GLORIA ER-CHUA, Whig Standard, 17 June 2009

Adil Charkaoui had mixed feelings about being in town this week.

"I'm excited to be here in the city that has its own 'Guantanamo North,' " he said wryly to a roomful of people at Queen's University.

Kingston is where Charkaoui started the Ontario leg of his cross-country campaign, Justice for Adil, but it's also the site of the notorious Kingston Immigration Holding Centre.

The six-cell facility in Bath was specially built in 2006 for terrorism suspects and has earned the nickname "Guantanamo North" in reference to the U. S.'s detention facility in Guantanamo, Cuba.

Charkaoui, a Canadian permanent resident, is one of five suspects who was issued a security certificate for alleged connections to terrorist organizations.

The others are Mohammad Mahjoub, Mahmoud Jaballah, Hassan Almrei and Mohamed Harkat.

None of them has ever been charged, nor have they been allowed to see the evidence against them.

Mahjoub, Jaballah, Almrei and Harkat were transferred from Ontario detention centres to the special facility, located in Millhaven Penitentiary, when it opened in April 2006.

Mcleans.ca, 25 June 2009

Adil Charkaoui, a Morocco-born Montreal resident, began a Canada-wide speaking tour last week to draw attention to the “nightmare” he endured after he was detained by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service six years ago for allegedly being an al-Qaeda sleeper agent. Charkaoui says after 9/11, CSIS agents—who believed he was associating with Muslims in Montreal with ties to extremists in North Africa—entered the pizzeria he owned and asked him “Where is Osama bin Laden hiding?” Not taking the query seriously, he said, “I told them he was in the basement, having a siesta.” Soon after, Charkaoui says they began interfering with his business. In 2003, he was detained under a security certificate law, and denied access to the evidence against him. After spending 21 months in prison, a Quebec judge released him on $50,000 bail on the condition that he agree to electronic surveillance. “This law is a medieval law,” he told a Toronto crowd last Thursday. “In a country like Canada, it is shameful.”

as read by Fernand Deschamps at a press conference in Vancouver on June 25th 2009

Good morning everyone.

Before speaking, Adil Charkaoui and the Coalition Justice for Adil Charkaoui would like to warmly thank the local organizations and supporters who went out of their way to give us the opportunity to come to British Columbia and help us break the wall of silence that is imposed on Adil’s conditions and the other four people detained in Canada under security certificates.

CBC, 19 June 2009

A Morocco-born Montreal man the Canadian Security Intelligence Service believes was once an al-Qaeda sleeper agent is on a cross-country speaking tour meant to show what he calls "the face of the monster."

Adil Charkaoui was detained under an immigration regulation known as a security certificate six years ago. He was later released but had to agree to put up $50,000 bail and remain under electronic surveillance.

The tour, which began in Kingston, Ont., four days ago, is an attempt to rally public support to have the security certificate law abolished and clear his name.

"This law is a medieval law. In a country like Canada, it is shameful," he told about 100 people at a union hall in Toronto on Thursday. There were notes of humour as well as bitterness as Charkaoui regaled his audience with tales from what he calls his "nightmare."

Well before the deadly Sept. 11, 2001 attacks on U.S. targets, CSIS agents had Charkaoui under surveillance. They had seen him associating with Muslim men in Montreal they suspected were supporting Islamist extremists in North Africa.

Marc Gionet, Rabble.ca, June 15, 2009

University studies are often dominated by abstract concepts and theories which seldom translate into something tangible. Those sacred teaching/learning moments, renowned in their scarcity, when the theoretical is transformed into the demonstrable seem even more elusive when dealing with the subject matter of my class entitled Terrorism and Human Rights.

For the majority of Canadians and most definitely my students here in Fredericton, the practical implications of terrorism and counter-terrorism measures have been held safely away at arm's length. The most concrete example of direct effects of terrorism or counter-terrorism measures for my class has been the new requirement of a passport to enter the United States.

An understanding of the difficulty in translating the theoretical into the practical and consequential can surely be appreciated. Nevertheless, on June 3, 2009, my students came face to face with the consequences of Canada's counter-terrorism measures and the realities they create.

Janice Tibbetts, Canwest News Service, June 15, 2009

The Conservative government's national security agenda has been set back by a steady losing streak in the Federal Court, a trend that analysts attribute to an emboldened bench that is finding its voice and growing out of a tendency to defer to lawmakers as it did in the early years after 9/11.

In the last two months, the traditionally cautious court has issued stinging decisions ordering the government to repatriate terror suspect Omar Khadr from Guantanamo Bay and bring Canadian Abousfian Abdelrazik home from Sudan.

Judges have also issued three biting critiques of CSIS, accusing the spy agency of possibly lying to the court about its intelligence information and being complicit in torture of Canadians abroad.

"It's the end of the honeymoon period -- when national security trumped everything," said Michael Byers, a civil libertarian and a political scientist at University of British Columbia.

Andy Worthington, Cageprisoners.com, June 13, 2009

Four years late, the Law Lords finally put the British government’s anti-terror policies under the spotlight on Wednesday by delivering a resounding repudiation of the government’s use of secret evidence to impose control orders on alleged terror suspects (the full judgment is here).

An unjustified stranglehold on liberty: the control orders

Introduced in March 2005 after the Law Lords ruled in December 2004 that the government’s previous policy of imprisoning suspects without charge or trial in Belmarsh prison (which had begun three years before) was in contravention of the Human Rights Act, the control order regime is effectively a form of house arrest. As I explained in an article for the Guardian in April,

"[Control orders] keep suspects, for most hours of the day, confined to their houses. They are tagged, told to report to the authorities several times a day, and are subjected to unannounced house raids by Home Office officials to ensure they are not breaching the conditions of their confinement.

Gazette, 29 May 2009

MONTREAL - With conditions of his security certificate detention now eased, Adil Charkaoui is to begin a cross-country speaking engagement June 1 in Halifax.

The Moroccan-born Montrealer was arrested in May 2003 under a security certificate - a seldom-used tool under immigration law allowing authorities to detain non-citizens indefinitely without charge and without seeing the evidence against them. At the time of his arrest, Ottawa maintained that Charkaoui was a sleeper agent for Al-Qa'ida. He has always steadfastly denied it.

In February 2009, the Federal Court lifted most of the interim conditions imposed on Charkaoui following his release from jail in 2005, pending his court case.

Charkaoui, one of five men in Canada undergoing the security certificate process, must still wear a GPS-tracking bracelet.

The cross-Canada speaking tour wraps up in Victoria June 25.

Mariam Sheibani, 29 May 2009, Toronto Star

The difference between accurate and objective reporting and inaccurate and biased reporting is essentially the difference between informing the public and misleading the public. Accurate, objective, investigative and independent news media is our country's best defence against corruption and (the) abuse of power.

Maher Arar's name is well-known to most Canadians – the story of his rendition by the United States, his torture in Syria, the O'Connor inquiry that exonerated him and, of course, the government's apology and compensation.

However, little attention has been paid to the role that the media played in Arar's case. Few journalists have been as brave as Haroon Siddiqui, the Toronto Star journalist who professed: "media credibility was no less tattered by these episodes than that of the security establishment."

In February 2009, the Federal Court finally lifted most of the interim conditions imposed on Adil Charkaoui. Adil was arrested under a so-called security certificate in 2003; he spent almost two years in jail before being released under draconian conditions pending the outcome of the process against him. Now, for the first time in six years, Adil is able to travel freely outside Montreal. In June, he will be taking advantage of this restored freedom to travel to other parts of Canada to speak about his continuing struggle to clear his name and achieve justice in Canada.

While the decision in February was a very welcome step in the right direction, Adil's struggle is not over. He is still forced to wear a GPS-tracking bracelet; he continues to live under the label of "suspected terrorist" (a label which has already cost him his job and much more); and he is still threatened with deportation to torture.

Adil Charkaoui is one of five men in Canada who are undergoing the Kafka-esque security certificate process. All are still subject to the agonizingly irrational "security" certificate process, deeply invasive and suffocating bail conditions, and live under threat of deportation and torture.

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