I wonder if anyone here in the United States has heard of Maher Arar. Tomorrow morning his face will likely be all over Canadian newspapers and television news programs. His story is a sad one.
Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen of Syrian descent, was detained by U.S. authorities as he changed planes in New York on Sept. 26, 2002. He was held for questioning for 12 days, then flown by jet to Jordan and driven to Syria. He was beaten, forced to confess to having trained in Afghanistan -- where he never has been -- and then kept in a coffin-size dungeon for 10 months before he was released.
All the while, no one even knew where he was.
In fact, I wonder if he would have ever been released if it weren't for his wife Mounia who campaigned relentlessly for the Canadian government to find him and bring him home. She caused the biggest ruckus that one woman could. CAIR CAN and Amnesty International became involved in his case. CAIR CAN's executive director at the time, Riad Saloojee, had this to say:
"The fact is that he was detained through a secretive and non-transparent procedure. He was interrogated without a lawyer present. His lawyer said she was notified of his deportation and immigration on a Sunday afternoon when the U.S. authorities knew she would be unable to attend. Mr. Arar was allowed to call his family only after a full week had elapsed since his detention. His whereabouts were, until very recently, a mystery, because U.S. authorities have been thoroughly unco-operative about providing details of his deportation. In fact, at no point since his deportation did the United States ever admit that it sent him to Jordan. In what can only be described as callous indifference, if not the cruel conceit of a hegemonic state drunk with power, the U.S. allowed Canadians and Mr. Arar's family to labour blindly over his whereabouts."
Tomorrow Canadians will finally hear the truth from their own government, the admission that Canadian intelligence services were under pressure to find terrorists after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and falsely labeled Maher Arar, an Ottawa computer consultant, as a dangerous radical. They asked U.S. authorities to put him and his wife, a university economist, on the al-Qaeda "watchlist," without justification, the report says. Arar was also listed as "an Islamic extremist individual" who was in the Washington area on Sept. 11. The report concluded that he had no involvement in Islamic extremism and was on business in San Diego that day, says the head of the inquiry commission, Ontario Justice Dennis O'Connor.
So he is innocent. I knew that, and I know, sadly, what this has cost them. Is there any recompense for something like this? Can you provide a monetary value to give him back anything that he has lost? Can you get back his reputation? or his job? or the time that he has lost with his family? There is nothing that can be done to fix this. It is an outrage. But I think I am more sad than angry right now. I always really believed that if you had nothing to hide, you had nothing to be afraid of. Not true in these days...
CBC Background information on Maher Arar's story
The Globe and Mail: How Canada Failed Maher Arar
The Ottawa Citizen: Arar Cleared at Last
CBS News: His Year in Hell
The Toronto Star: RCMP faulted; Arar cleared
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