Tainted Evidence

Copeland said the Canadian government's decision to drop claims about Harkat and Charkaoui that came from the CIA's interrogations of Abu Zubaydah indicates "the government of Canada, or at least the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, has concluded that everything that came from Abu Zubaydah was obtained by torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment."
    
Asked why the statements from Zubaydah had been dropped from the dossiers against Harkat and Charkaoui, Bernard Beckhoff, a spokesman for Canada's public safety ministry, which oversees CSIS, said he could not comment on developments in either case because they are both still before the courts. But he then added, pointedly: "The CSIS director has stated publicly that torture is morally repugnant and not particularly reliable. CSIS does not knowingly use information which has been obtained through torture."

The CIA declined to comment on the CSIS's apparent rejection of the agency's evidence. Spokesman Paul Gimigliano told NEWSWEEK, "The agency's terrorist-detention program has been run in keeping with U.S. law. The Department of Justice deemed CIA's interrogation methods to be lawful at the time of their use." 

But the development was immediately seized on by human-rights advocates as proof that the Bush administration's use of interrogation techniques rejected by the rest of the world will undermine counterterrorism cases in foreign courts. "This shows how the United States is shooting itself in the foot in terrorism cases," said John Sifton, the director of One World Research, a public-interest group that investigates human-rights abuses internationally.

The Canadian action comes as controversy within the United States over waterboarding and other "aggressive" interrogation methods is escalating. At a Capitol Hill hearing last month, CIA Director Gen. Michael Hayden acknowledged for the first time that the CIA had used waterboarding on three Al Qaeda detainees: Zubaydah, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks) and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri (allegedly Al Qaeda's operations chief in the Persian Gulf). American and other intelligence agencies say that Zubaydah, a longtime bin Laden lieutenant of Palestinian origin, was in charge of pre-9/11 Al Qaeda training camps and guest houses in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

All three of the waterboarded suspects were held for years by the CIA in a still-secret network of clandestine detention centers. In September 2006, President Bush ordered them and about a dozen other CIA detainees transferred to the Guantánamo detention camp. The Defense Department recently charged Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and five other men with plotting the 9/11 plot in a case that will be tried under specially set up U.S. military tribunals. The cases, for which the suspects will face the death penalty, are expected to raise a host of complex legal issues about whether the men had been subjected to mistreatment by U.S. officials. (The Justice Department recently launched a criminal investigation into reports that CIA officials destroyed videotapes of interrogations of Zubayadah and Nashiri.)

The White House and Capitol Hill continue to be at odds over the issue: Congress recently approved an intelligence authorization bill that would expressly forbid the CIA from using waterboarding and certain other interrogation methods. Although it says the U.S. government no longer engages in waterboarding, the White House has signaled President Bush will veto the measure because he does not want to tie the agency's hands in the future.

Terror Watch appears weekly on Newsweek.com

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