National Post, Letter-to-the-Editor by Director Richard B. Fadden

The following letter to the National Post from the CSIS Director, in response to a February 19th editorial by Amir Attaran which was critical of CSIS, appeared in today’s edition of the newspaper and on its website:

Letter to the Editor:

At a major conference in October of 2009, I called for a calm, measured debate about national security in Canada. Unfortunately, Amir Attaran has chosen to ignore that call and engage in ideological invective rather than participate in an important national dialogue. Mr. Attaran’s article of February 19 (‘Terrorism Isn’t Special’) is heavy on rhetoric but very light on facts.

Mr. Attaran begins his opinion piece by attributing to CSIS and other government agencies a series of statements that they in fact have never made. No one at CSIS has ever argued that “sometimes, torture is okay” or that “terrorists are monsters”. This is a distortion of the facts.

Having set up a false premise, Mr. Attaran then extols the virtues of working within the criminal law system to prosecute terrorists as an example of how CSIS should operate. But Mr. Attaran conveniently neglects to inform readers that CSIS intelligence played a pivotal role in all of the convictions he mentions, that CSIS shared portions of the careful work and successful results of its investigations with law enforcement authorities. It is puzzling that Mr. Attaran missed the role that CSIS played in various successful prosecutions, as our role in these cases has been the subject of judicial decisions and has been intensely covered by all major media.

Mr. Attaran is simply wrong when he states that CSIS has “failed to instigate even a single terrorist’s conviction”. He has created a straw man, then struck it down with vigour. But his article does nothing to advance knowledge or provide useful commentary on national security. His article is colourful and opinionated but deeply flawed. The bottom line is that terrorism presents challenges that can only be dealt with when intelligence and police agencies and the courts work together within the framework set out by the law.

Sincerely,

Richard B. Fadden
Director
Canadian Security Intelligence Service