Fmr. boss doubts Bartleman Air India testimony

Ottawa: Ontario Lt.-Gov. James Bartleman would have been obligated 22 years ago to pass on to his superiors details of the specific threat against Air India Flight 182 that he claims he saw days before the plane went down, his former boss said Monday.
Gordon Smith, then deputy minister of external affairs, cast doubt on Bartleman’s startling testimony at the Air India inquiry last week that a warning against the flight on June 22, 1985, crossed his desk just a few days before.
“I think it’s possible … that he has conflated several events and run them together and his memory in that sense is playing tricks on him,” Smith told inquiry head Justice John Major.
Bartleman, who worked under Smith at the time, said he tried to raise the threat with an RCMP officer on June 18, 1985, but was brushed off and then never discussed it again for more than two decades.
But Smith said he knows Bartleman very well and cannot imagine he would not have told Smith or others about the threat either before or after the June 23, 1985, bombing that claimed 329 lives.
“I would have thought he would have come forward immediately,” Smith said of Bartleman. “That would have been a very relevant piece of information for a lot of us to have.”
Smith said he watched Bartleman’s testimony last week and couldn’t believe he was hearing the information for the first time.
“It just doesn’t add, it just doesn’t make sense when you try to put all this together,” said Smith, now a professor at the University of Victoria. “This is a really important piece of information.”
Smith said if he had known about the specific warning Bartleman claims to have seen, he would have raced in to share it with his minister at the time, Joe Clark, within “two minutes.”
07/05/07 Kim Bolan/CanWest News Service/Global National, Canada

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