Abstract
Reviewed by: Craig Forcese (craig.forcese@uottawa.ca ), University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada
Law students at the University of Ottawa participate periodically in an intensive national security crisis simulation at the Georgetown law school in Washington, DC. Every year, at least one student team follows an unexpected path. A bit of “noise” in the data stream, placed into the storyline as “colour,” becomes a fixation. The fixation becomes an obsession. The obsession leads to terrible mistakes.
There is a phrase that describes this phenomenon: cognitive bias. Students anchor on a single piece of information and overestimate its importance because it resembles some recent notorious event. New information is construed through the lens of a now baked-in supposition, creating conformation bias. Group-think among the small group precipitates a vicious circle. And so, within hours, an innocuous report during the simulation about “two men drinking coffee in Lahore” is passed between student groups like a hot potato, and culminates in a drone strike.
In Detained: Islamic Fundamentalist Extremism and the War on Terror in Canada, Daniel Livermore, a former director general of security and intelligence in Canada’s foreign affairs department, tells the story of real-life cognitive bias in Canada’s security and intelligence services after 9/11. In this exacting work, he retraces the sorry history of Canadians maltreated in foreign hands, covered in Canadian fingerprints.
This terrain has also been covered by the reports of the 2006 Arar and 2008 Iacobucci commissions. 1 And Canada’s conduct has spilled into court in assorted constitutional, administrative, and civil litigation proceedings. Livermore urges, however, that the story has not been fully told—courts decide only on the facts before them, and commissions of inquiry are fettered by their terms of reference. The broader picture—and especially the international dimension of the post-9/11 events—has remained untold. Livermore sets out to correct this omission.
The context for the first part of his story is now well-known: the presence of Islamist extremists in Canada in the 1990s fixated on foreign conflicts; the plotting (and fortuitous apprehension by an alert US border guard) of the “Millennium Bomber”; and the activities of Ahmed Said Khadr (father of the notorious Khadr family) in Pakistan and Afghanistan. In telling the tales of these and other plotters—suspected and real—Livermore notes the weaknesses afflicting Canada’s security and intelligence community. No one was in charge; coordination from the government’s centre in the Privy Council was modest. Ministerial oversight and independent review of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) were weak. The government, concludes Livermore, was slow to grasp the challenge presented by Islamist extremism in the 1990s, seeing no direct threat to Canada.
Having developed no muscle memory, Canada’s security and intelligence community was poorly prepared for the aftermath of 9/11. The Americans embarked on their first “forever wars” in Afghanistan, with the active support of Canada and other close allies. And soon the United States opened its detention facility in Guantanamo Bay and its “dark sites” in receptive foreign jurisdictions. It pursued a policy of extraordinary renditions—removing people to countries likely to interrogate using extreme methods—and embarked on its own practice of torture.
Canadian agencies were swept along, often haplessly. The American intelligence community enjoyed close relations with Canada, but did not always hold Canadian agencies in high regard. CSIS officials, the US Central Intelligence Agency concluded, “were prone to exaggerating their own capabilities and knew next to nothing about the world outside of Canada” (87). And the Americans regarded the RCMP as “slow and disorganized, less than a sum of its parts, with few effective international contacts beyond the usual obvious Western partners” (87).
In cooperating with the Americans after 9/11, the Canadian agencies did not understand “US operations and practices or weigh the appropriateness and propriety of drawing boundaries around some form of continuing cooperation with US agencies” (122). And the RCMP and CSIS made “minimal investments in training, expertise, and linguistic competencies” (146). These shortcomings “resulted in the exchange of a considerable amount of inaccurate, inflammatory, contextually flawed, or ill-assessed information by Canadian agencies” to their American and other foreign counterparts (146). Canadian services remained, moreover, siloed, “hoarding information and keeping their own initiatives under wraps” (147).
These failings produced the failures Livermore documents in the second part of his book. Here, he tells the stories of five Canadian men swept up in the “war on terror” and victimized by muddled Canadian anti-terrorism: Ahmad Abou El-Maati, Abdullah Almalki, and Maher Arar (all detained and maltreated in Middle Eastern prisons); Abdullah Khadr (the older brother of Omar Khadr, detained in Pakistan, and then, upon return to Canada, sought by the United States in a failed extradition); and Abousfian Abdelrazik (detained and possibly maltreated in Sudan, and afterwards effectively banished by the Canadian government until intervention by the Federal Court).
Livermore’s conclusions are damning. After 9/11, the RCMP and CSIS sought “privileged positions as key US allies” and, under pressure to stop feared terrorist attacks, “moved well past the limits of their experience and competence, into complicated international issues for which they had few of the requisite skills and knowledge” (251). Moreover, after 9/11, “they drew simplistic and erroneous conclusions about Canadians and others in Canada,” and “[t]heir investigations were non-existent or incomplete, based on suppositions or theories” (252). Livermore’s litany of shortcomings includes: “inexperienced officers with little or no training; poor supervision; unclear ground rules; inadequate reporting to senior management or the ministerial level; poor analytical and drafting skills; incomplete investigations; lack of cooperation with others; inadequate protocols on information sharing; non-existent policies on interrogations abroad, and so forth” (254). The consequences were costly, both in human terms and as measured by the millions of dollars in compensation paid to the targets of bungled anti-terrorism investigations.
The services might resist Livermore’s conclusions. They might assert that, had we access to the secret information in their possession, we would reach different views. They would also urge that some lessons were learned—the RCMP and CSIS implemented new policies after the 2006 Arar commission of inquiry. And the Justin Trudeau government has issued strong ministerial directions on information-sharing with human-rights-abusing states. Still, pendulums swing, and institutional knowledge is a fragile thing. One might plausibly worry that the lessons of the last decade are only dimly remembered and loosely internalized, especially in resource-starved security services undergoing generational change.
This is precisely the right time, therefore, to be reminded of Canada’s post-9/11 record. The challenges Canada confronts in a newly unsettled world are considerable, and a repeat of the mistakes of the last decade would be even more costly. For this reason alone, everyone participating in security and intelligence work or discussions should read Livermore’s work. They need not agree with every conclusion. But we should all be attentive to cognitive baggage capable of daisy-chaining today’s discussion between two men in a restaurant into tomorrow’s miscarriage of justice.
Order-in-Council, P.C. 2004-0048 (5 February 2004) and Order-in-Council, P.C. 2006-1526 (11 December 2006).