Kerry Pither

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.

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.”