Jim Judd - WikiLeaks Cables

WikiLeaks Cables

On November 29, 2010 online whistleblower Wikileaks released a U.S. diplomatic cable sent from the U.S. Embassy in Ottawa dated July 2, 2008 that reported a meeting between Judd and US State Department official Eliot Cohen.

In the meeting Jim Judd, then head of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, tells Eliot Cohen that the Canadian spy agency was still “vigorously harassing” known sympathizers of Hezbollah in Canada.

In the same cable the American officer quotes Jim Judd as he laments a soon to be released video of Canadian citizen Omar Khadr being interrogated by CSIS's officers at American Guantanamo Bay detention camp in Cuba. Judd refers to video saying that it "would likely show three … adults interrogating a kid who breaks down in tears. He adds the comment that the release of the video would trigger “knee-jerk anti-Americanism” and “paroxysms of moral outrage, a Canadian specialty,” he says.

In another instance, Jim Judd said Canadians and their courts had an "Alice in Wonderland" worldview and he "derided" Canadian court judgments that, as per his view, threaten foreign governments' intelligence-sharing with Canada. The cable goes on reporting Judd as having said that "These judgments posit that Canadian authorities cannot use information that 'may have been' derived from torture, and that any Canadian public official who conveys such information may be subject to criminal prosecution."