Canada Charges Syrian Officer Over Maher Arar Torture

Canada has charged a Syrian intelligence officer with torturing Maher Arar, a Syrian-born Canadian citizen taken to Syria for a year via extraordinary rendition by American authorities for suspected terrorism ties.  

Maher Arar's nightmare started in September 2002; he and his family were returning home to Canada after a holiday in Tunisia, with a layover in John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York. Arar was detained in solitary confinement by U.S. authorities for nearly two weeks without being charged, and instead of sending him back to Canada, the United States sent him to Jordan, where he was turned over to Syria for a year of torture. He was finally released and returned home to Canada in October 2003.

Despite the fact that Arar was traveling on a Canadian passport, U.S. authorities insisted that Arar wasn't sent to Syria under the extraordinary rendition policy, but rather because of immigration laws, according to former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales:

Speaking to reporters in Washington, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said the U.S. government would never knowingly ship a suspect terrorist to another country if it believed that person would be tortured.

Further, Gonzales specifically refuted claims Arar was removed from the U.S. in 2002 as part of the Bush administration's controversial ''extraordinary rendition'' policy.

''Mr. Arar was deported under our immigration laws. He was initially detained because his name appeared on terrorists lists,'' Gonzales told reporters. ''Some people have characterized his removal as a rendition. That is not what happened here. It was a deportation.''

I would be remiss not to note that some American lawmakers weren't satisfied with Gonzales regarding the Arar case, especially as Canadian authorities were publicly seeking answers from the Bush administration (among other questions was why Arar was still on the U.S. watch list). Senator Patrick Leahy from Vermont, for example, challenged Gonzales during a Senate judiciary committee meeting, as reported by the Toronto Star in 2007. Here's my favourite part:

"We knew damn well, if [Arar] went to Canada, he wouldn't be tortured," Leahy said.

"He'd be held. He'd be investigated.

"We also knew damn well, if he went to Syria, he'd be tortured.

"And it's beneath the dignity of this country, a country that has always been a beacon of human rights, to send somebody to another country to be tortured."

So what came of these alleged terrorism ties that Arar was suspected of having? According to CBS News:

...Imad Moustapha, Syria's highest-ranking diplomat in Washington, says Arar was treated well. He also told [CBS correspondent Vicki] Mabrey that Syrian intelligence had never heard of Arar before the U.S. government asked Syria to take him.

Did the U.S. give them any evidence to back up the claim that Arar was a suspected al Qaeda terrorist?

"No. But we did our investigations. We traced links. We traced relations. We tried to find anything. We couldn't," says Moustapha, who adds that they shared their reports with the U.S. "We always share information with anybody alleged to be in close contact with al Qaeda with the United States." 

John Kiriakou, the former CIA analyst who blew the whistle on the Bush administration's torture program and spent two years in prison after being convicted of leaking classified information to journalists, revealed that there were internal debates in the CIA about the Arar rendition.

Of course, Canada is not blameless in this travesty. Together with Arar's family and lawyers, the Canadian public were demanding answers and action from the Canadian government. A judicial inquiry, led by Justice Dennis O'Connor, released its report in 2006 and found that Arar had no links to terrorist organizations, and that the Royal Canadian Mounted Policy had provided U.S. authorities with false and misleading information. The inquiry led to a multi-million dollar settlement between Arar and Ottawa, as well as an apology from Prime Minister Stephen Harper. RCMP Commissioner Guiliano Zaccardelli resigned shortly after the inquiry report's release.

So back to present day. The RCMP announced that it will attempt to extradite Syrian Colonel George Salloum to face charges of torture, issuing an arrest warrant and an Interpol notice. According to the Toronto Star, "it is the first ever criminal charge of torture laid in Canada against a foreign government official for acts committed abroad."

Besides the precedent that Canada has just set, I'm sharing this story in the hopes of it being a reminder that Maher Arar is one of many people with no terrorism connections whose lives have been devastated by the War on Terror that, in many ways, are invisible to the American public. The people swept up in it are often reported as statistics, or just names, so it's easy to not think of them as full people, with families, with dreams, with plans for the future.

Reading this news yesterday, I was reminded of the first time I heard of Maher Arar. Arar was interviewed by Anna Maria Tremonti of the Current, a CBC radio program, in 2003, just a month after he returned to Canada. I was able to find the interview, so I'll let him have the last word.