CSIS wiretap effort bogged down in red tape, Air India inquiry hears

Ottawa: It took Canada's spy agency five months to obtain an "urgent" wiretap warrant on a Sikh separatist who later became the key suspect in the 1985 Air India bombing, a public inquiry has learned.
Nine months before the bombing, documents tabled Friday show the Canadian Security Intelligence Service already considered Talwinder Singh Parmar the "most radical and potentially dangerous Sikh in the country."
In September 1984, CSIS started its internal process in motion to get legal authorization to tap Parmar's phone and electronically intercept his conversations.
But Jacques Jodoin, then in charge of warrant requests for the service, testified there was a backlog of cases that made it an arduous task to get even an urgent request through the mill.
"Obviously it was too slow," Jodoin told the inquiry headed by former Supreme Court justice John Major. "But it was par for the course at the time, considering the resources and the complex system that we had to go through."
Norm Boxall, one of the lawyers for the families of the Air India victims, was aghast at the inability to speed up the bureaucratic machinery.
"In 1984 and 1985 it was open season for terrorists," Boxall declared outside the hearing room.
"If it took five months to get an electronic intercept on someone who was described in the terms that Mr. Parmar was, it's frightening and it would be a concern to any reasonable-minded citizen."
The authorization to take action on Parmar finally came through four months before Air India Flight 182 went down in June 1985 with the loss of 329 lives.
04/05/07 Jim Brown/Canadian Press/Global National

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Categories: Air India May 2007, Foreign May 2007, Safety May 2007