Posted March 30th, 2005 at 9:06PMSuit by Detainee on Transfer to Syria Finds Support in Jet’s Log
WASHINGTON — Maher Arar, a 35-year-old Canadian engineer, is suing the United States, saying American officials grabbed him in 2002 as he changed planes in New York and transported him to Syria where, he says, he was held for 10 months in a dank, tiny cell and brutally beaten with a metal cable.
Now federal aviation records examined by The New York Times appear to corroborate Mr. Arar’s account of his flight, during which, he says, he sat chained on the leather seats of a luxury executive jet as his American guards watched movies and ignored his protests.
The tale of Mr. Arar, the subject of a yearlong inquiry by the Canadian government, is perhaps the best documented of a number of cases since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in which suspects have accused the United States of secretly delivering them to other countries for interrogation under torture. Deportation for interrogation abroad is known as rendition.
In papers filed in a New York court replying to Mr. Arar’s lawsuit, Justice Department lawyers say the case was not one of rendition but of deportation. They say Mr. Arar was deported to Syria based on secret information that he was a member of Al Qaeda, an accusation he denies.
The discovery of the aircraft, in a database compiled from Federal Aviation Agency records, appears to corroborate part of the story Mr. Arar has told many times since his release in 2003. The records show that a Gulfstream III jet, tail number N829MG, followed a flight path matching the route he described. The flight, hopscotching from New Jersey to an airport near Washington to Maine to Rome and beyond, took place on Oct. 8, 2002, the day after Mr. Arar’s deportation order was signed.
After seeing a photograph of the plane and hearing its path, Mr. Arar, 35, of Ottawa, said in a telephone interview: “I think that’s it. I think you’ve found the plane that took me.”
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“The US government is attempting to have the lawsuit dismissed. Invoking the rarely used “state secrets privilege” the Justice Department claims that any release of information on Arar could jeopardize “intelligence, foreign policy and national security interests of the United States.”"
I remember whaen Arar first returned to Canada and he was interviewed widely on Canadian TV networks. I doubt there are many Canadians who don’t believe every word he said. He was in terrible health to look at him, and his psyche was obviously tremendously damaged from nearly a year of being tortured. He was furious, depressed and expressed anger and that Canada had somehow betrayed him by not fighting harder to bring him home. His wife had constantly appealed to the government to put pressure on Syria to return him. It’s not really known if Canada had much influence on bringing him back, but Arar does name one or two officials that fought for his return.
There is also some evidence, though I can’t say specifically what, that a Canadian intelligence agency had informed the US that Arar (a Canadian citizen) might be a terror suspect. Instead of returning him to Canada though, the US delivered him to Syria where he was born.
Democracy Now has more on the story here: http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/01/28/1521259
Thanks for the link and background info. I must of heard of this when it first broke, but I was probably a bit skeptical. Hearing about the aviation records corraborating his story however, has maade me snap to, and focus on the story more.