Maher Arar (Arabic: ماهر عرار) (born 1970) is a telecommunications engineer with dual Syrian and Canadian citizenship who resides in Canada. He is famous for the outcry resulting from his deportation by the United States government to Syria. Arar has claimed he was tortured while in Syria. His experience has been put forward as an example of the United States government policy of "extraordinary rendition".
Arar was detained during a layover at John F. Kennedy International Airport in September 2002 on his way home to Canada from a family vacation in Tunis. He was held in solitary confinement in the United States for nearly two weeks, questioned, and denied meaningful access to a lawyer. The US government suspected him of being a member of Al Qaeda and deported him, not to Canada, his current home, but to his native Syria, even though its government is known to use torture. He was detained in Syria for almost a year, during which time he was tortured, according to the findings of the Arar Commission, until his release to Canada.
The government of Canada ordered a commission of inquiry which concluded that he was tortured. The commission of inquiry publicly cleared Arar of any links to terrorism. The government of Canada later settled out of court with Arar and awarded him a C$10.5 million settlement. The Syrian government reports it knows of no links of Arar to terrorism.
Despite the Canadian court ruling, the United States government has not exonerated Arar and, on the contrary, has made public statements to state their belief that Arar is affiliated with members of organizations they describe as terrorist. As of February 2009, Arar and his family remain on a watchlist. His US lawyers at the Center for Constitutional Rights are currently pursuing his case, Arar v. Ashcroft , which seeks compensatory damages on Arar’s behalf and also a declaration that the actions of the US government were illegal and violated his constitutional, civil, and international human rights.
Biography
Early life
Maher Arar was born in Syria and moved to Canada with his parents at the age of 17 in 1988 to avoid mandatory military service. In 1991, Arar became a Canadian citizen.
Arar earned a bachelor's degree in computer engineering from McGill University and a master's degree in telecommunications from the Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique (a branch of the Université du Québec) in Montreal. While studying at McGill University, Arar met Monia Mazigh. Arar and Mazigh married in 1994. Ms. Mazigh has a Ph.D. in finance from McGill. They have two young children: Barâa and Houd.
In December 1997, Arar moved with his family to Ottawa from Montreal and listed Abdullah Almalki as his "emergency contact" with his landlord. In 1999, he moved again to Boston to work for The MathWorks Inc., a job that required a considerable amount of travel within the United States. In 2001, Arar returned to Ottawa to start his own consulting company, Simcomms Inc. At the time of his rendition, Arar was employed in Ottawa as a telecommunications engineer.
Project A-O Canada and the events leading up to Arar's rendition
After he had moved back to Ottawa, Arar had a meeting with Abdullah Almalki on October 12, 2001. Almalki, an Ottawa engineer, was also born in Syria and had moved to Canada in the same year as Arar. They met at the Mango Café, a popular shawarma restaurant in a strip mall and talked about doctors and bought a print cartridge together.
At the time their movements were under close scrutiny by at least three police surveillance teams. The surveillance was prompted by Project A-O Canada, a Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP)-led terrorism investigation team based in Ottawa and a subdivision of Project O Canada which was based in Toronto. Project O Canada was created by the RCMP when the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) delegated responsibility for its national security investigation concerning Abdullah Almalki to the RCMP. CSIS had been monitoring Almalki at least since 1998 with respect to his relationship with Ahmed Said Khadr, an Egyptian-born Canadian and alleged senior associate of Osama bin Laden. CSIS was also concerned with Almalki's electronic components export business that he operated with his wife. Almalki, however, was purely a person of interest and was not, in fact, the target of the investigation. Nonetheless, Almalki's meeting with Arar appears to have prompted a wider investigation, with Arar also becoming a "person of interest."
On October 7, 2002, FBI agent Robert Fuller went to Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan and showed Canadian teenager Omar Khadr a black-and-white photograph of Arar obtained from the FBI office in Massachusetts, and demanded to know if he recognised him. Khadr initially stated that he did not recognise Arar, but when further pressured by Fuller, confessed he had seen him at a Kabul safehouse run by Abu Musab al-Suri or Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. However, it was later revealed that the actual interrogation notes from the incident showed that Khadr had denied recognising the black-and-white photograph he'd be shown and it wasn't until Fuller pressured him that he agreed the man in the picture "looked familiar", even though Khadr would have been only six or seven years old at the time Arar was alleged to have been in Afghanistan. This testimony given by Fuller is also contradicted by the fact that during the period indicated by Khadr in Fuller's testimony, Maher Arar was known to be in Canada, under surveillance by the RCMP.
Arrested in 2002, Arward Al-Bousha gave up the name of Arar as a possible militant, after he himself had been fingered in a confession given by Abdullah Almalki allegedly to stop his own torture.
Arar's rendition
On September 26, 2002, during a stopover in New York City en route from a family vacation in Tunisia to Montreal, Arar was detained by the United States Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). The INS was acting upon information supplied by the RCMP. When it became clear he was going to be deported, Arar requested he be deported to Canada; though he had not visited Syria since his move to Canada, he retained Syrian citizenship as Syria does not permit the renunciation of citizenship. Canadian (initially) and United States officials have labelled his transfer to Syria as a deportation, but critics have called the removal an example of rendition for torture by proxy, as the Syrian government is infamous for its torture of detainees. Despite the recent public rhetoric, at the time of Arar's deportation, Syria was working closely with the United States government in their "War on Terror". In November 2003, Cofer Black, then counterterrorism coordinator at the US State Department and former director of counterterrorism at the CIA, was quoted as saying "The Syrian government has provided some very useful assistance on al Qaeda in the past." In September 2002, the George W. Bush administration opposed the enactment of the "Syria Accountability Act" citing effectiveness of current sanctions and the ongoing diplomacy in the region. In addition, the administration noted the cooperation and support by Syria in fighting al-Qaida as a reason for its opposition to the "Syria Accountability Act".
US interrogation
US officials repeatedly questioned Arar about his connection to certain members of al-Qaeda. His interrogators also claimed that Arar was an associate of Abdullah Almalki, the Syrian-born Ottawa man whom they suspected of having links to al-Qaeda, and they therefore suspected Arar of being an al-Qaeda member himself. When Arar protested that he only had a casual relationship with Almalki, having once worked with Almalki's brother at an Ottawa high-tech firm, the officials produced a copy of Arar's 1997 rental lease which Almalki had co-signed. The fact that US officials had a Canadian document in their possession was later widely interpreted as evidence of the participation by Canadian authorities in Arar's detention.
Arar's requests for a lawyer were dismissed on the basis that he was not a US citizen, therefore he did not have the right to receive counsel. Despite his denials, he remained in US custody for two weeks and eventually was put on a small jet which first landed in Washington, DC and then in Amman, Jordan.
Arar's imprisonment in Syria
Once in Amman, Arar claims he was blindfolded, shackled and put in a van. “They made me bend my head down in the back seat,” Mr. Arar recalled. “Then these men started beating me. Every time I tried to talk, they beat me."
Arar was transferred to a prison, where he claims he was beaten for several hours and forced to falsely confess that he had attended an Al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan. “I was willing to do anything to stop the torture,” he says.
Arar described his cell as a three-foot by six-foot “grave” with no light and plenty of rats. During the more than 10 months he was imprisoned and held in solitary confinement, he was beaten regularly with shredded cables. Through the walls of his cell, Mr. Arar could hear the screams of other prisoners who were also being tortured. The Syrian government shared the results of its investigation with the United States. Arar believes that his torturers were given a dossier of specific questions by United States interrogators, noting that he was asked identical questions both in the United States and in Syria.
While he h
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