Maher Arar


Maher Arar is a telecommunications engineer with dual Syrian and Canadian citizenship who has resided in Canada since 1987.
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 without charges 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 and the passport on which he was travelling, but to Syria. He was detained in Syria for almost a year, during which time he was tortured by Syrian authorities, according to the findings of a commission of inquiry ordered by the Canadian government, until his release to Canada. The Syrian government later stated that Arar was "completely innocent." A Canadian commission publicly cleared Arar of any links to terrorism, and the government of Canada later settled out of court with Arar. He received C$10.5 million and Prime Minister Stephen Harper formally apologized to Arar for Canada's role in his "terrible ordeal." Arar's story is frequently referred to as "extraordinary rendition" but the US government insisted it was a case of deportation.
Arar, represented by lawyers from the Center for Constitutional Rights, filed a lawsuit in the Eastern District of New York, Arar v. Ashcroft, seeking compensatory damages and a declaration that the actions of the US government were illegal and violated his constitutional, civil, and international human rights. After the lawsuit was dismissed by the Federal District Court, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the dismissal on November 2, 2009. The Supreme Court of the United States declined to review the case on June 14, 2010.

Early life

Maher Arar was born in Syria in 1970 and moved to Canada with his parents at the age of 17 in 1987 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 in Montreal. While studying at McGill University, Arar met Monia Mazigh. Arar and Mazigh married in 1994. Mazigh holds a PhD in finance from McGill University. They have two 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 MathWorks, 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.

Royal Canadian Mounted Police Project A-O Canada and connection with Arar's rendition

On September 22, 2001, Jack Hooper, the director general of the Toronto region of Canadian Security Intelligence Service, chaired a meeting of members of CSIS, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Ontario Provincial Police, Toronto Police Service, and Peel Regional Police. On September 24, 2001, the RCMP's "O" Division in Toronto created a joint force investigative team called Project O Canada to handle national security investigations. The Toronto team included RCMP investigators and members of the Ontario, Peel, and Toronto police forces.
In October 2001, Inspector Garry Clement, officer of the RCMP "A" Division in Ottawa, told RCMP Inspector Michel Cabana that Toronto's Project O Canada needed a team in Ottawa to help with its investigations of an Ottawa man named Abdullah Almalki. In response, Project A-O Canada was created. Garry Clement told Michel Cabana that the team would be working closely with the US Federal Bureau of Investigation and Central Intelligence Agency. Later on, the Commission of Inquiry into the Actions of Canadian Officials in Relation to Maher Arar revealed that there were no clear directions to RCMP officers regarding how to share information with the FBI and the CIA. Richard Proulx, a RCMP officer and then assistant RCMP commissioner, was the official singled out in the report for failing to provide these clear directions.
The A-O Canada team included investigators and members from: the RCMP commercial crimes unit, "A" Divisions IPOC unit; the RCMP National Security Investigations Branch, CSIS, the Ottawa Police, Gatineau Police, Hull Police and Ontario Provincial Police; the Sûreté du Québec; the Canada Border Services Agency; and the Canada Customs and Revenue Agency, and the support of lawyers from the Canadian Justice Department.
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 teams of Project A-O Canada. Before Project A-O Canada was created, CSIS had been monitoring Almalki at least since 1998 with respect to his relationship with Ahmed 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."
While testifying at the Guantanamo military commission for alleged child soldier Omar Khadr, FBI agent Robert Fuller testified that Khadr had identified Maher Arar as among the al-Qaeda militants he met while in Afghanistan. On October 7, 2002, 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. Upon cross-examination, Fuller clarified his testimony saying that at first Khadr could not identify Arar. Then after giving him a couple minutes Khadr "stated he felt he had seen" Maher Arar at a Kabul safehouse run by Abu Musab al-Suri or Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. The validity of Omar Khadr's possible sighting has been seriously questioned due to the time frame of the alleged sighting which was sometime during September or October 2001. Arar was known to be in North America during this time frame and under surveillance by the RCMP. Khadr's lawyer told Canadian media that Khadr, claiming to be under torture at Bagram Theater Internment Facility, simply told his captors whatever he thought they wanted to hear. Lawyers and advocates familiar with the case immediately dismissed the allegations.
The information gathered from the United States' interrogation of Omar Khadr conflicts with the information gathered previously from the RCMP. Michael Edelson stated in public testimony given during the Arar Inquiry that RCMP officials from Project AO Canada had shown pictures of Arar to Khadr in either July or August 2002 and that Khadr denied ever seeing Maher Arar.
Within an affidavit, Khadr stated he was visited by three individuals claiming to be Canadians at Guantanamo Bay in March 2003. During their three-day visit, he was shown "approximately 20 pictures of various people" and asked about several people "such as my father and Arar." At which time he told them "what knew."

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. 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 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-Qaeda 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. It was later found that Almalki's signature was not in fact on the lease agreement; rather, he was listed by Arar as emergency contact.
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, D.C., and then in Amman, Jordan.