How Washington Steamrolled Ottawa And Sent Arar To Be Tortured

“The real frustration I had, I guess, with (U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell) and the ambassador (Paul Cellucci),” Mr. Graham testified Monday, “was that they consistently asserted that somebody in Canada had given them the go-ahead, if you like, to deport Mr. Arar.” He maintained that he did not know initially the whereabouts of Mr. Arar and was not able to obtain specific information from U.S. officials. Mr. Arar, who is of Syrian origin, was arrested at New York's Kennedy Airport in September, 2002, and accused by U.S. authorities of being a member of al-Qaeda. Within days, he was deported to Syria, where he was imprisoned for about a year. During the first two weeks of his imprisonment, Mr. Arar has said, he was beaten all over his body with a thick cable by Syrian officials and forced into a false confession of having participated in terrorist activity. Mr. Graham said the United States maintained until as late as Mr. Arar's return to Canada in the fall of 2003 that Canadian security officials gave U.S. authorities information on Mr. Arar. Mr. Graham testified that he was unable to verify this information with either CSIS or the RCMP. “So my frustration was very much around that: Why couldn't we get to the bottom of absolutely whether anybody here had anything to do with it?” Mr. Graham said. “If (Mr. Powell) had given me a name, we could have quickly tracked it down and said to the person look, ‘Did you or didn't you?' We could have found out. We never got a name. We never got a lead in Canada of anybody we could go to. That was the frustrating aspect.” Mr. Graham also confessed his uncertainties about the thoroughness of the briefings he received. “Of course, when Mr. Powell looks you in the eye and says, ‘Bill, you don't know what's going on and I do because I've talked to the people who know,' this obviously makes it difficult because you are sitting across the table and saying ‘Hey, that's not my advice, but you don't have quite the same confidence in terms of the level of information you are getting.'” Mr. Graham said he had a “general knowledge” of Syria's human-rights record at the time of Mr. Arar's detention but was unaware at that time of his detention whether Mr. Arar was being tortured there. “There was no question that I knew that Syria's human-rights record was not in any way anything like our own, and I wouldn't have known of specific acts of torture and things like that, I wouldn't have been that familiar with it but I had no illusions that these people were going to conduct themselves the way that we would expect a western democracy would do it,” Mr. Graham said. Mr. Graham also testified that even if Canadian officials had known what they know now, they might not have been able to do anything because Mr. Arar held dual citizenship. While the Canadian government was eventually given consular access to Mr. Arar, Syria still regarded him as a Syrian citizen and treated him as such. “I really feel very strongly that that knowledge certainly would have energized us, but I don't think it would have fundamentally changed our ability to change the picture, because we didn't have control over Mr. Arar. And even the Americans didn't at this point when I raised it with the U.S. ambassador,” Mr. Graham testified. The Canadian government's first stand was that it strongly wanted Mr. Arar brought back to Canada, Mr. Graham testified. Failing that, he urged Syria either to lay charges or to release Mr. Arar. “My position was if he's guilty of something in Canada, we're perfectly able to prosecute him in our country according to our laws,” Mr. Graham said. Commission lead counsel Paul Cavalluzzo asked Mr. Graham whether he thought there should be better co-ordination between the various federal agencies, including the RCMP, CSIS, and the Department of Foreign Affairs in dealing with cases like Mr. Arar's. Mr. Graham said he was not concerned. “My understanding from the Defence Minister today is that, yes, they are co-ordinated and we have very good working relationships between our agencies to ensure the security of Canadians.” [Proofreader's note: this article was edited for spelling and typos on May 30, 2005]