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Insight on the News - National
Issue: 06/24/02
Canada Turns Into Terrorist Haven
By John Berlau
On Sept. 19, 2001, in the Chicago suburb of Justice, Ill., U.S. authorities made the
first major arrest in connection with the attacks on the World Trade Center and the
Pentagon. Nabil al-Marabh technically was taken into custody on the basis of
immigration and parole violations, but authorities believe he may have played a major
role in coordinating the terrorist strikes.
Telephone records showed al-Marabh made telephone calls to at least two of the 19
members of Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda team who commandeered the planes
used to kill more than 3,000 people. According to newspaper reports, al-Marabh also
is suspected of providing the terrorists with cash and fake IDs. He had been a
coworker at a Boston taxi company and shared a residence with Raed Hijazi, an
alleged al-Qaeda operative now in prison in Jordan on charges that he planned to
bomb a luxury hotel in Amman during the 2000 millennium celebration. Sketches of
an airport flight line, including aircraft and runways, were found at a Detroit
apartment
al- Marabh had shared with three other men who also were arrested, according to
the Cox News Service.
This wasn't the first time al-Marabh, apparently born in Kuwait in 1966, had been
arrested in the United States. In fact, in an incident that has terrorism experts
shaking their heads, he had been in custody less than three months before his Sept.
19 arrest. On June 27, 2001, a U.S. border guard in Niagara Falls, N.Y., found al-
Marabh in the back of a tractor-trailer trying to sneak across the border with a fake
Canadian passport.
How did the U.S. government bungle this one? To a large extent, another
government mostly is to blame. The biggest U.S. mistake appears to have been
sending al-Marabh back across the border to face "justice" in Canada. Despite the
fact that he had been deported from Canada in 1994, had been found guilty of
stabbing a man in the leg in Boston and had known ties to al-Qaeda's Hijazi, a
Canadian judge released him after his uncle posted bail of $7,500 Canadian
currency, or about $4,500 U.S. Al-Marabh did not so much as attend his deportation
hearing and found his way back to the United States.
Even after Sept. 11, Canada's minister of immigration, Elinor Caplan, defended the
judge's decision and said it was in line with Canada's policies. "We do not detain
people on whispers or innuendo," she told Detroit television station WDIV a month
after the terrorist attacks.
Terrorism experts and a growing number of concerned Canadians contend that the
al-Marabh incident is just one more indication of why Canada has become a haven
for terrorists. "We've got a lot of blood on our hands worldwide," says David Harris,
former chief of strategic planning for the Canadian Security Intelligence Service
(CSIS), Canada's top intelligence agency. Harris tells Insight, "If some can say the
Americans were asleep at the switch prior to the 11th of September, we've been in a
coma."
In 1998 the director of CSIS told a special committee of the Canadian Parliament
that members of more than 50 international terrorist groups were living there. "With
perhaps the singular exception of the United States, there are more international
terrorist groups active here than in any other country," testified CSIS Director Ward
Elcock. "Terrorist groups are present here whose origins lie in virtually every
significant regional, ethnic and nationalist conflict there is."
The CSIS elaborated in 1999. "For a number of reasons, Canada is an attractive
venue for terrorists," said a CSIS report. "Long borders and coastlines offer many
points of entry which can facilitate movement to and from various sites around the
world, particularly the United States."
But there is another reason experts say Canada has become attractive to terrorists
� one which went unspoken by the CSIS. That is, Canada's highly permissive
immigration and refugee policies. With a population of about 30 million, Canada
takes in about 300,000 newcomers per year, which per capita is twice the rate at
which immigrants are admitted to the United States. And there virtually are no
restrictions on the countries from which they come.
According to Harris, now president of Insignis Strategic Research, "The tidal wave of
new people coming here, the vast majority of whom are going to be great
contributors to the country one assumes, has got to statistically include a really
significant number of very, very dangerous people in today's world who cannot
possibly be screened out in any meaningful sense. We are presenting ourselves year
after year with a building danger and menace, and if we refuse to deal with the
menace represented by the sheer statistics, we're going to inevitably find ourselves
in a situation where the government will have to impose more and more restrictions
on our civil liberties."
Terrorists also find Canada an ideal place for raising funds, critics say, because
before the al-Qaeda attacks on the United States there were very few laws there to
prevent the funneling of money to extremist organizations in foreign lands. "Before
Sept. 11, you could have opened up a storefront in Toronto and said, 'I'm raising
money for bin Laden,' and you could have collected money, and nobody could have
charged you because that was not against the law," Stewart Bell, a reporter for the
Toronto-based National Post, tells Insight. Bell, who has broken many stories about
terrorist connections through Canada, says: "There was no law against raising
money for terrorism. Now there's a law, but it's not being used yet."
This means that, even without crossing the border, terrorists still can use Canada as
a base from which to damage the United States and other countries.
Some of the most damaging support for terrorists that al-Marabh is alleged to have
provided may have been conducted in Canada. According to the Canadian television
network CTV, authorities say the unemployed Islamist moved about $15,000 from a
Canadian bank account to at least three of the hijackers. He is believed to have
made fake IDs for the hijackers at a Toronto print shop where he worked. Authorities
found similarities between the fake IDs left at the hijackers' homes and the paper
stock, laminates and ink seized from the print shop, CTV reported.
Like many other Canadian residents connected with acts of terrorism, al-Marabh
arrived in the country as a refugee claimant, and some say his case illustrates what
is wrong with the immigration system there. Immigration scholars such as George
Borjas have praised Canadian policy for actively seeking skilled immigrants who can
help the national economy, although some Canadians dispute just how many are
"skilled" as advertised and how much their presence benefits the economy. The
problem, Harris and others say, is that Canada admits practically anyone who claims
to be a refugee and does so in unlimited numbers. "We take a lot of people that no
one else would accept," Martin Collacott, Canada's former ambassador to Syria and
Lebanon and a senior fellow at the Vancouver-based Fraser Institute, tells Insight:
"We have stretched the definition [of refugee] far beyond the original intent in the
U.N. Convention on Refugees. We also have the most generous system of perks."
Because of a Canadian Supreme Court decision in the mid-1980s, everyone who
comes to Canada and claims to be a refugee is entitled to a hearing, even if they
have no documentation. The Canadian government provides them with a free lawyer
and, while awaiting the government's decision, refugee claimants are eligible for
welfare and/ or employment, are covered by Canada's national health-care system,
may attend school and only rarely are detained, as they often are in the United
States.
The generosity of these perquisites combined with freedom of movement has
attracted the attention of terrorists targeting the United States. The process for
determining refugee status can take years. And even if a refugee claim is denied,
claimants often stay in Canada by declaring that a return to their country of origin
will
put them in danger. Al-Marabh came to Canada in 1988. His refugee claim wasn't
denied until 1994 and he had no trouble re-entering in 2001.
Mahmoud Mohammad is a convicted terrorist and murderer from the Popular Front
for the Liberation of Palestine who hijacked an Israeli airliner, served time in Greece
and was released as part of demands by another group of hijackers. Then he
entered Canada in 1986 with a false identity. He soon was arrested and ordered
deported, but he filed suit and remains in Canada today � 16 years later � and runs
a small candy store in Ontario.
The number of refugee claimants in Canada has doubled from 22,000 in 1998 to
44,000 in 2001. The Toronto Sun reports that official records show as many as 60
percent of refugee claimants have unsatisfactory documents or none at all. Many just
"disappear" and are believed to have entered the United States illegally. In a paper
for the U.S.-based Center for Immigration Studies, James Bissett, the former
executive director of Canada's immigration service, reports that 20 percent of
refugee claimants in Canada never even show up for their asylum hearings, and
there are more than 25,000 outstanding arrest warrants for them. "It is evident,
therefore, that the chances of remaining in Canada despite a negative ruling [for
refugee status] are favorable," Bissett writes, with dry wit. "Naturally, this is a
major
selling point" for terrorists.
Canadian connections have been found in a host of terrorist incidents. Conspirators
who had lived in Canada were involved in the first World Trade Center bombing in
1993 and the Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia in 1996. A Canadian-refugee
claimant also played a role in a foiled plot that could have been as devastating as the
attacks of Sept. 11. In 1994 Ahmed Ressam came to Montreal as a refugee
claimant, using a fake French passport. After failing to show up for his refugee
hearing and "disappearing," he was arrested by a U.S. Customs agent in December
1999 as he tried to cross the U.S. border from Vancouver with 100 pounds of
explosives in his car trunk.
Ressam turned out to be a member of an Algerian terrorist group with close ties to
bin Laden and planned to bomb Los Angeles International Airport during celebrations
for the year 2000. He was convicted in a Los Angeles courtroom in April 2001.
Terrorism experts say Canadian law enforcement is not the problem. The CSIS and
the Royal Canadian Mounted Police courageously have warned about the threat of
terrorism and provided crucial help going after al-Marabh, says Steven Emerson,
executive director of the Investigative Project, a counterterrorism think tank in
Washington. The problem is that they're being handcuffed by politicians afraid of
offending voters in ethnic communities, he argues. "There's a tremendously
polarized situation between the 'refugee lobby,' which includes advocates of some of
the government policies, versus the law-enforcement and intelligence services."
And many of the leaders from Canada's ruling Liberal Party still appear to be in
denial about their country's contribution to international terrorism. Longtime Prime
Minister Jean Chr�tien stood in the House of Commons shortly after Sept. 11 and
proclaimed, "I am not aware at this time of a cell known to the police to be operating
in Canada with the intention of carrying out terrorism in Canada or elsewhere."
Perhaps the many CSIS reports and lengthy testimony documenting the terrorist
presence in Canada did not reach his desk.
When members of the conservative Canadian Alliance Party ask questions in
Parliament about refugee policies that contribute to terrorism, they are shouted down
as anti-immigrant and racist by Liberal Party members. This is despite the fact, as
Bell has documented in the National Post, that ethnic communities sometimes are
the first victims of terrorist shakedown and extortion efforts to raise money.
After Sept. 11, under pressure from the United States and a shocked Canadian
public, Parliament finally attempted to outlaw terrorist fund raising. The government
responded by banning fund raising only for Hezbollah's military purposes but not for
its "social" and "political" wings, a distinction many say is without a difference.
Hezbollah, based in Lebanon, takes credit for suicide bombings in Israel and it
bombed U.S. Marine barracks in Lebanon in 1983. It is formally cited as a terrorist
organization by both London and Washington. But Canada's foreign-affairs minister,
Bill Graham, explained in Parliament in April that "there is a civil dimension" to
Hezbollah, adding: "We will continue to work with all parties with whom we can get
peace."
Meanwhile, Hezbollah is free to funnel money from its "charitable contributions" in
Canada to its worldwide terrorist activities. Says Harris, "The Canadian Boy Scouts
have a demonstrably favorable record of good works, but if some arm of that group
ever starts blowing up major public buildings, I reserve my right to question their
entitlement to collect funds on Canadian territory. It's this kind of thing that's
surely
got to be raising significant questions among our allies."
Since Sept. 11, Canada has allocated $200 million to improve its screening of
foreigners, a fact that Canada's leaders point to when called on the carpet by victims
of terrorism. But former immigration- service head Bissett says the ongoing policy of
generous perks plus freedom of movement for refugee claimants with shoddy
paperwork essentially is unchanged. In fact, he says, a recently passed law
advertised as streamlining the process may make it even more generous to potential
terrorists.
Before the new law was passed, the Canadian courts had the discretion to choose
which refugee cases would be heard on appeal if a claimant was denied refugee
status. But under the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act, appeals now will be
heard automatically, adding another layer to the already-lengthy process to deport
terrorists and other inappropriate immigrants. "It's just made the whole process a hell
of a lot easier for a claimant to make his claim and be accepted, and extremely
difficult to get rid of them once they're here," Bissett tells Insight. He says the new
law "reflects an attitude of complacency and cynicism on the part of a government
that appears less concerned about the security of its citizens than in satisfying the
demands of special interests."
John Berlau is a writer for Insight magazine.
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