Journalists are maggots.
That’s besieged Toronto mayor Rob Ford’s rather predictable view of the fourth estate. (He has since apologized.) I’m not wounded by his uncharitable remark. Maggots are, by their nature, adept at burrowing into dark, dank spaces to satiate their appetites. And, in a way, I have spent much of my working life digging into often murky places too. But rather than mining for food, I’ve dug for information.
Many of my excavations have dealt with Canada’s spy service, CSIS, its sister intelligence agencies, and the so-called oversight bodies, including the Security Intelligence Review Committee (SIRC) that are nominally tasked with keeping an eye on this nation’s spooks.
Try as I might to escape them, secrets and spies tend to follow me like a shadow in the late-day sun. During the past few days, events have, despite my reticence, inexorably drawn my attention back to this covert world.
First, news broke on Monday that Arthur Porter, the former SIRC chair, was arrested with his wife in Panama. Porter, you may recall, resigned the part-time job in November 2011 after it was revealed he had a dubious financial relationship with a loquacious Israeli arms dealer and self-professed spy.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper, in yet another appointment gone embarrassingly awry, had named the prominent Montreal oncologist to the sensitive post, as well as to the Privy Council, in September 2008. It turns out, courtesy of The Canadian Press’s Jim Bronskill — another muckraking maggot (I’m sorry, I mean reporter) — that Harper’s office did little if any vetting of Porter despite the fact that he theoretically enjoyed unfettered access to state secrets. The oops excuse understates the potential security faux pas this represented.
Indeed, the spectre of a serious security breach became exponentially worse for Harper and company when, this past February, Quebec’s anti-corruption police issued an arrest warrant for Porter on charges of fraud, conspiracy, breach of trust, taking secret commissions and money laundering stemming from a probe into a multi-million-dollar contract to build the new super hospital in Montreal. (By this time, Porter had left for the Bahamas.)
When asked about police allegations that the former SIRC chair was a crook, Harper and his hand-picked new top guy at SIRC, former Conservative cabinet minister, Chuck Strahl, dismissed it all as much ado about nothing. No need to fret, they insisted, because the slew of charges Porter faces didn’t have anything do with his time at SIRC. How’s that for a limp bit of reassurance, particularly coming as it does from the hard-nosed party of law and order?
Harper and Strahl have kept to this “nothing-to-see-here, move along” line despite the fact that Porter is the first SIRC chair to resign; to become a wanted man; to be charged with indictable offences, and, finally to be arrested. It is a vapid response — to borrow a shopworn phrase often employed by the powers-that-be — on a matter of national security.
At present, beyond a handful of persistent scribes and the occasional politician during Question Period, there is no one capable of even attempting to hold Harper, Strahl, et al to meaningful account on this score. This means, of course, that no one has been or will be held to account over the Porter affair.
Beyond my cynicism, why am I convinced of this? I have written so many words in so many places about the need for professional, full-time, and adequately funded oversight of Canada’s security-intelligence apparatus that I’m nearing the point when I will retire from making the same reasonable plea again.
The last person in an official capacity who kept watch over our powerful spies with some admirable measure of tenacity and effectiveness was Eva Plunkett, the former inspector-general over CSIS. Plunkett, like Maurice Archdeacon and notably David Peel before her, was determined to do her job well. What reward did she receive from the Harper government for her good work? She retired a few months before her office was shuttered in April 2012.
It’s a shame, because I’m certain that Plunkett would also have probed, without fear or favour, recent reports that CSIS withheld from the RCMP vital information it had apparently gathered about recently convicted Canadian spy, Jeffrey Delisle. It reportedly fell to the FBI, not CSIS, to alert the Mounties to suspicions that Delisle was selling secrets to the Russians.
The possible consequence of this silence was that CSIS permitted Delisle to continue his treachery without bothering to tip off the Mounties for an unnecessarily long time. This is what still constitutes co-operation between our spooks and police not only in the aftermath of 9/11, but more importantly after the lethal Air India debacle.
Despite the carefully parsed non-denial denials about the news report by our hear-no-evil, see-no-evil Public Safety Minister Vic Toews, relations between CSIS and the RCMP remain as frigid as ever. The old enmities have not been extinguished. The silos remain. The turf is still jealously protected. And what is the cost of this institutional hubris and intransigence and who will have to explain why this remains unacceptably so?
Since Plunkett isn’t around, it will be left to my fellow maggots in the press to try to decipher answers to these questions. Meanwhile, Harper, Toews, CSIS, SIRC and Strahl will, no doubt, instruct us to quietly run along.
Original Article
Source: ottawacitizen.com
Author: Andrew Mitrovica
That’s besieged Toronto mayor Rob Ford’s rather predictable view of the fourth estate. (He has since apologized.) I’m not wounded by his uncharitable remark. Maggots are, by their nature, adept at burrowing into dark, dank spaces to satiate their appetites. And, in a way, I have spent much of my working life digging into often murky places too. But rather than mining for food, I’ve dug for information.
Many of my excavations have dealt with Canada’s spy service, CSIS, its sister intelligence agencies, and the so-called oversight bodies, including the Security Intelligence Review Committee (SIRC) that are nominally tasked with keeping an eye on this nation’s spooks.
Try as I might to escape them, secrets and spies tend to follow me like a shadow in the late-day sun. During the past few days, events have, despite my reticence, inexorably drawn my attention back to this covert world.
First, news broke on Monday that Arthur Porter, the former SIRC chair, was arrested with his wife in Panama. Porter, you may recall, resigned the part-time job in November 2011 after it was revealed he had a dubious financial relationship with a loquacious Israeli arms dealer and self-professed spy.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper, in yet another appointment gone embarrassingly awry, had named the prominent Montreal oncologist to the sensitive post, as well as to the Privy Council, in September 2008. It turns out, courtesy of The Canadian Press’s Jim Bronskill — another muckraking maggot (I’m sorry, I mean reporter) — that Harper’s office did little if any vetting of Porter despite the fact that he theoretically enjoyed unfettered access to state secrets. The oops excuse understates the potential security faux pas this represented.
Indeed, the spectre of a serious security breach became exponentially worse for Harper and company when, this past February, Quebec’s anti-corruption police issued an arrest warrant for Porter on charges of fraud, conspiracy, breach of trust, taking secret commissions and money laundering stemming from a probe into a multi-million-dollar contract to build the new super hospital in Montreal. (By this time, Porter had left for the Bahamas.)
When asked about police allegations that the former SIRC chair was a crook, Harper and his hand-picked new top guy at SIRC, former Conservative cabinet minister, Chuck Strahl, dismissed it all as much ado about nothing. No need to fret, they insisted, because the slew of charges Porter faces didn’t have anything do with his time at SIRC. How’s that for a limp bit of reassurance, particularly coming as it does from the hard-nosed party of law and order?
Harper and Strahl have kept to this “nothing-to-see-here, move along” line despite the fact that Porter is the first SIRC chair to resign; to become a wanted man; to be charged with indictable offences, and, finally to be arrested. It is a vapid response — to borrow a shopworn phrase often employed by the powers-that-be — on a matter of national security.
At present, beyond a handful of persistent scribes and the occasional politician during Question Period, there is no one capable of even attempting to hold Harper, Strahl, et al to meaningful account on this score. This means, of course, that no one has been or will be held to account over the Porter affair.
Beyond my cynicism, why am I convinced of this? I have written so many words in so many places about the need for professional, full-time, and adequately funded oversight of Canada’s security-intelligence apparatus that I’m nearing the point when I will retire from making the same reasonable plea again.
The last person in an official capacity who kept watch over our powerful spies with some admirable measure of tenacity and effectiveness was Eva Plunkett, the former inspector-general over CSIS. Plunkett, like Maurice Archdeacon and notably David Peel before her, was determined to do her job well. What reward did she receive from the Harper government for her good work? She retired a few months before her office was shuttered in April 2012.
It’s a shame, because I’m certain that Plunkett would also have probed, without fear or favour, recent reports that CSIS withheld from the RCMP vital information it had apparently gathered about recently convicted Canadian spy, Jeffrey Delisle. It reportedly fell to the FBI, not CSIS, to alert the Mounties to suspicions that Delisle was selling secrets to the Russians.
The possible consequence of this silence was that CSIS permitted Delisle to continue his treachery without bothering to tip off the Mounties for an unnecessarily long time. This is what still constitutes co-operation between our spooks and police not only in the aftermath of 9/11, but more importantly after the lethal Air India debacle.
Despite the carefully parsed non-denial denials about the news report by our hear-no-evil, see-no-evil Public Safety Minister Vic Toews, relations between CSIS and the RCMP remain as frigid as ever. The old enmities have not been extinguished. The silos remain. The turf is still jealously protected. And what is the cost of this institutional hubris and intransigence and who will have to explain why this remains unacceptably so?
Since Plunkett isn’t around, it will be left to my fellow maggots in the press to try to decipher answers to these questions. Meanwhile, Harper, Toews, CSIS, SIRC and Strahl will, no doubt, instruct us to quietly run along.
Source: ottawacitizen.com
Author: Andrew Mitrovica
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