I was just told by a nice individual about Kerry Pither, who has been acting as a human rights and civil liberties advocate for almost 20 years.
Do read her book “Dark Days”, where she discusses torture and forced confessions of four Canadian Muslim men.
Excerpt
The following excerpt from Dark Days: The Story of Four Canadians Tortured in the Name of Fighting Terror ran in the Globe and Mail on Saturday, August 23, 2008.
November 12, 2001 – Damascus
The lock slid open and the door swung into the cell. Ahmad had to jump out of the way. The guard ordered him out and led him back upstairs into a room, where he tied a piece of rubber over his eyes.
Then the interrogation started. Someone said they’d received information about him and read out the names and addresses of his family in Toronto, the make and colour of his car, and its licence plate number. They knew his address, the man said, and read it out to him. He had the wrong apartment number, so Ahmad corrected him.
Then the beating started. Ahmad was punched in the face and kicked at. The men in the room screamed insults at him, his family, and his faith.
One of the interrogators leaned in and told Ahmad that they were going to bring Rola, the woman he’d been going to Damascus to marry, in and rape her, there, in front of him.
Ahmad was terrified — did they have Rola? He knew this kind of thing happened in Syria. He pleaded with them, saying that he had told them the truth.
“No,” the man yelled. “We need to hear something new!”
“I can’t invent something,” said Ahmad.
“No,” the man replied. “You can invent something.
Then things got worse. Ahmad was ordered to strip down to his shorts and lie on his stomach on the floor. In pain from the beating, he moved slowly. The men yelled at him to move faster as he struggled out of his shirt and pants. When Ahmad was lying down, the men grabbed his hands and handcuffed them behind his back, then lifted his feet up and tied his wrists to his ankles with a rope. He was like a sheep ready for slaughter, Ahmad says.
Ice water was poured all over his body, then he was whipped on his feet, legs, knees, and back with a thick metal cable. The pain was sharp and fierce, but the first strokes were the worst. After a few lashings, Ahmad’s feet and legs went numb, but that was what the dousing with ice water was for – to bring the feeling back. He could see the interrogators’ shoes from under the blindfold. The ones without the cable kicked him in the face and his back and legs.
Ahmad begged the men to stop, asking why they were doing this to him. They just laughed. “They were asking me to repeat my story, and I kept repeating what happened, and they said, ‘That’s not what we want to hear.’ They kept threatening me and mocking me and said they were going to inflict permanent injury – they said I wouldn’t be able to have kids later on.”
Ahmad lost track of how often he was taken down to his cell and back up for more torture but remembers that eventually he couldn’t walk and had to be dragged up and down the stairs. In his cell, without the blindfold, he saw his legs were covered in blood. His feet were too swollen to fit into his shoes.
“After I just couldn’t take it any more, I told them, ‘I’m willing to say whatever you want me to say,’” Ahmad recalls.
The men asked him about people he knew in Canada – including Abdullah Almalki and Maher Arar. Ahmad told them he knew Abdullah but not very well. They’d probably talked three or four times. Ahmad knew that Abdullah and his family were well connected in Ottawa’s Muslim community, and had consulted him about finding someone to marry. Ahmad had also stopped in to see Abdullah in Ottawa before going to the Syrian Embassy to apply for a visa to go and meet Rola.
Ahmad told his interrogators that he had met Maher too, but knew him even less than he knew Abdullah.
The interrogators wanted Ahmad to say he had seen both Abdullah and Maher in Afghanistan. Ahmad told them the truth: that he thought he had seen Abdullah in Afghanistan in an administration building with a group that was applying for a permit for a NGOs project, but that he hadn’t spoken to him.
“They said, ‘They were with you in Afghanistan.’ I said no, I briefly saw Abdullah … but I didn’t see Maher in Afghanistan.
“‘No, you saw Maher in Afghanistan. You have to say that.’”
“I said no, I didn’t know Maher from Afghanistan. So they started punching and beating me. So later on, I said yes, I had seen him in Afghanistan.”
Then the men got to the heart of the interrogation: They wanted Ahmad to confess to a plot.
“You wanted to blow up the U.S. Embassy in Ottawa!”
Ahmad thought quickly. He worried that if he agreed that the target was the U.S. Embassy, he would be sent to the United States, not back to Canada, so he changed the story slightly. “It wasn’t the U.S. Embassy,” he said. “It was the Canadian Parliament.”
The interrogator seemed pleased. “He was feeling very happy now, like this new information was even juicier,” Ahmad recalls.
Mission accomplished. Ahmad’s blindfold was removed, and he was handed a pen and paper and told to write it all down.
Ahmad started to write down the fabricated story but changed his mind and instead wrote the truth. A few hours later, guards came for him, kicking the cell door open so that it hit Ahmad, throwing him against the back wall.
“They were shouting at me, screaming, the whole dictionary of insults. Then they started kicking me … and grabbed me by my hair and beard, dragged me upstairs, handcuffed me from the back, and took me inside the room.”
The man who’d been in charge of his interrogation was there.
“You want to change your story now?” he yelled at Ahmad.
“He brought a cigarette out. I felt the heat of the cigarette on my cheek. They were kicking me and beating me and then they laid me down, and then he started burning my shins and I was screaming like crazy. And then he said, ‘I am going to burn your eyes now.’
“I said I’d write down whatever they wanted.”
Kerry is hoping to give a free copy of this book to all the M.P.s. Help Kerry accomplish her goal.
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