Study Finds Dubious Information Helped Lead to Torture of 3 Canadians

The inquiry, led by Frank Iacobucci, a former justice of the Supreme Court of Canada, lacks the scope of an earlier examination of the case of Maher Arar, a Syrian-born Canadian who was sent by United States officials from New York to Syria, where he was tortured. But the two reports have many similarities regarding the relations between North America’s security and intelligence services.

Unlike Mr. Arar, the three men in this case, Abdullah Almalki, Ahmad Abou-Elmaati and Muayyed Nureddin, were not sent to Syria through the American program known as rendition. The three all went there independently at different times for personal reasons and were arrested and jailed upon their arrival.

Mr. Iacobucci confirmed a longstanding contention by the three men that Canada had tipped the United States to their travel plans. He also faulted the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Canadian Security Intelligence Service for making strong claims about the men that were mainly unsupported.

The inquiry was limited to assessing the actions of Canadian officials, and the United States and several other foreign governments declined to cooperate.

In Mr. Elmaati’s case, Mr. Iacobucci concluded that the detention resulted from three events: the Mounted Police advised several foreign legal authorities, including those in the United States, that the man was “an imminent threat to public safety”; the Canadian intelligence agency told its American counterparts and others that the man was an associate of an aide to Osama Bin Laden; and the Canadian police gave the C.I.A. and the F.B.I. his travel itinerary.

The Mounties, Mr. Iacobucci wrote, “should have considered, before providing Mr. Elmaati’s travel itinerary to the U.S., that U.S. authorities might take steps to have Mr. Elmaati detained and questioned.”

In connection with Mr. Almalki, the report indicates that in October 2001, the Mounties told the United States Customs Service in a letter that he was an “Islamic extremist individual suspected of being linked to the Al Qaeda terrorist movement.”

The inquiry, however, found that this claim — and similar information given to agencies in the United States about the other men — was largely based on secondhand information. In Mr. Almalki’s case, some of it referred to another person.

The Canadian suspicion about Mr. Almalki seems to have come from his business, which involved exporting common, and in some cases obsolete, electronic components to Pakistan.

In May 2002, the Mounties met with the F.B.I. and members of other United States security agencies. Those agencies are not identified in the public version of the report, which was censored. The meeting, which was apparently intended to prompt an American criminal investigation of Mr. Almalki, included a PowerPoint presentation titled, “The Pursuit of Terrorism: A Canadian Response.” It described Mr. Almalki as a “procurement officer” for terrorist groups.

“Labeling of someone at a time when 9/11 was sort of recent can be a very serious matter,” Mr. Iacobucci said at a news conference.

Mr. Almalki, who had traveled to Syria to join his parents on a family visit, was detained for 22 months. The inquiry concluded that he, like the other two men, was tortured and held under “inhumane” conditions.

Mr. Iacobucci was not assigned to review the actions of the three men. Despite that, all three told reporters that the report of the inquiry had cleared them of any wrongdoing.

Mr. Almalki, after noting that he was apparently a victim of identity confusion, told reporters: “My life has been ruined; my reputation has been ruined. I lost my business based on information that didn’t even relate to me.”

A lawyer who represented the Canadian Arab Federation in the inquiry, James Kafieh, said the report showed that “these three men were sacrificed to show the United States that Canada was doing something.”

While Mr. Iacobucci found fault with actions by the Canadian police, intelligence investigators and diplomats, he added that no one had behaved improperly.

“Mistakes were made, but I don’t think that’s inconsistent with saying that people doing their jobs were doing so conscientiously,” he said.

The three men have all filed lawsuits against the Canadian government. Last year, the government gave Mr. Arar about 10.5 million Canadian dollars in compensation.