Posted on 11/15/2003 9:39:36 PM PST by Ryan Bailey
Qaeda Pawn, U.S. Calls Him. Victim, He Calls Himself.
By CLIFFORD KRAUSS: November 15, 2003
OTTAWA — Maher Arar has been back from Syria for five weeks now, with his wife and two children in their simple apartment, earnestly pleading to all who will listen that he is an innocent casualty of the Bush administration's war on terror. As Mr. Arar tells it, American officials detained him on circumstantial evidence during what was supposed to be a brief stopover at Kennedy Airport on Sept. 26, 2002. Within days, they packed him off to Syria where, he says, he was locked in squalor and tortured for nearly a year. Though he holds dual Canadian and Syrian citizenship, he had not lived in Syria for 16 years. "After what happened, I started asking myself questions," Mr. Arar, 33, said in a calm voice in an interview in his living room. "How can a country like the United States send me to a country where they know torture is commonplace, where they know there is no law?" His story has proved deeply embarrassing to American officials, even if they continue to insist, privately, that Mr. Arar is not just the mild-mannered computer consultant he seems, but a man with ties to a probable cell of Al Qaeda in Canada, though he has never been charged with a thing. Whatever the truth, Mr. Arar's soft, steady voice has touched the conscience of Canada and raised disturbing questions about whether Washington's pursuit of terror suspects has trampled judicial due process, or swept up guiltless bystanders. In his short time home, Mr. Arar's sad, bearded face has become a staple of Canadian television news shows. He has been the subject of newspaper editorials and angry debate in the House of Commons, whose foreign affairs committee called for a public investigation. Today Mr. Arar appears a determined but shattered man. He says his limp comes from almost a year of beatings and sleeping on a cold tile floor. Though he lost 40 pounds, he has little appetite. He still paces his living room, a habit he picked up in his tiny cell. At night, he wakes from nightmares in which a guard slaps him and tells him he must return to Syria. In the day, his mind wanders to a world so distant he does not hear his wife, Monia, pleading for him to return. Bush administration officials concede that the entire episode has been a public relations disaster. "The damage has been done," one official said. "We need to say something because `Arar' is going to become shorthand for excess in the name of security, running roughshod over the rule of law." While the administration has yet to make its case publicly, American officials who spoke on condition of anonymity said the evidence was strong that Mr. Arar had associated with suspected Islamic militants over a long period in Canada. They say he confessed under torture in Syria that he had gone to Afghanistan for terrorist training, named his instructors and gave other intimate details. In the interview, Mr. Arar said that he would have said anything to stop his beatings, so intense that he urinated on himself twice, and that he had never been to Afghanistan or Syria or anywhere nearby since he came with his family to Montreal at 17. At least part of the evidence against him, he said, was a 1997 apartment lease that was witnessed and signed by Abdullah Almalki, another Syrian-Canadian immigrant suspected of having terrorist links. American officials, Mr. Arar said, showed him a copy of the lease at the airport, where he was to make a connecting flight on his way home from a vacation in Tunisia, his wife's family home. His answer, he said, was that he had wanted Mr. Almalki's brother to sign, but that he had not been available. He said his request for a lawyer was ignored. Taken to the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, he said, he was strip-searched and given an injection that prison officials refused to identify. During his interrogations in Brooklyn, he said, he was asked about his politics. "I had nothing to hide," he recalled, and said he told the Americans that he supported the Palestinian cause but abhorred the tactics of Osama bin Laden. He said in the interview that he had never associated with any radicals. Mr. Arar said he pleaded with American officials not to send him to Syria for fear he would be tortured. The officials said they had the discretion to deport him to Canada or Syria, but did not explain why they chose Syria, or why they did not keep him in the United States. Within two weeks of his detention, on Oct. 8, 2002, Mr. Arar said, he was put on a private jet with Americans whom he described as C.I.A. agents. He was flown to Amman, Jordan, where he was blindfolded, chained and put in a van destined for Syria. His beatings began in the van, he said, and only intensified at the hands of his Syrian captors, with thrashings on his palms, wrists, lower back and hip with a cable. Mr. Arar said he whiled away the days thinking about how his two young children might be growing up, worrying about his family's financial well-being. He became so desperate, he said, that he banged his head against the wall. He was visited by Canadian consular officials, who told him there was not much they could do because he was a dual citizen, he recalled. "During every visit, I used to cry and say I want to go back to Canada," he said. The Syrian government finally released him without explanation on Oct. 5. Syrian officials say their investigators found no direct link between Mr. Arar and Al Qaeda, and deny he was tortured. Prime Minister Jean Chrétien has rejected calls for a public inquiry into what role the Royal Canadian Mounted Police played in handing over information to American authorities that led to Mr. Arar's arrest. An American official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Secretary of State Colin L. Powell has asked Attorney General John Ashcroft and the director of central intelligence, George J. Tenet, for a clarification of what happened. For now, Mr. Arar's American lawyers are preparing a suit against the United States as he tries to restore his life. "I look at life differently now," he said. "I would never have imagined before that human beings could do such things to other human beings." Worst of all, he says, is knowing that he may never be able to bury the suspicions that he is a Qaeda agent; he may never get his family off welfare and restart his career. Mr. Arar graduated from McGill University with a degree in computer engineering and earned a master's in telecommunications from the National Institute of Scientific Research in Montreal. He worked in Boston as an engineer at MathWorks, a high-tech company, before setting up a consulting company in Ottawa. Those achievements, he fears, may not mean much now. "My life and career are destroyed," he said matter-of-factly. "To brand someone as a terrorist after 9/11 — I don't think it will be easy to return to normal life."
-The case of Maher Arar has become the cause du jour of the Anti-Bush crowd. This is due largely to the fact that the average person has had some trouble getting their hands around the entire story. It is rarely reported that the evidence in this case is in fact conclusive, and still classified which is why it cannot be published, and even rarer is the admission in the liberal media that Arar is a Syrian Citizen ( "No... You mean to tell me that our Government detained a terror suspect and deported him to his native country, how wretched!). Of course the liberal-communist left in this country could only use the story against the Bush administration if there was some greater impropriety to decry, which they easily concocted by deleting those essetial facts from many reports. I have today posted this article because it is one of the only ones to break that trend of reporting half the story. Reporting that Arar is a Canadian citizen while he is actually a dual Syrian-Canadian Citizen is the textbook definition of half-truth.
I myself have been labelled a 'rascist', for supporting the Administration on this one, by many reputables in Political Circles in the Greater Philadelphia Region ( Just because an Arab is pulled out of an Airport Line, the left assumes racial profiling) . My only response is that if "Terrorist" is a race then I am definitely guilty as charged.
The simple facts remain that our Government acted lawfully and according to it's procedure in deporting Arar to his country of birth and citizenship. He was legally more Syrian than Canadian because he was born there. A good reason for not letting him remain at large in New York is that he had documented liasons with known terrorist suspects.
Perhaps most disturbing of all in this case is the pristine treatment accorded the Syrians by the American Left. They seem to ask, "How could the US send Arar to a country where they knew he would be tortured?" My correlating question would be, "How could the US, and the Free World allow a country to exist where they know there is torture?" The article shows that a lawsuit is being prepared against our government by "Mr. Arars American Lawyers", well I wonder if these geniuses ever thought of suing the men who actually did the alleged torturing. We should all know that in the first day of any Punitive and Compensatory Law Course they must teach you that it always helps to go after people who have actually wronged you, but I suppose these American Lawyers referred to might have skipped class to get high that day, or they might have done their training in a little more Anti-Bush academic realm. Is anyone suing Syria?
The left is completely letting the criminals in this case off the hook and transferring the blame to President Bush's administration, just because they do not like him.
We know who the enemy is !
I can easily imagine Muhammad Atta having been described in the same endearing terms by the shameful NY Slimes, had he been captured before he slaughtered thousands of innocent children, women, and men on 9-11.
I might, myself, cry a crocodile tear as I slid my blade across his throat, ending his evil existence.
Yeah, I think the same about all terrorists, murderers, molesters, rapists, etc. In fact, most of the U.S. thinks the same about muslim terrorists.
He was travelling on a Canadian passport, he lives in Canada and has so since his parents escaped when he was a teen. The only reason he is still considered Syrian is that once a Syrian - always a Syrian - they are not allowed to give up their birth citizenship.
"The simple facts remain that our Government acted lawfully and according to it's procedure in deporting Arar to his country of birth and citizenship."
If he was guilty of something, or we suspected he was guilty of soemthing, then we should have sent him to Gitmo. Sending him to be tortured is against the fundamental principles of our country.
"He was legally more Syrian than Canadian because he was born there. "
That's illogical nonsense. This guy may or may not be a villain - the evidence is certainly not conclusive - if we did feel the evidence was conclusive, WE should have detained him and put him on trial. Torture is NOT part of the American way...
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