Arar was released from prison by Syrian government officials and returned to Canada October 5, after nearly a year of incarceration.

At a news conference in Ottawa November 4, Arar said he was astonished to find out that U.S. immigration agents produced a 1997 rental lease he had signed for an Ottawa apartment as evidence of his alleged involvement with suspected “terrorists,” which could have only been turned over to them by Canadian officials. Arar said he found this out after being arrested on Sept. 26, 2002, at New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport in transit to Montreal from a vacation in Tunis. FBI and U.S. immigration agents questioning Arar showed him the rental lease and pointed out that another man, Abdullah Almalki, had cosigned the document as a witness.

“They were consulting a report while they were questioning me and the information was so private. I thought this must be from Canada,” Arar told the media. “I could not believe they had this.”

At the press conference Arar said a public inquiry was needed into possible complicity by the Canadian Security and Intelligence Service (CSIS) and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) in his deportation. “The past year has been a nightmare, both for me and my family,” he said. “My priority right now is to clear my name, get to the bottom of the case, and make sure this does not happen to any other Canadian in the future. I believe the best way to go about achieving this goal is to put pressure on the government to call for a public inquiry.”

“Arar first came to our attention from information from the Canadian government,” a U.S. official told the Toronto Globe and Mail. The article continued, “The U.S. sources acknowledge that the decision to deport Mr. Arar to Syria instead of to Canada was indeed made in Washington. But that is only part of the story, they insist. They say information from the RCMP got the ball rolling.”

Prime Minister Jean Chrétien has so far rejected calls for a public inquiry. Chrétien called the treatment Arar suffered “unacceptable,” but has tried to deflect blame for the case onto the U.S. and Syrian governments. Joining Arar in demanding a public inquiry are Amnesty International, the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, and the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee.

Arar, who was born in Syria, is 33 years old and came to Canada when he was 17. He works as a computer consultant. When he was arrested at JFK Airport last year, he was interrogated for five days without being able to speak to a lawyer or make a phone call. On Oct. 8, 2002, U.S. authorities deported him to Syria via Jordan. Four days prior to his deportation, said Arar, a Canadian consular official visited him in jail and assured him he would not be sent to Syria. Arar reported that he had been beaten and tortured with electric cables for weeks, and held in a tiny Syrian jail cell.

“It had no light,” Arar said of the cell where he was held. “It was three feet wide. It was six feet deep. It was seven feet high. It had a metal door, with a small opening in the door, which did not let in light…. I spent 10 months and 10 days in that grave.”

After considerable torture he says he falsely confessed to a trip to Afghanistan. He says he has never been to Afghanistan.

Imad Moustafa, the chargé d’affairs at the Syrian embassy in Washington, told the November 6 Washington Post that Syria had agreed to imprison Arar as a goodwill gesture to Washington. Moustafa said Arar was freed because the Bush administration cut communications with Damascus recently. The release was a “political decision” made in Damascus, Moustafa said, according to the Post. “We believe there is no case against him.”

“U.S. officials confirm that in the year following the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the CIA had a growing relationship with Syria,” the Post said. “Syria had provided helpful information not only about al-Qaeda but also about terrorist plots. But by mid-2003, the Bush administration lessened ties and shut down the intelligence relationship…. The Bush administration charged that the Syrian government had allowed personnel and equipment to flow to Iraqi forces during the war.”

An article in the November 5 Post reported that officials “said that the Arar case fits the profile of a covert CIA ‘extraordinary rendition’—the practice of turning over low-level, suspected terrorists to foreign intelligence services, some of which are known to torture prisoners.”

“The U.S. was possibly benefiting from the fruits of that torture,” said Steven Watt, of the New York-based Center of Constitutional Rights, told the Post.

“With a secret presidential ‘finding’ authorizing the CIA to place suspects in foreign hands without due process, Arar may have been one of the people whisked overseas by the CIA,” the Post continued. “In the early 1990s, renditions were exclusively law enforcement operations in which suspects were…brought to the United States for trial or questioning. But CIA teams, working with foreign intelligence services, now capture suspected terrorists in one country and render them to another, often after U.S. interrogators have tried to gain information from them.”

Arar says he may have been listed as a “terror suspect” because of his acquaintance with Almalki, another Canadian of Syrian origin who is also imprisoned in Syria without charges and has been tortured there. Almalki was arrested by authorities when he arrived in Damascus to visit family. The RCMP alleges he has links with “terrorists” because he sold computer components to Middle East companies and the gear later reached terror groups.

Arar’s lawyer, Lorne Waldman, said CSIS officials visited Syria soon after Arar signed the false confessions. “It appears that our people are willing to use rogue states like Syria to do what they’re not allowed to do at home,” Waldman said.  
 
 
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