Dark Days is the story of Canadian national security investigations gone terribly wrong, told through the experiences of four of its targets: Ahmad El Maati, Abdullah Almalki, Maher Arar and Muayyed Nureddin.
In the spring of 2003 I was approached for help by Maher Arar’s wife. That initial meeting led to years of intense campaign work that won his release and return to Canada, made headline news for years and forced the establishment of a public inquiry into his case. I continued that work with intervenors at the Inquiry, helping expose the role Canadian security and law enforcement agencies played in Arar’s kidnapping by the CIA and his detention and torture in Jordan and Syria. That work also exposed Canadian complicity in the detention and torture of three other Canadian Muslim men, and led to their release and to the establishment of a second inquiry. All four men have now received public apologies and compensation.
I researched and wrote a number of chronologies while working on the torture files, chronologies that evolved into a book called Dark Days: The Story of Four Canadians Tortured in the Name of Fighting Terror. Published by Viking Canada in August 2008, Dark Days won public praise from spymaster and author David Cornwell (better known as John le Carré), won the 2009 City of Ottawa Book Award for Non-Fiction, was a Quill and Quire “Book of the Year” in 2008, and was one of the “Best Books of 2008” chosen by Amazon.ca.