A new Canadian report clears the reputation of a Canadian man who was deported by the United States to a Syrian prison where he was tortured for 10 months. In 2002, Maher Arar was mistakenly marked as a major terrorist suspect by the Canadian government. The U.S. secretly deported Arar to Syria after receiving the flawed terrorist allegations from Canada.
The new report concludes that Canadian authorities were not complicit in
the American decisions to detain Arar and remove him to Syria, but that those decisions were based on inaccurate and misleading information received from Canada. The report attributes the mistake to "a failure of communication."
Arar has declared his relief at having his name cleared. Roger Smith of CTV News reports that, "Though the RCMP [Royal Canadian Mounted Police] and CSIS [Canadian Security Intelligence Services] tried hard to nail him as a terrorist, the report says they came up with nothing."
