Deported Terror Suspect Details Torture in Syria
Canadian's Case Called Typical of CIA By DeNeen L. Brown and Dana Priest
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, November 5, 2003; Page A01
TORONTO, Nov. 4 -- A Canadian citizen who was detained last year at John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York as a suspected terrorist said Tuesday he was secretly deported to Syria and endured 10 months of torture in a Syrian prison.
Maher Arar, 33, who was released last month, said at a news conference in Ottawa that he pleaded with U.S. authorities to let him continue on to Canada, where he has lived for 15 years and has a family. But instead, he was flown under U.S. guard to Jordan and handed over to Syria, where he was born. Arar denied any connection to terrorism and said he would fight to clear his name.
U.S. officials said Tuesday that Arar was deported because he had been put on a terrorist watch list after information from "multiple international intelligence agencies" linked him to terrorist groups.
Officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that the Arar case fits the profile of a covert CIA "extraordinary rendition" -- the practice of turning over low-level, suspected terrorists to foreign intelligence services, some of which are known to torture prisoners.
Arar's case has brought repeated apologies from the Canadian government, which says it is investigating what information the Royal Canadian Mounted Police gave to U.S. authorities. Canada's foreign minister, Bill Graham, also said he would question the Syrian ambassador about Arar's statements about torture. In an interview on CBC Radio, Imad Moustafa, the Syrian chargé d'affaires in Washington, denied that Arar had been tortured.
Arar said U.S. officials apparently based the terrorism accusation on his connection to Abdullah Almalki, another Syrian-born Canadian. Almalki is being detained by Syrian authorities, although no charges against him have been reported. Arar said he knew Almalki only casually before his detention but encountered him at the Syrian prison where both were tortured.
Arar, whose case has become a cause celebre in Canada, demanded a public inquiry. "I am not a terrorist," he said. "I am not a member of al Qaeda. I have never been to Afghanistan."
He said he was flying home to Montreal via New York on Sept. 26, 2002, from a family visit to Tunisia.
"This is when my nightmare began," he said. "I was pulled aside by immigration and taken [away]. The police came and searched my bags. I asked to make a phone call and they would not let me." He said an FBI agent and a New York City police officer questioned him. "I was so scared," he said. "They told me I had no right to a lawyer because I was not an American citizen."
Arar said he was shackled, placed on a small jet and flown to Washington, where "a new team of people got on the plane" and took him to Amman, the capital of Jordan. Arar said U.S. officials handed him over to Jordanian authorities, who "blindfolded and chained me and put me in a van. . . . They made me bend my head down in the back seat. Then these men started beating me. Every time I tried to talk, they beat me."
Hours later, he said, he was taken to Syria and there he was forced to write that he had been to a training camp in Afghanistan. "They kept beating me, and I had to falsely confess," he said. "I was willing to confess to anything to stop the torture."
Arar said his prison cell "was like a grave, exactly like a grave. It had no light, it was three feet wide, it was six feet deep, it was seven feet high. . . . It had a metal door. There was a small opening in the ceiling. There were cats and rats up there, and from time to time, the cats peed through the opening into the cell."
Steven Watt, a human rights fellow at the Center for Constitutional Rights in Washington, said Arar's case raised questions about U.S. counterterrorism measures. "Here we have the United States involved in the removal of somebody to a country where it knows persons in custody of security agents are tortured," Watt said. "The U.S. was possibly benefiting from the fruits of that torture. I ask the question: Why wasn't he removed to Canada?"
A senior U.S. intelligence official discussed the case in terms of the secret rendition policy. There have been "a lot of rendition activities" since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in the United States, the official said. "We are doing a number of them, and they have been very productive."
Renditions are a legitimate option for dealing with suspected terrorists, intelligence officials argue. The U.S. government officially rejects the assertion that it knowingly sends suspects abroad to be tortured, but officials admit they sometimes do that. "The temptation is to have these folks in other hands because they have different standards," one official said. "Someone might be able to get information we can't from detainees," said another.
Syria, where use of torture during imprisonment has been documented by the State Department, maintains a secret but growing intelligence relationship with the CIA, according to intelligence experts.
"The Syrian government has provided some very useful assistance on al Qaeda in the past," said Cofer Black, former director of counterterrorism at the CIA who is now the counterterrorism coordinator at the State Department.
One senior intelligence official said Tuesday that Arar is still believed to have connections to al Qaeda. The Justice Department did not have enough evidence to detain him when he landed in the United States, the official said, and "the CIA doesn't keep people in this country."
With those limitations, and with a secret presidential "finding" authorizing the CIA to place suspects in foreign hands without due process, Arar may have been one of the people whisked overseas by the CIA.
In the early 1990s, renditions were exclusively law enforcement operations in which suspects were snatched by covert CIA or FBI teams and brought to the United States for trial or questioning. But CIA teams, working with foreign intelligence services, now capture suspected terrorists in one country and render them to another, often after U.S. interrogators have tried to gain information from them.
Renditions are considered a covert action. Congress, which oversees the CIA, knows of only the broad authority to carry out renditions but is not informed about individual cases, according to intelligence officials.
Priest reported from Washington. Staff writers John Mintz and Glenn Kessler in Washington contributed to this report.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A522-2003Nov4.html 
More like mosquitoes-----what exactly am I wrong about.
