Maher Arar and his family are still waiting.
It’s been nearly a decade since Justice Dennis O’Connor tabled his 394-page report in September 2006 that found the software engineer was the innocent victim of a web of accusations – false, it turns out – made by Canadian and American police and intelligence agencies, and orchestrated his illegal detention in the U.S. and deportation and torture in Syria a year after 9/11. The family was returning from a vacation in Tunis when Arar was arrested at New York City’s Kennedy Airport in September 2002.
On Tuesday, September 1, the RCMP announced that it had charged Syrian Colonel George Salloum in absentia with Arar’s torture and will seek his extradition to Canada to face that charge. The irony is that the Mounties were, in large measure, responsible for Arar’s detention by Syrian authorities in the first place as part of
Project O Canada, a cross-border anti-terrorism investigation created in response to the September 11, 2001, attacks.
Arar welcomed the RCMP charges in a statement read to the media by his wife, Monia Mazigh. The last two paragraphs stick out: “The laying of this charge comes at a critical point in our history. Canada has lost much of its credibility within the last decade when it comes to supporting important human rights causes. It is my hope that Canada gives high priority to eradicating torture and bringing those who commit it to justice.
“Enhancing national security and protecting human rights can go hand in hand.”
The horror that Arar and his family endured and the effects they continue to live with were, Justice O’Connor wrote, compounded by prominent members of the Canadian media who reported the false allegations fed to them by anonymous government sources.
Among these accusations were that Arar was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood before he immigrated to Canada from his native Syria and that he’d been seen at an al Qaeda safe house in Kabul.
The lies about Arar were plastered on the front pages of national newspapers and at the top of network news broadcasts by reporters who – save one – have never apologized to him.
“It’s been a long time,” Mazigh told me in an interview from the family’s Ottawa home a few months back. “But what was published hurt Maher a lot.”
Arar, who hasn’t spoken to the media in two years, declined to be interviewed for health reasons. His wife says he still suffers from PTSD.
The state-sanctioned narrative about Arar not only tarred him as a trained terrorist, but kept him locked up in a rat-infested Syrian jail where thugs masquerading as intelligence officers tortured him again and again.
The prime minister has formally apologized. So has former RCMP commissioner Giuliano Zaccardelli, who ended up resigning because of the case. Zaccardelli admitted to a parliamentary committee that he knew within days of Arar’s arrest that he was not a terrorist. “You let him rot for almost a year in Syrian prisons,” Bloc Québécois MP Serge Ménard told Zaccardelli.
The sad, instructive irony is that, rather than being disciplined for causing unimaginable suffering to a fellow Canadian, many of the police, spies and reporters responsible for it saw their careers continue. “They got away with it,” says Mazigh.
Robert Fife, Ottawa bureau chief for CTV News, who in recent years has received justifiable praise for his aggressive reporting on the Senate scandal, penned some of the most egregious stories about Arar while he was with Canwest News.
In his banner front-page July 2003 stories, Fife quoted anonymous officials as insisting with “100%” certainty that Arar was no “virgin” and that he had received training at the same al Qaeda camp as convicted would-be terrorist Ahmed Ressam. He has said that he had no reason to think his sources had intentionally misled him about Arar. Regrettably, Fife was not alone. Others also played a part in smearing Arar’s name and reputation. That stain has been difficult to erase.
Their failure to publicly acknowledge that their stories were fatally flawed remains part of the unfinished business of the Arar affair.
“It would mean a lot,” Mazigh says. “[They] made mistakes. The least [they] can do is apologize. A personal apology would [allow us] to turn the page and move on.”
Globe writer Jeff Sallot apologized personally to Arar several years ago for a story he wrote quoting sources suggesting that the Ottawa engineer had simply been “roughed up” and not tortured while in Syrian captivity.
Sallot’s gesture, Mazigh says, had a profound impact on her and Arar. “He was saying, ‘I’m a human being talking to another human being,'” she says. “I respect him really very much.”
Mazigh says she and her husband have not pursued legal action against the media because it might be construed as a selfish response to the many journalists at home and abroad who helped Arar and expedited his safe return to Canada.
Stephen Harper, an autocratic politician not known for admitting errors or undertaking acts of reconciliation, rightly apologized to Arar in 2007. “On behalf of the Government of Canada, I wish to apologize to you, Monia Mazigh and your family for any role that Canadian officials played in the terrible ordeal that all of you experienced,” Harper wrote in his letter, which hangs framed in the study of the Arar home.
“I can see it and read it whenever I do work on my computer, and my kids can see and read it, too. It’s important for everyone,” Mazigh says.
It’s long past time for the others to apologize. But, as Mazigh says, “I don’t know if they even remember the words they used. But, of course, they should look at themselves in the mirror and remember what they have done.”
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