Secrecy issues delay Air India inquiry

A belated inquiry into the 1985 Air India bombing is facing an unexpected delay as lawyers sift through two decades of documents and figure out how much of the 21-year-old paper trail must remain secret for national security reasons.
Commission counsel Mark Freiman, who disclosed the problem at a hearing Monday, said seven weeks of testimony that had been scheduled for late November, early December and January will have to be postponed.
Freiman said he still hopes the inquiry can wrap up hearings by next spring — a timetable that would allow former Supreme Court judge John Major to meet his original target of September 2007 for writing and delivering a report.
“We’ll be able to accomplish most of what we wanted to do in exactly the same amount of time that was budgeted,” Freiman said outside the hearing room.
He went on to admit, however, that there’s a chance he could be wrong about that. “If it turns out that, in order to do a good job we have to take a little longer, we’ll take the route of doing a good job.”
07/11/06 Jim Brown/Canadian Press/Ottawa Sun, Canada

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