by Andy Lamey
… I know what the United States would have done, and that is conduct a background check to make sure that he was eligible for entering the United States and that he was not going to be a threat to the American citizens. I am not sure he would have even gotten in our front door, to tell you the truth.
Smith was a long-time proponent of slashing immigration. For him, Ressam’s case merely confirmed the problem with “lax” immigration laws. When Elinor Caplan, the Canadian immigration minister, was interviewed for the same program, it provided an opportunity to correct the impression that Ressam arrived in Canada as a terrorist. That Caplan never did suggests that even she thought it was true.
“Trail of a Terrorist” and its website were used as sources for The 9/11 Commission Report, the U.S. government inquiry into September 11. The report described how Ressam first entered Canada: “Following a familiar terrorist pattern, Ressam and his associates used fraudulent passports and immigration fraud to travel. In Ressam’s case, this involved flying from France to Montreal using a photo-substituted French passport.” When the 9/11 report’s version of events was quoted in the media, the backdated version of Ressam’s arrival became self-perpetuating, with media reports citing a government document that had itself sourced its version of events from the press.
The Ressam myth was widely taken to highlight a problem with Canada’s policy of official multiculturalism. Such was the conclusion of the New York Times, for example, when it reported on the factors in Canada that had allowed Ressam to thrive. The Times explained Ressam’s attempt to kill thousands of Americans by reference to “the rich ethnic mix and the loose immigration controls that have made it possible.” For years afterwards, Canadian commentators would draw a similar connection between multiculturalism and terror. The same David Harris who had denounced “Canada’s absurd refugee laws” in Washington later acknowledged to an interviewer that Ressam’s passport played a role in his transformation. But Harris went much further than calling for changes to the passport application procedure. “We need a gigantic cultural shift in this country,” he said:
We are not used to seeing ourselves at the front line of any major struggle. But there is a war on. It’s a global, terrorist-based war that we are all going to be facing, and it is increasingly going to become home here to Canada. We have got to get our laws and our attitudes into line to meet the threat before it’s too late.… Above all, all of us have got to be more aware that no matter what kind of emphasis we want to place on multiculturalism and the benefits of diversity, some of those issues open us to struggles that are going on around the world, and that we don’t want to have to come home.
Harris was drawing the same connection between Ressam and multiculturalism that the New York Times had drawn, one that would continue to be reiterated for years afterwards. In 2008, for example, a report by the Vancouver-based Fraser Institute argued that “high immigration compromises security” and invoked the legendary Ressam to make its case. Canada’s immigration and multiculturalism policies had always had critics. But the legendary Ressam provided the critics with a new talking point that had a powerful resonance in the wake of September 11. Multiculturalism. Immigration. Refugees. These things are all dangerous.
The Fraser Institute report came out a decade after Ressam had left for Afghanistan. Accurate accounts of his activities had long been available, including a twenty-part Seattle Times series that documented his transformation in painstaking detail. Yet it did not seem to matter. It was as if the legend of Ahmed Ressam had become indestructible. In real life Ressam had combined professional training with personal incompetence. After the legend took hold, his ill-conceived border crossing was taken to show he was “no amateur,” while he himself was promoted to a terrorist “all-star.” The central image of Ressam’s arrival was not that of a run-of-the-mill economic migrant with a false story of persecution. It was rather of a terrorist who had not only waltzed through Canada’s asylum system but had been allowed to do so after he “all but volunteered to immigration officials that he was a terrorist,” as 60 Minutes put it.
The real Ahmed Ressam was gone. The failure and petty criminal who drifted into terrorism years after arriving in Canada had been replaced by a far more ominous figure. One who used Canada’s refugee system as a means of executing a major terror operation and was only narrowly averted from causing great carnage in the United States. His actions showed that Canada’s refugee system was a gaping weakness in the North American security perimeter. The only thing to do now was to overhaul that system from top to bottom to make it far less welcoming. Columnist Diane Francis drew the lesson of the Ressam affair most bluntly. “There should be a complete moratorium on immigration.” Canada was admitting too many dangerous foreigners. Something had to be done to stanch the flood tide. It was time to slam shut the door.
Peter Showler put the Ressam file down on his desk. He could not quite believe what he was reading. It was as if there were two Ahmed Ressams. The real one, who had his final brush with the refugee board in 1996 and flew off to Afghanistan two years later, and the very different figure being described in the press. “The media conception of him was that … he was a terrorist when he entered, which is false,” Showler says. Showler would do what he could to counter the myth, in interviews and elsewhere, but it was like a household fan blowing into an airplane engine’s exhaust. There was too much misinformation coming the other way.
Showler left the refugee board in 2002 to teach refugee law at the University of Ottawa. The Ressam legend bothered him for years afterwards. It was not because Showler thought Canada’s asylum system of the 1990s was perfect. Far from it. In late 2001, Canada introduced a new security review for refugee claimants. They would now have their personal data sent to CSIS immediately upon filing a claim. This reasonable step, which had previously been planned but received funding only after September 11, was one Showler approved of. As he says, “Some changes were appropriate.”
Showler’s concern had to do with the timing of the Ressam legend and the lessons that were drawn from it. There was something surreal, he thought, about so much criticism being directed at Canada’s refugee program in the wake of September 11. What did the terrorist attacks have to do with refugees? After all, the attacks had not involved any refugee claims, in Canada or anywhere else. “None of them actually came through the American asylum system either,” Showler says. “But you didn’t see huge headlines: ‘[Terrorists] coming in on student visas,’ ‘[Terrorists] coming in on business visas.’ But the fact of the matter is that these people, most of them entered the country legally: primarily through business visa programs, student visa programs. Some of them overstayed and became illegal, but you didn’t see this treated as the leak in the system. Instead you saw endless replays of the case of Ahmed Ressam.”
To Showler it was as if someone had determined in advance that Canada’s refugee system was a danger to the public, and the legend merely reinforced a view that was never really up for examination.
There was something else. The introduction of the front-end security review, alongside other safeguards that had been in place when Ressam arrived, meant that the Ressam myth took off just when Canada’s refugee system became one of the least effective ways for a terrorist to enter North America. Showler describes the process refugee claimants go through: “The first thing that happens is they’re photographed, they’re fingerprinted, and [scheduled for] an intensive interview. Well what self-respecting terrorist would do that, when most terrorists have the money and the means to obtain false passports, false visas? Or even obtain legal visas and enter the country through legal means? Why would they bring themselves to the attention of authorities, knowing that they would immediately be put into Interpol scans?”
Showler’s reference to terrorist resources is borne out by The 9/11 Commission Report and other sources, which note that al-Qaeda maintained its own passport office in Afghanistan. As for Ressam himself, it is worth noting that he did not file
an asylum claim when he attempted to enter the United States, for precisely the reason Showler states. It would have attracted unwanted attention.
This brings us to one of the most misleading aspects of the Ressam myth. It was widely taken to show that if Canada’s refugee system were harder to enter, fewer terrorists would try to reach Canada. Showler’s remarks about terrorist resources, however, suggest that this view is naive. More likely is that that they would continue to arrive through other means, such as business and tourist visas. The terrorist’s choice, in other words, is not whether to travel at all but between different means of doing so. Given this reality, it is worth asking whether Canada’s refugee system is really a fatal weakness terrorists can exploit, as the legend would have it, or whether it is in fact an underappreciated counter-terrorism tool.
In order to answer this question we need to know two things. How frequently do terrorists arrive in Canada via asylum fraud compared with other means of travel? And what is the capture rate of terrorists who enter on a refugee claim compared with those who come in other ways? I am unaware of any study counting the number of terrorists who have tried to enter Canada through the refugee system. But by looking through media and think tank reports, and using a broad definition of “terrorist,” it is possible to generate a rough count of twenty-six asylum claims made by individuals involved with extremism (see Postscript). Statistics on the number of terrorists active in Canada are even harder to come by, for obvious reasons. But in 2000 a rough benchmark was provided by Ward Elcock, then the head of CSIS, who said that his organization was aware of 350 terror suspects in Canada. (As Elcock pointed out, this is not a large number for a country of 33 million.) They belonged to about fifty organizations working for overseas causes, such as radical Sikh, Tamil and Islamist groups.
Elcock’s figure was a snapshot of groups active in the year 2000, whereas the twenty-six refugee claims were made between 1988 and 2001. If we were to speculate about the number of terrorists present in Canada during the same thirteen-year period, it would possibly be larger. But the limited information that is available suggests that terrorists intending to exploit the asylum system represent a small minority of those who attempt to reach Canada.
What is even more striking about terrorists who pose as refugees in Canada is their overwhelming failure rate. There have been a few cases characterized as terrorists twisting the system to their own ends, but they are ambiguous. Essam Marzouk, for example, was a member of al-Jihad, an Egyptian organization that later merged with al-Qaeda, when he filed a refugee claim in Vancouver in 1993. Marzouk, whose claim was eventually accepted, was later rumoured to be indirectly involved in the 1998 bombing of two American embassies in East Africa, although his involvement in the bombing has never been conclusively established. He was captured by the Central Intelligence Agency shortly after the embassy attacks, but was not included in the list of suspects brought to the United States for indictment. (The CIA handed him over to Egyptian authorities instead, who convicted him of the separate charge of belonging to al-Jihad.) More importantly, during his time in Canada Marzouk was either in jail or under investigation by CSIS, frustrating whatever terrorist designs he had while in North America.
Marzouk, in other words, did not use the refugee system to carry out a successful terrorist operation. In this way he is typical of extremists who file refugee claims in Canada. In two or three cases they lived quietly for a few years before engaging in non-violent crimes, such as passport forgery, for which they were eventually caught. In others they were arrested on arrival by the RCMP or later placed under CSIS surveillance. In only one case, involving a fundraiser for Hezbollah who fled to Lebanon after CSIS began following him, was a documented terrorist able to avoid arrest. Contrary to the Ressam legend, in none of the twenty-six instances was someone plotting a terrorist attack able to use a refugee claim as a means of avoiding detection.
Said Atmani, Ressam’s former roommate, provides a better example of what happens to terrorists’ refugee claims than the Ressam legend did. Atmani did not actually use asylum fraud to enter Canada. Rather, he smuggled himself into the country by sailing as a stowaway on a cargo ship that docked in Halifax, and then filed a claim a month later. Nevertheless, at the time of his refugee claim Atmani was unambiguously a political extremist and while living in Montreal he forged documents for Islamic terror groups.
Filing a refugee claim, however, did not allow Atmani to evade detection by authorities. CSIS bugged the apartment he shared with Ressam precisely because they knew Atmani lived there. This is quite common with extremist refugee claimants, who often provide valuable intelligence to CSIS without knowing it. More to the point, Atmani’s dual status as a terrorist refugee claimant made him the easiest member of the Montreal cell to deal with.
Unlike Kamel and Hannachi, who had Canadian citizenship, Atmani had no legal right to stay in Canada. Unlike Ressam, who was not a terrorist at the time of his criminal arrests, Atmani’s history of political violence was obvious when he was picked up for credit card fraud. As a result, the moment Atmani found himself in police custody it was all over for his North American terror career. He was on a plane to Bosnia three days later.
The reason Atmani could be summarily deported was because he was both a terror suspect and a refugee claimant. In this way he symbolizes what may be the most overlooked fact about terrorists who pose as refugees: rather than being especially dangerous, such terrorists are the least likely to be effective, as they are the easiest to prosecute. This is evident in the fact that the most common outcome for terrorists who enter Canada’s refugee system has been not merely to be arrested but to be subject to what are known as security certificates.
Security certificates, which can be used against any non-citizen, grant the government sweeping powers of detention. Refugee claimants can be pulled out of the refugee system and incarcerated, a step that is consistent with both the Singh decision and the Refugee Convention (neither oblige Canada to grant oral hearings to terrorists or other violent individuals). Security certificates are by far Canada’s most powerful national security tool. They are also controversial, on account of the extraordinary measures they allow the state to employ. Prosecution lawyers have been able to present evidence that is withheld from an alleged terrorist and his lawyers, giving rise to allegations that the certificate process is itself a form of lawlessness, or what critics have termed “Guantánamo North.”
In 2007 a Supreme Court of Canada decision modified, but did not eliminate, the secret-evidence provision of security certificates. Even in their revised form, certificates are arguably inconsistent with the principle of human rights, as they permit procedures that would be illegal in any legal context involving Canadian citizens. But what is not in doubt is the certificates’ effectiveness as counterterrorism tools. As of 2009 fifteen terrorist asylum claimants have been dealt with through certificates. In each case, whatever threat they represented was instantly neutralized. Thanks to certificates and conventional arrests, no terrorist who has come through Canada’s refugee system has been able to carry out an act of terror in North America.
The overwhelming capture rate of terrorists who make refugee claims is in noticeable contrast to terrorist operations that do not involve asylum fraud. The September 11 hijackers, as we’ve seen, used tourist and business visas, while the largest terrorist attack in Canadian history, the 1985 Air India bombing, was perpetrated by long-time Canadian citizens. Perhaps a successful operation involving the Canadian asylum system will someday occur or come to light. But the evidence to date suggests that terrorists who attempt to enter North America through Canada’s refugee system are making a huge mistake, one that dramatically increases their chance of being caught.
If the alternative is terrorists not coming to North America at all, we should obviously hope no extremist ever makes another asylum claim. But the more likely alternative is that terrorists will continue to arrive. Given this reality, we may actually prefer that they
come in through Canada’s refugee system. Because during the 1990s it was the means of entry that functioned like flypaper: nearly every terrorist who touched it was stopped dead in his tracks.
The strong emotions the Ressam myth tapped into caused many observers to associate Canada’s refugee system with a higher level of fear than was warranted. In this way the myth illustrated a phenomenon known as “probability neglect.” This term, which was coined by American legal scholar Cass Sunstein, describes responses to emotionally charged events, such as terrorist attacks and natural disasters, that do not take note of the low probability of such events occurring. The aftermath of low-probability catastrophes often sees people calling on governments to undertake major policy responses, even though the event in question is less likely to happen than other risks the public is familiar with. “Hence an act of terrorism will have a large number of ‘ripple effects,’ ” Sunstein writes, “including a demand for legal interventions that might not reduce risks and that might in fact make things worse.” Sunstein gives the example of extensive security precautions at airports causing more people to drive, even though driving is more dangerous than flying.
The Ressam myth had two negative ripple effects. The first was to advance a flawed view of the best way to respond to terrorism, one that, if acted upon, would only make life worse for people whom terrorists target. Terrorism is a form of universalism. This much, at least, it has in common with the doctrine of human rights. When a bomb goes off in a public place such as an airport or subway car, it does not discriminate on the basis of nationality or religion or race. As in the case of September 11, when victims of fifty-two nationalities died inside the World Trade Center, everyone within the radius of a bomb blast is equally its victim. If we are truly opposed to terror, we will not wade selectively through the carnage and express remorse only for some who have suffered. Rather, we will oppose terrorism at the same level at which it operates by exhibiting sympathy for all victims.