Innocent man extradited to be tortured

COLIN FREEZE
Globe and Mail
Aug. 11, 2007

Canada suspected Maher Arar was to be sent to the Middle East to be tortured after the RCMP gave intelligence to the CIA, newly uncensored documents reveal.

A Washington-based CSIS operative reported there was a new "trend" post-9/11 that "when the CIA or FBI cannot legally hold a terrorist subject ... they have them rendered to countries" that will question them in "a firm manner."

The deputy director of Canadian Security Intelligence Service, Jack Hooper, wrote a memo on Oct. 10, 2002, saying: "I think the U.S. would like to get Arar to Jordan where they can have their way with him."

Canada was unaware that Mr. Arar, a telecommunications engineer, had already been secretly sent by Central Intelligence Agency Gulfstream jet to Jordan and on to Syria two days earlier from New York.

These details, and criticism of related RCMP court testimony, have been kept from the public by government lawyers who have argued that releasing such information would compromise national security.

After a legal fight that pitted the Arar commission against the government, final disclosure of almost all of Mr. Justice Dennis O'Connor's findings was completed yesterday. Although roughly 500 words remain secret, yesterday's material gives the clearest picture yet of what led to the Ottawa engineer being sent to Syria, where the O'Connor report found he was tortured.

Among the points to emerge yesterday were:

The CIA contacted RCMP officers who entered into an intelligence-sharing relationship.

When applying for search warrants, Project A-O Canada, an RCMP anti-terrorism operation, relied on information obtained from a country with a poor human-rights record and "no assessment was made of the reliability of that information."

Even though the RCMP was made aware that a confession from a terror suspect, Ahmad Abou El Maati, was extracted by "extreme coercion," they insisted that it was "still accurate and continues to be true."

All of this information had been kept from the public by first the Liberal government and then the current Conservative government on the grounds of national security.

Although Mr. Arar was held in foreign detention for nearly a year, the Syrians told visiting CSIS agents in Damascus they regarded him as more of a "nuisance" than an actual al-Qaeda suspect, the disclosed documents show.

Yet the Canadian spent most of the next year jailed in Syria, as federal officials debated whether they would intervene on his behalf.

Paul Cavalluzzo, a lawyer who acted as counsel for the judicial commission that unearthed the details, said: "One asks oneself, why did he remain in the hellhole he was in for another 10 months?"

The Canadian commission of inquiry that spent years probing Mr. Arar's ordeal wanted to reveal the details last fall when volumes of findings were first released but it is now known the federal Conservative cabinet approved a continued censorship of 1,500 words, ostensibly for national security. It took a court order last month to force the federal officials to relinquish their claims on most - but not all - of the information that was deemed secret.

Many observers yesterday questioned why the information revealed in yesterday's "addendum" was ever considered a state secret. They said that while important, the revelations appeared to be more embarrassing than sensitive.

"The law is very clear that the government can only legitimately claim material that could injure national security," Mr. Cavalluzzo said. "That's not to be used to cover information that could cause embarrassment."

References to the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and intelligence possibly tainted by Syrian torture abound in the new information that had been excised from the original findings. Canadian officials - including an RCMP official referred to only as "Mr. X" in an affidavit - had sought to keep this information secret by arguing they did not want to compromise the goodwill of foreign allies who send in intelligence from abroad.

Exchanges between Canada, the United States and Syria were key to the detentions of Mr. Arar and others. Several security officials have argued that intelligence agencies never reveal their sources and methods - and that any breach of this principle compromises security.

Judge O'Connor said Canadian agencies should not necessarily be forbidden from using intelligence from countries that abuse human rights, but they should carefully assess reliability. Judge O'Connor found Mr. Arar was never a threat to Canadian national security and that Canadian authorities had spread incorrect information that may have caused the United States to send him to the Middle East.

Mr. Arar has received $10-million in compensation and it appears the new information released in his inquiry might bolster the claims of his onetime alleged associates, higher-level suspects.

Many of the new findings centre on the original Canadian suspect detained in Syria, Ahmad Abou El Maati. The former mujahedeen fighter was jailed after flying into Syria two months after 9/11. He was forced to say "he undertook pilot training at the request of his brother and that he accepted a mission to be a suicide bomber by exploding a truck bomb on Parliament hill," new documents say.

Mr. El Maati has previously described this admission as a fabrication he was made to say under torture. He also says that he falsely placed Mr. Arar in Afghanistan. Another suspect, Abdullah Almalki, was jailed after flying into Syria in 2002. The RCMP had zeroed in on him as an al-Qaeda suspect, after probing his business exporting two-way radios to the Pakistani military. It appears Mr. El Maati's coerced statements figured into searches in the Almalki case too.

"I am innocent, yet the RCMP and other Canadian agencies destroyed my life and business," Mr. Almalki said in a statement, responding to the new findings.