But how much cheese would you give them?

That’s what British counterterrorism officers asked friends of John Letts and Sally Lane. This wasn’t code. They were actually talking about cheese — a big circle of pressed milk curds — and how much it would weigh.

It was early 2016, shortly after Letts and Lane had been charged with terrorism for trying to send money to their son Jack to help him escape from Raqqa, Syria.

Jack Letts, who has both British and Canadian citizenship, converted to Islam as a teenager and went to Syria in 2014. By the following year, he told his parents he was desperate. Scared that Daesh would kill him, he begged them to send money for smugglers so he could escape.

Police, however, suspected his story.

On Dec. 31, 2015, Letts and Lane tried to send £1,000 ($1,766 Canadian) from a Western Union in Oxford, England, but the transfer was blocked. They tried again with £500 on Jan. 4, 2016. Again, it was denied.

Early in the morning two days later, police raided their house and they were thrown in jail. A judge refused them bail at their first court appearance. At a second hearing, five days later, a different judge ordered them released, seeming shocked they were still behind bars. “Two perfectly decent people have ended up in custody because of the love of their child,” he wrote in his ruling.

John Letts, a botanist and organic farmer born in Chatham, Ont., and Lane, a freelance book editor who spent her teenage and university years in Ontario, both hold Canadian and British citizenship. They met in 1982 at Ste-Marie Among the Hurons, where, as “historical interpreters,” they gave tours to tourists and school groups. They moved to Oxford in 1990, had two boys and enjoyed a comfortable, middle-class life — until their eldest son left for the Middle East.

After they were granted bail, Letts and Lane found themselves suddenly destitute, their bank accounts closed, Lane fired from her administrative job. Friends rallied around the couple, aghast that police would charge desperate parents.

Then came the “cheese incident,” as Letts and Lane call it.

Dairy farmer Simon Fairlie and his wife, Gill Barren, longtime friends of the couple, sent them an email offering to pay their rent. Soon after, police officers with the South East Counter Terrorism Unit (SECTU) knocked on the door of Fairlie and Barren’s West Dorset home.

The officers warned them they could be committing a crime, Barren told the Star. “John is charged with funding terrorism, so if we gave him money, we would be funding him, and by extension, terrorism,” she said they told her.

She pressed the officers: What about paying the landlady directly?

Same problem, an officer replied, since that could free up funds that Letts and Lane could use for terrorism.

“I said that if all money was forbidden, then would we be allowed to give John and Sally something else to help them survive? Cheese, for instance. We are dairy farmers and we make cheese,” Barren said.

How much gruyère or cheddar would they give? the officers asked.

“Our cheeses are about four kilograms each; one would feed the family for a while,” Barren said she told the officers. They refused, she said, “because John might sell the cheese to get money to fund terrorism.”

If convicted, John Letts, 57, and Lane, 55, face 14 years in prison for terrorism fundraising.

Beyond their own plight, the case also exposes the political and legal maelstrom surrounding terrorism laws. Their case and others like it force governments, including Canada, to define their policies on how they will deal with citizens who left for Syria and Iraq.

Although there was enthusiastic support for an international coalition to militarily force Daesh, the group also known as ISIS or ISIL, out of Iraq and Syria, most governments have done little to deal with the fallout. Their inaction risks repeating security mistakes made after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and the subsequent Iraq War, after which prisoners held for years in U.S. camps formed the terrorist group that would eventually became Daesh — and civil rights abuses against thousands of others fuelled anti-western hatred.

Today, hundreds of suspected foreign Daesh members, including women and their children, are being housed in prisons or camps in areas of Syria controlled by Kurdish authorities. Some countries have suggested, essentially, that what happened in Syria should be left in Syria.

Lawyer Clive Stafford Smith, who is helping represent Letts and Lane pro bono, believes their case will be the first in the U.K. to confront what he calls a “policy of assassination.”

Last fall, British International Development Minister Rory Stewart said his government was prepared to execute its citizens in Syria, rather than extradite them back to the U.K. for trial. “We have to be serious about the fact these people are a serious danger to us, and unfortunately the only way of dealing with them will be, in almost every case, to kill them,” Stewart told BBC Radio 5 Live’s “Pienaar’s Politics”.

In December, British Defence Minister Gavin Williamson told the Daily Mail, “a dead terrorist can’t cause any harm to Britain,” prompting questions as to whether the government had a “kill list” of suspected Daesh members.

“This is a fantastically immoral and stupid policy by politicians who are trying to be tough populists, without seeing how they are trampling on the very principals we stand for,” Stafford Smith said.

There is no proof Jack Letts is on a kill list, if one exists. But his government has made no attempt to bring the 22-year-old back to Britain, nor provided any option to his parents — which is why they say they tried to send him money in 2016, when they feared he would be killed.

Their son made it out of Raqqa last May, and was picked up by Kurdish militia aligned with coalition forces. He has been held since in a Kurdish-run prison in Qamishli, a town near the border with Turkey.

Overwhelmed by the number of foreigners in their custody, Kurdish officials have said they welcome countries to deal with their own citizens if repatriation is officially requested.

The British government, however, has taken a hands-off approach. In a Sept. 7 letter to Letts and Lane, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office wrote: “There is nothing further the UK Government can do to assist Mr. Letts so long as he remains in Syria.”

Lane says the language is similar to that in five letters they have received over the years.

Canada has been aware of the case since June 2016, when Letts and Lane contacted the Canadian High Commission in London. A year later, officials with Global Affairs Canada contacted them and raised the possibility of negotiations for their son’s release, but said Canada preferred to speak with him directly.

That direct contact happened on Jan. 10, when Jack Letts called Canadian consular officials from prison, the CBC reported. He begged them for help. “Tell my mom I’m sorry. Tell my dad I’m sorry. Tell them if I ever get out of this place I’m going to try to be a better person,” he said in an audio recording of the Jan. 10 call, posted online by the CBC.

He had previously sent texts to his parents from prison, saying he had been kept in solitary confinement, was tortured and felt he was losing his mind. (His parents have not heard from him since July).

Kurdish officials have denied the claims of abuse.

“I want to come back to Canada,” Letts told the Canadian consular official, the CBC reported.

“Please get me out of this place,” he said. “I don’t mind if you put me in prison, just get me out of here as soon as possible.”

Like many of the cases involving foreigners who left for Syria and Iraq, little is known about Jack Letts, or his possible involvement with Daesh, or any other group.

He has not been charged in Britain or Canada, nor has he been charged by the Kurdish authorities who are holding him.

But the British tabloids and the echo chamber of social media has already tried and convicted him, branding him “Jihadi Jack.”

Letts and Lane said their son struggles with mental illness and was diagnosed with Tourette’s syndrome and obsessive compulsive disorder. At 16, he converted to Islam after becoming attracted to religion and Arabic through some of his Muslim friends. He dropped out of college at 18, and a short stint working with the relief group Oxfam spurred a passion for helping refugees and an interest in the Middle East.

In May 2014, at age 18, he went to visit a friend from Oxford who was studying in Jordan. His parents say he was due home in 10 days, but decided to go to Kuwait for a three-month Arabic course with his friend, which they supported.

Then, on Sept. 2 of that year, he called and told his mom: “I’m in Syria.”

What Jack Letts did over the next two years is unclear. There are angry, offensive Facebook posts on his account, which he told his parents he did not write, claiming that others had access. In the summer of 2015, he posted a photo of himself in Syria, holding up the one-finger salute associated with Daesh, which until recently controlled a large swath of Iraq and Syria.

Communication with his parents was spotty, but when he could speak to them, he said he was doing humanitarian work, teaching in schools, telling them he did not belong to any group.

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Police first came to Letts and Lane in March 2015, looking for information on their son.

“No one would tell us anything about what the hell was going on, despite police saying this was going to be a two-way communication. We said, ‘Do you have information, any intel, anything on him you can share with us?’ ” John Letts told the Star. “And they said, ‘No, we know nothing about him actually. No information other than the fact that he went there.’ ”

“That’s not parents in denial, who don’t want to believe this. We did our homework and we tried to understand the context and whenever Jack was online we grilled him and tried to figure out what was going on … we did try, we weren’t living in a bubble.”

Letts and Lane thought of the police, and a liaison officer from Britain’s counter-extremism program, known as “Prevent,” as their allies. They said they shared any information they had on their son, even when they got nothing in return.

In August 2015, they sent £223 to him and, according to Lane, police did not object. She willingly spoke to a detective about the transfer and said she was told, “You’re not a criminal, Sally.” (That money transfer was later included in the 2016 charge of “making property or money available to another person, knowing or having reasonable cause to suspect it would or might be used for the purposes of terrorism.”)

By November, the messages from their son became desperate. He claimed he had been in hiding for months and was worried about “spies” at the internet cafés. At one point, he told them he was injured in a bomb blast and taken to Raqqa, the stronghold of Daesh’s self-declared caliphate, or Islamic State.

He begged them to send enough money so he could escape, saying he was fearful that Daesh would kill him because he didn’t support their ideology.

“We did work within the system as best as we could,” said John Letts. “We tried everything. You’re just supposed to sit there and watch as your child sends you horrible, begging messages saying, ‘Please help me mom and dad because otherwise they’re doing to torture me and chop my head off?’ And these police have been telling you all along they don’t think he’s guilty, they just want to question him, and there’s no charges against him.”

When Letts and Lane asked police about sending more money, they claim their Prevent liaison officer told them that “no court in the land would convict a parent for trying to protect their child.”

But when the parents asked for that reassurance in writing, Lane said police instead gave them a statement that said although they wouldn’t be stopped from wiring money, they could face prosecution.

“They played us, lied to us,” John Letts told the Star. “They said they fully, deeply understood the dilemma we had, and said they felt for you, and gave you all this great sympathy, and then put the cuffs on you.”

Who cares about Jack Letts, a 22-year-old who willingly went to a war zone and now is asking for help from a country where he has only vacationed?

Why should Canada get involved when the U.K. will not?

These questions, no doubt, will be hotly debated by politicians and the public.

For Toronto lawyer Frank Addario, the answer is straightforward: “Citizenship comes with rights. Period.”

Addario is working on behalf of Jack Letts in Canada and, along with Stafford Smith, he believes the whole family have become “pawns” in the U.K.’s populist security agenda.

The lawyers say much of what is happening now in Europe, the U.S. and elsewhere parallels policies that were enacted in the aftermath of 9/11.

“Speaking as an American,” said Stafford Smith (who holds both British and U.S. citizenship), “we have inflicted on the world a number of utterly deranged policies in the last 16 or 17 years, starting with torture and rendition and Guantanamo Bay.”

Along with lawyers at his London-based organization, Reprieve, Stafford Smith has represented dozens of former detainees held by the U.S. in Guantanamo Bay or the CIA’s so-called “black sites.” He has seen firsthand the sometimes tragic — and costly — fallout to post-9/11 security policies.

In 2010, the British government paid millions to 16 Guantanamo Bay detainees for the torture they endured while held captive.

In Canada, under both the Conservative and Liberal governments, more than $50 million in compensation has been paid to Maher Arar, Omar Khadr, Ahmed Elmaati, Muayyed Nureddin and Abdullah Almalki, following federal inquiries and Supreme Court rulings that condemned Ottawa for not protecting its citizens abroad.

Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale made it clear last fall that Canada would stand apart from its European counterparts. “Canada does not engage in death squads,” Goodale told CBC’s “Power and Politics”.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has also complained that his government has had to pay in cases, such as Khadr’s, for the previous administration’s mistakes.

But exactly what the Trudeau government has done so far — or is willing to do in the face of a political backlash — to bring citizens home from Iraq and Syria is unclear.

Global Affairs Canada will not answer questions about Jack Letts or the case of other Canadians being held, such a 22-year-old Montreal woman and her two daughters, whose story was told in the Star and a CBC documentary this year.

When asked what responsibility Canada has to its citizens, spokesperson Elizabeth Reid wrote to the Star: “Each consular case is unique and the assistance we can provide will vary depending on circumstances. The Government of Canada’s ability and success in resolving consular cases are conditioned, in many instances, by the laws and regulations of other countries.”

Syria is complicated by the fact that Canada’s diplomatic ties with Bashar Assad’s regime have been “reduced to a minimum” since 2012, according to Reid. Jack Letts, along with the young Montreal family and another Toronto woman and her children, are held by Kurdish forces in a self-governed region that is not internationally recognized. Canada, “only has diplomatic relations with states,” Reid wrote in an email to the Star.

Sinam Mohamed, an international representative for the administration of the Kurdish-controlled regions of Syria, told the Star she had been contacted by Canadian authorities about both Letts and the Montreal woman, offering the appropriate representatives should Canada wish to negotiate their releases.

“Since we’ve declined the assassination option, and we’ve declined the wilful ignorance option, the remaining option is participating in the active solution, so I’ll expect Global Affairs to do that,” Addario said.

“It’s not as if ignoring the problem will solve the problem.”

As Letts and Lane begin their fight for freedom in the U.K. courts — their trial is scheduled to begin in September — they say their hope for their son now rests in Ottawa’s hands.

“The Kurds will only hand him over to a government,” Lane said. “So since the British government has been so intransigent, we have turned to the other country of his citizenship. We just know he will get fair treatment in Canada and they do have a more enlightened approach.”

She added: “We had two years of saying, ‘Save his life first, and then decide if he’s guilty or not’ … I think they’re hoping he will just die in prison and the story never comes out.”

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