Maher Arar was deported, by the U.S. to Syria where he was (most likely) tortured
The AP via CNN reports that Maher Arar, who was deported by the U.S. to Syria where he was tortured, has been compensated by the Canadian government for its role in this drama. He will get C$10.5 million (US$8.9 million) and Prime Minister Stephen Harper publicly apologized. Harper also called “on the U.S. to remove the Ottawa telecoms engineer from any of its no-fly or terrorist watchlists and reiterated that Ottawa would keep pressing Washington to clear Arar’s name.”
The U.S. government has – thus far – refused to take Arar of any of these lists.
What happened to Arar?
Arar was detained at New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport in 2002 during a stopover on his way home to Canada from a vacation with his family in Tunisia.
He said he was chained and shackled by U.S. authorities for 11 days during interrogation and then flown to Syria, where he was tortured and forced to make false confessions.
He was released 10 months later, with Syrian officials saying they had no reason to hold him further.
[…]
Arar was exonerated last September after a two-year public inquiry led by Associate Chief Justice of Ontario Dennis O’Connor.It found that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police wrongly labeled Arar as an Islamic fundamentalist and passed misleading and inaccurate information to U.S. authorities, which very likely led to Arar’s arrest and deportation.
The report pointed out that Arar’s inability to find work since his return from Syria has had a devastating economic and psychological impact on him and his family.
One reaction from an American Senator:
The new Democratic chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sen. Patrick Leahy, earlier this month publicly scolded U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales for refusing to explain why the United States had sent a Canadian citizen to Syria.
“The Canadian government now has taken several steps to accept responsibility for its role in sending Mr. Arar to Syria, where he was tortured,” Leahy said in a statement Friday. “The question remains why, even if there were reasons to consider him suspicious, the U.S. government shipped him to Syria where he was tortured, instead of to Canada for investigation or prosecution.”
A U.S. court already dismissed Arar’s case against U.S. government officials, Arar has appealed.
Leahy, of course, asks the correct question: why would the U.S. deport a citizen of Canada to Syria? Rendition of course.
Glenn Greenwald wrote a must read on this.
He first quotes this reports from the Canadian government:
The American authorities who handled Mr. Arar’s case treated Mr. Arar in a most regrettable fashion. They removed him to Syria against his wishes and in the face of his statements that he would be tortured if sent there. Moreover, they dealt with Canadian officials involved with Mr. Arar’s case in a less than forthcoming manner.
Glenn explains:
By “less than forthcoming,” what the Report is referring to is the fact that the “F.B.I. continued to keep its Canadian counterparts in the dark even while an American jet was carrying Mr. Arar to Jordan” because they knew the Canadians would object if they learned that their citizen was being sent by the U.S. to be tortured. So the Bush administration did it anyway and only told the Canadians afterwards.
And goes on to write:
Like the Jose Padilla case, it’s difficult even to know what to say about this incident. I’ve written about it before, but one’s anger is renewed each time there is a further development. There is absolutely no question that Arar is a completely innocent individual whom our government literally abducted and sent to be tortured — for months, away from his family and everything he knew. Once this entire matter came to light, the administration simply dug its heels in further, insisting that national security required that his case be dismissed from our courts (which naturally obliged), and now — almost out of spite and/or a pathological inability to admit error — continues to keep him on its no-fly list.
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At least the Canadian Government seems to be run by people with a minimal sense of conscience and decency. The contrast with our own government, in this case at least, is depressingly glaring.
I agree completely with Glenn. This case is a travesty. It’s shocking, it’s appalling. Pieter Dorsman concludes that this case “is very instructive in how not to fight the war on Islamist terror.” That is putting it mildly. When I was first working on this post I wrote: “The U.S. government and American citizens should be ashamed of themselves: the U.S. government for the way it dealt and continues to deal with Arar and the American people for letting it happen.” I deleted that, because I realized that it was going too far, but it resembles my anger quite perfectly.
It almost seems as if the Bush administration is dedicated to destroy America’s image in the world. It’s unbelievable. The Canadian government has concluded that Arar is not a terrorist, that he was treated in a shameful, horrific manner, it has decided to compensate him by paying millions of dollars, it has has called on the U.S. to get him off the watchlists… but the Bush administration is simply ignoring the entire case.
America should apologize to Arar as well and… it might consider ‘compensating’ him just like the Canadian government did.
And with ‘might’ I mean should.
