The Mounties must be put back in their law-enforcement box, says security specialist WESLEY WARK

From Wednesday's Globe and Mail

The report by Mr. Justice Dennis O'Connor on the case of the wrongful suspicion, rendition and imprisonment abroad of Maher Arar brings to a close one of the most dramatic judicial inquiries in Canadian history.

The O'Connor report has only two parallels: the royal commission into Soviet espionage in Canada at the end of the Second World War, featuring Igor Gouzenko as star witness; and the McDonald royal commission into the RCMP Security Service's clandestine war against violent Quebec separatists in the 1970s.

The Arar report will ultimately be measured in this company. It won't be a bestseller to match the slimmer Gouzenko commission report with its startling cast of apparent Canadian traitors. And its recommendations don't have the same root-and-branch upheaval as the McDonald commission that brought about the birth of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service. But Judge O'Connor's report deserves equal pride of place, close public attention and swift government action.

There are two reports nestled within Judge O'Connor's findings. One is a forensic account of the chapter of errors, pratfalls and wrong practices by Canadian officials that led to a U.S. decision in 2002 to detain Mr. Arar, a Canadian citizen, in New York City while he was on his way home, to put him in the nefarious secret pipeline known as "extraordinary rendition," and to send him to Syria, his country of birth. Pulling facts from the shadows, Judge O'Connor is commendably clear in stating that Mr. Arar was tortured in a prison run by Syrian military intelligence, and equally clear in absolving Mr. Arar of suspicion of any involvement in terrorist activities. It only remains for the government to respond quickly to the recommendation that Mr. Arar be compensated for his ordeal.

Judge O'Connor also provides us with a disturbing report card on Canadian security practices in the post-9/11 war on terror. It's the only detailed, public report card we have, and probably the only one we will have for a long time to come. It's a reality check to weigh against the reassuring messages about our national security policy and capabilities that have been the staple of government pronouncements since 9/11.

The O'Connor report tells a sad tale of shoddy investigative and intelligence practices by the RCMP's national security division. Chasing the tantalizing spectre of an al-Qaeda underground cell based in Ottawa, the RCMP concocted a flimsy dossier on Mr. Arar and his family, then shared it without a moment's caution with American authorities. The lack of critical capacity evident in the Mounties' Project A-O Canada takes us back to the McDonald commission's scathing indictment of the RCMP's unsuitability as an intelligence-gatherer. There are good reasons behind the division of responsibilities that we arrived at in 1984 between a civilian intelligence service and a law-enforcement agency.

Intelligence services make mistakes, sometimes egregious ones. The post-9/11 landscape is littered with them. What matters is a capacity to learn from those mistakes. The worst chapters in the whole sad Arar mess were the unwillingness of the RCMP and CSIS to fully support a Foreign Affairs initiative launched by then-minister Bill Graham to secure Mr. Arar's release from prison in Syria and the deliberate smear campaign indulged in by unidentified RCMP officers to cast doubt on Mr. Arar's innocence once he had been returned to Canada. The question of possible criminal wrongdoing in the leakage and manipulation of information should be pursued. Ironically, the only target to date of the RCMP's own investigation into these leakages has been an Ottawa Citizen reporter, Juliet O'Neill. The Mounties are searching the wrong end of the barrel.

The key recommendation that stems from Judge O'Connor's report is that the RCMP must be put back into its law-enforcement box created by the McDonald commission and cease to covet a return to its former role as an intelligence service. CSIS doesn't escape criticism in the O'Connor report, but its role as the primary domestic intelligence agency has to be reinforced and the point of transition whereby intelligence collection and analysis (CSIS's job) leads to a criminal investigation with the intent to lay charges (the RCMP's role) has to be more clearly delineated, enforced and, most important, watched over.

There are two missing pieces to the O'Connor report. One is a literal ghost at the banquet. The government fought tenaciously to keep certain material from being released; Judge O'Connor objected. It's a shame that the government chose to make its stand on the hill of secrecy rather than public accountability.

The other missing piece is a delayed report on recommendations regarding accountability for RCMP national security activities. The delay is unfortunate and needs explanation. It may serve to weaken the impact of the recommendations when they do finally emerge, a fate that also befell the Gomery commission looking into the federal sponsorship scandal. My hope is that Judge O'Connor will recommend an integrated watchdog agency capable of bringing under scrutiny the full mosaic of agencies currently involved in national security and intelligence work in Canada. Such a watchdog would bring a much-needed improvement in public knowledge about our national security, would encourage better performance on the part of security and intelligence agencies, and may even wean us from a deeply ingrained tradition of secrecy about threats and responses to public safety.

The Martin government did the right thing, however reluctantly, in establishing the Arar inquiry in 2004. The Harper government now needs to do the right thing in making changes to a system that failed one man, and the country as a whole. To say, as the government might be tempted to do, that Mr. Arar is history and the problems revealed by Judge O'Connor were unique to an early phase of our post-9/11 experience and have already been fixed, is a temptation to be avoided at all costs.

Wesley Wark, a professor at the Munk Centre for International Studies at the University of Toronto, is completing a book on Canada and the war on terror.