Anna Toronova's List: Research for Law ISP

• National Security Criminal Investigations provides a national program to detect, prevent and disrupt terrorist criminal activities and other threats to Canada's national security.

• On a stopover in New York as he was returning to Canada from a vacation in Tunisia in September 2002, U.S. officials detained Arar, claiming he has links to al-Qaeda, and deported him to Syria, even though he was carrying a Canadian passport.
• When Arar returned to Canada more than a year later, he said he had been tortured during his incarceration and accused American officials of sending him to Syria knowing that they practise torture.

• Security of Information Act — a revamped version of the old Official Secrets Act) not even journalists are exempt.
• ndeed, so dysfunctional is the relationship between the RCMP and its complaints commission that commission head Shirley Heafey has taken the extraordinary step of asking a federal court to force the Mounties to give her the information she wants.
• Accounts from the ongoing Vancouver trial of two men charged in the 1985 Air-India bombing, for example, read in places like malevolent episodes of the Keystone Kops
• For their part, the Mounties have been forced to acknowledge that they repeatedly failed to keep notes and tape recordings of interviews with a key prosecution witness.
• These divisions date to the establishment of CSIS in 1984 after the royal commission into so-called RCMP dirty tricks blasted the Mounties and recommended that they get out of the spy business.

  To many Mounties, the new civilian agency was a bitter affront. To many CSIS agents, a number of them ex-Mounties, the paramilitary RCMP was a relic from another time.
• Indeed, the RCMP never really accepted the notion that it abandon the national security field. Shortly after they were forced to disband their old security service, the Mounties quietly created a replacement — a new national security intelligence section working with new regional RCMP national security investigation sections.
• Their entrée was the Liberal government's sweeping anti-terrorism bill, one that dramatically expanded the notion of terrorism as a Criminal Code offence — and, therefore, expanded the territory of the federal police force charged with enforcing this code.
• "When we added terrorist-related offences to the Criminal Code, the gap between security intelligence and criminal intelligence narrowed. As a result, the gap between the mandate of the RCMP and that of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service narrowed as well."

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• Major's inquiry report into the bombings, which he refers to as the "worst mass murder in Canadian history," recommends sweeping changes to Canada's air security system
• Air India Flight 182 blew up over the Atlantic Ocean near Ireland on June 23, 1985, killing all 329 people aboard, 280 of them Canadians.
• n one of its key recommendations, Major's report calls for a powerful national security czar with direct access to the prime minister to sort out turf wars between the RCMP and CSIS.
• The ramped-up powers would include overseeing communication between agencies and settling disputes; supervising agencies and controlling distribution of intelligence; and providing oversight to the government on the effectiveness of national security strategies.

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• he Ontario Court of Appeal today released its decision to increase Mohammad Momin Khawaja''s sentence to life imprisonment for his role in a terrorist bomb plot.

   

  The Court concluded that the trial judge erred by imposing a 10.5 year sentence in addition to the four and a half years served in pre-trial custody.

• • Best Site for RCMP's own inferences on its Terrorism Prevention Program
• The role of the RCMP is to understand, detect, disrupt/prevent and investigate that threat.
• investigative successes are largely determined by our flexibility, leadership and collaboration with foreign and domestic law enforcement partners
• maintaining a nation-wide integrated National Security Program; by continuously improving our information sharing practices with other federal agencies and partners consistent with current policies; by developing outreach and education strategies that will lead to the engagement of stakeholders across the country and assist Canadians in avoiding being victimized; and, by ensuring the situational awareness of the RCMP Senior Executive and government on the status of the threat environment.

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