Kerry Pither

It seems that FBI interrogator Robert Fuller’s testimony is a little different today. Yesterday he testified that Omar Khadr, while being interrogated at Bagram in Afghanistan, identified Maher Arar by name, and said he’d seen him in al Qaeda-run “safe-house” near Kabul.

Today, Fuller’s story appears to have changed.

According to Canwest news reports, interrogation notes show that Omar Khadr only told interrogators that the man in the picture they showed him “looked familiar.”

It gets worse. It also turns out that “in time” Khadr told interrogators that he “stated he felt he had seen” the person in the picture in Afghanistan in 2001, a time when Maher Arar’s life in North America is well-documented.

In what appears to have been a last ditch effort to make some use of Guantanamo trials that will almost certainly be shut down within the first few days of an Obama presidency, and in a seemingly desperate attempt to detract attention from, or somehow justify, the shameful legacy of lawlessness and torture that has marred the credibility of American and Canadian law enforcement and security agencies since 9/11, the FBI has taken another gratuitous swipe at Maher Arar’s reputation.

Today, at a pre-trial hearing for Omar Khadr in Guantanamo Bay, FBI interrogator Robert Fuller testified that in October 2002, a then just turned 16 year-old Omar Khadr, while incarcerated at the American’s military base in Bagram, Afghanistan, said that he had seen Arar in Afghanistan, an allegation Arar has long denied.

Never mind that nothing that anyone has said to interrogators at the Bagram air force base, where so much prisoner abuse, torture and even prisoner deaths have been documented, can be considered remotely reliable. As Michelle Shephard, Toronto Star journalist and author of Guantanamo’s Child: The Untold Story of Omar Khadr notes, some of Bagram’s interrogators were later convicted of killing an innocent Afghan citizen during an interrogation there.

And never mind that Khadr has said that he repeatedly lied to interrogators in order to improve his detention conditions, especially when interrogators kept saying that if only he cooperated, he’d be sent home.

The fact is that Maher Arar has been exonerated.

First, by an exhaustive four-year long public inquiry in Canada which concluded that Canadian agencies had no evidence of wrongdoing by Arar, and that the U.S. “very likely” based their decision to send him to torture in Syria on erroneous Canadian information.

Then, by the Harper government itself, which, before settling Arar’s law suit, sent then-public safety minister Stockwell Day to the U.S to see the American file on Arar.

Day returned to say there was nothing there that would justify keeping Arar on a watchlist, and within weeks Prime Minister Harper was on live television issuing an official, and long-overdue, public apology on behalf of the government to Arar and his family.

Not much later, Arar and his family were deservedly financially compensated for Canada’s role in what happened to him.

Quite simply, the information put forth today, coming from an agency under fire for its legacy of complicity in torture, cannot be trusted.

Maher Arar and his family have endured enough.

It is the record of the FBI, CIA, RCMP, CSIS and other security agencies that must come under scrutiny now — not Maher Arar’s.

Maher Arar and I will be speaking at an event hosted by the Canadian Journalism Foundation called “High-level leaks and undisclosed sources: The case of Maher Arar and lapsed media ethics” on Thursday, January 29. The event starts at 6:30 p.m. and is being held in Alumni Hall, Victoria College (VC), University of Toronto.

Quill and Quire, “Canada’s magazine of book news and reviews,” says Dark Days is “an essential book for our morally ambiguous times,” and has chosen it as one of fifteen books (and one of four non-fiction books) to remember from 2008.

Here’s the full article from the December issue of Quill and Quire:

Anyone who believes that Canada is exempt from the human rights abuses of the so-called “global war on terror” needs to think again. In an essential book for our morally ambiguous times, human rights advocate Kerry Pither looks at the stories of four Canadian citizens — Maher Arar, Ahmad El Maati, Abdullah Almalki and Muayyed Nureddin — who were imprisoned in Egypt and Syria, held without charge or counsel, and tortured, all with the implicit sanction of our government. Those abuses made headlines this fall with the release of the Iacobucci report; Pither’s book is a resounding clarion call for Canadians concerned with due process and the presumption of innocence.

Okay, not really. But it’s a great idea, courtesy of today’s brilliant spoof edition of the New York Times. 1.2 million copies of the paper, dated July 4, 2009, were handed out to commuters in morning rush hour in several American cities. The story on rendition leads with an apology to Maher Arar, and ends with former Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld, awaiting trial, musing that “maybe the whole torture thing wasn’t a good idea after all…” Brilliant. Truly brilliant.

It seems that the Hudson Institute’s Chris Sands can’t read. Or doesn’t want to. Here’s what the Ottawa Citizen’s Ian McLeod says Sands said at a conference on security last week:

“I don’t think that we’re convinced Maher Arar was vindicated or acquitted by your process,” Mr. Sands said, referring to the O’Connor judicial inquiry. “What you did was re-evaluate the treatment of Maher Arar and decide that procedural mistakes along the way had been made. That didn’t vindicate him from the charge that he was involved in fundraising for terror.”

And here’s what Justice O’Connor said in the Arar Inquiry’s report:

“I am able to say categorically that there is no evidence to indicate that Mr. Arar has committed any offence or that his activities constitute a threat to the security of Canada.”

So what’s up, Mr. Sands?
I always find it interesting to substitute names in these kinds of careless statements. Consider this:

“I don’t think that we’re convinced Chris Sands was vindicated or acquitted by your process,” Mr. Pundit said, referring to the O’Connor judicial inquiry. “What you did was re-evaluate the treatment of Chris Sands and decide that procedural mistakes along the way had been made. That didn’t vindicate him from the charge that he was involved in fundraising for terror.”

Monia Mazigh’s new book, Hope and Despair: My struggle to free my husband, Maher Arar, is in stores this week, and will be launched on Thursday night in Ottawa. The event starts at 7:00 p.m. at the Saint Brigid’s Centre for the Arts and Humanities, 314 St. Patrick St., on the corner of Saint Patrick and Cumberland in the Byward Market. CBC Radio’s Adrian Harewood is hosting the evening.

If you’re trying to find the Arar Commission’s web site, it’s now located on the Library and Archives site. 

While the public waits for answers about Canadian complicity in the overseas detention and torture of El Maati, Almalki and Nureddin, startling evidence is emerging about Canadian complicity in the detention and torture of yet another Canadian, Abousfian Abdelrazik, in Sudan.

It should come as no surprise that the Canadian government is blocking his return to Canada.

According to just-released testimony by Sean Robertson, a senior foreign affairs official, the Harper government was presented with evidence that Abdelrazik was tortured in Sudanese prisons after being imprisoned there at Canada’s request.

Robertson testified that when Deepak Obhrai, Canada’s junior foreign minister, travelled to Khartoum to question Abdelrazik last March, Abdelrazik said he’d been whipped with cables and lifted his shirt to show the scars still evident more than two years later.  

Predictably, Obhrai isn’t taking calls from the Globe and Mail’s Paul Koring, who wanted to know what, if anything, Obhrai and other government officials, did about it.

In a story in Saturday’s Globe and Mail, Koring writes: