Arar Report Shows New Details
Posted August 9, 2007 12:00 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
Canadian security officials suspected early on in the Maher Arar affair that their U.S. counterparts had shipped the Ottawa engineer off to a third country to be tortured, according to a newly released report.
Previously unreleased sections of the report by a public inquiry into Arar’s ordeal show that an official of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service in Washington wrote to his superiors in the fall of 2002 about so-called “rendering” to third countries by the FBI and CIA. The CSIS officer reported that Arar’s detention and subsequent handover added up to just such a case, where U.S. authorities could not legally hold a terrorist suspect or wanted them questioned “in a firm manner.”
The deputy director of CSIS, Jack Hooper, stated in a memorandum dated Oct. 10, 2002: “I think the U.S. would like to get Arar to Jordan where they can have their way with him.”
That was two days after U.S. authorities removed Arar from a holding cell in New York at 3am and put him on a plane to Jordan. From there he was sent to Syria where he was tortured. CSIS, however, was unaware of those details at the time and was trying desperately to find out from the CIA what was going on. The newly released documents also show that the RCMP was in contact with the CIA at the time.
The revelations come after the federal government gave up a court battle to keep some portions of the Arar report secret.
Justice Dennis O’Connor, who headed the inquiry, has already concluded that Arar, a Canadian citizen of Syrian birth, was wrongly labelled a terrorist by the RCMP before they passed that information to U.S. authorities.
