Crooked Canadian spoooks

A law unto themselves. They probably think they are James Bond

A former Crown prosecutor who is now a B.C. Provincial Court judge says Canada’s spy agency was neither co-operative nor forthright when he was working with the RCMP on the Air India bombing case. James Jardine told the Air India inquiry Tuesday that he was frustrated for months by the reluctance of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service to protect intelligence it had gathered on the key suspects in the terrorist plot.

Jardine also told Commissioner John Major that he learned that CSIS had erased critical tapes made of suspect Talwinder Singh Parmar’s telephone calls when the agency’s director appeared on CBC in December 1987. He wrote a brief note at the time stating his disbelief, he testified. “In the brashness of the moment, I wrote inconceivable, incomprehensible, indefensible, incompetent,” Jardine said.

Inquiry counsel Mark Freiman took Jardine, who is now on the bench at Surrey Provincial Court, through years of documents showing repeated requests by the RCMP and Jardine’s prosecution team to get details of surveillance and wiretap evidence that would have been helpful in their efforts to build a criminal case against Parmar, Inderjit Singh Reyat and other suspects in both the Air India bombing and same day blast at Tokyo’s Narita Airport.

Jardine assisted the Air India Task Force beginning in July 1985 and felt that there must be wiretaps because he knew that CSIS had surveillance on Parmar. He told RCMP investigators, with whom he had a great relationship that “If there are watchers, there will likely be wires.’” “I certainly made it clear what I required” to mount a successful prosecution, Jardine said. So the RCMP set out on a frustrating quest to get CSIS to hand over tapes and get access to surveillance and notes of the tapes.

They only learned later on that CSIS had decided there was nothing of evidentiary value on the tapes and that CSIS had routinely erased them without police ever getting a chance to review them.

Report here



(And don't forget your ration of Wicked Thoughts for today)