By Yavar Hameed and Jeffrey Monaghan
Over the past two decades, there have been a litany of abuses directed towards Muslims and Arabs in Canada under the banner of the “war on terror.” Regrettably, these abuses continue and the “war on terror” carries on. While there are many agencies and institutions responsible for the pattern of racial attacks against minority communities, one institution is consistently at the core of these violations: the RCMP.
In-line with their history of repression and discrimination against outsider and Indigenous communities, the RCMP have marshaled the material and ideological resources of the “war on terror” – far from being supposedly neutral actors, as police mythology will often articulate – to act as activists for expanding their own policing power.
Islamophobia, Rendition, and Torture
The transgressions from the RCMP in pursuing Muslims and Arabs as terrorists is long. At the very inception of the “war on terrorism,” the RCMP was inextricably linked to the heinous US extraordinary rendition program by virtue of its sharing of false information without caveats to US authorities that resulted in Maher Arar’s rendition to Syria. Canadian involvement in US rendition programs only came under close scrutiny following the public advocacy and outrage associated with higher profile cases of rendition, like those of Maher Arar, Abdullah Almalki, Ahmad Abou Elmaati and Muayyed Nureddin.
The RCMP’s opportunistic reliance on rendition practices resulted in two independent judicial commissions, the O’Connor Commission and the Iacobucci Commission. Not only were the RCMP thoroughly criticized in the O’Connor Commission, the final report pointed out how “Canadian officials leaked confidential and sometimes inaccurate information about the case to the media for the purpose of damaging Mr. Arar’s reputation or protecting their self-interest or government interests.” Former RCMP Commissioner Zaccardelli was forced to resign after blatantly lying to Parliament over the Arar case. However, with that one exception, no police officers have been publicly reprimanded in any form for the incredible violence directed towards these individuals. The blanket impunity for racist policing is conjoined to the subsequent activities of the “war on terror.”
In addition to rendition, RCMP were central in many of the subsequent actions directed against Muslims and Arabs. RCMP collaborated in discussions with DFAIT and CSIS about interviewing Omar Khadr while he was a child detainee in Guantanamo Bay. Although RCMP did not visit Khadr in detention in Cuba, it was briefed on the fruits of interrogations of Khadr by CSIS in October 2002 at the same time that it was positioning itself to actively engage in the now infamous post 9/11 surveillance of Canadian Muslims under Project A-O Canada.
While RCMP played a lesser role in the “Security certificate” regime, they were nonetheless party to security and policing agencies increasingly using unlawful imprisonment and torture in the name of fighting Islamic terrorism. The legal exceptionalism directed towards Muslims continued to expand: security certificates normalized the practice of secret trials and secret evidence, CSIS began accepting intelligence derived from torture, and National Defence was accomplice to the torture programs taking place in Afghanistan. Against the backdrop of these manifestations of racial violence the RCMP was a key actor in a ballooning national security bureaucracy, retaining core functions and involvement in these sprawling efforts to combat the perceived threat of Islamic extremism.
Fear-mongering as tactic to expand RCMP powers
Unsatisfied with the powers and resources accumulated over the first decade of the “war on terror,” the RCMP instrumentalized high-profile cases to become the lead advocates for more policing powers under the Harper government. Specifically, the force expanded their reach through the contentious powers contained in the updated Anti-Terrorism Act in 2015 (known as Bill C51).
During Parliamentary debates around C-51, RCMP Commissioner Bob Paulson made a host of media appearances warning of increased “extremist” activity. Paulson also stage managed the opportunistic release of a martyrdom video – which he’d previously suggested may not be released – during a Parliamentary committee meeting in advance of the C-51 vote. Among the range of powers sought by the RCMP, two key elements included a request to lower the evidentiary criteria for terrorism peace bonds as well as demanding “disruption” powers. With the passing of the new legislation, the RCMP made quick use of the lowered peace bond threshold, pursuing a number of cases and exploiting the increasingly illiberal standards.
From neighbourhood surveillance to bumbling terror plots
The manufacture of terror by the RCMP is a tactic that operates on a spectrum from community level surveillance as seen in the notorious Project A-O Canada which the O’Connor Commission described as having “lacked experience and training in conducting national security investigations and in addressing human rights and cultural sensitivity issues” to the elaborate efforts to infiltrate and ensnare impressionable youth or recent converts to Islam.
In the most egregious case of the pressure cooker plot in British Columbia, the BC Court of Appeal upheld a finding of entrapment against the RCMP for constructing a terrorist plot, concluding: “The police did everything necessary to facilitate the plan. I can find no fault with the trial judge’s conclusion that the police manufactured the crime that was committed and were the primary actors in its commission.” Even in courts highly deferential – and often complicit – in circulating Islamophobic tropes, RCMP actions have been ridiculed as clumsy and outdated.
In recent years, the RCMP have categorically framed national security threats as Islamic-related. Despite occasional overtures around the threats of other types of political violence – and claims around “bias free policing” – the “war on terrorism” is fundamentally constructed through a racialized lens, in large part due to its genesis in the “new terrorism thesis”, news media fixations on Islam, and also through widespread popular representations that have long recirculated anti-Muslim logics.
In recent occasions where the RCMP press forward with terrorism charges against non-Muslim cases of violence, there is a tendency to regard these instances as evidence that the “war on terrorism” is no longer a war against Islam or to deny the racial origins of national security. Yet, the “war on terror” retains its institutional and ideological components – which cannot be undone with an INCEL prosecution or other nominal efforts to demonstrate that “terrorism” is not racially coded. Despite bias-free claims from police, “terrorism” is racially coded because of police – and RCMP – actions that have fed and conditioned the publics’ imaginary around Islam and violence.
The harm RCMP have caused
The RCMP have been central in advancing the racist and discriminatory national security practices that have expanded over the past two decades of the “war on terror.” In the aftermath of 9/11, the RCMP reasserted its presence in anti-terrorism policing in the notorious racial profiling of Muslim men, which has received public censure from a public inquiry. Using strategic leaks to the media it attempted to justify its practices, while leveraging the threat of Muslim terror as an impetus for justifying greater policing powers. The RCMP used Islamic terror as a rationale for promoting and securing the new instruments of anti-terror policing to pre-emptively identify and arrest terrorist suspects. From community level surveillance of Muslim targets to more invasive attempts to construct Islamic terrorism bomb plots, the RCMP has continued to hyperbolize the threat that Islamic terrorism represents in Canada as a means of expanding national security policing and its own role within it.
In the aftermath of 9/11, the RCMP reasserted its presence in anti-terrorism policing in the notorious racial profiling of Muslim men, which has received public censure from a public inquiry.
Meanwhile, two decades of racialized terrorism panic produced by policing and media outlets has led to indelible impacts. Muslim communities have faced broad-scale impacts of policing and surveillance on the one hand, and, on the other, continue to suffer from brutal political violence at the hands of white supremacists who are often animated by the police’s Islamophobic sentiments. Certainly, there are layers of national security agencies responsible for the horrors of the “war on terror” but among those the RCMP remains an instrumental force in expanding and justifying the white supremacy of security policing in Canada.