The Clipboard: Arar case should worry all Canadians

From an article¹:

If the Americans lacked sufficient proof to charge Mr. Arar with a crime, they had, it seems to us, a couple of choices: they could simply have let him go; or if they were still suspicious, they could have deported him to Ottawa (where he was headed in the first place) and informed our government that they didn't want to see him south of the border again.

The Canadian embassy has apparently been pressing the Americans vigorously on this case. Good. It should continue to do so. Whatever his place of birth, Mr. Arar is a Canadian, and our allies to the south have some explaining to do. (link)

What's up in this case? It does seem like Canada got slapped in the face here.

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Complete text of the article, Arar case should worry all Canadians, by the Editors of the Montreal Gazette

Where is Maher Arar, and what has happened to him? These are questions that Mr. Arar's wife and family are no doubt pondering anxiously as they wait to hear from him. But they're questions that should worry all of us.

To all appearances. Mr. Arar is a blameless Canadian, a 32-year-old communications engineer who lives in Ottawa with his wife and two young children. But on Sept. 26, as he changed planes in New York on the way home from a vacation in Tunisia, U.S. authorities took him into custody, claiming he had links to the Al-Qa'ida terrorist network. For more than a week, he simply vanished; his family heard nothing from him. He has since seen a Canadian consular official and a lawyer, but now he has vanished again, and there are reports that he might well have been deported to Syria.

Mr. Arar's case seems egregiously abusive, and his treatment appears to undermine the sovereignty of one of the U.S.'s closest allies - us. No one would deny the Americans have reason to be a little anxious about who's allowed to enter their country these days. And indeed, the necessary tightening of U.S. security and immigration procedures since Sept. 11, 2001, is one of the little inconveniences of life we should all be ready to endure in the interest of safety. But even if the Americans are right, and Mr. Arar does have terrorist contacts in Ottawa, that doesn't explain what happened to him.

Why, for example, has he been kept from his family? And why, if what his New York lawyer says is true, was he asked to sign a document permitting his deportation to Syria of all places? Mr. Arar hasn't lived there since he was 17, and according to his family, he left before he'd done his compulsory military service - an oversight that will not sit well with the rulers in Damascus, who run one of the most repressive regimes in the Middle East.

If the Americans lacked sufficient proof to charge Mr. Arar with a crime, they had, it seems to us, a couple of choices: they could simply have let him go; or if they were still suspicious, they could have deported him to Ottawa (where he was headed in the first place) and informed our government that they didn't want to see him south of the border again.

The Canadian embassy has apparently been pressing the Americans vigorously on this case. Good. It should continue to do so. Whatever his place of birth, Mr. Arar is a Canadian, and our allies to the south have some explaining to do.

reference=http://www.canada.com/montreal/montrealgazette/editorials/story.asp?id=C1FFA5A2-C9C1-4534-8A46-9315A84EBF49