. Mahjoub?
- as is the case with any intelligence document, the facts presented have been interpreted, given meaning,
and made to fit together in a way consistent with the original interpretation by “filling the gaps” or
“connecting the dots” of mostly incomplete data.
- most claims made in the documents are qualified by the use of phrases such as “is believed to” or “may have.”
- the documents offer few hard facts pertaining to Mr. Mahjoub’s activities.
- many passages are extremely vague, to the point of offering nearly unfalsifiable statements. (For instance, a key claim made against Mr. Mahjoub, that he has not renounced his radical beliefs, is expressed in such a way that to oppose it one must attempt to prove a negative, a classic error in logic.)
- I have taken the facts in the reports at face value. Whether or not new, secret or exogenous information exists, known or unknown to me, I look at the reports as all the information deemed pertinent to Mr. Mahjoub’s case, as selected by the producers of the reports.
- On the second aspect, I have tried to approach the matter of the evaluation of risk in two ways.
- One is quite traditional: judging only from the facts presented that I have deemed to be
likely, on the whole the risk appears to be as low as possibly imaginable.
- The other is a thought experiment which consists in assuming that all the facts submitted in the reports are verified and have been properly interpreted. Even with such an evaluation, based on all merely possible facts, the only logical conclusion is that the risk is still not significant.
Two more general notes are in order before moving on to the details of the “Threat Assessment.”
- First, the point most strongly underlined in the document is the contacts Mr Mahjoub is purported to have had with other persons identified as members of terrorist listed entities.
- In keeping with my “thought experiment” approach explained above, thus assuming that all these contacts are genuine and that all persons deemed to be radicals were indeed radicals (there is no information showing that they still are), such associations are at the most what I would call a “network of subversives.” There are many reasons subversives, especially former subversives, might contact one another, besides subversion and plotting subversive acts.
- By contrast, the “subversive network” described in the Threat Assessment lacks a central element: a subversive network is a group of persons currently involved in subversion. Yet the Threat
Assessment submits no clue regarding the reasons why members of the purported network were
communicating.
- For stronger contrast yet, one might add that the subversion identified in the Threat Assessment is against the Egyptian regime, which both
- 1) was widely known to be a totalitarian, repressive government, opposed by most of its citizens and
- 2) was toppled recently.
- In short, if Mr. Mahjoub was ever truly a subversive, the target of his subversion no longer exists.
- Finally, one must ponder the strength of all claims made from decade-old, partial information about present and future probability.
- Many things change in a decade.
- This leads us to a few basic difficulties inherent to any attempt to evaluate individual risk or ‘dangerousness’.
- In criminology and in the thousands of routine criminological evaluations submitted to Canadian courts and Parole Boards every month, two basic means are used to evaluate the risk represented by offenders.
- First is actuarial and calculates individual risk based on offender categories identified by factors such as the type of crime committed, age, gender, schooling, job history, psychological characteristics, social context, criminal history, etc. This actuarial categorization rests on statistical analysis and large samples, and is therefore out of reach for crimes related to terrorism which, fortunately, continue to be extremely rare.
- Second is the clinical evaluation of individual cases. By and large, criminologists who use even the most rigorous methods of qualitative risk assessment are fully aware that their conclusions amount to a balance of probability.
- Certainty is known to be out of reach.
- What is certain, however, is that the facts laid out and used in the evaluation, whether they are meant to inform us about the individual’s biography, state of mind, future plans, present activities etc. must be complete, verified and, preferably, accepted by the individual being evaluated. Short of that, criminologists would be accused of guessing.’
During the examination, Professor Leman-Langlois made other statements to support his thesis that Mr. Mahjoub does not constitute a threat to Canada and that the CSIS Threat Assessment has no validity when examined throught the scientific lens of modern Criminology theory.
Some of these are: “people change over time – M. in his twenties is not the same person he is now; conclusions from 20 years ago are completely invalid now; old (criminal or terror networks no longer exist); there is little new information (on Mr. Mahjoub) since the year 2000; CSIS’ evaluation is static – they need to evaluate a suspect (contacts and content of those contacts) every year or more often; on a graph or matrix of risk assessment – probability of doing something vs. consequences (low to severe), Mr. Mahjoub cannot even be plotted on the matrix; M.s’ threat to Canada is about the same as for the average Canadian (example used is to ask a person what laws they have broken this year – jaywalking, speeding, cheating etc.); the connecting of the dots mentioned above requires the imagination of the analyst to fill in the gaps – might as well go all the way and use complete imagination; it is impossible that M. has taken an active current part in any previous Egyptian group he is alleged to have been a member of while he has been detained in Canada for eleven years – there is no connection at all – there is nothing to be restarted if M. is set free; terror networks are dark networks (little known about) with members who don’t know of the activities of other members – therefore one cannot impute a connection to the activities of others; there are many reasons – political, family, personal - to belong to or sympathize with a group or network; the CSIS Threat Assessment has no internal logic, chronology is disregarded, it makes no sense at all; this CSIS T. A. if evaluated in a Criminology class would receive a mark of zero; the first diagnosis of terrorist activity keeps colouring the present, (with no new facts presented); CSIS T.A. asserts that incarceration of M. has mitigated his threat – is false - because they didn’t measure his threat at the beginning – they have no baseline, therefore they have no idea how incarceration has affected his threat – in fact he was free in Canada for four years, from 1996 to 2000 so apparently did not constitute a threat; observations of contacts with others by itself without knowing the content of the contact is meaningless – eg. M. spent an extra half hour at Mosque, but no one knows what he was doing – imputed by CSIS as dangerous activity when it may have been harmless ssocializing.
The cross examination by Ministers’ Counsel disputed these statements of Professor Leman-Langlois by saying that anyone who is alleged to have once had contacts with Egyptian anti-government groups, must still be a threat to Canada.
There are still two days of hearings to wrap up this ‘Detention Review’ – Monday and Tuesday, December 19 and 21. Monday’s hearing begins at 10 am at Federal Court, 180 Queen st. W., 6th floor.
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