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On Sept. 26, 2002, Syrian-born Canadian engineer Mäher Arar is detained by U.S. Immigration and Naturalization officials at New York's John F. Kennedy Airport while returning alone to Montreal from a family vacation in Tunisia with his wife and two young children. American officials allege Arar has links to al-Qaeda and detain and question him. Arar is subsequently transported to Syria, where he is imprisoned in Damascus and interrogated under torture,1 only being released to return to Canada 375 days later on October 5th 2003. Mr. Arar has never been charged with any offence and the recently released report of the Canadian Judicial Commission of Inquiry into his situation2 has confirmed that there is no evidence he had ever committed any offence or engaged in any activities that might constitute a threat to the security of Canada or any other country or that he was ever considered a suspect or target of any investigation. Erroneous intelligence improperly shared with U.S. agencies by Canada's national police agency, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), has been determined as what exposed Mr. Arar to the scrutiny and subsequent actions of U.S. and Syrian authorities.3
The Arar case is the most public thus far of a growing number of U.S. "extraordinary rendition cases." There are at least four other known Canadian cases4 of individuals either detained by U.S. authorities while in transit and transported for interrogation to other countries or detained while abroad and interrogated. One of the recommendations of Justice O'Connor in his examination of the Arar case was that these cases be reviewed. A similar case of a German citizen, Khaled Al-Masri, abducted while vacationing in Macedonia and transported to be interrogated by Americans in Afghanistan, is now before a special investigative committee of the European Parliament. This committee has reported, on the basis of data gathered from air safety regulators, that the Central Intelligence Agency had flown 1,000 undeclared flights over European territory since 200 1.5 Italy has since arrested two persons and sought the arrest of four Americans in the kidnapping of an imam there in 2003. 6 As more and more revelations come to light, now including admissions and a defense of these actions from the White House itself, a picture emerges of...