This is the first in a new column series on "national security" and civil liberties in Canada and abroad that seeks to focus on specific cases as well as the overall framework in which serious human rights abuses have been justified in the name of security.

Just after Thanksgiving, Montreal's Westin Hotel played host to a gathering of high-powered Federal Court judges, NGO heads, lawyers, academics, and members of Canada's torture-complicit spy service, CSIS. Coming together under the predictably dry title "Terrorism, Law and Democracy: 10 years after 9/11," the conference sought to determine "whether Canadian law has successfully preserved fundamental rights and values of substantive and procedural justice while at the same time contributing to anti-terrorism."

As Abousfian Abdelrazik awoke one morning in the Canadian embassy in Khartoum, he found himself transformed into a rodent in a maze ...