Ex-Guantanamo detainee sues Canada over 14-year detention, torture

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A former detainee of Guantanamo Bay is taking authorized motion in opposition to the Canadian authorities over its alleged position in his 14 years behind bars marked by torture and intimidation.

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Mohamedou Ould Slahi, a Mauritanian who lived in Montreal for beneath two months, filed a $35-million lawsuit Friday alleging that defective intelligence offered by Canadian authorities contributed to his detention on the U.S. offshore army jail, the place he mentioned he suffered fierce beatings, sleep deprivation and sexual assault.

A press release of declare from Slahi, whose story grew to become a bestselling memoir and Hollywood movie, states that surveillance by Canada’s spy company and police drive was fed to his American interrogators. Ultimately their “torture broke him down” and prompted a false confession a couple of plan to explode the CN Tower — a constructing he’d by no means heard of — the court docket filings state.

“Canadians want to know this can be a Canadian story,” Slahi instructed The Canadian Press in a message on social media Saturday. “With out Canada I’d by no means have been kidnapped. With out Canada I’d by no means have (been) tortured.”

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Jody Brown, certainly one of two legal professionals representing Slahi, described his shopper’s saga as the result of a “vicious cycle” of flawed intelligence and so-called enhanced interrogation methods — torture or degrading remedy of detainees carried out beneath the George W. Bush administration.

“You present data, which ends up in somebody’s detention. After which although you’re not the social gathering detaining them — you’re not the one waterboarding them — once you obtain that data again from torture and also you act on it, you’re justifying it,” Brown mentioned in a telephone interview, calling the Canadian authorities “complicit in torture.”

Slahi, now a 51-year-old writer-in-residence at a Dutch theatre firm, left Canada in 2000 after authorities with the Canadian Safety Intelligence Service and the RCMP began questioning him about supposed ties to Ahmed Ressam, the so-called millennium bomber who deliberate to assault Los Angeles airport. The 2 had briefly attended the identical giant mosque in Montreal.

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The Federal Courtroom of Canada dominated in 2009 that Slahi, who was as soon as a everlasting resident, was not entitled to intelligence paperwork as a result of the then-detainee was neither a citizen nor topic to authorized proceedings in Canada.

The Lawyer Common of Canada has not but filed a response to the allegations in opposition to CSIS and the RCMP.

CSIS declined to touch upon a matter earlier than the courts, or to “verify or deny the specifics” of any investigations or intelligence shared with international states “with a view to preserve the integrity of our operations.” The RCMP didn’t instantly reply to questions Saturday.

The surveillance of Slahi throughout his temporary interval in Montreal pushed him to return to West Africa, setting off a two-decade sample of arrests, interrogations and imprisonment, the assertion of declare says. He was arrested on arrival in Senegal and interrogated by American officers about the identical allegations Canadian authorities had pursued.

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“Within the aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001, Slahi was once more arrested in Mauritania on the behest of america. He was kidnapped and transported in opposition to his will on a CIA-orchestrated rendition airplane to Jordan, the place he was interrogated and tortured for eight months, earlier than being rendered to Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan after which onwards to Guantanamo Bay,” the assertion of declare reads.

He was not launched till 2016, remaining beneath restricted mobility in Mauritania, unable to go away the nation till 2020, the court docket doc says.

At Guantanamo, the knowledge that fashioned the premise for Slahi’s interrogations was “absurd,” Brown mentioned in an interview.

The filings state, for instance, that Slahi’s interrogators pressed him a couple of telephone name in Montreal during which he invited somebody for tea and requested him to deliver sugar.

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“His interrogators insisted the request for ‘sugar’ was code for ‘explosives,”’ the assertion of declare says.

Mustafa Farooq, head of the Nationwide Council of Canadian Muslims, mentioned Canada’s alleged complicity in Slahi’s torture stems from Islamophobic stereotypes.

“The fact is that Mr. Mohamedou was in peril partially as a result of he occurred to be praying at a mosque, the place he was on the incorrect place within the incorrect time and occurred to come back beneath the surveillance of the Canadian state,” Farooq mentioned in a telephone interview.

“A part of the rationale that it’s so horrifying is that the Canadian authorities and Canadian nationwide safety administrations participated in having a person who had accomplished nothing incorrect tortured, that we knew about it, and that we tried to verify Canadians by no means came upon about it.”

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Farooq drew comparisons to the case of Maher Arar, a Syrian-born Canadian detained in New York in September 2002 and shipped overseas by U.S. authorities.

Ending up in a dungeon-like Damascus jail, Arar gave false confessions about involvement with al-Qaida. He agreed to a $10.5-million settlement in 2007 and accepted an apology from then-prime minister Stephen Harper for “any position Canadian officers might have performed” within the affair.

Extra not too long ago the case of Omar Khadr, a Canadian citizen who on the age of 15 was detained at Guantanamo Bay for 10 years for the wartime killing of a U.S. military sergeant in Afghanistan, additionally culminated in a $10.5-million settlement with the federal authorities in 2018.

Slahi mentioned he desires to make sure what occurred to him is not going to befall anybody else.

“I would like Canada to advertise human rights and democracy. … I would like a greater future for my son, my nephews and nieces,” he mentioned.

“Accountability can’t occur with out reality.”