Longshaft took his time before responding. “Everything you say is true … up to a point,” he said in the soothing tone of voice of a father speaking to a rebellious teenage son. “But our decision to send Sanchez back to Colombia must be looked at in context. Don’t you look at decision-making in context Luc?”
“Of course I do,” I muttered.
Longshaft’s tone changed and he went after me with prosecutorial fervour. “And did you not tell the officers interviewing you for the position of Foreign Service officer in May 1966 that you put national security above human rights in the ordering of Canada’s foreign policy priorities?”
“You were there, sir. I did.”
“Do you still feel that way.”
“I do, depending on the context.”
“And what was your definition of national security at that time? Do you remember?”
“To safeguard the national territory of the state from foreign aggression and to defend its citizens against terrorism,” I said, pulling the words from memory.
“And did you not tell that same interview board that that the use of torture to obtain information was acceptable if it would save a human life?”
“You’re taking my words out of context. I said torture was acceptable if it saved a lot of lives.”
“But you still support the use of torture in exceptional circumstances?”
“I did, but I’m no longer so sure after hearing Minister Hankey’s views.”
“The minister doesn’t live in the real world. He hasn’t woken up to the fact we live in a world where the existence of countries is threatened by international terrorism.”
“That’s not true,” I said. The existence of countries is not at stake; their well-being is at stake.”
“Don’t quibble with me. Existence and well-being are almost the same thing.”
“Maybe, but I still won’t go.”
“But when I hired you, I assumed you were a man of your word. I thought you were telling the truth when you said you put the fight against terrorism above human rights and accepted the use of torture to save lives in exceptional circumstances.”
“With respect, sir, you’re distorting my words.”
“If you can find any errors in my description of your views, I invite you to do so.”
Not wanting to prolong the inquisition, I said nothing.
“Now what I want you to understand,” he said carrying on where he had left off, “is that you’re not as smart as you think you are. It’s quite possible Sanchez knows where Peabody is being held. The chances aren’t high, but there’s still a possibility. The only way we’ll know for sure, to be 100 percent certain, is to let the Colombians question her. They’ll torture her, of course, but we’ll find out what she knows. What is not just a possibility, however, is that if we don’t take this step, if we don’t send her to Colombia, the Americans will make us pay. They are the big partner in the relationship and we are at their mercy.”
In the end, I gave in and said I’d go. I did so partly because Longshaft had worn me down and I couldn’t take any more of his hectoring. But I also wanted to meet Sanchez, to find what she was like as a person, to gain some insight into how someone who had come to Canada seeking a better life could turn against the country that had made her welcome.
“I thought you’d come around when I clarified the context,” Longshaft said. “You push back and I like that. That’s a sign of strong character, like the Métis soldiers in my battalion — the type of person with the mental toughness we need in our type of work. I was going to tell you later, but I’m sending you on a posting next summer to Washington as the bureau’s representative to the CIA and the NSA. On your return, you’ll work for me again on the ninth floor.”
I should have been happy but I wasn’t. Instead, I ignored his flattery and asked him to tell me how upright Canadian citizens could bring themselves to write a torture directive — something that ran contrary to all the principles Canada had defended so strongly at home and abroad since Confederation.
Longshaft didn’t become angry and treated my question seriously.
“Have you ever heard of the Guardians?” he asked.
“I’ve heard rumours. It’s a group of elite public servants who try to influence the politicians to adopt whatever consensus emerges from their discussions, isn’t it?”
“The Guardians do more than try to influence the politicians, Luc. They almost always get their way, although the politicians don’t realize it. What you must understand,” he said, putting his arm around my shoulder and speaking in a conspiratorial tone, “is that there’s always been a small coterie of people in Ottawa with the courage to break the moral code of the country to save the nation. And I’m proud to say I’m a member of that group. And if I have my way, you’ll soon be invited to join. We need representation from the aboriginal world.”
“I thought it was some sort of high-level lobby group.”
“Nothing as vulgar as that. We deal with the really big and tough moral issues facing the country. If it wasn’t for the Guardians, the regulations barring the entry of Jews into Canada before the war would never have come about, and the country would have been swamped with undesirables. The law expelling Japanese Canadians from their homes after Pearl Harbour would never have been passed, and Canada’s war effort would have been exposed to sabotage. Going back a generation or two, the Guardians supported the head tax on Chinese migrants and the tough-love regulations directing the police to seize Indian children and send them to residential schools to educate them in the ways of the white man. ”
Longshaft looked at me with a small cold smile after he made his last point, gauging what my reaction was to these outrageous revelations — especially on the residential school system — but I said nothing. I wanted to stick to the subject we were discussing.
“And so that’s how the decision was taken to come up with the torture directive?”
“Exactly. Although the members prefer to call it the Exceptional Circumstances Directive. It emerged as an unspoken consensus as the politicians began to worry about the danger the FLQ posed to the country.”
“Minister Hankey didn’t seem to be part of your consensus.”
“There’s always someone who is out of step. I tried to talk sense to him ahead of time to let him know what was coming. But he didn’t seem to understand what I was saying. He’s in the wrong line of work.”
“Maybe he reflects Canadian values better than his colleagues.”
“I don’t agree. Look at the enthusiastic reaction the directive has received by the press and public since it was announced. ”
“Do you think the day will come when a Canadian minister of public safety will send a directive to the law enforcement authorities authorizing them to have the torturing done by Canadians in Canada rather than farming the job out to foreigners?”
“Not to handle crises like the current one. When the next really big terrorist attack occurs — and one will eventually come along, international terrorism is here to stay — the immigration minister will rush through legislation to strip dual national Canadians of their Canadian citizenship and expel them to their countries of origin on a massive scale. And Cabinet will direct the head of CSEC to launch a vast program of electronic spying on literally everyone. The know-how hasn’t yet been developed, but the NSA, the CSEC, and their partners are working on it.”
I had learned enough to become thoroughly frightened. I left and called the RCMP to get a plane to fly to Bogota. The officer in charge told me arrangements had already been made to fly Sanchez to Colombia that evening on a Canadian Forces transport. I was welcome to come along. The Colombian secret police, he said, had already confirmed their willingness “to process her” immediately on arrival. I thus sent a message to the Bogota embassy giving it my travel plans and asking it to reserve me a room close to the airport, and made ready to depart.
15: Return to Bogota
An unmarked car with an
RCMP driver picked me up at the Daley Building that afternoon and drove me to Dorval Airport to wait for the arrival of Sanchez. It was already dark when we got there, and a dirty wind was blowing wet snow mixed with rain across the tarmac. Although I had seen shackled people before, it was still a shock to see her struggle out of the paddy wagon. With dark brown skin and pronounced Indian features, she looked more like a forlorn gamine, lost on a street in downtown Bogota, than a terrorist who had helped murder a hostage. I waited until the RCMP constable, who had come with her and who would hand her over to the Colombians, led her inside and removed her handcuffs. I took a seat beside her and the policeman sat at the back.
“You a cop?” she asked me in French, as the plane waited to take off.
Not wanting to explain why a Foreign Service officer was flying with her to Colombia and wanting to carry on in French, I said, “No, I’m not.” and nothing else. I would tell her more about myself later if necessary.
“Where we going?”
“Didn’t they tell you?”
“They said I was being sent to Colombia, but that makes no sense.”
“You’re being expelled to Colombia.”
“And why’s that?”
“Because you helped kill Minister Jolicoeur. Canada doesn’t want you.”
“I wasn’t the only one. Besides, you can’t do that. I know my rights. I’m a Canadian citizen.”
“Not any more. The government has stripped you of your Canadian citizenship.”
“That’d be illegal. It can’t do things like that.”
“The War Measures Act gives the government the authority to override normal laws to deal with people like you. It now rules by decree. The FLQ has been outlawed and its members are guilty of a crime.”
“But I haven’t been convicted of anything.”
“You should’ve thought of that before you killed the minister.”
“But the secret police will pick me up. I know what happens to people like me over there.”
“So does the Canadian government. That’s why it asked the Colombians to question you — to get you to say where Peabody is located before your friends in the Che Guevara cell kill him.”
“But the secret police will torture me.”
“The Canadian government is counting on that. The minister of public safety has even issued a directive to the commissioner of the RCMP to let it use any information the Colombians can force out of you.”
“But I don’t know where Peabody is held. I told the police that. The FLQ is divided into cells. Each cell is autonomous. The members know only the location of their own cell. That’s for security reasons. Everybody knows that. It’s to prevent the capture of one cell from rolling up the whole network. It’s classic urban warfare technique. I thought I was being sent to a woman’s prison somewhere in Canada. Now I find I’m being sent to my death. You believe me, don’t you?”
“My opinion doesn’t count. I just know that if you don’t tell me where Peabody is, the policeman sitting over there will hand you over to the Colombians.”
“This is a nightmare!”
“I’m sorry. It wasn’t my decision.”
Sanchez stopped talking and turned her face to the window and stared out. She was telling the truth but there was nothing I could do.
“Want a cigarette?” I said, holding one out to her.
“You’re offering a condemned prisoner her last cigarette,” she said and laughed. I laughed back and told her I believed her — that she didn’t know where Peabody was hidden.
“Then why don’t you tell the pilot turn this thing around and take me back to Montreal?”
“I could only do that if you told me where Peabody is hidden, but you don’t know.”
“Do you know Waiting for Godot?”
“You mean the absurdist play by Samuel Beckett — where no one shows up?”
“That’s one way of looking at it?”
“What’s your way?”
“It’s about waiting for death.”
“You sound like my wife.”
“She sounds interesting. Where is she tonight?”
“I don’t know. She left me.”
“Why.”
“Because I was a pain in the ass.”
“There must be more to it than that.”
“She was a nymphomaniac.”
“Better than being a boring housewife.”
“Not to me.”
“Anyway, I’m waiting for Godot on this flight, even if I don’t believe you when you say we’re going to Bogota.”
“We’re really going to Bogota.”
“I still don’t believe you. You’re just trying to scare me into talking when I haven’t anything to tell you. You’re going to fly me around in the dark even if I can’t tell you anything. That’s it, isn’t it?”
“I wish that were the case.”
“I still don’t believe you. Why not turn back and let me go back to my cell?”
“I’m sorry.”
After a while, she asked me where I picked up my accent.
“I’m a Métis from Ontario.”
“Ah, a member of an oppressed people. You should be on our side.”
“Why did you join the FLQ?”
“Can you give me another cigarette?”
“Sure. Now tell me why you started kidnapping people? Didn’t you know the government would never surrender to your demands? That would just encourage terrorists to carry out more kidnappings.”
“That’s not what we thought. Brazil, Guatemala, and Paraguay let hostages go in exchange for political prisoners.”
“Those governments now kill their prisoners, to discourage future kidnappings.”
“How come you know that?”
“It’s my job to know things like that.”
“Oh, I see…”
“What led you to help kill another human being, someone who had a family?”
“It was hard not to like him. I had to keep reminding myself he was the enemy, and not a real person.”
“Don’t you feel guilty?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because I wasn’t guilty of a crime. I was obeying a higher moral code — a code that allows me to kill for the greater good, permits me to ignore the moral limits ordinary people must follow, and compels me to kill to eradicate the evil in society and change the political consciousness of the people.”
“That was a speech, not an answer.”
“I know. It’s what I had to tell myself before we killed him.”
“Did you have time to get to know him? Did you eat with him?”
“I did. I had time to share meals with him, to get to know him. But our struggle is a war, and in a war, the rules of civilized behaviour don’t apply,” she said, beginning to cry.
“How could you help kill someone you broke bread with?”
She kept on sobbing and later, speaking softly, said, “On a human level, taking a life can never be justified. He was a family man, even if he was a representative of a repressive government. I can explain why we did it on a political and logical level, but reasons never equal justifications.”
“What were your reasons?”
“We did it to make the English respect the Quebeckers. It was a question of pride and dignity.”
“Surely you didn’t kill someone just to be respected?”
“No, there was more to it than that. We wanted to provoke an uprising among the Quebec people, an uprising in the streets so huge it’d be like the French revolution, the Paris commune, and the 1917 revolution in Russia all rolled into one. It’d be so overwhelmingly mind-altering, the consciousness the people would forever change and an independent communist state of Quebec would emerge from the mix. There’d be another Cuba in the Americas.”
“Do you really believe that? Sounds to me like a lot of unrealistic doctrinaire banalities.”
“I truly do. Why else would I take such risks?”
“What about your parents? Do they want the same things?”
“No, they’re self-satisfied bourgeois who bought into the phoney Canadian dream of multicultural bliss. They’re deluded. Happy with their new lives in Canada.”
“What made your family decide to come to Canada?”
“The usual — my parents were campesinos in the Llanos. Paramilitaries drove them out during the civil war and they ended up in a barrio in Bogota. My father worked at odd jobs but couldn’t support the family and my mother had to do things on the streets I don’t want to talk about. They wanted out and one of my mother’s clients told her about Canada. All you had to do was buy a one-way ticket to Montreal and claim status as a political refugee fleeing persecution and they’d let you stay.”
“What sort of job does your dad have?”
“He drives a taxi and my mother cleans offices. They live in Saint-Henri and watch the Montreal Canadians play the Toronto Maple Leafs on CBC on Saturday nights.”
“Do you remember Colombia?”
“Of course. I was ten we came. I hated the barrio.”
“Don’t you feel Canadian?”
“No, I’m a Quebecker. My first language is French.”
“Do you speak Spanish?”
“Yes, but only with my family, and we haven’t seen each other for a long time — too many quarrels.”
“Aren’t you worried there‘ll be a backlash against all new Canadians for what you did? That people will think you can’t be trusted — that you’d turn your backs on the country that gave you their citizenship?”
“Canada didn’t give us citizenship because it loved us. That’s the version of history they teach in school, but it’s the capitalist version. The business oligarchs needed cheap labour to build the railroads, open the West, dig the mines, and fuel the capitalist industrial machine — to make them a lot of money. That’s the way it was in the past, that’s the way it’s today, and that’s the way it’ll be until the people rise up in revolt and install a Cuban-style government. New Canadians don’t owe anything to Canada.”
Exceptional Circumstances Page 19