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Maher Arar - Magda Hassan - 01-11-2012
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.
Contrary to Pither's spin, the public record shows that Arar has stressed that he was physically tortured, not just kept in a small cell. In his statements to the press, on his own website (maherarar.ca) and in his lawsuits, over and over again, Arar has been graphic and very specific in his descriptions of the physical torture he endured and when it happened.
For instance, in his Nov. 4, 2004, statement to the press, Arar told of being whipped with a two-inch-thick electrical cable. "They hit me with it everywhere on my body. They mostly aimed for my palms, but sometimes missed and hit my wrists; they were sore and red for three weeks," Arar states. Arar alleges his interrogators also hit him on his hips and lower back. "They used the cable on the second and third day, and after that mostly beat me with their hands, hitting me in the stomach and on the back of my neck, and slapping me on the face. Where they hit me with the cables, my skin turned blue for two or three weeks, but there was no bleeding," Arar stated. According to his own timeline, these horrors occurred between Oct. 11 and Oct. 16, 2002.
Yet the entire time he was in the Syrian prison, the Canadian officials who visited with Arar saw no signs of physical abuse. As for his condition when he got out, one Canadian eyewitness-- speaking to theWestern Standard on condition of anonymity--who saw Arar in Syria only moments after his release from jail, put it this way: "If you call not being able to shower for 10 months torture, then I guess he was tortured. But from what I saw, he didn't look like he had been tortured."
Arar received a total of nine consular visits during his 10-month ordeal. The first of these was only one week after the alleged beatings stopped, so that would have been well before Arar, in his own words, says his injuries healed. On Oct. 23, 2002, Leo Martel, an experienced consular official, met with Arar. The diplomat described the visit in a note to his superiors written immediately afterward. The Syrians were present at all times and obligated everyone to speak in Arabic. He reported that Arar walked normally; the two men shook hands and Martel described the handshake as "normal" and stated that Arar did not withdraw his hand. The meeting lasted a half-hour. Martel wrote that Arar "looked like a frightened person," yet appeared otherwise healthy, but added, "Of course, it is difficult to assess." He saw no bruising. The commission report states, "Mr. Martel saw no apparent signs of sore or red wrists or palms, and no blue skin around Mr. Arar's face or neck."
Martel, contacted at his home in Montreal, said he could not comment because he is under instructions from his department not to speak to the media. (Though officially retired, due to labour shortages at the Department of Foreign Affairs, he is still subject to recall if he is needed. He is a man with considerable experience. In his 47-year career, Martel has served in such difficult places as Haiti, Senegal, Cameroon, Egypt and Moscow.)
Martel would visit Arar eight more times, sometimes alone, sometimes in the company of others. All his consular reports were made public at the Arar commission. No signs of physical abuse were ever observed. Even after Arar was released, he did not speak of beatings. On the plane returning to Canada, when Martel asked Arar about physical torture, all he would say was, "They have other means."
John Thompson, president of the Mackenzie Institute and an expert on terrorism, has met people who have been tortured in exactly the same way that Arar alleges. To him, Arar's account sounds fabricated. "If you're being whipped, there are permanent marks. A cable like that would leave scars, it would split the skin. Also, if you were being beaten around the hands with it, it would break your fingers. That's what these things do," he says. Ten years ago, he met an Iraqi who had been beaten with a two-inch electrical cable. "He lifted up his shirt and showed me the welter of scars on his back, and then pulled his arm out of his sleeve and there were marks on the upper arm. Whipping leaves some horrific scars."
In order to get around Martel's eyewitness accounts, his expertise was questioned at the commission. He was asked if he was "an expert" on assessing torture, and he had to admit he was not. Case closed. It is never explained, nor was it established, how much of "an expert" one has to be to recognize a bruise. (The O'Connor report notes that when Martel first saw Arar's lawsuit against the Canadian government, he was very upset.) Instead, the commission keyed on Martel's superior, Gar Pardy, who interpreted his suspicions that Arar was being tortured by reading Martel's reports second-hand. Pardy had learned to read "between the lines"--as the Toronto Star reported on May 27, 2005.
As strange as that sounds, it is in the actual investigation of Arar's mistreatment at the commission where things begin to look really fishy. That aspect of the inquiry was actually farmed out. On July 29, 2005, it was announced that Stephen Toope, president of the left-leaning Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation, was appointed as fact-finder to look into this critical aspect of the story. Toope, the commission's press release noted, was a former dean of the faculty of law at McGill and serving as chair and rapporteur of the United Nations Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances. His investigation concluded with a report to the commission on Oct. 14, 2005.
Unfortunately, torture allegations are quite common. Even the 18 accused terrorists who were arrested in Ontario last summer on charges of plotting to blow up the CBC and CN Tower and behead the prime minister claimed they were tortured at the Maplehurst Detention Centre. Such accusations have become standard fare; when training its recruits, al Qaeda teaches them to make a claim of torture as soon as they are put before a magistrate, or the media. And refugees have been making claims of torture all over the world for eons. In order to sort the real charges from the exaggerations or lies, in 1999, the United Nations created the Manual on the Effective Investigation and Documentation of Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, otherwise known as the Istanbul Protocol. Its 84 pages are full of detailed instructions. Nowhere, in the whole of the Arar story--in mountains of press clips, in Arar's lawsuits, in the O'Connor commission itself--is the Istanbul Protocol mentioned. Specifically, there is no reference to it in the Toope Report, and that might seem strange because, as the commission's press release made everyone aware, Toope has experience with the UN. Toope, now president of the University of British Columbia, did not return a request for an interview.
When compared to the recommendations outlined in the Istanbul Protocol, the Toope Report can only be characterized as inadequate. For instance, the Protocol emphasizes the creation of a medical report by a physician with expertise in documenting physical abuse. But no such medical report appears to have been created--at least, none was ever presented to the Arar commission. Instead, Toope relied on an oral interview with Doug Gruner, a doctor who Amnesty International, which had politically lobbied for Arar, had recommended--hardly an independent expert. As for expertise, Toope states that Gruner is "a family physician in Ottawa with experience in post-traumatic stress disorders. . . . Practicing for roughly a decade, he has worked in Malawi and Tanzania and was with the International Committee of the Red Cross in East Timor in 2000. In the latter context he saw people who had been tortured, and who had experienced severe physical and emotional trauma."
The Protocol stresses the selection of an unbiased physician, but Toope makes no effort to establish Gruner as unbiased and actually notes Gruner is also working for another political activist. "Dr. Gruner is also the physician for another person in a position similar to that of Mr. Arar, but the doctor was assiduous in not confounding the cases," Toope writes.
Toope spends much of his report describing his interviews with Abdullah Almalki, Ahmad Abou El-Maati and Muayyed Nureddin, all of whom have made similar allegations of torture abroad. (Almalki was the RCMP's principle terrorist suspect back in 2001, when Arar came to their attention after the two were observed speaking together for three hours.) The report gives great weight to the fact that their accounts corroborate Arar's--though it is not clear how their allegations of what happened to them have any factual bearing on Arar's case. Toope did not interview Martel, even though the Protocol says (Section 79): "The investigative authority shall have the power and obligation to obtain all the information necessary to the inquiry. . . . The investigative authority is entitled to issue summonses to witnesses, including any officials allegedly involved."
And the conclusion on physical torture? Toope writes, "Fortunately, the purely physical effects of the torture suffered by Mr. Arar have mostly proven to be short-lived. Dr. Gruner reports that when he first examined Mr. Arar there were few physical signs of torture. This is consistent with Mr. Arar's story that the physical force applied against him took place in the earliest days of his detention." That's it--for $23 million, that's all Canadians get on that subject. By using Toope's amateurish report, the Arar commission neatly circumvented the need to have a neutral medical doctor testify and, therefore, the risk of having that doctor cross-examined. Toope himself did not appear before the commission either.
The credibility of Arar's allegations of physical torture is important because it was under these conditions that he made the confession that he travelled to Afghanistan and Pakistan in 1993. (After this confession was relayed back to Canada, it was leaked to the press and the leak itself is now the subject of investigation.)
Arar and his wife, Monia Mazigh, an economics professor and one-time
candidate for the NDP, have said on several occasions that he has never been to Afghanistan and never had any desire to go there. Like the torture claims, this statement has gone unchallenged. At one point, while Arar was incarcerated and after the confession, Canada's Foreign Affairs department contacted the Arar family in order to obtain any documentation establishing Maher's whereabouts that year. They produced none. And it's not like the RCMP or CSIS were incapable of finding information; early in the RCMP investigation they turned up a gun permit Arar obtained in 1992. In fact, there was never any evidence presented at the Arar commission as to his whereabouts in that year. Instead, there were lengthy discussions downplaying any significance attached to being in Afghanistan at that time. In his final report, O'Connor skirts the whole issue and instead presents a chapter titled "Background Information on the Afghanistan Camps," in which the reader is treated to a little history primer, the conclusion of which can be summarized as: just because someone might have been at a terrorist camp in Afghanistan in 1993, doesn't necessarily mean they were a terrorist.
The Mackenzie Institute's Thompson sees this as a critical point. If Arar's whereabouts in 1993 would have been established, suspicion of him would have "cleared up like a snowbank in July," Thompson says. "So here's the critical proof, because if he had gone to Afghanistan, you're presuming he's training and linked up with the jihad movement," Thompson says. Instead, the issue just hangs out there unresolved and Thompson says that doesn't serve anyone's interests--not the Canadian public nor Maher Arar's.
One thing is certain; Maher Arar is getting $10.5 million.
http://www.westernstandard.ca/website/article.php?id=2333&start=3
Maher Arar - Magda Hassan - 01-11-2012
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Posted 1/19/2009 8:00:00 PMWell, well, well... I wonder if he cashed that cheque, because there may be some new questions for Maher Arar to answer:
Maher Arar, the Ottawa computer engineer whose 2002 deportation and torture in Syria made him a symbol of the perils of post-9-11 hysteria, was identified by Omar Khadr as someone he'd seen at al-Qaeda safehouses and possibly an Afghan training camp, an FBI special agent testified Monday.
The teenaged, Toronto-born Khadr immediately identified Mr. Arar from a black and white photo he was shown during two weeks of interrogation that got under way Oct. 7, 2002, at a U.S. base in Afghanistan, FBI Special Agent Robert Fuller told Mr. Khadr's war-crimes trial in Guantanamo Bay.
"He identified him by name," Mr. Fuller testified. "He said he had never seen him in Canada."
So what are we now to make of this information? We've already officially cleared Arar, and given him millions of dollars in compensation. There have always been holes (see here, here, and here) in the Arar story, and maybe this is what blows those holes wide open. Perhaps if the Americans had been more forthcoming in the first place, we could have had this information when it might have been more useful.
Author Paul Palango, in his book "Dispersing the Fog", uncovers some further anomalies in the Arar narrative:
Palango discovered that the O'Connor commission report misspelled the name of a company that was listed as part of Arar's employment history. In one place, it was identified as "CIM21000 Inc.", and in another, it was written as "CIM2000".
Palango later discovered that Arar had set up a company with a slightly different name, CIM 2000 Inc., which was registered between 1997 and 2000 in the name of his former sister-in-law, Parto Navidi. At the time, she and her ex-husband, Mourad Mazigh, were living in a house owned by an arms dealer named Pietro Rigolli. Rigolli was later jailed for violating a U.S. embargo on selling military hardware to Iran. Palango reports in his book that search warrants were executed on Navidi's house and at a building at a Montreal airport, but that the affidavits to support the search warrants disappeared from a Montreal courthouse in 2000. In the book, Palango notes that it's unclear whether Arar lived in the house with his brother-in-law and his brother-in-law's then-wife.
Palango, though, has come to the odd conclusion that Arar was (and presumably still is) an FBI agent. Either way, it would seem that the whole Arar story has yet to be told. More here:
...The other big story concerned Maher Arar. [Palango] explained how yet another massive PR campaign made Arar and his wife Monia Mazigh "politically bulletproof" and discussed the limitations of the O'Connor report that investigated selected aspects of the Arar affair. He raised questions about Arar's experiences in the US, in Syria, and in Canada that no official has. Indeed, he pointed out that Arar has never answered a single question under oath.
For example: Palango analyzed Arar's famous October 12, 2001 lunch at Mango's Café with Abdullah Almalki, a person of interest to CSIS because of his association with the notorious Khadr family, and their walk in the rain to converse a bit of elementary tradecraft designed to prevent electronic eavesdropping. Second, he raised a commonsensical question: if Arar had been tortured in Syria, why has no one seen the physical evidence?
UPDATE: More in today's Toronto Star:
"If he (Day) was told he was shown the whole file, either we have a major problem if he wasn't shown this, or he was shown it and he attached no credibility to it. The minister said after reviewing the file he said he was still satisfied with Commissioner (Dennis) O'Connor's opinion," [Lorne Waldman, Arar's former lawyer] said
Well, which is it? Was it problematic for the government to rely on anything Omar Khadr may have admitted to? Was there nothing else to confirm Khadr's account? Even if Khadr's account could be confirmed, would that be enough for the government to denounce Arar as a terrorist and scuttle the entire O'Connor Commission? Probably not. Curiously, the government is rather mum on all this:
Kory Teneycke, communications director for Prime Minister Stephen Harper, who personally issued an apology to Arar, said only: "We have seen the story and we have no comment at this time."
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Maher Arar - Magda Hassan - 01-11-2012
Was Maher Arar linked to the FBI?
By
Charlie Smith, November 6, 2008
A journalist who has written three books on the RCMP says a typographical error in a federal commission of inquiry report led him to discover a great deal about Maher Arar's past. Paul Palango, author of the new book Dispersing the Fog: Inside the Secret World of Ottawa and the RCMP (Key Porter Books, $32.95), told the Straight in a phone interview that he wonders if Arar, a Syrian-born Canadian engineer, has had a long-standing relationship with the FBI. Palango also said he thinks that the federal government made former RCMP commissioner Giuliano Zaccardelli a fall guy, possibly to cover this up.Zaccardelli resigned in 2006 after revelations that the RCMP shared information about Arar with U.S. authorities, who detained him at an airport in New York. "They had to have a scapegoat to hammer home this Arar story," Palango said. "And he was made a scapegoat."
A commission headed by Ontario associate chief justice Dennis O'Connor had a mandate to report on the period between Arar's detention in the United States on September 26, 2002, and Arar's return to Canada in October 2003. O'Connor determined that Arar was shipped to Syria by the Americans and tortured, even though he posed no threat to national security. Prime Minister Stephen Harper later announced a $12.5-million settlement (including legal fees) for Arar, who never testified under oath to anyone about his experiences.
Palango, a former national news editor at the Globe and Mail, said he had originally planned to write one chapter on Arar as an example of RCMP bungling. But it mushroomed into a much larger portion of the book as he learned more about the case. He noted that the O'Connor commission report provided very little information about Arar's past.
"I didn't know who he was," Palango said. "If you asked the basic questions of journalistswho, what, where, when, why, and howhe's like an invisible man."
Palango discovered that the O'Connor commission report misspelled the name of a company that was listed as part of Arar's employment history. In one place, it was identified as "CIM21000 Inc.", and in another, it was written as "CIM2000".
Palango later discovered that Arar had set up a company with a slightly different name, CIM 2000 Inc., which was registered between 1997 and 2000 in the name of his former sister-in-law, Parto Navidi. At the time, she and her ex-husband, Mourad Mazigh, were living in a house owned by an arms dealer named Pietro Rigolli. Rigolli was later jailed for violating a U.S. embargo on selling military hardware to Iran. Palango reports in his book that search warrants were executed on Navidi's house and at a building at a Montreal airport, but that the affidavits to support the search warrants disappeared from a Montreal courthouse in 2000. In the book, Palango notes that it's unclear whether Arar lived in the house with his brother-in-law and his brother-in-law's then-wife.
Palango said that if in fact Arar was living there, "In light of the Rigolli investigation, which was conducted on both sides of the border in 1999 and 2000, Arar and his family would have been identified as being the tenants of Rigolli's house. And all of those connections would have been made."
In 1999, Arar went to Boston to work for a company called MathWorks, which Palango said was a contractor for the CIA and the U.S. defence department. Palango said that Arar appeared to have no difficulty obtaining work permits for the U.S., adding that it's unlikely Arar was ever linked to terrorism.
"You can only infer from this that there is a special relationship between the U.S. government and Arar that had to be protected," Palango maintained. "So what is that relationship? And why I lean towards the American angle is because of his access into the States. He can renew his work permits. He goes to work for MathWorks. You know, it seems all orchestrated to me."
In a 2005 article citing unnamed CIA sources, the Washington Post reported that of 39 people who were sent to jails overseas through a process known as rendition, about 10 were later found to be innocent. Palango said that they all shared similar stories, which increased his suspicions about the true nature of the Arar case. As well, he claimed, all later got involved in left-wing politics. Arar's wife, Monia Mazigh, the sister of Mourad Mazigh, ran for the federal NDP in the 2004 election. "So where does the FBI or CIA or U.S. intelligence want to be?" Palango said. "Where do they want information? It's from the left wing."
The Straight left a message for Arar through his publicist; Arar did not return the call by deadline.
http://www.straight.com/article-168992/was-maher-arar-linked-fbi