Arar has launched two gutsy lawsuits in 2004 targeting some of the most powerful people on the continent, including U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft, FBI Director Robert Mueller, former Canadian Prime Minister Jean Chrétien and R.C.M.P. Commissioner Giuliano Zaccardelli.
Whatever the outcome, Arar has forced Canada to rethink how it balances human rights and security concerns. His struggle has revealed troubling details about how Canada’s police and intelligence agencies share information with foreign governments. And his case is a disturbing reminder of America’s outsize role in the world, particularly since 9/11, and has prompted fresh debate on the harsh powers of Canada’s Anti-Terrorism Act.
TalkLeft has covered Maher Arar since the disclosure of his arrest in October, 2002. Our first post is here. All of our coverage is accessible here. But read the Time Magazine because it puts his ordeal in perspective. This is their recap of what happened to him:
Before his detention at J.F.K., he was an apolitical workaholic who was obsessed only with making ends meet and spending free time with his family. “Engineers by nature are machines,” he says. “They work 9 to 9. They do what they’re told to do.” But it wasn’t a bad life. The Damascus native, now 34, immigrated to Canada with his family in 1987 and became a citizen four years later. By 1997, he was making a decent living in Ottawa amid the city’s high-tech boom. Two years later, while his wife Monia Mazigh was completing a Ph.D. in finance at McGill, Arar took a job at the MathWorks, a Boston-area computer company. In 2001, wanting to be near family and friends, he returned full-time to Ottawa and started a consultancy specializing in wireless technology.
That life came to an abrupt end on Sept. 26, 2002, when Arar was pulled aside while passing through J.F.K. after a vacation in Tunisia, where most of his wife’s family lives. He was detained at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, New York, where he says U.S. authorities questioned him for 10 days. Then, in the middle of the night, he was put into shackles and spirited away via Jordan to Syria, a country he hadn’t been to in 16 years— despite the fact that he was a naturalized Canadian citizen traveling on a Canadian passport en route to Canada.
Arar ended up in a dark, 1-m by 2-m cell he calls the “grave” in the Syrian military intelligence agency’s Palestine branch in Damascus. He was held there without charge for 10 months and 10 days. During his first two weeks, he claims, he was interrogated about people he had known in Canada, sometimes for 18 hours at a time, and tortured. One punishment, he says, was repeated lashings with a 5-cm black metal cable on his palms, wrists, lower back and hips. The mental ordeal was also brutal, he said in November 2003 at one of the most dramatic press conferences ever televised in Canada. “The second and third days were the worst,” he told the world that day. “I could hear other prisoners being tortured, and screaming.” During his first week in prison, he says, he falsely confessed that he had received military training in Afghanistan.
It's a very long article, we recommend bookmarking it and reading it in it's entirety. What happened to Arar is inexusable and in our view, a crime in and of itself. Don't think it won't happen again, to somebody else.
