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Jan. 18, 2006 - When is it safe to release a captured Islamic terrorist from prison or detention? According to a top official of Canada’s intelligence service, the answer is: never.
In public testimony at a court hearing in Ottawa last November, which got no attention south of the border, the senior Middle East analyst for the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), identified only as “P.G.,” declared his agency’s “belief” that people who have joined militant “networks” linked to Al Qaeda and affiliated Islamic movements “maintain their ties, and their relationships to those networks, for very long periods of time. These ties are forged in environments where relationships mean a great deal, and it is our belief that the dedication to the ideology, if you will, is very strong, and is virtually impossible to break.”
In an official paper that he drafted outlining the service’s position on the release of alleged jihadi detainees held by the Canadian government under a controversial post-9/11 security procedure, P.G. wrote that “Individuals who have attended terrorist training camps or who have independently opted for radical Islam must be considered threats to Canadian public safety for the indefinite future. It is highly unlikely that they will cast off their views on jihad and the justification for the use of violence.” The paper adds that “Incarceration is certainly not a guarantee that the extremist will soften his or her attitudes over time; quite the contrary. The Service assesses that extremists will rejoin their networks upon release.”
In a section of the paper carrying the subhead “Once a Terrorist, Always a Terrorist?”, P.G. noted “there have already been instances where released detainees have rejoined extremist groups … At least 10 detainees released from the Guantanamo Bay prison after U.S. officials concluded they posed little threat have been recaptured or killed fighting U.S. or coalition forces in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and one of the repatriated prisoners is still at large after taking leadership of a militant faction in Pakistan and aligning himself with Al Qaeda.”
The CSIS paper cites several well-known cases as evidence that Islamic militants are likely to maintain, and even intensify, their extremist views and violent tendencies as a result of imprisonment. In one case, Allekema Lamari, an Algerian “extremist,” was released from a Spanish prison only to later mastermind the deadly March 11, 2004, bombing attacks on Madrid commuter trains. Then there are the cases of Ayman al-Zawahiri, who, the paper, says spent three years in an Egyptian prison for his involvement in the 1981 assassination of President Anwar Sadat, only to emerge as Osama bin Laden’s principal deputy, and Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi, the militant who spent seven years in prison in his native Jordan for extremist activities, only to emerge as self-proclaimed creator and leader of Al Qaeda’s ultraviolent affiliate in post-Saddam Iraq. The CSIS paper also pointedly notes that after serving half of an eight-year terrorism-related sentence in a French prison, Algerian Islamic militant Fateh Kamel returned to Canada; Kamel, the document says, once boasted: “Killing is easy for me.”
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