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At 5:40 AM on October 8, 2002, a Gulfstream III, tail number N829MG, operated by a Florida company called Presidential Aviation, took off from Teterboro, New Jersey, whose airport is mainly for private planes. First stop was Dulles, for a crew change. At 7:46 AM, it took off for Bangor, Maine, where it stopped for refueling, then it headed to Rome. The plane was on the ground overnight, and at 10:59 the next morning, it headed to Amman, Jordan. On board, handcuffed and shackled to the floor, while federal agents sat in upholstered leather seats, was Maher Arar, a Canadian software engineer who worked for an American company called Mathworks and is the father of two small children. A dual citizen of Syria and Canada who had lived in Canada for seventeen years, Arar had been arrested two weeks earlier as a terror suspect while changing planes at JFK airport. The flight to Jordan probably cost the US government $120,000, according to Grey, and in this case was paid for by the Justice Department.
In Amman, Arar was shoved into a van. If he tried to move or speak, he was beaten by the guards. He was switched to another van, beaten some more, and three hours later, the van had crossed the Jordanian border into Syria and pulled up at the Palestine Branch, one of the world's most notorious prisons, named for the street where it is located in Damascus. It contained specially designed torture cells, where prisoners would be beaten with electric cables, scorched with cigarettes, placed in a device designed to induce paralysis called a "German chair," or threatened with submersion in a barrel of excrement. "The Palestine Branch was a prison constructed with torture in mind," Grey writes. "Everything about it was designed to break the soul." Arar was beaten by Syrian officials, and for ten months and ten days, he was confined in a coffin-like cell, with rats and cats, stifling hot in summer, freezing cold in winter.
Grey sees Arar's story as "emblematic of how an innocent man could be caught up and crushed by the manipulation of intelligence." It also suggests how the American judicial system, and the presumption of innocence, have been perverted in the aftermath of September 11. Arar "was simply lynched," Grey writes. At the time Grey was writing his book, a high-level government commission in Canada was conducting an inquiry into the Arar case. The commission issued its report in September—three volumes, over 1,600 pages. Its findings are appalling.
"I am able to say categorically that there is no evidence to indicate that Mr. Arar has committed any offence or that his activities constitute a threat to the security of Canada," wrote the head of the inquiry, Dennis O'Connor, an associate chief justice of Ontario. He continued: "Canadian investigators made extensive efforts to find any information that could implicate Mr. Arar in terrorist activities.... They found none."
Yet Arar suffered brutal torture. According to the commission's report, on the second day at the Palestine Branch, after a night without sleep, George Salloum, the chief interrogator, "brought a black cable, which might have been a shredded electric cable, about two feet long, into the room with him." Arar started to cry. Salloum told Arar to hold out his right hand. Arar did. Salloum hit him with the cable. Then he told him to hold out his left hand. He whacked it. Arar could hear the screams of other prisoners being tortured. One day the interrogation and beatings lasted nearly eighteen hours. "The pattern was three or four lashes with the cable, then questions, followed by more beating," the report says. Twice he urinated on himself; he was forced to wear the same clothes for the next two and a half months.
The Canadian commission's report provides details of Arar's detention, which it describes as "degrading and inhumane":
He was kept in a basement cell that was seven feet high, six feet long, and three feet wide. The cell contained only two thin blankets, a "humidity isolator," and two bottles—one for water and one for urine. The only source of light in the cell was a small opening in the ceiling, measuring roughly one foot by two feet. According to Mr. Arar, cats would sometimes urinate through the opening.
At the time of his arrest, Arar, according to the report, was returning from a vacation with his wife's family in Tunisia. He switched planes in Zurich and headed to New York, where he would change planes again before flying to Montreal. But when he landed at JFK and went through immigration,[8] he was stopped, photographed, fingerprinted, and strip-searched, "an experience he found 'humiliating,'" O'Connor writes. He was, it turned out, on a watch list, put there because of allegations by the Canadian government. In the aftermath of September 11, Canadian police had begun to monitor the small Syrian community in Canada. Arar and his wife, Monia Mazigh, were Syrians, and they fell under further suspicion when Arar was seen having lunch, and then taking a walk in the rain, with another Syrian, who was being followed by the Canadian police.
In October 2001—a year before his arrest—the Canadian police alerted US officials that Arar, who has a master's in telecommunications, and Mazigh, who has a doctorate in finance, were "Islamic Extremist individuals suspected of being linked to the Al Qaeda terrorist movement." But Commissioner O'Connor writes that this description was "inaccurate, without any basis," and in the United States in the fall of 2001, "potentially extremely inflammatory." Indeed, after holding and questioning Arar for eleven days, and exchanging information with Canadian officials, the US Immigration and Naturalization Service declared that the evidence "unequivocally reflects that Mr. Arar is a member of a foreign terrorist organization, to wit, Al Qaeda."
It is not clear what information the INS was relying on. By this time, the Canadians had backed off the report that they had sent a year earlier, and told the Americans there was virtually no evidence linking Arar, or his wife, to al-Qaeda. The police "did not have evidence to support a search warrant or a wiretap, let alone the evidence to lay criminal charges," the commission's report says. Nor did the Americans have evidence of their own. In a telephone conversation on October 5, 2002, an FBI agent told an officer in Canada's Criminal Intelligence Directorate that the United States did not have any basis for pressing charges against Arar. Would Arar be arrested if he were returned to Canada? the FBI official asked. No, the Canadian official said, there was insufficient evidence to detain him in Canada either. Not wanting to let Arar go free, the Americans sent him to Syria, without telling the Canadians, who had been led to believe that if Arar were not allowed into the US, he would simply be sent to back to Zurich, where his flight to the United States had originated. (The Bush administration refused to cooperate with the Canadian investigation, as did the governments of Syria and Jordan.[9] )
For all the abusive treatment he received, Arar was far more fortunate than hundreds of other suspected terrorists who remain trapped in the post–September 11 system set up by the Bush administration. He was set free in August 2005, after the Canadian government, embarrassed by the efforts of Arar's wife to make known his fate in the press, put pressure on Syria to release him.
But when Arar got home, "his torment did not end," Commissioner O'Connor writes. "Unnamed" government officials who sought to smear him before his story had embarrassed them leaked accusations against him to the press. Even before Arar's return, one "anonymous" Canadian official described him to a reporter as a "very bad guy," and said he had undergone training with al-Qaeda—a claim he denies and for which no evidence has been produced. Another article in a Canadian paper cited "high-level sources in the US and Canada" who said that he had trained in Afghanistan. "This guy is not a virgin," a "senior intelligence source" told the reporter. Still another article cited "officials" saying "Arar was not tortured." Some of the leaks, O'Connor concluded, "were purposefully misleading in a way that was intended to do him harm."
For the most part, O'Connor's report uses straightforward language and states clear findings, but here he describes merely as "misleading" statements that are outright lies. Still, about the leakers, he writes, "It is disturbing that there are officials in the Canadian public service who see fit to breach the public trust for their own purposes in this way," he writes. O'Connor's mandate was only to examine the conduct of government officials, not the press, so he does not say, as he could have, that journalists were disturbingly willing to publish unverified claims that were damaging to Arar. Far too many reporters, including this one, have published allegations of terrorism, or of "links to al-Qaeda," based on assertions from officials who would not be named, and who turned out to be wrong.
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