He said he was flying home to Montreal via New York on Sept. 26, 2002, from a family visit to Tunisia. "This is when my nightmare began," he said. "I was pulled aside by immigration and taken [away]. The police came and searched my bags. I asked to make a phone call and they would not let me." He said an FBI agent and a New York City police officer questioned him. "I was so scared," he said. "They told me I had no right to a lawyer because I was not an American citizen."

Arar said he was shackled, placed on a small jet and flown to Washington, where "a new team of people got on the plane" and took him to Amman, the capital of Jordan. Arar said U.S. officials handed him over to Jordanian authorities, who "blindfolded and chained me and put me in a van. . . . They made me bend my head down in the back seat. Then these men started beating me. Every time I tried to talk, they beat me."

Hours later, he said, he was taken to Syria. There, Arar said, he was forced to write that he had been to a training camp in Afghanistan. "They kept beating me, and I had to falsely confess," he said. "I was willing to confess to anything to stop the torture."

Arar said his prison cell "was like a grave, exactly like a grave. It had no light, it was 3 feet wide, it was 6 feet deep, it was 7 feet high. . . . It had a metal door. There was a small opening in the ceiling. There were cats and rats up there, and from time to time, the cats peed through the opening into the cell."

Steven Watt, a human rights fellow at the Center for Constitutional Rights in Washington, said Arar's case raised questions about U.S. counterterrorism measures. "Here we have the United States involved in the removal of somebody to a country where it knows persons in custody of security agents are tortured," Watt said."The U.S. was possibly benefiting from the fruits of that torture. I ask the question: Why wasn't he removed to Canada?"

We began writing and complaining about Mr. Arar's treatment by the U.S. on day one. All of posts are accessible here.