Toronto Star Editorial: RCMP chief torturer must go

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Editorial: RCMP chief must go
Dec. 6, 2006. 01:00 AM

What did Royal Canadian Mounted Police Commissioner Giuliano Zaccardelli know about the Maher Arar fiasco and when did he know it?

After Zaccardelli's credibility-shredding flip-flop yesterday before a House of Commons committee probing his role in one of the great RCMP bungles, it is anybody's guess.

But it is clearly Prime Minister Stephen Harper's problem. After expressing "surprise and concern" at Zaccardelli's erratic performance, Harper should go the next step, seek his resignation and have an outside police force look into this affair.

Canadians also expect swift action from the Conservatives when Mr. Justice Dennis O'Connor tables his recommendations next week to place the RCMP's national security operations under closer scrutiny.

In a damning report on Sept. 18 about the Arar case, O'Connor concluded the RCMP told U.S. officials that Arar was "an Islamic extremist" based on bad information. That "very likely" led to his arrest in New York in 2002 and removal to Syria, where he was jailed and tortured.

When Zaccardelli testified before a House of Commons committee just 10 days after O'Connor released his report, the RCMP chief said he had been "personally shocked" in 2002 to learn his force had supplied "false or incorrect" data. He claimed the force "made an effort to correct that false information" before Arar was deported. And "we let Canadian officials know about that." In that story line, the RCMP knew it had erred and scrambled to make it right.

That's not how O'Connor saw it.

He found the RCMP kept federal officials in the dark about the errors. Key ministers in the Jean Chrétien and Paul Martin governments recently confirmed that finding.

Yesterday, in a bizarre about-face, Zaccardelli changed his tune.

"I made a mistake in inferring or leaving an impression that I knew information about those mistakes in 2002 when, in fact, I couldn't have known. I knew it in 2006 (after reading O'Connor's report)," he said.

The RCMP did try to correct part of the record by telling the Americans they could not link Arar to Al Qaeda and could not detain him. But they continued to regard him as a suspicious "person of interest." And they never corrected other bad data they had passed along.

All this left Mark Holland, a Liberal member of the committee, wanting to know when Zaccardelli had "perjured" himself: on Sept. 28, or yesterday. Opposition members of committee now want him fired.

Whichever story is right — and O'Connor's findings support yesterday's version — the damage is done.

If Zaccardelli did know the RCMP shared bad information on Arar in 2002, why didn't he speak up then, to clear him of alleged extremist ties?

If Zaccardelli did not know exactly how the RCMP bungled in 2002, and still didn't know until O'Connor reported four years later, what does that say about his leadership? How long does it take to sort out a mess? Why was no one held accountable?

It is all bad. Harper's reluctance to fire Zaccardelli and bring in an outside police force to probe how this file was handled is inexcusable.

O'Connor's thoughts on stronger oversight have never been more urgently needed.