Our worst fears confirmed -CSIS, RC MP were negligent

The Air India inquiry report repeats what many of us suspected a quarter-century ago -- negligence by the RCMP and CSIS allowed 331 people to be murdered in 1985.
When Ottawa used national security laws in 1987 to shut down the first trial of bomber Inderjit Singh Reyat, we assumed that the investigation into our country's worst terrorism incident was botched.
Our worst fears have been confirmed after 25 years.
This tragedy was the result of decisions made by white men who knew nothing about religious strife on the subcontinent that inflamed thousands of Canadians of Indian heritage, men who were too busy fighting over their own little pieces of turf to do their real job -- keeping us safe.
For decades, the federal government used every means at its disposal to keep secret from Canadians the scope and breadth of this unconscionable failure of intelligence, law-enforcement and governance.
Let us never forget it.
Our intelligence agents listened on wiretaps as the bloodthirsty conspirators plotted this atrocity. Not surprisingly, they planned the massacre to coincide with the anniversary of the 1984 slaughter of Sikh militants and pilgrims at the Golden Temple in Amritsar by the Indian army.
But our spies didn't understand a word and translation of the Punjabi farming dialect sometimes took six weeks.
Everyone in the expatriate community was aware of a threatened strike and people had been warned not to travel on Air India, especially around the key dates.
CSIS knew danger loomed: It had blanket surveillance on Sikh separatists in the province and agents followed their leader Talwinder Singh Parmar around the clock. They even watched as he oversaw a bomb test in the woods near Duncan.
Yet bag bombs were checked through YVR in June 1985 destined for two state-owned Air India jetliners on opposite sides of the globe.
The explosives on Flight 182 detonated off the Irish coast on June 23, 1985 killing all 329 aboard the plane; the other bomb exploded as it was being transferred through Narita Airport, killing two Japanese baggage handlers.
The RCMP was so ignorant of Indian sectarian tensions officers went to see the movie Gandhi to educate themselves. Prosecutors in those days were similarly out of touch -- one even asked to refer to Sikh defendants by their "Christian" names.
That was our biggest problem -- white kids and small-town cops chasing big-world multilingual bad guys. It still is.
18/06/10 Ian Mul Grew/The Vancouver Sun

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Categories: Air India - International Jun 2010, Foreign Jun 2010, NACIL Jun 2010, Safety Jun 2010