Three Mahjoub supporters attended today’s hearing at Federal Court, 180 Queen St. West. Two were Amar and Noah, film-makers who are making a film about the families affected by the Security Certificate regime in Canada. See http://secrettrial5.com/
The CSIS witness known as Witness #4 was still being examined by lawyer Paul Slansky in an Ottawa courtroom with video transmission to the Toronto courtroom and with the witness concealed from view. Mr. Slansky tried his best to get the witness to admit that CSIS has routinely used evidence obtained by torture in countries like Egypt to place restrictive and invasive conditions on Mr. Mahjoub for more than eleven years. Witness #4 is the author of the latest ‘threat assessment’ of Mr. Mahjoub, written this fall and using data that goes back fifteen years. From this, CSIS recommendations are that present restrictive conditions placed on Mr. Mahjoub should not be relieved because he would still constitute a threat to Canada if he were set completely free. Mr. Slansky presented a couple of documents to the witness; one was written by former CSIS head Jim Judd in which Mr. Judd said it was very difficult to determine whether any evidence that came from foreign countries was or was not obtained by torture. The other document was a 2009 letter from then Public Safety Minister Toews to CSIS head Fadden in which Toews instructs CSIS to stop using evidence that has been obtained from torture. Then the games began with Ministers Counsel raising objections and witness #4 behaving like ‘snakes in oil’. With Mr. Slansky trying to get witness #4 to admit that the Toews letter implied that CSIS had been using ‘torture evidence’ up to then and had used at least some ‘pieces’ of this ‘torture evidence’ in their threat assessment of Mr. Mahjoub, witness #4 kept saying that CSIS always had taken ‘torture evidence’ with a grain of salt, even prior to the directive to stop using it. Mr. Slansky was doing his best in a court that seems to be unfriendly to questioning government actions via CSIS that have used doubtful, ‘torture obtained’, low threshold evidence such as ‘suspicion’ and ‘reason to believe’ – to remove the rights to a private life of an individual for more than eleven years.
The examination of witness #4 continues tomorrow – Wednesday, December 7. Please come to court to support Mr. Mahjoub at 180 Queen St. W., 6th floor (near Osgoode subway station)
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