Our Friendly Local Terrorist by Mary Jo Leddy

Author:Mary Jo Leddy [Leddy, Mary Jo]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Political Science, Terrorism, Emigration & Immigration
ISBN: 9781926662237
Google: WxkBBQAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 13173170
Publisher: Between the Lines
Published: 2010-08-28T00:00:00+00:00

As the hearing ground on, certain rituals developed. At noon hour, with the exception of Bob Rae, we would all go down to a coffee shop on the main floor of the Eaton Centre. Suleyman and his lawyers and I would sit a few tables away from the Justice Department lawyers. We would exchange a few pleasantries. One of the government lawyers, I discovered, knew a friend of mine from Timmins. I came to feel that the lawyers for CSIS were just doing their job as competently as they could, that they had no personal axe to grind, that they were life-sized. Suleyman was not so sure. “She’s a pretty woman, but she looks devilish,” he said of one of the lawyers. He told me how once they were having a chat—it was on a Friday after the session was over—and she said she was going home to Ottawa because she had a dog at home alone. Suleyman remarked that it might be difficult for the dog to be alone, “because animals are very sensitive.” When she asked him if he liked animals, he suspected it was because she believed that terrorists should not like animals.

Towards the end of the hearing a single piece of paper surfaced, and I still do not know where to file it. After we became aware of the contradiction between my memory of the length of the October interview (seven hours) and the officers’ (less than five hours), we had tried to find the original call-in notice, which would indicate a time for the interview. Suleyman had kept the original notice in his briefcase, together with newspaper articles about the death of his father and other matters. However, his briefcase had been stolen shortly before the SIRC hearing. He had given a copy of the notice to a lawyer, who would not take the time to find Suleyman’s file. So Suleyman went to the Immigration office in Etobicoke to ask for a copy. He waited there for several hours until the person at the desk finally told him that there was no notice in his file, or perhaps it had been removed.

To rebut my testimony, the lawyers for CSIS tabled a copy of the call-in notice, which indicated that the interview was scheduled for 10:00 a.m. and not 9:00 a.m., as I recalled. The notice was passed across the table to me, and as Sharry Aiken questioned its origins I kept looking at it; and as I read the details on the piece of paper and saw the time recorded on it I began to feel completely disoriented. I felt that my grip on reality was fragile at best. I knew what I remembered, but then again maybe I did not.

I kept looking. I knew something was wrong, either with me or with the document. Then I realized that the notice, addressed to Suleyman Goven, presented his current address, on Appleton Avenue—and not Quebec Avenue, where he had lived in 1994.

Clearly the document had been retrofitted.

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