Donald Santarelli, a senior Justice department official in the Nixon administration, among many other heavyweight positions through the years, is very old school.

Not old school as in prep schools and bow ties, but as in the blunt talk of Nixon administration officials 40 years ago, when Santarelli was in charge of bending the Constitution to the White House’s specifications.

A thin, hawk-faced Republican apparachik back then, it was Santarelli who ginned up the “no knock” and “preventive detention” statutes that gave the FBI vast new powers and liberals screaming nightmares in the winter of 1969-1970.

Pretty radical stuff, back then.

On Thursday Santarelli, 68, was presiding over a panel of U.S., British and Canadian intelligence and law enforcement officials — including the FBI’s current chief of intelligence, Robert E. Casey Jr. — at the fifth annual global counterterrorism conference in a ballroom of the Ritz-Carleton Hotel in Washington.

“I learned how to drink from Canadians,” Santarelli reminisced, in what was surely meant as an affectionate nod to the Canadians on the panel. Beer and tomato juice, he remembered, was the drinking bout of choice. “It amounted to lunch for Canadian police chiefs.”

However well-intentioned, the tale had the Canadians shifting in their seats, visibly discomfited. Only a few chuckles rose from the audience of a hundred or so police officials and homeland security complex contractors, most of whom were three decades younger than the veteran insider.

Yet there was a thread connecting Santarelli’s offhand remark to a speech a few minutes earlier by Jack Ewatski, president of the Canadian Association of Chiefs of Police: Trust, he said, is the linchpin of a successful global counterterrorism strategy.

Trust between the Bush administration and Canadians is in bad repair these days, due in large part to recent revelations that the CIA has been using Canadian air bases for its secret, global al Qaeda snatch program. Trust had already taken a hit in Canadian public opinion when the U.S. detained a Syrian-Canadian transiting New York in 2002 and deported him to Damascus, where he said he was tortured.

The finger of blame in that case was pointed at the Americans (apparently the Syrians escaped censure because they are expected to torture people). But it turned out that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police had supplied the man’s name to U.S. terrorist watch lists.

All these activities, Ewatski suggested, are putting a heavy strain on relationships, not just between countries, but between governments and their citizens, and among citizens, who are increasingly polarized over the war on terror and Iraq — and now Iran, which the intelligence agencies say is hell bent on building nuclear weapons.

“And so,” Ewatski said, “I am going to focus my remarks, not on technology or the intricacies of global information and intelligence sharing, but on a more fundamental ingredient to counter-terrorism.

“This ingredient is trust.”

Citing home-grown British-Islamic holy warriors who carried bombs onto London’s subways last summer, Ewatski talked about the importance of local police having the community’s trust, and especially the trust of the nation’s minorities.

He didn’t need to mention that the so-called Millennium Bomber, intercepted by an alert U.S. Customs agent en route to Los Angeles, originated among Canada’s Algerians. Or that the U.S.-Canadian frontier pretty much remains wide open to terrorist penetration.

“For those who have come to Canada from countries where police are a repressive force of the state, it is not a natural thing to turn to the police as trusted members of the community,” Ewatski said.

Recruitment of non-whites is essential to effective policing, along with ensuring the education of police to a point where they can relate to Muslims and their concerns, he added.

“Why talk about trust in a discussion about counterterrorism? Because community safety is not about the police,” he said. It is about the community.

“Whatever the threat, the police cannot counter it without the active participation of the community. And that participation depends upon trust.

“One way to build and maintain trust is to ensure that the rights of our citizens are scrupulously upheld.”

And “this trust,” he seemed to add pointedly, with a senior U.S. intelligence official sitting a few feet away, “must be in place at home and abroad.”

When Casey spoke, he took the numbers route, as FBI officials are wont, spinning out figures on the thousands of work force hires since 9/11. He also spoke of the challenges of transforming the FBI from a cops-and-robbers outfit into a sophisticated intelligence service, the river of reports flushed out and the special problems of commingling evidence with raw intelligence reports (which a clever defense attorney might exploit).

As for policing, Casey described a “tremendous umbilical cord between the FBI and state, local and tribal authorities,” tying together “600 to 700,000 law enforcement officers spread among 18,000 police agencies, many of which have three people or less.”

One big counterterrorism family — or an echo chamber of fear?

“I was there,” Santarelli was saying, not long before he took the stage at the Ritz, at a January forum sponsored by The Constitution Project, a group that sponsors conferences featuring former intelligence and law enforcement officials of all stripes.

Santarelli entered the Justice Department in 1969, when Congress, the administration and police honored constitutional protections of unreasonable search and seizure, if only in the breach.

“I can remember when congressmen and senators used to say let’s discuss the constitutional limitations of our power to legislate, etc.,” said Santarelli at the January forum. He also did stints as counsel to both the House and Senate Judiciary committees. “We don’t see much of that anymore.”

“Almost nothing went through the Congress that didn’t get screened by [the Judiciary committees] to see whether it was within the scope of the constitutional power of the Congress to in fact enact it,” he said.

That’s gone now, with Congress not even bothering to rubber stamp warrantless wiretaps of millions of U.S. citizens’ phone calls, faxes and e-mails.

Back then, he said, Nixon Justice Department attorneys felt the need to bend the law, not ignore it.

As “the guy who wrote the preventative detention statute — the first of them — and the guy who wrote the first of the no-knock statutes . . . ” Santarelli maintains, “we were very seriously concerned about the constitutional issues and vetted those proposals for many months — and sometimes years — before, in fact, enacting them and putting them forward for enactment.”

Far from proud of such legal craftsmanship, Santarelli called it “a sad moment in our history.”

A barrier had been broken. A few years later, he would tell a reporter from The New Yorker magazine, “the whole constitution is up for grabs.”

A decade later, he said, the “sham” of the Carter administration and Congress was to create a “star chamber” court to hear government applications for wiretaps in secret.

On the one hand, the court almost never turns down the Feds’ request for a wiretap or surreptitious house search; even so, its judges read about warrantless wiretaps by the NSA in their morning newspapers.

When the Ritz panel was over, I sought out Ewatski, who also happens to be the police chief of Winnipeg. The dark, square-faced policeman looked like he’d been sent South to live up to our stereotype of Mounties.

I asked him about the need for trust “at home and abroad.”

Were those remarks, and some of the others about gaining the trust of Muslim communities at home and abroad, directed at us?

“They aren’t directed at anybody in specific,” he said, smiling, and I almost believed him.

So much for Canadians’ vaunted lack of guile.

“All I’m saying,” he explained, “is we can’t miss taking the opportunity to enhance the level of trust everywhere.”

The uproar over secret CIA planes landing on Canadian bases with kidnapped al Qaeda suspects, he said, “highlights some of the unknowns about information-sharing in a global context.”

Meaning the U.S. lied to Canadian authorities about the flights?

“We are in uncharted territories,” he said, smiling.

But that, in a way, was what I think Santarelli was getting at when he reminisced about being a young official banging back beers and tomato juice with his Canadian counterparts ’til the cows came home.

We’ve created a huge counterterror superstructure at home and around the world that, at bottom, is supposed to make sure people talk to one another.

They still don’t, according to last week’s report from the Government Accountability Office on information-sharing. Five years and jillions of dollars down the road from 9/11, U.S. intelligence agencies still aren’t freely passing terror data back and forth, the GAO said.

Something has been lost in the global war on terror.

It’s the human dimension.

Trust.

NEVERMIND: In the same week that The Washington Post’s Dana Priest wins a Pulitzer for reporting on the CIA’s alleged global network of secret interrogation sites, the EU’s antiterrorism chief, Gijs de Vries, says that he’s not found proof “beyond reasonable doubt” that they exist in Europe. A report last January by the Council of Europe, the European human rights agency, came to the same conclusion, although the leader of that inquiry, Swiss senator Dick Marty, said there were enough “indications” to justify continuing the investigation. Some reports in recent months have suggested that the allegations of secret prisons were based on CIA flight records, not hard details on the prisons themselves. The Post has said it has withheld the locations of the alleged prisons after appeals from national security officials. A CIA officer identified as Mary McCarthy was fired for leaking to Dana Priest, according to an MSNBC report Friday.

SHARP ELBOWS: Supporters of R. Lindley DeVecchio, the veteran FBI agent indicted March 30 on charges that he helped his mobster snitches carry out four murders, have launched a Web site DeVecchio Web site to raise money for his defense. Calling the charges “ludicrous . . . baseless . . . [and] specious,” the Friends of Lin Devecchio Trust amounts to a Who’s Who of FBI organized crime fighters, including Joseph D. Pistone, memorably portrayed by Johnny Depp in 1997’s Donnie Brasco. Devecchio’s exit from the Brooklyn courthouse was described by FBI agent Chris Mattiace in an e-mail message to supporters: “We wrapped Lin in a human blanket and escorted him out of the courthouse with his attorney’s [sic] and kept the press away from him. It might even be said that a few reporters received a few body checks out on the sidewalk.”

In some jurisdictions, that’s called assault.

The CIA’s top European official during the run-up to the Iraq invasion is telling “60 Minutes” that the White House ignored intelligence that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction or an active nuclear program. In a broadcast scheduled for Sunday, April 23, Tyler Drumheller says the White House ignored crucial information from a high and credible source, Iraq’s foreign minister, Naji Sabri.

Jeff Stein can be reached at jstein@cq.com.