For Gawds Sakes Let's Put This To Rest

After years and years of anguish for the families and millions of taxpayer$$$$ we are still screwing around....

Inquiry in Major need of all the facts
By Lorrie Goldstein, Toronto Sun Associate Editor
February 21, 2007

Federal bureaucrats are insisting that if "secret" documents are made public at the ongoing Air India inquiry, it could compromise Canada's security.

Surely the greater concern is that if civil servants are allowed to keep too many documents secret using the excuse of "national security," the inquiry will never get to the bottom of how Canada's intelligence agencies botched their investigation of the 1985 Air India bombings.

The point of Prime Minister Stephen Harper calling this inquiry was to ensure such blunders as the erasing of key evidence and damaging turf wars between CSIS and the RCMP never happen again.

John Major, a retired Supreme Court of Canada judge who heads the inquiry, has privately seen the disputed documents and does not believe all of them need to be secret. Based on his mandate, which is to oversee a public inquiry into the Air India disaster, Major has given the federal government until March 5 to address this issue, or he will shut down his probe.

Major is not calling for the release of documents that might reveal the identities of spies or the sources of intelligence supplied by foreign governments. He is saying that having seen the documents in question, too many have been deemed "secret" without good reason, to the point that it compromises his ability to give a full public accounting of what happened.

Harper's instructions to the bureaucracy in response to Major's concerns -- full co-operation -- must be taken seriously. It's easy to suspect many documents deemed "secret" are simply embarrassing to the government or reveal negligence, which is not the same as compromising security.

Almost 22 years ago, terrorists got away with murdering hundreds of innocent people, most of them Canadians, by blowing a passenger plane out of the sky.

It's not just families of the victims who deserve an answer as to why that happened. All of us do. Because it's our security that's at stake as well.