Too Guilty To Fly, Too Innocent To Charge?

Another lesson from the Arar saga is that religious and racial profiling, no matter how vigorously it is denied, is too often the reality for a growing number in Canada’s Muslim and Arab communities at least in the national security context. In fact, this was confirmed by none other than the Department of Justice in a report leaked a couple of years ago. A number of other men of Muslim/Arab heritage have made similar allegations as Arar. Three of them will get their own less comprehensive inquiries. One of the common denominators of each of their stories is the fact that they were placed on one kind of watch list or the other. The proliferation of government watch lists is a troubling development in the “war on terrorism.” The challenges of such lists include differences of opinion on who’s actually a security threat, consolidating information across agencies by making the computer systems communicate the with one another. In fact, Canada’s Auditor General Sheila Fraser found in 2004 that watch-lists used to screen visa applicants, refugee claimants and travelers seeking to enter Canada were in disarray because of inaccuracies and shoddy updating. And now we have another list to worry about. http://www.asiantribune.com/index.php?q=node/4968 [Proofreader's note: this article was edited for spelling and typos on March 21, 2007]

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