CSIS DESTROYED KEY TERRORISM EVIDENCE

CSIS DESTROYED KEY TERRORISM EVIDENCE

Canadian spy agency's policy of destroying tapes cited in
U.S. Hezbollah terrorism trial
Chris Nuttall-Smith
Vancouver Sun
Wednesday, October 17, 2001

Canada's spy agency destroyed wiretap evidence in what has been described as a critical U.S. anti-terrorism case involving an alleged ring of Hezbollah supporters with links to North Carolina and Vancouver. The Canadian Security and Intelligence Service has a policy to destroy tapes not needed in its investigations. The
defence lawyer for an accused terrorist in North Carolina has asked that wiretap reports on this client be thrown out of court because the tapes no longer exist. According court documents filed in Charlotte, N.C., defence lawyer Christopher Fialko says CSIS conducted surveillance of his client Said Mohamad Harb when he visited Vancouver twice in 1999.

Harb is being tried for allegedly supporting and supplying Hezbollah fighters. Hezbollah is a Lebanon-based terrorist group that has been implicated in a deadly 1983 bombing of a U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut that killed 241 servicemen. Hezbollah members may also have trained with followers of Osama bin Laden, who is accused of masterminding the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the U.S. Burnaby resident Ali Adham Amhaz was arrested on the weekend because U.S. authorities have charged him with conspiring to supply money and equipment to the Hezbollah. He is scheduled to appear in a Vancouver courtroom today. U.S. prosecutors allege Amhaz
and his brother-in-law Mohammad Hassan Dbouk became involved with the Charlotte-based group because Dbouk was a longtime acquaintance of Harb. This is the second time in recent memory
that CSIS has destroyed wiretap tapes later needed in a U.S. terrorism trial. A U.S. district court judge blasted CSIS last summer for destroying wiretap evidence in the case of Ahmed Ressam, the Canadian resident found crossing from B.C. to Washington State with bomb-making materials in Dec. 1999. The judge in that case refused to accept as evidence 750 pages of CSIS reports based on the destroyed tapes.

"I'm disturbed the tapes don't exist anymore, but apparently that's the Canadian way of doing things," Judge John Coughenour said last April. CSIS's involvement in the Harb case came to light when U.S. authorities tried to enter CSIS wiretap reports of intercepted calls -- to which Harb was allegedly a party -- as evidence in court. But defence lawyer Fialko filed a motion this summer to have the CSIS evidence thrown out. According to documents later produced on the case, CSIS was eavesdropping on Canadian residents in a national security case when Harb became party to one of the conversations. The motion filed by Fialko claims that CSIS
conducted surveillance of Harb in cooperation with the Federal Bureau of Investigation during two of Harb's alleged visits to Vancouver.

That same motion raises what Fialko calls "grave doubts about the
reliability of CSIS's wiretap reports," and alleges that the reports are littered with speculation and hearsay and are deliberately misleading. Fialko's motion questions why U.S. authorities have not been able to produce tapes of many of the intercepted conversations. "The missing tapes include all conversations in which Harb is alleged to have participated," the motion says. "Instead of producing these tapes, the government has provided non-verbatim 'synopses' of the conversations on those tapes, apparently prepared by an unnamed CSIS eavesdropper." The motion further
states that CSIS's surveillance surrounding the case was conducted between February 1999, and September 2000. It says that CSIS was able to produce only the tapes from Oct. 1999 onward.

But the motion sheds light on other aspects of CSIS's involvement, as well. Fialko cites an affidavit in support of warrants for arrests, searches and seizures, saying "When Harb allegedly traveled from Charlotte [North Carolina] to Vancouver by way of Seattle in March 1999 and August 1999, the FBI monitored his movements from Charlotte to Seattle, and the CSIS apparently conducted surveillance after Harb left Seattle and entered Canada." According to an affidavit filed in response to Fialko's motion by Claude Baker, CSIS' assistant director of operations, the spy agency was
eavesdropping on some Canadian residents, whom he does not identify, when Harb's name came up.
But Baker wrote that CSIS policy forces the agency to destroy tapes of communications after 30 days if it is not relevant to the agency's mandate.In addition, Baker wrote that CSIS is not a law enforcement organization,
so it does not typically keep records for the purposes of evidence. CSIS did, however, contact the FBI to tell it about the intercepted
communications involving Harb, Baker wrote. And over time, CSIS officials realized the importance of the evidence they were collecting. "As time progressed, the intelligence that was being collected gave indications that some of these individuals were involved in activities that could have a law enforcement implication on both sides of the Canadian/American border,"
Baker wrote in the affidavit, dated Aug. 22, 2001. "The CSIS therefore determined that the information being collected for
intelligence purposes might also be of value for investigational and/or prosecutorial purposes by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and possibly by the criminal side of the FBI."

So in what Baker characterizes as an "exceptional case," the agency began saving pertinent tapes from its eavesdropping activities. A report this weekend in The Charlotte Observer said CSIS gave U.S. investigators electronic copies of 81 reports of intercepted conversations, 20 surveillance photographs and 30 cassette tapes.
cnuttall-smith@pacpress.southam.ca