What really happened to Maher Arar?
Maher Arar received the largest government settlement in Canadian history. Even after an inquiry, the public should ask, why?
Kevin Steel - February 26, 2007
Torture is the heart of darkness at the centre of the Maher Arar story. Back in 2002, when the U.S. deported Arar as a suspected terrorist to Syria, a country with an appalling human rights record, everyone feared he would be tortured. When the Syrians sent back word that Arar had confessed to being in Afghanistan in 1993 training with the mujahedeen, Canadian officials worried that confession was obtained through torture. And when Arar was finally released, he told the media that, yes, he had only confessed falsely because he had been repeatedly whipped with a two-inch-thick electrical cable and had been beaten with hands in 18-hour interrogation marathons. And Arar was awarded the largest government settlement in Canadian history--$10.5 million announced on Jan. 26--because he said he suffered so horribly during his ten months in that Syrian jail.
Despite the fact that it was the U.S. government that sent Arar to Syria, and the Syrians who allegedly tortured him, the Arar commission determined back in September that Canada was "very likely" to blame for all of this because the RCMP had provided to the FBI exaggerated reports of Arar's supposed terrorist connections. But it always comes back to the question: blame for what? And that is where torture re-enters the picture.
The problem is, Arar's claims of physical torture have gone largely unchallenged. The Canadian media has been eager to report every dramatic detail and columnists write as if the allegations are established fact. But even though the Arar commission wrote that he had been tortured, it did little to substantiate the 34-year-old wireless technology consultant's assertions. The commission, headed by Justice Dennis O'Connor, ran for two-and-a-half years and cost taxpayers $23 million. Yet in all that time and for all that money, no medical evidence was presented that demonstrated Arar had been physically tortured. No doctor testified. A psychiatrist did testify about the psychological effects of torture, but on physical torture, none.
Arar was never cross-examined on his allegations because he did not testify at the commission that bears his name.
Arar, now living in Kamloops, B.C., is not speaking to the media. Dayanti Karunaratne, media co-ordinator for the Maher Arar Support Committee, declined a request from the Western Standard to interview him.
His supporters now contend that Arar has always stressed the psychological torture over the physical kind. That's what Kerry Pither says. She monitored the Arar commission on behalf of the interveners, which included groups like the Canadian Council on American-Islamic Relations, the Canadian Arab Federation and the Canadian Labour Congress. "He lost his reputation, he lost his career, he lost a year of his life; his son was an infant when he went into prison and didn't know him when he got out. Does that not justify the lawsuit on its own?" Pither asks.
While he was imprisoned, Arar, who was closely monitored by the Syrians, made only one negative statement to the Canadian consular officials who visited him. On Aug. 14, 2003, he gave them the dimensions of his cell. "Being kept in a three-by-six-by-seven-foot cell obviously constitutes psychological torture, which is worse, and that was Maher's whole point; it's not about the beatings, it's, 'I can't survive living in this cell another day,'" says Pither. (David Milgaard spent 22 years in a Canadian jail after being wrongfully convicted of murder. He received $10 million for his wasted years, slightly less than Arar got for his ten months.)
Obviously, if Arar was wrongfully imprisoned, he does deserve compensation--though logic would suggest that Syria, which imprisoned him, or the U.S., which sent him there, might be the payers. And though the Arar commission went out of its way to stress that Arar is innocent, it also underplayed facts that demonstrated why Canadian police were suspicious of him back in 2001--his frenetic cross-border travel, for instance, and his residence in Framingham, Mass., are barely mentioned in the 1,200-page final report or in the 12,000-plus pages of testimony.
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